WarRoom Battleground EP 894： How Hamas Surprised The Most Powerful Military
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Summary
Yaakov Katz, the author of While Israel Slept, joins us to talk about his new book, The Big Lie: What Happened on October 7th, 2011, and why it s the most important book to write about the events of that day.
Transcript
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I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
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I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,
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And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
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I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
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If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
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Also, there's going to be this formal dinner tonight,
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so Real America's Voice will be covering all of it.
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Here at a conference, General Assembly of Jewish Federations in North America.
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Okay, so the book is, While Israel Slept, I cannot give a higher recommendation to read,
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I think, an even-handed yet shocking account of October 7th.
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What led up to it, the intelligence failures, although you'll see individual stories of heroism and bravery,
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and then the military part, which we'll get into.
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When you present this, because, look, you know, I'm not Jewish.
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We have other people who are questioning some of the relationships now.
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This is, I believe, as an outsider, so brutal in its assessment.
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Number one, how has the book been received in Israel?
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I know our audience that bought it from the first time we spent an hour with you have loved it,
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And as I've told people around town, because the details are not really talked about anywhere.
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The feedback I've gotten is like, how is this not like the number one book that everybody's talking about?
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And what has been the response like when you come to a conference like this?
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You know, people are still very much intrigued and want to understand what happened
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and how this very powerful military that I think we all recognize is really one of the most powerful and strong militaries
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and intelligence apparatuses in the world, how it failed so miserably.
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Because at the end of the day, Stephen, I think you get this, strategic surprises will always happen.
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We don't have to go that far back in time, right?
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These things will always happen to countries around the world.
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Or if they happen, how do we identify them happening and know how to provide the right answer and right response immediately
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so it doesn't spiral into a war, for example, that Israel has been embroiled in now for two years?
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You're saying go from the strategic, what I love about the book, you go strategic operational level to the tactical level, right?
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And as you see, strategic failures can kind of overwhelm you, right?
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When you're totally caught by surprise and then you've got, you're trying to turn around operationally.
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And then in the tactical, that's where you see some of the individual heroism of people.
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People will always stand up if they see something bad happening and they'll go out there and they'll race down to southern Israel,
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take a sidearm and go out and try to fight to save people they don't even know.
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But beyond that, and you're asking how it's been received, look, it's still a very painful moment in Israeli history.
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It's one that while a lot of the people in the military and in the intelligence agencies have been replaced in the government,
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same government, same ministers, same people who are still in their roles.
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And now that the war has winded down, there's a lot of talk and a lot of demand of commission of inquiry on a national level
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that will look into what happened here to get to the bottom of it and study.
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This book has been received, particularly at a professional level, as something that's got to be read,
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I was been doing this for about 25 years, covered military affairs.
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Amir, my co-author, continues to cover military affairs in Israel for about 20 years.
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I was the editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, one of the daily newspapers,
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big English language papers in Israel for about eight years, up until two years ago.
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I've written about Israel's bombing of Syria's nuclear reactor back in 2007,
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I've written about Israeli military technology.
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Actually here at this conference, I'm at speaking on a panel about Iran and the fear, for example,
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that the next round is not a question of if, but it's more of a question of when,
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and that you're hearing from the intelligence folks both here and in Israel.
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So really been in this space of Israel-US relations and of Israeli military and intelligence operations.
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So I came up as a kid, as a paper boy, and I remember the 67 war because it was amazing.
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It had all these kind of larger-than-life figures.
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But the thing that left the impression is that whether it's Mossad or in this case Shin Bet and Amman,
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Israeli intelligence is world-class and the IDF is a world-class military operation.
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And so that aspect of it, you never have to worry, right?
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In fact, they say, hey, and I doubt I'm not a big believer in the greatest ally theory,
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but part of that is because of the intelligence and the military.
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The book, what's so shocking about it, takes those two institutions as institutions
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and really gives you kind of an insider's look of these failures.
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So let's just summarize the intelligence part for those who weren't with us a couple weeks ago.
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Just take us through the lead-up and the intelligence failures.
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And they're pretty dramatic because the intelligence was actually out there, right?
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And particularly you have these young women that are the first wave.
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Then you have later they find a report that actually was written two years before
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that absolutely goes through in detail what they believe Hamas is going to do.
