RadixJournal - February 04, 2025


Do We Now Own Gaza？


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

130.87402

Word count

2,850

Sentence count

225

Harmful content

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

35

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu hold a press conference. What does this mean for the future of peace between Israel and the Palestinians? Is this a good or bad thing? And what does it mean for peace in the long-term?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 connected. Hello, everyone. I hope you are well. Well, we seem to be cursed with living in
00:00:08.980 interesting times. We are definitely cursed with living in ambiguous times in the sense that I
00:00:17.460 don't really know what to make of Donald Trump's dual press conference with Bibi Netanyahu.
00:00:25.720 Even after the question and answer session, where Trump used typically some colorful language to
00:00:35.880 describe what happened. The takeaway seems to be that we now own Gaza. We own it. We're going to 1.00
00:00:43.820 level it. And then we're going to build it back beautiful, better than ever. He actually said to
00:00:50.380 a journalist that it's going to be like the Riviera. And I saw some Republicans like Nancy
00:00:56.980 Mace tweeting out that, yeah, it's going to be like Mar-a-Lago in the Middle East. Sounds great.
00:01:05.280 The other thing that seems to be happening here is that Palestinians are going to be ethnically
00:01:12.840 cleansed from their native land and pushed off into Egypt or Jordan or maybe whoever would take 1.00
00:01:22.500 them. I don't think they're going to be treated as refugees in the United States because that would 0.98
00:01:28.400 generate some backlash among conservatives. And so throughout the press conference, there seemed to
00:01:34.560 be this sort of shell game going on in terms of whom exactly are you referring to. When Trump says,
00:01:43.180 you know, we can't do anything now. It's terrible. It's a rubble. We're going to build it back better.
00:01:48.020 There seemed to be the implication that the Palestinians would now be given a great new place,
00:01:55.540 you know, at the Trump Tower and casino and all of that. But I don't think that's what he means
00:02:01.380 because he's also talking about, again, what's definitionally ethnic cleansing that is moving
00:02:07.780 people out of their land out of there. So who's going to enjoy this new Gaza? It seems to be Israelis, 1.00
00:02:14.420 although, again, that wasn't said directly. Owning it. Who owns Gaza now? I don't know quite what this
00:02:24.640 means. I mean, the United States owns some foreign territory. The United States, the federal government
00:02:32.280 obviously owns states within the continuous U.S., although that's not really how we think of it.
00:02:41.000 Does he want to own Gaza like he might want to own Greenland or own Canada? What does this actually 0.65
00:02:47.500 mean? Is he meaning that we're going to morally own it? I think regardless of his intentions, I think
00:02:54.120 that's what's going to happen. The troops that are going to go in there and wipe out the remnants of
00:03:01.460 Hamas are going to be U.S. troops. The troops are going to occupy Gaza in effect. Now, a future 0.97
00:03:10.540 ownership stake? I don't think so. I think what will ultimately happen with this is that Israel will be 1.00
00:03:17.660 given this territory at some point and the greater Israel project, including an annexation of Gaza is
00:03:25.000 underway. Now, let me just say a few things about this. First off, I don't think moving Palestinians to 1.00
00:03:41.140 another territory as refugees is really the worst thing that could happen to them at this point. 1.00
00:03:50.520 I get it. This is the definition of ethnic cleansing. This isn't genocide exactly. That word has also
00:04:00.120 been used. This is clearly an example of ethnic cleansing. That being said, is this not the
00:04:11.140 least bad of all solutions? I could certainly imagine worse solutions. To be honest, I could
00:04:19.480 imagine worse solutions under a liberal government that is a democratic regime that wants to have it
00:04:29.040 both ways in the sense that you just create the worst of all possible worlds. Democrats are far more
00:04:35.920 likely to talk about not just Palestinian human rights and safety, but Palestinian nationhood.
00:04:43.120 Republicans, no, they don't talk that way. Democrats are much more likely to subsidize and defend
00:04:51.040 humanitarian aid coming in there to Gaza. At the same time, they're never going to really stop giving
