The Culture War #38 - Israel Vs. Palestine, US Foreign Policy, And Terror
Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Scott Horton and Will Chamberlain to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict and its impact on American foreign policy, as well as the Israeli government's response to criticism of its actions in Gaza and the West Bank. We also discuss the political ramifications of Israel's actions and the criticism of them, including the growing number of Democratic primary candidates who are opposed to them, and the potential impact on their chances of winning the presidential election in 2020. And, as always, there's a lot to be said about Israel and Palestine, so be sure to check out the episode before you listen to this episode. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your news and information. You can also join our FB group, and use the hashtag on to help spread the word about this podcast. Thanks for listening and share it with your friends and family! Timestamps: 3:00 - What's the worst thing I've ever said about a foreign policy issue? 4:40 - How to defend Israel 5:30 - Who's the bigger threat in the Middle East? 6:20 - Why I'm not a reflexive defender of the country 7:00 8:00 -- Why I don't have a vendetta 9:00 | What's more important than Israel? 11:10 - What do you like about it? 12:30 -- What's my gift to me? 13:40 -- What do I like about the most? 14:30 | What would you like? 15:40 | How do you want? 16: How do I know me better? 17:20 -- What are you better than you're a better than I'm going to give me a glass of tea? 18:40 15, do you have a cup of coffee? 19:30 21:10 -- How did you like it better than that? 22: Is it a good thing? 27:00 & 15:10 ? 26: What's your point of view on this? #1? ) 27: What s your favorite piece of advice for me? #1) #2) -- What is your favorite part of the conversation? & 3) Is it possible to be an enemy of the enemy?
Transcript
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Oh boy, Israel and Palestine. This is a very, very serious subject that seems to get everyone's
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emotions cranked all the way up to 11. I can talk about how in the United States, domestic
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policy, you get the left, you get the right. But there are some people that can have a calm,
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reasonable conversation with you. And then as soon as the issue of Israel-Palestine comes up,
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it is cranked instantly up. Emotions are running high. So I'm really excited that once again,
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we're going to be having this conversation, but I do think it'll be interesting, especially
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considering the political ramifications of the domestic reaction to what's happening in Israel
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with Hamas, with Gaza, with the West Bank. You have a lot of people who are at odds. You had
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rioting just the other day in front of the DNC. Police made, I believe, only one arrest,
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but several officers were injured. And these are left-leaning young people.
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So we're now seeing polls that suggest 18 to 29-year-olds, more than half are at odds with
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the Democrat official foreign policy position on Israel, which is going to have some very
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serious ramifications for 2024. And that being said, we're going to start off just with the
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conversation around Israel and Palestine, the moral justifications versus the criticisms of
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military action, as well as, you know, IDF, Hamas, et cetera. And we've got two really awesome
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guests to have this conversation, of course, returning. We have Scott Horton.
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I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and the director of the Libertarian Institute.
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And I'm the author of this book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
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Yes. My name's Will Chamberlain. I'm senior counsel at the Internet Accountability Project
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and the Article 3 Project. And formerly, I've worked on the Ronda Sanis campaign most recently
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And so your position here is to defend the actions of Israel?
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Yes. Like, I'm here to defend Israel's actions in Gaza and also just to defend Israeli policy
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more broadly. Although, I mean, there's obviously going to be cases where I think Israel did
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something wrong. I'm not a reflexive defender of the country.
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Well, right on. I mean, let's just jump into it. I know, Scott, you wanted to start by saying.
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I have a ton of things here. First of all, I wanted to say, by way of disclaimer, I know
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a few people were saying things on Twitter, but my reputation as a debater comes from taking
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on Bill Kristol and Kathy Young, both of whom I absolutely despise and quite deliberately
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destroyed. And but I like you. I don't know you, but you're a friend of a friend of mine
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and I have no vendetta here. And so I want to be nice and start off nice. And I actually
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have a couple of gifts for you. First of all, this is Reclaiming the American Right
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by Justin Raimondo, my mentor at antiwar.com, the late great. And it's about the real foundations
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of the American right and then the rise of the neoconservatives and how they stole it.
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And then this one is mine. Enough already time to end the war on terrorism. That's all
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the wars from Jimmy Carter through Trump in the Middle East.
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By me. So I hope you like them. And that's my my gift to start here.
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And then also, I want to say, Tim, to your audience, which I know is gigantic and most
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of whom don't know me by way of disclaimer, I want to be very clear about this. I am not
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an anti-Semite. OK, and the truth is there are a lot of people who actually are even in
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my mentions on Twitter. Right. And the truth is anyone who actually is an anti-Semite will
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be happy to tell you that they are and will be happy to try to get you to be one, too.
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And that just doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about here.