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So it's not that you didn't have the information, but somehow the system was so bureaucratic that it never got up to
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and the failure of imagination that Hamas could ever do this caught Israel in those brutal moments
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Because a lot of people in the United States don't realize the night before,
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like starting at 6 p.m., local time, the guys are saying, hey, I think something's going on here, right?
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And there's an eight-hour debate about what that is.
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And basically at 3 o'clock in the morning a lot of guys in the Central Command realize, hey, something big is about to happen.
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So I would split it into three different categories.
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On the one hand, in the tactical, in that moment, in the 24, 36 hours preceding, there were alarms going off and indications.
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They were uncovering rocket launchers. They were preparing Hamas.
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They were preparing their underground bunker systems, tunnel networks for their top commanders.
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There was things going on with their communications that Israel was picking up on.
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All of that was information that was flowing in in real time.
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Some of it was getting caught in bureaucracy, was not moving from one agency to the next.
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That's always going to be a problem in the worlds of intelligence, as you know.
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Level one. And that was misinterpreted. Israel was in a debate, the commanders on the ground.
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And the tension is, if it's a drill, we can't be too quick to respond because then they'll know all the intelligence we have.
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It's the Coventry in England situation where you have the code system, ultra, the cold breaker, and you got to let this town be bombed.
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Otherwise, you'd let the Luftwaffe know you had their bombing schedule.
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Right. So you will know that they'll be they'll know that, you know, and then they'll reverse engineer.
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Or they'll think that you're doing something and they're they're just planning a drill.
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But now because they see you doing something, they might actually attack.
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The second layer, which goes back a few months, is those women soldiers and others who are seeing things happening on the ground, the surveillance people who watch Gaza, watch the border, seeing training, seeing more senior Hamas commanders come near the border.
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And they're shut down by their commanders who say, listen, you don't get it.
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And then the third is going back even further in time was this report called Jericho Walls, a reference to the biblical walls of Jericho that came tumbling down.
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Tell about the report, that report, because it comes about halfway through the book.
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Yeah, it was written by just intelligence analysts who saw what was actually 21 or 22 and saw what was happening and said, basically outlined one to one, Steve, what was going to happen.
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And they call the Jericho walls because they looked at the barrier that we had erected along Gaza and said it could come tumbling down like ancient biblical Jericho came tumbling down if we're not prepared.
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And this report also stuck in a drawer somewhere.
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The Israeli defense minister only finds out about it about a month or two into the war that there was even such a report.
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How come he didn't see it on day one in his job?
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So really, when you look at all of that, you have to ask yourself a bigger question.
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We fought with them multiple wars over the years.
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And that speaks to a deeper issue for a country when it gets caught up in a belief system that its enemy, A, is not capable of doing something, or B, its enemy is deterred.
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But it's also something else, and this is a weakness and a strength that Israel has.
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It's a country that has its trade and cultural ties with the United States, with Europe.
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It wants to be like the rest of the Western world.
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Yeah, but you know, appeasement also to some extent.
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If there's a way to buy off your enemy as opposed to confront your enemy, go that route first, because we just want to have a good life.
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The problem is Israel is in a region and a neighborhood that you can't just have a good life.
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How much is, when you read this, how much, and you're the technology guy, how much is it the belief that we're so far technologically superior?
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Because here, one of the first things in the evening at six o'clock, you have a surveillance system that's even the name of it's classified.
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That system went down and people are arguing, hey, that's either been taken down and a guy said it's got glitches in it.
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But there was, you could tell from the institutional response, you depended a lot on technology.
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You thought you were so technologically superior and had such a detailed surveillance system, nothing can happen.
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There at the strategic level was a belief that it looks like so much of the focus had been on Tehran, that not just Hezbollah and the proxies, but that the regime itself and a lot of the strategic resources or time and focus was on the Persian situation versus the wolf that happened to be at the door.
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You know, we had Iron Dome, Arrow, David Sling, multi-layered missile defense technology.
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We'll build an underground tunnel and sensors to detect when they're digging tunnels.
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We'll build a multi-layered barrier to stop them.
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The technology also in the SIGINT and signal intelligence, we can listen to all their conversations.
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So we don't need to have human assets on the ground inside Gaza.
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Why waste your time in cultivating an asset and having an informant?
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But Steve, thousands of people ended up crossing the border.