00:04:59.840 Netanyahu and company more bombs and weapons to destroy the Gazans and create this rubble, 0.98
00:05:07.940 prehistoric situation that we have now. So they want to have it both ways. And it turns into this awful
00:05:15.980 situation where they're vaguely promising Palestinian nationhood one day, and in effect, encouraging them 0.98
00:05:24.080 to stay there, helping them survive while they're in Gaza, while they're at the end of the day, beholden
00:05:30.940 to Israel, and at the end of the day, providing Israel weapons. I do think that's a sort of worst of
00:05:36.720 all possible worlds. It's at the very least, totally incoherent. So I want to be fair here. It's easy to
00:05:45.080 jump on Donald Trump for outright supporting ethnic cleansing, and that's what it should be called, 0.97
00:05:51.940 etc. But I do want to be fair. If I were a Palestinian, at some point, you've just got to grasp
00:06:01.860 that you have lost, that you're getting your ass kicked, that no one's coming to save you, 0.99
00:06:09.220 and that surviving somewhere else is better. Now, plenty of them would disagree with this and want 0.99
00:06:17.080 to fight harder, to die fighting Israel, etc. That's their prerogative. But at some point, you sort 0.88
00:06:26.100 of have to cut your losses. So I think Trump should be criticized for this. People should call it for what
00:06:33.620 it is. But to think of it as the worst thing in the world. No, it's not the worst thing in the world.
00:06:44.280 Some other aspects of this, the ownership aspect, this does seem to be that US troops will have boots
00:06:55.060 on the ground. Now, to be fair, maybe that's better. If I were a Palestinian, I would rather 0.96
00:07:04.440 see an American troop with the US flag lording over me than I would an Israeli troop. American troops are 0.62
00:07:13.420 much more likely to follow the law and much more likely to treat them with some level of decency.
00:07:19.640 I mean, look, I get it. I'm not naive about dirty wars in the Middle East, etc. However, I'm just saying
00:07:27.880 of the horrible option and even more horrible option, I would choose American boots on the ground.
00:07:35.920 So from the Palestinian standpoint, again, it's not the worst thing in the world.
00:07:40.320 From the US standpoint, it might be. First off, again, I find it difficult to believe
00:07:51.200 that America is going to own Gaza. Gaza is a very small sliver of territory on the seaside
00:08:00.120 of the Mediterranean that has been effectively surrounded by Israel. It's been an open air 0.92
00:08:07.020 concentration camp. A lot of people say that. They say because it's true. We're going to own 1.00
00:08:12.420 this territory. There are gas rights and natural resources, I guess. It's still very tiny. And you're
00:08:21.800 in this very weird situation where you're surrounded by the Israeli state, who's, of course, an ally
00:08:28.900 and a client of the US empire. Just odd. But the other thing about it is that you are putting American 0.74
00:08:39.960 troops in a situation where they are in all likelihood going to face terrorist actions, hostile
00:08:48.980 fire, etc., etc. It is very easy to foresee that there is going to be some terrible incident with Hamas or 0.98
00:09:01.880 someone else in which a dozen US troops get blown up. And then we blame Iran and whatever. It's not just an 0.57
00:09:12.740 attack on Israel. It's an attack on the US. After all, we own it. 0.99
00:09:18.980 So I think this is an extremely precarious situation. And I don't fully know if Donald Trump
00:09:30.540 recognized what he's getting into. And is this a guy, he seems to be operating on this logic of
00:09:37.880 real estate and luxury real estate. We're going to own it. It's going to be the Riviera of the Middle
00:09:42.220 East. Amazing vacation resort. Okay. But the idea that this land wouldn't be given to Israel at some
00:09:53.500 point also strikes me as extremely implausible. So in effect, we're doing the fighting and dying.
00:10:01.240 We're taking on the risk. We're taking on the risk. We are engaging in the billions of dollars of
00:10:09.000 cleanup and leveling and rebuilding that will take place just to give it to Israel. I mean, 0.98
00:10:16.840 I'm sorry, but at some point, that's rather outrageous. Isn't it the rule when you go into
00:10:27.860 an antique store? You break it, you buy it. I mean, I understand how it's in some ways,
00:10:35.360 it would be sort of bizarre to expect Israel to now treat the Palestinians or the people who live