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I know that people kind of assume that, oh, if you're talking bad about Israel, it must
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just be because you hate Jews. But I'm just telling you that's stupid. And it's not where
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I'm coming from at all. Just so that people understand that about me. I'm against terrorism,
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even when it's backed by the United States and its allies. I obviously oppose what Hamas
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did on October the 7th. In fact, an extended family member of mine was kidnapped and killed
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by Hamas in that attack. I don't take it lightly at all. I don't believe every claim
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by Hamas. They have a huge incentive to embellish. Increasing their victimhood was the reason
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for their attack in the first place here. So just because someone is sniped doesn't mean
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we know exactly who sniped them. And I'm not one to try to jump to those kind of conclusions.
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And it is also true that Hamas sometimes does hide behind civilians, although that is quite
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exaggerated. And Israel's killed more than 10,000 people using that as a cheap excuse.
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Um, but it is true that Hamas does fire from civilian areas. Uh, that's no, that's an accusation
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by me, no concession. And, uh, my, uh, last disclaimer here is I don't care at all what
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leftist protesters or college kids or tick tock wine moms say about anything. And that association
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doesn't have anything to do with me. And if anyone wants to hang that on me, well, then you're all
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gay married to Lindsey Graham and Bill Kristol, and you should all sign up under the foreign agents
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registration act because you put Israel first, just so we're even on the guilt by association
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thing. Okay. Now opening argument here, supporting Israel is not in America's interest. Joe Biden
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says if there was no Israel, we would have to invent it. He says it's an American aircraft
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carrier, an unsinkable aircraft carrier, but he never explains how Israel in fact is nothing
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but a burden on our country. For example, right now, U S forces are being repeatedly attacked
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in Syria and Iraq. None have been killed yet, but many have already been injured and the
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tit for tat, which is obviously a result, uh, reaction to the strike. So what's happening
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in Israel, Palestine right now. And we already lost five guys. They say in a training accident,
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Tim, I don't know exactly what happened to him. Maybe it was, uh, but we already have five
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dead here and the strikes going back and forth in Syria and Iraq threatened to grow into a true
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regional war. We could have Iraq war four as the result of what's going on, uh, in Israel,
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Palestine right now. And perhaps this is what James Mattis was referring to in July, 2013,
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when he said, quote, I pay a military security price every day as the commander of CENTCOM,
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because the Americans are seen as biased in support of Israel. And when David Petraeus told
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Congress in 2010, the enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct
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challenges to our ability to advance our interests. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to
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a perception of us favoritism for Israel, Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the
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strength and depth of us partnerships with governments and peoples in the region and weakens
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the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and other militant groups
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exploit that anger to mobilize support. It's the smartest thing America's worst general ever said in
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his life. Donald Trump said, quote, we should never have been in the Middle East. It was the single
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greatest mistake in the history of our country. Well, he doesn't know much about Woodrow Wilson,
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but he's close. And it's interesting, Tim, that we still have troops in Syria because don't you
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remember Donald Trump, president Donald Trump ordered them withdrawn in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
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And he was overruled by the Pentagon and the Israel lobby. Remember Joe Kent, the almost and future
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congressman from Washington state? His wife was killed in Syria after Trump ordered her withdrawn.
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And anybody watching this right now can just Google it. 2008, Trump, Syria, Israel. And you'll find
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2018, Trump, Syria, Israel. And you'll see all the headlines about how Trump is betraying Israel and
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leaving them high and dry if we pull our troops out of Iraq. So what are they even doing in Syria in the
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first place? Okay, well, therein hangs a tale. I'll try to do this as fast as I can. After the revolution
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in 1979, Israel still backed Iran. They weren't scared of Shiite fundamentalism then. And remember
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when Ronald Reagan backed Iraq against Iran, Israel backed Iran. And remember during Iran-Contra when
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Reagan actually backed Iran for a little while and sold them some missiles, he sold the missiles
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through Israel. They were the cutout because Israel were the ones who had maintained that relationship
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with Iran all through the 1980s, right? Well, then after Rock War I, which Israel didn't start,
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that was the U.S. and the U.K. that got us into Rock War I, although they did support it.
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After Rock War I, Bush Sr. kept the troops in Saudi Arabia. But then he lost the election. And Bill
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Clinton's plan was to pull the troops out of Saudi Arabia and normalize relations with Iraq and Iran.
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And Iran, the mean old Ayatollah, had died. The new Ayatollah was in and a more moderate president.
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And they wanted to normalize relations. But Israel insisted on what was called the dual
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containment policy. And it was inaugurated by a guy named Martin Indyk, who had worked for Yitzhak
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Shamir, the prime minister of Israel. Now here he is working for Bill Clinton. And he's the founder
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of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is a spinoff of the American-Israel Public
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Affairs Committee. And in a speech at Wynep, he announced the dual containment policy. America will
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stay in Saudi Arabia through the rest of Clinton's presidency in order to contain Iraq and Iran both.
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Why? Because America, well, first of all, Israel had helped build up Iran for 10 years. And now
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America, with Israel's support, had just beat up on Iraq. So now Iraq wasn't powerful enough to
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balance against Iran. So the Israelis insisted America had to stay in Saudi to contain them both.