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Not one could pick up the phone and call their Israeli handler and say, listen, this is in the works.
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Because one thing that jumps off here, you think, being a Westerner, that whether it's
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Mossad or Shin Bet or Amman, whoever it is, that half of Gaza's on the payroll.
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The thing that's so shocking here, there's no real ever human intelligence even for verification
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Is that because the reliance on technology made human intelligence like a thing from a
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Well, Israel, A pulls out of Gaza in 2005, 20 years ago.
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Harder to have intelligence, human assets to be able to manage and cultivate.
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But you're able to do it, for example, in Iran.
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You're able to do it in Lebanon with Hezbollah.
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Here it was, okay, we don't have the boots on the ground.
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Why invest the resources when we actually have the technology that can fill the gap, right?
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I mean, we see this with the United States as well in so many different spheres of operations
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where they also, the American intelligence community, is putting much more of an emphasis on the technology
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as opposed to on the old school, you know, the guys in the trench coat standing on a street corner
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and trying to get a source, get an agent, someone on the inside who can give them information.
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Do you think the entire West is too dependent upon technology now, particularly surveillance technology,
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Do you believe we have these kinds of problems that we could get caught as bad as 9-11?
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Look, everyone, I mean, we have satellites, we have drones,
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we have systems that can listen to our phones and intercept our emails.
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It makes you feel almost that you can get into someone's head.
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It makes you feel that you know everything about someone.
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As much as you might think you know, you don't know what's really going on.
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And if they also can assess that you're listening and seeing everything,
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they're going to come up with other ways to communicate that are old school or offline.
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OK, so we get to the three o'clock in the morning and the attack comes by three o'clock a.m.
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You basically put the nation on alert militarily and militarily.
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I mean, the nation's still sleeping militarily.
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And you can't tip it because if it's not happening,
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you don't want to give away the fact that you know what's going on.
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And right away, head of the Shin Bet, for example,
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calls the commander of the IDF of the Israel Defense Forces and says,
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Let's go through the hour because what happens then?
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One of the other questions here besides the intelligence, the IDF is kind of legendary.
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I mean, so many of the heroes here are old school.
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IDF guys have fought in previous wars or older guys are just hearing this.
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And they're getting in the cars and driving down with whatever weapon they could grab.
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And and they're going to kill some, you know, they're going to shoot some bad guys.
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But the institutional, you know, you got the strategic, the operational tactical.
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Why did it take so long for the tactical operational piece to kick in to have a more organized response?
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This is this is one of the more painful questions and issues that come up here because, OK, they'll try to invade here.
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The whole military should be flooding the south.
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Number one is this was a very sophisticated, although very low tech attack.
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They had studied for years the way the Israeli military is deployed along the border.
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They understood what happens when, for example, they fire rockets.
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Those women soldiers that we spoke about, where do they go when the rockets are fired?
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So they know that basically they're kind of not watching right now.
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They're pretty much inside, all centralized in this one area to protect themselves because
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They know that's happening in all the frontline positions.
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At that moment, they're also storming the border.
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They're dropping explosive devices on the cameras.
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Then they're going to those frontline positions.
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So they're going to make it difficult for one frontline position to talk to the other.
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And then they're raiding those bases themselves.
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The assumption of the IDF had been they're going to go to the communities, the kibbutzim,
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No, they're going first to the bases and also to the kibbutzim at the same time.
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But once they bog down the commander, so you got a story, for example, in the Gaza division
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headquarters near a kibbutz called Re'em, big base.
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He used to be the commander of the Shaldag unit, one of the most elite.
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So he's got to have his soldiers are fighting for survival in their own base.
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How can he actually send troops to the kibbutzim?
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So they managed very successfully to cut communications, cut the eyes and bog it out.
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Let me stop right there, because as a you're a professional in this area, I'm not.
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But when I read this, the level of detail they have about the kibbutzes.
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They have a map of the kibbutz and who lives in what home, who lives in what home, where the safe space is, who the key people are in the kibbutz, who are the leaders.
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The level of the base, what they know about the bases, the tactics of the Israelis.
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It leads a civilian to say or former naval officer to say they had to have inside information.
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There is no way they could just garner this from particularly Hamas.
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I mean, they don't have the reputation of being the most organized folks in the world.
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They don't have the reputation of being people that have put together a strategic plan like this.