00:10:43.060 there with any sort of decency after what's been done. Nevertheless, isn't this their problem?
00:10:49.160 Isn't there something to be said for America first and whatever? We're going to spend a decade
00:10:55.580 rebuilding this place and investing billions of dollars only to hand it over to Israel and their 1.00
00:11:00.860 greater Israel project from the river to the sea? Very strange. And on top of that, there's the issue
00:11:09.220 of this leading directly to war, confrontation with Iran. You know, Hamas militant attacks U.S.
00:11:17.160 personnel. We figure out pretty easily or we simply lie about it that Iran sponsored these people,
00:11:25.640 provided them the weapons, etc. Next thing you know, you're directly in war with Iran. Is that the
00:11:32.540 end game here? It's certainly worth considering. But I would say this, and I've actually been fair to
00:11:42.080 Trump during this stream. Ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to Jordan or Egypt, assuming that's 0.62
00:11:49.880 possible, is not the worst outcome. It just simply isn't. Secondly, American troops on the ground in
00:11:58.760 Gaza, even from a Palestinian standpoint, that's not actually the worst outcome. And Trump is bumbling
00:12:05.020 and fumbling, but maybe he's sort of disrupting this horrible status quo of the liberals, where they 0.99
00:12:14.220 want to protect the Palestinians, talk about their nationhood, and also just allow them to be killed 1.00
00:12:22.760 en masse. I mean, is not some sort of disruption in this situation better, or at least a change 0.89
00:12:32.460 worth saying. But I would say this just in closing. So I was just on a space and I was talking about
00:12:43.360 this to someone that this idea came to my head. So Freudian psychoanalysis. Just wait for it and I'll
00:12:52.180 get there. Freudian psychoanalysis is a theory based on the notion that what was once unspoken,
00:13:00.000 unconscious, becomes conscious, becomes conscious, it is put into words. So let's say you are a patient
00:13:09.220 of a psychoanalyst and you've got major daddy issues. Something happened in your childhood that
00:13:17.380 you have not really dealt with or even confronted. And so you're having dreams and you can't get to
00:13:25.480 sleep and you're looking to partners who are the worst possible ones for you due to this trauma.
00:13:32.140 Well, psychoanalysis, the promise of it is that you finally get to the original trauma. You finally,
00:13:40.840 what is unspoken and unspeakable and kind of traumatizing and destroying, you actually put it
00:13:48.920 into words and you deal with it. You can manage it. Maybe you could overcome it even. At the very
00:13:54.480 least, it's better once things are sort of clear. So what I was thinking about, so I'm in my mid-40s.
00:14:03.920 I can definitely remember the Iraq War and the run-up to the Iraq War. At that time, if you said,
00:14:13.500 if your criticism of the Iraq War was that, ah, this is a big waste of time and treasure and money,
00:14:19.060 we might get killed, it might create chaos, that was sort of the acceptable liberal critique,
00:14:26.220 maybe even libertarian or paleoconservative critique of the Iraq War. Now, if you said,
00:14:31.780 I don't support the Iraq War because it's a war for oil, that's kind of on the borderline of what's 0.81
00:14:39.520 acceptable. You might get a lot of pushback, even from critics of the war. If you said,
00:14:45.820 I don't support the Iraq War because it's a war for Israel, then you were treated as a crank. 0.82
00:14:52.480 You were a right-wing anti-Semite. You were a Marxist. You were a crazy person, conspiracy theorist,
00:14:59.120 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The fact is, Netanyahu wanted the Iraq War. Netanyahu established 0.98
00:15:04.700 the intellectual foundations for the Iraq War. The Iraq War fits into a Lakutist plan for the Middle 0.98
00:15:14.040 East. It was, on some level, and certainly not entirely, a war for Israel. That was 20 years ago.
00:15:24.880 You couldn't say these things out loud. Maybe now you see where I'm going with this.
00:15:29.260 When Donald Trump wants to remove Palestinians from Gaza, ship them off to another Middle Eastern
00:15:39.600 country, put American forces on the ground in order to rebuild the Holy Land that will soon be
00:15:48.060 integrated into the Greater Israel Project. I don't know, maybe it's time for the Third Temple 0.96
00:15:54.520 or something. I don't know. It's been 2,000 years. Why not? Well, when a situation like that is so
00:15:59.660 clear, you almost have to put it into words. You can't beat around the Bush or try to claim that