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And that was the proximate cause of the provocation of the September 11th attack on the United States
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of America. And after Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a Netanyahu fan in 1995, Prime Minister Shimon
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Perez launched what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon. And Mohammed Atta,
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the lead hijacker of September 11th, and his friends from what's called the Hamburg cell of the pilot
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hijackers from September 11th. When that started, they signed their last will and testament and
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decided they're going to join essentially the army and go to war against the United States.
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And a few months later, when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war,
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called Declaration of War Against the Americans, Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,
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in there he went on and on about Grapes of Wrath and about the Kana Massacre,
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where 106 women and children were killed in a UN shelter. And according to Lawrence Wright in his
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book, The Looming Tower, and Terry McDermott in his book, Perfect Soldiers, this was what convinced
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Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib and their friends to join al-Qaeda. And it was then that
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they decided to travel to Afghanistan and join the attack. So what happened on September 11th was some
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Egyptians were answering a call by a Saudi to avenge Lebanese killed by Israelis by crashing their
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planes into towers in the United States of America. And instead of explaining that to your mama,
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they said, Bush said literally, quote, they hate our freedom. And that was what they told the American
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people was that radical Islam makes people hate virtue and innocence and whiteness and people's love for
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their mama. When in fact, what it was, was these were mercenaries who had fought for America, Saudi,
00:12:27.920
and Pakistan in the Holy War in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They had fought for Bill Clinton in Bosnia,
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Kosovo, and Chechnya in the 1990s. And even though he supported them, he had not bought off their loyalty.
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And the Israeli insisted policy of staying in Saudi to dual contain Iraq and Iran and support for Israel
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their war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon were the reasons brought for the September 11th attack,
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the motive for the attack. And I know everybody's going crazy because the wine moms on TikTok found
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the letter to America. Well, they should read the declarations of war from 96 and 98. The letter
00:13:06.280
to America is after the fact. But what's important about that is that what they're saying in there is
00:13:14.320
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Well, as I saw you putting it on on on Twitter, Tim, that these women are like being convinced
00:14:50.040
by Osama like he's right or something. Well, I think that's a little bit overstating it. But
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the point is, if he's so convincing to them, think how convincing he was to a bunch of Egyptians
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studying engineering in Germany and saying this is the enemy and this is what should be done
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about it. But it's not it's not wine moms. Oh, well, whatever. Anyway, whatever. I'm not on
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TikTok, but I'm saying people people are getting this wrong. But the point is this, OK? And Michael
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Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, emphasized this over and over again, that
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when Ayatollah Khomeini denounced American culture, nobody really cared. But when Osama bin Laden pointed
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at specific American foreign policies, regardless of what he believed, this is what
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was successful recruitment shtick for him to recruit the likes of Mohammed Atta and them
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to attack the United States of America. OK, so you don't have to take bin Laden's motive
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personally, what he believed. We don't know what he believed. We know what he told people
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to get them to do what he wanted to do. And this is what he did is he focused on American
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foreign policies and not America being a nice guy and not Israel being a nice little Jewish
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boy minding his own business. But America doing the wrong thing, blockading and bombing
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Iraq, supporting Israel, bombing U.N. shelters full of women and children. This is what's
00:16:08.920
called blowback. As Ron Paul pointed out, the CIA coined the term means long term consequences
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of secret foreign policies that come back to bite us. As Ron Paul said in the Giuliani moment,
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we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 years before the September 11th attack.
00:16:27.440
Now, Tim, hang on one second, because the next day, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview
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to The New York Times where he said, quote, it's very good. Well, not very good, but it
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will generate immediate sympathy. And he predicted the attack would, quote, strengthen the bond
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between our two peoples. So even though the attack was provoked by Israeli policies and Israeli
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insisted policies, they saw a huge advantage. And in Ariel Sharon and his government, I'm almost
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done here. And the neoconservatives, what did they do? I'm actually not almost done here,
00:17:00.340
but I swear to God, I'll be quiet for 20 minutes.
00:17:02.780
But wait, but it's not even that. You've made so many points that I think are just wrong.
00:17:06.400
And it's like, if you want to open the show by saying, I'm going to do an opening statement
00:17:09.860
now, 15 minutes in, and you've glossed over so many extremely important details as to what
00:17:14.300
you're saying. All right. All right. How about this? What I want to get to is like,
00:17:18.440
it's taken a long time, but we haven't talked at all about why you think Israel is wrong about the
00:17:24.120
current conflict in Gaza, right? Like, I feel like that wasn't my opening statement, but I got
00:17:28.500
plenty on that into that, that like, you know, and so we can, well, that's changing the subject from
00:17:32.800
what I was talking about, which was American support for Israel. It causes these huge problems
00:17:38.720
for us. If you want to go back over any of those statements, I'm happy to. I know Will's written
00:17:43.040
or I've been paying. Yeah, I've been, I've been writing down in detail. Or would you like to let
00:17:47.660
me finish? Sure. Okay. So, so then what happened was the neoconservatives, who are the neoconservatives?
00:17:53.060
They're the vanguard of the Israel lobby in the United States of America is who they are.