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It can be operated over such a wide, you know, it's paramilitary.
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But the level of detail down at the what you call the center of battle is so detailed.
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I'm sitting there going, not only did they not have human intelligence on the Hamas side, Hamas somehow has human intelligence on the Israeli side.
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So the couple of years before the attack, Israel starts to allow because this fits into the paradigm.
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So the more they're prosperous, the less we got to worry about terrorism.
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So that's how you get to the situation where Qatar is sending $30 million in cash every month to Gaza.
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It starts to allowing Gazans from Gaza into Israel to work inside Israel, work mostly inside these kibbutzim,
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So these guys cross back into Gaza after a day's work or a week's work.
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They get pulled aside at the crossing by Hamas security forces.
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Tell us what you know, who lives here, who lives there.
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Whether they did it willingly or unwillingly doesn't make a difference.
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And you're saying over time, that's how they knew like the maps of the kibbutzes.
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Who the leaders were, where the safe rooms are, all of that.
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But they were also very sophisticated in gathering intelligence on the military bases, watching them, watching the deployment, seeing over time what happens when they do X.
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Do you think that in this inquiry, that could be quite painful?
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Do you think that it's going to come up, the potential that they're actually Israelis that sold out their nation and gave information to these guys?
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I know it'll be heart-wrenching to anybody in Israel, particularly given the smallness of the nation and you surround it.
00:21:05.000
Super patriotic, but you have to come to the conclusion that something there is deeply wrong, given the level of detail they knew.
00:21:12.000
They had such an advantage tactically in going because they kind of knew the whole thing, right?
00:21:18.000
And that's where they knew where to go, what to do.
00:21:19.000
I can't say it's impossible because we just don't know.
00:21:24.000
The Israeli people are going to demand to get to the bottom of this and find out everything that went on.
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And look, unfortunately, there have been instances recently that have come to light of cases of where the Iranians have succeeded in
00:21:42.000
So not people who are within the defense establishment.
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You know, reaching out to people online, social media, finding susceptible Israelis.
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Go find out information about this senior official.
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Look, here in the United States, you've had cases of senior American officials who have literally been under threat.
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And there have been assassination attempts by the Iranians against American officials, right, who have needed to have security.
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And they use people in the United States and they use people also in Israel like any other country in that sense.
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We're always going to have people who are going to be rotten weeds, but we got to get to the bottom of it.
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So that day, walk through particularly kind of the panic of some people in the IDF, but the basically heroism of others that said, OK, we got to get a grip here.
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Like why not take the Air Force, take a couple of Apaches, throw them up on the border.
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They got those cannons under the fuselage and just mow down anyone who's crossing in from Gaza.
00:23:01.000
I spoke to pilots who boarded their aircraft and flew out to protect gas rigs in the Mediterranean.
00:23:07.000
Who gives a shit about a gas rig right now, right?
00:23:09.000
We got people who are flowing into the communities.
00:23:13.000
So there's a couple of things you got to say here.
00:23:14.000
Number one is we have this attack in the south.
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Maybe you got Hezbollah that's going to come across the border.
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So you can't just send the whole army down south.
00:23:35.000
Although these guys, it's interesting to me, I don't call them terrorists.
00:23:40.000
I mean, their training in Hamas is pretty impressive for how they hit their marks about what they had to do.
00:23:46.000
This was their elite force, what they called the Nukhba force.
00:23:52.000
You know, just random people who decided to come across and pillage once the border was wide open.
00:23:59.000
And if we send everybody down south, this just might be...
00:24:04.000
So 6.30 is when the attack potentially commences.
00:24:07.000
Only about 9, 10 o'clock do they start to understand, okay, we see what's going on down there.
00:24:13.000
Can we safely assess that Hezbollah is not coming as well?
00:24:18.000
So that's two, two and a half hours in, three hours in.
00:24:20.000
But what time is the political higher up Netanyahu in the...
00:24:23.000
They're already at this point at the military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
00:24:27.000
And they're making those decisions and they're taking, they're gathering the intelligence to understand that for sure Hezbollah is not coming.
00:24:32.000
And they're beefing up forces on the north, just in case they're misreading that situation too.
00:24:36.000
At the same time, they're trying to assess what's happening in the south.
00:24:40.000
But because of the lack of communication, because of what the success of Hamas's low-tech attack, it's hard to understand what's happening.