00:16:09.000 it's something else. This is not a war for democracy. George W. Bush actually believed in
00:16:16.080 democracy. He believed his own bullshit. He was high in his own supply. He, after all, 1.00
00:16:21.680 allowed the Gazans to vote. That's why Hamas won in 2005 or 6, I believe. That was one stone in this 0.96
00:16:33.860 path that led us to where we are today. He actually believed his own bullshit. George W. Bush, say what 1.00
00:16:39.800 you will about him. At this point, in terms of our relationship with Israel and Gaza, you cannot claim
00:16:50.280 that this is anything other than a war for Israel. It is a war for the Jewish Holy Land. Period. End of 0.82
00:16:58.880 statement. It's actually nothing else. And some leftist who claims that it's all about mineral rights,
00:17:07.460 that's ridiculous. It's obviously about this. And I think there's this way in which Donald Trump 0.79
00:17:13.920 makes things that were formally implicit or unconscious, explicit and conscious. He moves
00:17:21.960 from soft power, things that were sort of assumed that were consensual, and he moves to just outright
00:17:28.840 hard power. I think that's what we're seeing even with the destruction of USAID or deconstruction of
00:17:35.480 USAID. Lots of criticism of USAID are certainly warranted. But it was, if anything, a sort of soft power
00:17:46.380 effort at maybe funding some revolutionaries here, maybe sponsoring musical theater in Ireland over
00:17:54.920 there. But it was all about consensus and soft power, influence, all these kinds of things that
00:18:00.980 liberals are rather good at and certainly think about a lot more than conservatives do.
00:18:07.500 But with Trump, why are we wasting a cent of taxpayer dollars on that? Let's just threaten them
00:18:14.980 with tariffs. Let's just ship a few more billion dollars in bombs to Israel. Let's do that to Ukraine as 0.97
00:18:22.200 well. And let's demand rare earth minerals from Ukraine as a deal, a transaction for our supporting
00:18:31.480 Ukraine. There's no more soft power. It's all hard power. It's all do this or else. And maybe if you're 0.70
00:18:40.680 nice, we can make a deal. But there's no more consensus. There's no more idealism around the American
00:18:48.280 project in the American empire. Now, in many ways, I think this is, in an ironic way, I think it's
00:18:56.860 almost a good thing. We're not lying anymore. We're not persuading anyone. We're simply beating them
00:19:02.200 over the head with a stick. Which is, at the very least, honest. Let's just be honest about it. 0.99
00:19:11.580 Palestinians, get out of here. Holy land, that's yours, Israel. There's something more honest about 1.00
00:19:17.580 that as opposed to the cloying, lying nature of liberals. This is perhaps the biggest backhanded
00:19:25.980 compliment anyone could ever give, but it actually is a compliment. And so I think that's where we are.
00:19:33.460 Now, what does this mean for the American empire? I do think that moving from soft power to hard power
00:19:39.060 is a sign of decline. A lot of conservatives probably think, oh, this is the new golden age.
00:19:47.260 Everything's going to get so much better. It's going to be so wonderful with Trump. We're not
00:19:51.980 going to get ripped off by the rest of the world. Whether we got ripped off by the rest of the world
00:19:57.660 in the Bretton Woods system or the unipolar moments or the Cold War remains to be seen. I certainly
00:20:04.500 wouldn't describe it that way. But we're moving from some sort of soft power consensus to a hard power,
00:20:11.880 do this or else, and maybe we'll make a deal. I think that is a sign of decline. The Cold War
00:20:19.260 institutions like USAID are being dismantled. Any sort of rules-based order consensus is being dismantled.
00:20:29.540 But the empire is not being dismantled. The empire is just something else. The empire is no longer
00:20:34.340 invisible. Now it's visible. It was soft. Now it's hard. I do think that making recourse to these
00:20:43.400 types of tactics with Trump, whether Trump recognizes this or not, whatever his motivations
00:20:49.140 might be, it does spell a sort of end stage of the American empire, of the American century,
00:20:55.920 the long American century. Towards that, I have mixed feelings. The American century was a pretty
00:21:05.700 good century. We did a lot of good things. The world is better, but all things come to an end.
00:21:13.680 Just some thoughts. Hope you enjoy them. Talk to you later.
00:21:25.920 What's up?