00:17:57.140
And inside the Bush government, this is what Colin Powell called the JINSA crowd, meaning the Jewish
00:18:03.180
Institute for National Security Affairs, Richard Pearl and his friends. And Colin Powell said,
00:18:08.720
they set up a separate government inside the government. They created in the Pentagon, something
00:18:13.120
called the Office of Special Plans, where they laundered all the fake intelligence to lie us into
00:18:18.940
war. And the reason they did it was because David Wormser and Richard Pearl and Douglas Fythe had this
00:18:25.620
strategy called the clean break. And it said, if we get rid of Saddam in Iraq, totally nonsensically,
00:18:32.400
this is the Rube Goldberg scheme we talked about last time, Tim. If we get rid of Sunni Saddam in Iraq,
00:18:37.900
that will empower Jordan and Turkey there. And then they will use their influence over the Shiite
00:18:43.500
clergy in Najaf to, quote, wean Hezbollah away from Iran and make them start being friends with
00:18:53.020
Israel. And then by neutralizing Hezbollah's pressure on Israel on their northern flank, they will then
00:18:59.960
not have to abide by the Oslo Accord and give the Palestinians an independent state. And they can get
00:19:05.740
away with, this is the clean break, instead of peace through land for peace, it'll be peace through
00:19:12.980
strength. And we will dominate the region. And then, but what happened? The neocons were fools. And they
00:19:19.320
didn't empower Turkey and Jordan in Iraq. They empowered Iran in Iraq. And that was what that
00:19:25.080
whole five-year war was for. It was what they call in soccer an own goal, where these neocons, in fact,
00:19:30.900
empowered the Shiite Iranians and their axis. And which led to then, and this is so important for
00:19:37.840
people to read, the redirection by Seymour Hersh from 2007, explains how then they turned around.
00:19:45.140
In fact, this is in the WikiLeaks. People Google golden platter, and you'll see where the Saudi king,
00:19:50.600
it's not all Israel here, the Saudi king told Zalmay Khalilzad, it used to be you and us and Saddam
00:19:56.800
against Iran. Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter. And Khalilzad says, don't worry,
00:20:03.540
your highness, we're going to fix it. Hang on, I'm almost, I swear to God. And then this was the
00:20:08.080
reason then, Tim, why Barack Obama backed al-Qaeda in Syria from 2011 through the end of his presidency
00:20:16.960
was because Bush put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. So now they were trying to take them down a peg
00:20:23.520
in Syria. And as I demonstrate in the book through block quote after block quote after block quote,
00:20:28.820
this was the entire policy was Israel has been harmed by Iraq war two and the empowering of
00:20:36.260
the Shiites. And now, so to protect the Israelis, we have to tilt back toward the Sunnis, but the
00:20:41.940
Saudis don't have a big infantry. They just have al-Qaeda shock troops. And that led to the rise of the
00:20:47.480
Islamic State caliphate and Iraq war three, all of this because of American support for Israel.
00:20:55.280
When we don't have, none of this would have happened without that. I don't know. Yeah,
00:21:00.220
they'll well take it away. All right. So, okay. I want to just start out with like the basic core of
00:21:05.060
my contention. I'm certainly willing to defend America's general defense of Israel in support of
00:21:09.440
it. But I think like the core of my argument, at least certainly on Twitter and elsewhere has been
00:21:16.460
Israel is justified in attacking, uh, in defending itself against Hamas and its actions in Hamas,
00:21:23.380
against Hamas in Gaza have been totally justified. I don't know what would be a more just war than
00:21:28.980
fighting against the organization that decided to raid your country and murder, butcher, and kill
00:21:34.720
1500 of your citizens, kidnap 240 more. Um, I don't know what you would have a military for if not to
00:21:40.680
defend yourself against that. If this isn't justified military action, what would be? Um, and
00:21:45.660
it's, it's also gets to the point of like, why should, if Israel isn't willing to defend itself
00:21:50.960
in these terms, then it should just fold up as a country because in any country that isn't willing
00:21:55.300
to protect its citizens from an action like this, it's just going to fold. People will leave and it
00:21:59.500
would just be the end of their, it would be the end of their nation state. Um, no country in the world
00:22:04.200
would be expected to tolerate a Hamas like organization on their border. If we had something
00:22:08.880
like this in Tijuana or even on an Indian reservation, I know that Scott has liked to use kind of Indian
00:22:12.900
reservations as an analogy, but if we, there was suddenly an Indian reservation that formed
00:22:16.980
an Hamas like organization and started attacking neighboring cities, this would be a similar
00:22:21.000
response. We would not tolerate it. And if we did tolerate it, it would lead to at least the end of
00:22:25.700
the current government, right? The, you know, the kicking out of the politicians who agreed to it.