00:24:48.000
And here was a problem with the military, right?
00:24:50.000
The Air Force, for example, which is very painful because they could have made the difference.
00:24:54.000
They don't know, or they didn't know then how to function in an operation where they don't have somebody on the ground telling them where to go and what to do.
00:25:02.000
And that's something that has now changed, right?
00:25:11.000
Helicopters don't just go to a border and shoot people.
00:25:13.000
You know, maybe that should have happened on October 7th.
00:25:17.000
But that's not a good way to operate on a regular day.
00:25:20.000
And therefore, the military was not built for this type of chaos.
00:25:26.000
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Yakov Katz, the author of a book that you've got to get while Israel slept.
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And it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out.
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It's where I put up exclusively all of my content 24 hours a day.
00:31:02.000
Yaakov Katz joins us in the house while Israel slept in a subtitle,
00:31:06.000
How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.
00:31:12.000
Hamas, I want to get back to the operation of the IDF.
00:31:24.000
And some of the brutality that went on that day is almost unspeakable.
00:31:32.000
They were never considered that serious as sophisticated.
00:31:37.000
But in this day, they actually had thought this thing through pretty well.
00:31:40.000
They knew exactly where the leverage points and the weaknesses of not just Israeli intelligence,
00:31:49.000
And they understood exactly how to carry out what they wanted to do.
00:31:56.000
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, didn't think he's going to defeat the IDF, right?
00:32:03.000
And that he succeeded, killing 1,200 people, taking 251 people hostage.
00:32:10.000
One of them, for example, we're talking on the day that Muhammad bin Salman is visiting Washington, D.C.
00:32:15.000
We back then, on October 7, 2023, we were on the verge of potential normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
00:32:28.000
And now even with this visit, it's not so clear if this is going to get back on track or not.
00:32:46.000
What is the rallying cry of every young progressive liberal in the world?
00:32:52.000
Where are they marching in London, in Paris, and university campuses here in the United States?
00:33:04.000
He got the French and the Canadians and the UK and others to recognize the Palestinian state while they're holding hostages.
00:33:13.000
The UN Security Council now passing a resolution that includes a Palestinian state in a pathway towards that.
00:33:26.000
And the funder of the Muslim Brotherhood being the financier.
00:33:29.000
If you have an answer, it's pretty jaw-dropping.
00:33:31.000
So, I mean, if you think about all that, I question sometimes, I mean, who's really won this war and who has lost this war?
00:33:48.000
Because, I mean, I think from a military perspective, if we look at the last two years, where we were then and where we are now, we are totally safer and more secure than we've ever been.
00:34:00.000
Iran's axes, these proxies that they created, they're in decline.
00:34:07.000
You dropped a hammer blow on the proxies of Iran, but…
00:34:12.000
Well, I would argue, and this has been my big problem, and I was called anti-Septic.
00:34:16.000
I believe Netanyahu, you had no ability to finish what you started.
00:34:20.000
Immediately upon the start of that war, which I think goes to the fact of you've got to take care of business here.
00:34:28.000
We had to send Aegis cruisers, Patriot missiles, STAADs, and then you had no ability.
00:34:32.000
If the whole objective of that war is to take out their nuclear enrichment capability, you had no ability to do it.
00:34:39.000
And to the point of even the Israeli Air Force, we had to send 30 cruise missiles on a place.
00:34:46.000
I was patrolling in 1979 the North Arabian Sea.
00:34:51.000
You had to send 30 cruise missiles to take out the surface capability.
00:34:54.000
You had no ability until President Trump dropped the hammer with the total obliteration.
00:35:00.000
Did you do some great stuff in Tehran militarily, you know, taking out the negotiating team and taking out some members of the hierarchy?
00:35:11.000
To me, if the United States had not stepped in, I told the president this.
00:35:15.000
You're bailing out the Israeli military because they can't…
00:35:19.000
That war was about to go dramatically the other way because you couldn't stop what was hitting Tel Aviv at all.
00:35:25.000
But here's the question that Israel had to ask itself.
00:35:28.000
Iran is racing forward with its enrichment towards a nuclear bomb.
00:35:32.000
Okay, that's not true because the Times of Israel…
00:35:40.000
On that Thursday night when Netanyahu bombed, I said, show me the intelligence that is so urgent.