00:22:29.880
Um, but also potentially people just leaving. So I think it's fundamentally justified. Um, I don't,
00:22:35.360
I mean, I see a lot of people talking about Israeli genocide and things like that,
00:22:39.020
that they're bombing indiscriminately or carpet bombing. I think that's total nonsense. Um,
00:22:43.420
there's, uh, you know, I think something like the relative, you know, they've put first off and
00:22:48.580
foremost, most obviously they essentially gave, you know, people in Gaza two weeks to evacuate North
00:22:54.060
Gaza, to move to the South portion of the strip. And they have like, generally, they are clearly
00:23:00.860
targeting Hamas. If they wanted to, they had the capacity to just essentially obliterate the Gaza
00:23:05.240
strip. It's not a large piece of land. It's roughly the size of Las Vegas. So Israel is a
00:23:09.500
very strong military. If they wanted to simply obliterate it and leave nothing there, they could
00:23:13.180
have done that. They didn't, they're being surgical and they're trying to target Hamas.
00:23:16.660
And, uh, they're, they're being righteous in doing so. And, and, and the calls for a ceasefire
00:23:20.940
are nonsense, especially now because most of the population of the, of Gaza city has evacuated down
00:23:25.700
to the South. So we're not, the civilian casualties have dropped markedly in the last few days. I think
00:23:29.520
there's a reason you haven't seen the same sort of stuff coming up in the media. It's because the people,
00:23:32.880
only people left in North Gaza are mostly Hamas. And as a result, this is actually the perfect time
00:23:39.240
to finish the job of dismantling all the terrorist infrastructure, dismantling the tunnels. I mean,
00:23:43.780
I think people forget essentially Hamas built a castle underneath Gaza city. That's where they built
00:23:48.400
their fortifications. And the solution to that problem is, is tricky in terms of avoiding civilian
00:23:52.900
casualties. But I think Israel has done anything that any country in their situation would do. And if
00:23:58.000
not more so by giving that much notice for people to evacuate. So that's, that's my broad
00:24:02.020
thesis about, you know, since we're, you know, this is the current conflict, it's what's ongoing
00:24:05.440
right now. I think Israel is perfectly justified in what it's doing. Um, I think, you know, in terms
00:24:10.300
of what America is specifically doing in regard to this, I don't think their contributions to push
00:24:14.220
for a ceasefire are helpful. Um, because Hamas is an organization committed to the destruction of
00:24:18.640
Israel. I don't, and has indicated it is, has the will to just, you know, kill every man,
00:24:23.300
woman and child in Israel. They just don't have the means right now, but after October 7th,
00:24:26.960
who can question that they do want to do that. Um, so that's, you know, that's the core of the
00:24:32.560
question. Now, I mean, broadly speaking, I will answer the question of, do I think it is in
00:24:38.460
America's interest to support Israel? I absolutely think it is. Um, it is a outpost of Western
00:24:44.060
civilization in the Middle East. It is one of the most innovative technologically. Um,
00:24:48.560
our military benefits enormously, and that the strength and power of the United States is a good
00:24:52.860
thing for us as American citizens. We do not want to live in a weak country, whether or not,
00:24:57.440
you know, I'm not pro Iraq regime change war. I'm not like, I'm, you know, I have as much contempt
00:25:02.340
for bill crystal as you do. Maybe not quite as much, but almost as much. Um, so I'm not like,
00:25:07.760
this isn't for a purpose of the regime change war, but I, it is good for American citizens that
00:25:11.380
we live in a strong country with a strong military is what it allows us to have the dollar remain as a
00:25:15.320
reserve currency. Um, our military, you know, it, it allows it get, there's a lot of benefits that
00:25:20.680
come to American citizens from us being strong. And we shouldn't want it. We shouldn't want
00:25:24.120
ourselves weakened. And Israel does help us be stronger. Um, it's the only source of intelligence
00:25:28.620
we get on the Middle East there. I mean, at least human intelligence, we get plenty of signals
00:25:31.480
intelligence from all our tech, but Israel is uniquely good at, you know, having people on the
00:25:35.680
ground in various countries, Arabic speakers, people couldn't actually get real human intelligence.
00:25:40.540
And I think it's, you know, it's a country that is ultimately, you know, from the perspective
00:25:44.920
of conservatives, you know, since we're talking about reclaiming the American right, it's one of the
00:25:48.300
only right wing countries in the Western world. Um, the only one of the conservative countries,
00:25:53.180
it's like them and Hungary and Poland for maybe like two months longer, because Poland's about to
00:25:57.500
be taken over by liberals. We should want to see, you know, a Western country that one that is able
00:26:02.080
to, you know, actually, and one that isn't suffering these massive birth rate problems that all the other
00:26:06.100
Western countries are suffering from one that isn't so reflexively anti-American. Um, I think we should
00:26:10.860
want them to survive. We should support them and we should see them as a good thing. Um, and I mean,
00:26:16.220
there's, you know, again, your, your opening statement contained a huge, you know, like historical
00:26:21.360
background into, you know, American relations in Israel. Um, I think it's, I mean, I could go down
00:26:27.940
each of these in, in individual points, but I, I think I want to get to the, the heart of, you know,
00:26:33.860
if the, if the core thesis of these arguments is that our support for Israel angers the Arab world,
00:26:38.760
it is underlying, motivates people like bin Laden, it motivates people to join Al Qaeda, et cetera.