00:35:46.000
And Netanyahu is happening next week, two weeks.
00:35:48.000
On Sunday night on Fox News with Brett Berry, he goes, what, six months to a year.
00:35:52.000
Well, now we know from the Times that Israel released the War Cabinet minutes where the War Cabinet said it was two years.
00:35:59.000
There was no pressing concern they had to go that Thursday.
00:36:02.000
Netanyahu's government wants to always focus on Tehran and the Persians.
00:36:11.000
If it hadn't been for the heroism of some people that day and quick decisions,
00:36:15.000
this could have metastasized into something worse.
00:36:20.000
It could have been 1,200 people, which is the worst day since World War II or since the Holocaust.
00:36:24.000
You could have had thousands of done, and then you could have had all of Gaza risen up.
00:36:28.000
You know, all of Gaza, because as Hamas, as you know, how they've trained up some of the people there,
00:36:42.000
By the time you're in the late morning, it's like, hey, if it's not for people making quick decisions and getting their act together under the pressure of combat, this thing could have metastasized much worse.
00:36:53.000
And the Iranians, I say the two problems is one here, because now you've got the Turks and the Muslim Brotherhood in it.
00:37:02.000
Number two, you have a bigger problem in the streets of New York.
00:37:08.000
But I've said I'm the first guy to identify this guy when he was at 2% because people in New York told me, hey, you're not focused on this guy from the working family party.
00:37:23.000
And everybody, I would talk to all the people in New York, no, Cuomo's got $40 million.
00:37:26.000
He's got the firemen, the cops, the Irish, every synagogue, the New York Times op-ed page, the New York Post.
00:37:36.000
And to me, you saw the real face of him on the night of his victory.
00:37:40.000
You don't have happy tap dancing, you know, tick tocks going through the grocery store.
00:37:47.000
He was coming out and I'm saying, hey, that's the new boss.
00:37:50.000
Because you saw that up in President Trump's grill and up really in the American establishment's grill.
00:37:56.000
But to me, you've got to focus on exactly what you have to take care of business to do.
00:38:01.000
No, but all I'm saying, you have to look at it in its entirety.
00:38:05.000
What Hamas did crossing into Israel, obviously, with that attack, they are a massive terrorist group that we failed to deal with.
00:38:14.000
The bigger picture starts in Iran, proceeds to Hezbollah in Lebanon, is also Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen.
00:38:21.000
The nuclear track, whether they're six months a year, 18 months, two years, with the ballistic missiles that they're developing, with their capabilities, and with the whole picture, they had to be taken on at this moment.
00:38:40.000
You're absolutely dead wrong, because here's why.
00:38:44.000
In the middle of November, in the year of our Lord, 2025, you have the reality.
00:38:48.000
Two million Gazans or Palestinians are going to stay in Gaza.
00:38:52.000
The Muslim Brotherhood in Qatar are going to finance a redevelopment.
00:38:58.000
You have the Turks are going to be the international security force coordinators of the Saudis, UAE, and Egyptian troops in Gaza, which is basically a foothold in Israel.
00:39:10.000
And now we have today, you're about to have a formal dinner with Elon Musk and all the tech bros showing up, because they can't wait to get their hands on the cash of the Saudis.
00:39:21.000
And so it is the worst possible world, and a big part of that came from this maniacal focus on Tehran as an immediate threat.
00:39:30.000
Now, Hezbollah and the Houthis, yes, they're proxies, definitely.
00:39:33.000
And you took, but you took out, you took out Hezbollah.
00:39:36.000
You've eventually, with the Americans, crippled the Houthis.
00:39:39.000
The maniacal focus on that, and I think for political reasons, has left Israel in a horrible strategic situation.
00:39:48.000
I think you are, but let me explain to you why.
00:39:53.000
If you have Iran, what's your concern about Iran?
00:39:56.000
A, they get nuclear, B, their ballistic missile program, and their proxies.
00:40:00.000
If you ever want to attack, let's say it's in two years, because you've got two years according to what you're saying.
00:40:12.000
When you attack, you're going to get the Iranian missiles, the Hezbollah missiles, and the Hamas missiles.
00:40:17.000
What did Israel do in June after it had eviscerated Hezbollah?
00:40:23.000
The payback, the retaliation goes from being up here suddenly to being down here.