00:26:43.680
Right. I think the first obvious point is they wouldn't like us anyway. Or for example,
00:26:49.000
Iran of all people will not, is still not happy about the coup and Mossadegh and all that. They're
00:26:52.920
not, you know, they just wouldn't suddenly like us and be happy with us in a world where we stopped
00:26:56.740
supporting Israel. Um, it also ignores that there, they are, have motivations beyond blowback. I think
00:27:01.680
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One reason I reject the libertarian thesis is there's sort of a totalizing focus on blowback
00:28:36.740
as the central question of how foreign policy works and how people operate, i.e. their motivations in
00:28:43.640
attacking us are almost all reactive. They are all in response to what we do. And it ignores the fact
00:28:49.040
that they have their own proactive agency, that there is plenty of motivation within the Islamic world
00:28:55.360
to actually establish a caliphate, to establish Sharia law in places. That was what we saw in
00:29:00.160
ISIS and all those videos. Like, no, this isn't a group that's just reactive. They have a worldview
00:29:04.380
that they want to impose as well. And that's true of Hamas as well. They're not there just to have
00:29:08.840
their own state. They want Israel gone. They want from the river to the sea. And the idea that merely
00:29:15.240
us stopping supporting Israel would just solve all our problems in the Middle East, I think is naive.
00:29:19.260
Um, so I'll address this too, because I mentioned in your opening statement, Scott, there are things
00:29:24.240
that, that, that, uh, I believe you said that were, were, were wrong. And what I mean by that is
00:29:27.960
nothing historical or factual. Um, the, the issue I took with primarily was you determining what
00:29:32.920
their motivations were outside of the things they've said themselves to Al Qaeda. So particularly many of
00:29:37.880
them, as well as, uh, uh, bin Laden himself noted, uh, noting the bin Laden letter has been going viral
00:29:43.140
because as you mentioned, TikTok wine moms, but it's like 17 year olds, it's 20 year olds,
00:29:47.560
it's college students. And they're not just saying he made some interesting points, or they're not
00:29:52.080
just saying, I did not realize this perspective. These people are outright posting that he was
00:29:56.280
correct. And what, uh, and, and so we can start, we can start with this. Uh, uh, I'll give you a
00:30:01.420
second, uh, uh, to respond in just a moment. Will mentions the libertarian argument that it is
00:30:06.060
wholly a blowback. This is what happened last night on, on Timcast IRL. When I was talking with
00:30:10.700
Dave Smith and Clint Russell, it seemed that the libertarian perspective, something Glenn, Glenn Greenwald
00:30:16.760
tweeted, uh, Glenn Greenwald tweeted that bin Laden's three main grievances were very, very specific
00:30:24.380
U.S. military and foreign policy, uh, uh, actions, including sanctions, invasion, et cetera. However,
00:30:30.840
if you actually read the full text of his letter, not that you should take him seriously, it seems to
00:30:34.060
be a great propaganda and recruiting tool, which hits a lot of points. The core component starts with
00:30:39.060
Palestine specifically, and then goes into what bin Laden meant by attack on us was the imposition of
00:30:46.360
Western values over what should be Islamic Sharia states. He then dedicates half of the letter
00:30:52.100
specifically to the amorality and immorality of the West, fornication, homosexuality, usury, et cetera.
00:30:57.860
So, uh, to Will's point, many libertarians are outright saying, oh, it's, it's the military
00:31:03.180
actions, the foreign policy. If you were going to try and make that argument, you'd have to,
00:31:07.700
you'd have to further assume bin Laden didn't actually mean anything about Islam. He actually
00:31:13.280
was on. I, I, I, I don't think we can make those assumptions. Well, look, I don't think everything
00:31:18.220
is also black and white. I don't think anyone denies that bin Laden himself was a Salafi, you know,
00:31:23.900
hardcore Wahhabi and all this, but it's like a rectangle and a square, all squares are rectangles,
00:31:29.000
but not all rectangles are squares. Right? So there are millions of Salafis and Wahhabis who do not
00:31:35.700
share bin Laden's politics or terrorism at all. Look at the height of the ISIS caliphate that Barack
00:31:41.000
Obama built for them. Well, first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama built for them in Western
00:31:46.340
Iraq and Eastern Syria at the height of their power. They had a couple of hundred thousand
00:31:50.120
fighters who had gone to fight out of 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. Where are all the jihadis?
00:31:56.600
They don't share bin Laden's politics. Even oftentimes the most extremely fundamentalist Muslims
00:32:03.100
are quietists. They obey the part of the Quran that says, whoever your King, he wouldn't be your
00:32:09.020
King. If ma, if Allah didn't want it that way. And it's not your job to care about that. It's your
00:32:14.620
job to care about your afterlife. And there, that used to be the American tradition among Christian
00:32:20.400
fundamentalists as well. They were quietists and stayed out of politics mostly. And so yes,
00:32:25.300
bin Laden was a right-wing religious kook. And yes, as you said, he wanted to build a caliphate.
00:32:29.640
As I explained in the book, the whole point was bin Laden at the time of September 11th
00:32:36.120
was 400 guys was Al Qaeda bin Laden and his friends hiding out in Nangarhar province on the Afghan
00:32:42.820
Pakistan border and in exile, as far as you could get from anywhere in no man's land. He had no ability
00:32:49.120
to create a caliphate, even in Nangarhar. Hell, the Taliban's great success in Afghanistan was due to
00:32:55.900
the help of Saudi Pakistan and Bill Clinton's United States of America helped the Taliban in
00:33:00.640
the 1990s because they wanted to build an oil pipeline through there. They wanted the Taliban
00:33:04.620
to win. So caliphate, shmaliphate, look at the map. The whole place is carved up with Westphalia
00:33:10.840
nation states run by a bunch of sultans and potentates and dictators and el presidentes who
00:33:16.980
have nothing in common with each other and hate each other's guts. You got Sunni-Shia splits,
00:33:21.160
Persian-Arab splits, and this and that. What caused the caliphate? What gave the ability of
00:33:27.360
400 nobodies, 400 bandits on the Afghan-Pakistan border the ability within 15 years to create a
00:33:36.180
caliphate in Syria and Iraq? It was George Bush and Barack Obama doing what the Israel lobby wanted
00:33:44.260
and going to war in Iraq and Syria. Sure. So I agree the Iraq war was a mistake, obviously.
00:33:49.980
I don't think the relative feasibility of creating a caliphate is relevant to the discussion of what
00:33:56.860
bin Laden's motives were and whether ultimately Israel is right. So I mean, you know, getting back
00:34:03.080
to like, why is, you know, basically the idea here is, okay, so I don't think you've actually refuted
00:34:10.460
the underlying argument, which is that blowback is not the, I mean, you, maybe you just agree blowback
00:34:14.600
is not the underlying, the only reason or the only motivation.
00:34:17.500
What I didn't say is the, I never said it was the only anything, right? I mean, what's with all
00:34:21.420
the black and white? The point is these guys had a daydream about someday conquering the Middle East
00:34:27.160
and they could have never gotten anywhere near that without getting America to essentially quote,
00:34:35.280
fall for their scam because the scam was, I don't know if you've ever read this, but bin Laden's son
00:34:39.700
gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010 where he says, when Bush won, my father was so happy.
00:34:44.920
This is the kind of president that he needs. One who will go to war and break the bank. This is what
00:34:51.340
Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit wrote in Imperial Hubris. He said,
00:34:56.960
America is completing the radicalization of the Middle East that Al-Qaeda could never have achieved
00:35:03.700
on their own. America and Al-Qaeda are strategic allies. And really like, this is what makes me a
00:35:09.660
reverse 9-11 truther. I think you could make a lot better case that the whole US national security
00:35:15.560
state were secretly working for Al-Qaeda than the other way around because we're the ones doing
00:35:19.880
their dirty work throughout the Middle East here this whole time. So let's take this to Israel.
00:35:24.420
Okay, good. Cause I do want to talk about Hamas and Al-Qaeda too, but I wanted to clarify about that.
00:35:28.460
This is actually like, cause this is a point I've been thinking about cause I've listened to your
00:35:31.760
podcast appearances. And so, and one of the points that you've repeatedly made about what the,
00:35:35.180
how the Israeli government should act is that they need to, the goal of Hamas is similar to the goal
00:35:41.820
of Al-Qaeda. They were trying to, you know, inspire blowback against them and then rally the Muslim
00:35:47.560
world to fight Israel. And so Israel instead of, you know, needed to be thoughtful and, you know,
00:35:54.600
should not have attacked. Right. So, you know, doesn't want to act rashly. And so the first thing
00:35:59.440
I'd say is I don't think Israel is actually acting rashly. I think the rash response to,
00:36:04.860
something like the 10-7 massacre is, oh, we'll just nuke the place. Right. That's the rash response.
00:36:10.180
That's the, we'll just drop Moabs. We're just going to, you know, enough, right. Gaza is not so
00:36:14.160
big. We could just destroy it all. That's, that's the rash response. That response got quashed within
00:36:18.700
Israel and its military establishment. They said, no, we're not just going to carpet bomb. I know people
00:36:23.320
have accused them of that, but that's not what they're doing. We are going to invade, you know,
00:36:28.080
evacuate the civilian population, try and minimize civilian casualties, but we're going to tolerate some
00:36:32.700
because ultimately we can't tolerate the continued existence of the Hamas organization right on our
00:36:37.360
border. So we are going to go in there, kill as many Hamas people as we can, dismantle all the
00:36:42.620
terrorist infrastructure. And then who knows exactly how we're going to handle like de-Hamasification of
00:36:48.660
Gaza going forward, but we're not going to allow a return to Gaza coming back. That's, I think,
00:36:57.800
Yeah, we're not going to let Hamas come back. And I guess my point being that even if there,
00:37:02.940
I guess there's two independent points, right? Hamas wants the reaction. Okay. But sometimes you
00:37:08.000
can do something that you force a reaction. Like in any game, there are things called forcing moves
00:37:11.960
where you make a move and it forces your opponent to respond in a certain way because the alternatives
00:37:15.760
are far worse, right? If you, as a terrorist organization, kill 1500 and butcher them and maim them
00:37:21.880
in a brutal way, that is a forcing move if we're talking about it. Like you are forcing a response
00:37:27.360
out of the Israeli government because if they do not respond, they will lose all credibility.