00:40:32.000
So you do have to be concerned about the Iranian missiles, and America helped Israel with that, with the THADs and the Aegises.
00:40:37.000
I'm not saying not, but you had an operational window.
00:40:49.000
I knew nothing of the plans that were taking place.
00:40:52.000
I wrote a piece the week before saying Israel has a moment in history now to operate because we don't have to worry about Hezbollah.
00:41:02.000
We still have to worry about Iran, but if you're going to act, you act now.
00:41:06.000
If Israel was going at it on its own, it was only going to set them back for a small window.
00:41:11.000
We didn't know that Trump was going to send the B-2 bombers and take out-
00:41:22.000
We took out an enemy that you would not want the Iranians to get a nuclear bomb just as much as I would not want them to get a nuclear bomb.
00:41:32.000
Yeah, or two years could end up being half a year.
00:41:34.000
It could be half a year, but in all likelihood it's not.
00:41:38.000
I just think there, I don't believe there was active buy-in because you see that Friday morning when you go on Fox News.
00:41:45.000
Israel did it, and we kind of caught up with it and said, okay, but it was an active thing.
00:41:51.000
As soon as you sent, as a naval officer, as soon as you sent the Aegis cruisers to the eastern Mediterranean, I said, these guys are in trouble because they need our air defense.
00:42:01.000
You know what was happening, and the full story, your book tells the full story of the Hamas attack.
00:42:11.000
This will be the predicate for, which I believe will be one of the biggest events in the history of Israel, will be the inquiry into this, right?
00:42:20.000
And even the setting up of the inquiry, whether Netanyahu forms a warring commission or whether other voices say, no, we have to have this totally independently.
00:42:29.000
And what comes out here, there's going to be a lot of finger pointing.
00:42:32.000
The other thing is what really happened on the 12-day war because I believe that Tel Aviv was getting pounded much harder than the Western media said.
00:42:41.000
You know, the Western media hasn't done a good job, I don't think, in Gaza, but they particularly didn't do a good job during the 12-day war.
00:42:46.000
Yeah, we had about 500 missiles that were fired, and about 60 of them, 10 percent or so, were not intercepted and landed, and they caused casualties.
00:42:57.000
But I think you and I do agree whether it had to happen then or not.
00:43:01.000
The world is a safer place today with the Iranians on the defensive.
00:43:04.000
The world is a safer place with the Iranians weaker, and the Iranians are just as much a threat.
00:43:11.000
When the Iranians, when the Ayatollahs march on the streets of Tehran.
00:43:18.000
When they march and say destroy Israel, death to Israel, they're saying death to America on the same breath.
00:43:23.000
I was there in 79 and 80 when the hostage crisis happened.
00:43:29.000
When people use that, I go, if that's the best you've got.
00:43:33.000
You have the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza with two million Palestinians and their unlimited amount of money.
00:43:44.000
The whole purpose of the revolt, the whole purpose of that sector in World War I was to drive the Ottoman Empire and the Turks, not just away from the two holy sites, but drive them out of the Holy Land.
00:43:56.000
In fact, drive them out of Damascus back to Turkey.
00:43:58.000
And now you've got the Turks that are going to be the international security force coordinator of an Arab army and basically an Arab legion that's going to be have a foothold in Israel.
00:44:09.000
So you can't say from Israel's perspective, it's catastrophic.
00:44:14.000
What's happening now in Gaza is deeply concerning.
00:44:31.000
Because if this is what victory looks like, then this is not victory.
00:44:37.000
Because I'm going to have, I had Rabbi Walicki and I'm close to Rabbi and I've been adamant that he was, these guys taking the wrong path.
00:44:44.000
He said, well, Hamas has got to be disarmed and that's going to be a thing.
00:44:48.000
You're not, you're missing what's really happening.
00:44:51.000
They're saying now, hey, if Hamas turns over their arms, fine.
00:44:54.000
If not, we're going to be segregated or there'll be some deal.
00:44:57.000
There's no push to take the arms away from Hamas.
00:44:59.000
Am I missing that or is that just the way I read it?
00:45:01.000
Now it doesn't look like that's going to happen, which is insane, right?
00:45:14.000
They might not have the rockets that have depleted or been destroyed, but they'll rebuild.
00:45:19.000
If this is how the war ends, this is not a victory for Israel.
00:45:32.000
Why am I advocating now a three state solution?
00:45:34.000
I'm saying, hey, we need a Christian part of this.
00:45:36.000
I think I say this, if this deal goes on and it looks in the direction of what you're seeing with the Saudis today, I'm not sure you have an Israel in 20 years.
00:45:45.000
That's why I'm arguing for a three state solution.
00:45:49.000
And I think that would be a stabilizing factor.
00:45:53.000
I go, no, I'm not crazy because I've seen the arc of this.
00:46:00.000
If this is what victory looks like, and Moss is still armed, because they're going to be still armed.
00:46:11.000
There is something called decisive victory in war.
00:46:14.000
America has achieved that in some of its conflicts.
00:46:19.000
But when it did that after World War II, when Japan and Germany were decisively defeated, both those countries embarked on a new journey.
00:46:28.000
And the thought that what is happening is going to change the people.
00:46:32.000
Well, part of the world would say they are on a new journey.
00:46:35.000
They're on a new journey of self-sufficiency and really Arab buy-in, Muslim buy-in, et cetera.
00:46:42.000
That's been yesterday's show about the Islamification of Texas.
00:46:46.000
Because I keep telling people, you didn't pay attention to me in New York, and now New York is going to be like London in 10 years.
00:46:53.000
And some of my conservative friends said, oh, you're playing this.
00:47:02.000
Once they get in there, you're not, you're going to take a...
00:47:04.000
There are parts of London you walk through today.
00:47:06.000
You feel like you're in downtown Beirut to Ramallah.
00:47:08.000
Because you are in downtown Beirut to Ramallah.
00:47:10.000
This is what New York City is on track to become.
00:47:12.000
And Jews cannot walk down their streets safely.
00:47:15.000
Frankly, most Englishmen can't walk down the street safely.
00:47:18.000
Sadiq Khan, and they had the same kind of happy face, you know, happy clappy.
00:47:26.000
I've said that the English are heading to a civil war.
00:47:36.000
We've had 48 mosques developed in the Dallas area in the last two years.
00:47:47.000
It is actually a mind-blowing outcome of this war.
00:47:56.000
To start to get a grip of all of it, which we try to do to make sure that you guys
00:48:00.000
geopolitically and capital markets, everything can make decisions for yourself.
00:48:11.000
And then you see what happened in the war and the solution we have now.
00:48:15.000
And all I say is that when you guys have the formal inquiry, it's going to be even more shocking.
00:48:23.000
But they'll have to face up to a lot of things they looked at, not just technology,
00:48:28.000
but maybe focus too much on Iran, but also just how societies and cultures get ossified.
00:48:35.000
The legendary intelligence services, the legendary military that saved Israel every time they're overwhelmed.
00:48:47.000
You're a great guy and I'm really glad you came over here to do that.
00:48:53.000
I think what we all want is we want a safer region and we want a safer place.
00:48:56.000
And I think that the problem that we currently face in the aftermath...
00:49:02.000
And there will need to be a commissioner of Ukraine.
00:49:04.000
Hopefully, the Israeli government will establish that.
00:49:11.000
The way this war ended in Gaza, it could happen again.
00:49:18.000
And the government of Lebanon, despite all the support it's getting from Europe and the United States,
00:49:23.000
they're still not confronting them head on and trying to disarm them too.
00:49:27.000
And the Iranians will rebuild if they are not stopped.
00:49:31.000
Next time I want to get you on, maybe we'll have to...
00:49:36.000
I want to get you on because I want to talk about the Greater Israel Project.
00:49:41.000
People not understanding that here in the United States of America hurt at the moment of decision,
00:49:46.000
hurt kind of the relationship between Israel and the United States.
00:50:02.000
By the way, I can't recommend enough that you should do that book.
00:50:08.000
I think people have to understand about the 12-Day War,
00:50:11.000
particularly here, President Trump's decision-making, what it all meant, etc.
00:50:21.000
We're going to launch that next week about how you can actually qualify for it.
00:50:27.000
It's going to be at AmFest, Charlie Kirk's AmFest.
00:50:30.000
It's going to take place, I think, the 18th through the 21st, I'm correct?
00:50:36.000
Of course, the 19th and 20th will be the big days.
00:50:44.000
I knew you had a busy thing, and thanks for coming into the world.
00:50:51.000
We're back at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow.
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