00:37:32.160
People will leave Israel. The whole state might as well fold. So they have to respond. And moreover,
00:37:37.920
if the idea is, well, we can't respond, you know, like first off, I'm not even sure that's what
00:37:44.420
they're trying to do. It's not necessarily that they're trying to generate an Israeli response.
00:37:47.380
They were trying to go viral. This is the equivalent of a loomer stunt in the foreign
00:37:51.540
policy world, right? It is an attempt to do something bizarre and outlandish and horrifyingly
00:37:57.400
barbaric that it is going to go viral regardless of what Israel does, which is what indeed happened.
00:38:03.380
If we allow that to succeed as a matter of foreign policy, what do you think will happen in the future?
00:38:08.340
We will get more 10-7s nonstop. There has to be a massive disincentive to engage in the kind of
00:38:13.840
conduct that Hamas is engaged in because there is obviously a benefit they are trying to achieve,
00:38:18.420
which is going viral, bringing attention back to their cause.
00:38:21.200
Wait, which side of the argument are you on? It sounds like you're saying we shouldn't be doing
00:38:23.940
what they wanted us to do, which is bomb them the way-
00:38:26.500
My side of the argument is consistent. Israel is right. Israel is right to go in there and punish
00:38:30.660
them brutally, right? And punish Hamas brutally. So the idea is the question of whether or not we do
00:38:37.080
what Hamas wants, I don't think you seem to think that that's an important question in the sense of like,
00:38:42.220
oh, we need to not fall into their trap. My point is that's an irrelevant question because one,
00:38:46.620
it's a forcing move. And two, the imperative of punishing this sort of stunt barbarism is
00:38:52.700
overwhelming. So you are making the point, Scott, that bin Laden wanted George W. Bush to go to war
00:39:00.520
to use as a radicalizing force. Will is pointing out that Hamas is making a forcing move to try and,
00:39:05.940
I would assume, trigger the West into moves which could radicalize. But I think Will takes it one
00:39:11.200
step further saying, eradicate Hamas for this reason so they can't do it again. Is that what
00:39:15.540
Yeah. And to deter this kind of tactic by being used by other groups in the future, right?
00:39:20.840
So look, take the analogy back to Al-Qaeda. At the time of September 11th, Ron Paul issued a letter
00:39:28.000
of Mark and reprisal and said, we should send special operations forces to target and kill bin Laden and
00:39:34.880
his friends and anybody who wants to get in between our guys and his guys. Not regime change Kabul and
00:39:41.900
carpet bomb the Pashtuns for 20 years. Sorry, precision bomb the Pashtuns for 20 years. Okay.
00:39:48.680
And then go to Iraq against Sunni Saddam who, you know, secular Sunni Saddam who didn't do it.
00:39:55.460
And then on to Libya and Syria and Yemen and the rest of this chaos that they spread.
00:39:59.880
And Iran, if they get their way. So that's, if you want to just on the analogy back to Hamas here,
00:40:09.100
we all know, and our mutual friend, Daryl Cooper has explained this well, and he's a military guy
00:40:15.100
and knows the history of this very well. That, and back to the analogy about Gaza being an Indian
00:40:21.040
reservation and not the nation state next door. What that means is that Shin Bet and Mossad and the IDF
00:40:27.080
can reach out and touch these guys one at a time. And that's how they dealt with terrorism for decades
00:40:32.480
was reach out and kill these guys, abduct them and imprison them, execute them, assassinate them
00:40:38.260
one at a time, not bomb the whole place to the ground. And I want to talk about a couple of things
00:40:44.020
that you mentioned here about things that other people are saying. I haven't been calling it a
00:40:47.880
genocide. Okay. I think there's a question about whether they're going to let the people of Gaza come
00:40:52.380
back. They leaked some trial balloons about forcing them all into the Sinai and this kind of thing.
00:40:56.420
I don't think it's clear that that's what's happening here. And I don't like to throw that
00:41:00.700
term around wildly. You haven't heard me say that. I also have not been saying that they've been
00:41:05.400
bombing indiscriminately, but the thing is, that's not really what counts. And we learned this from
00:41:10.540
the Syria war and Iraq war three, for example, where the Russians and the Syrians would bomb in a
00:41:15.840
much more careless way than the Americans. But then what it turned out is the casualty rates on the
00:41:20.380
ground were the same. And as Chris Woods and the guys from airwars.org showed it's population density
00:41:25.820
below, not the precision and the care of your strikes that really makes the difference.
00:41:31.040
And Colonel Amos Fox from the U.S. Army wrote a study on what he called the precision paradox,
00:41:37.080
where he talked about, geez, we were only hitting one building very carefully, sometimes even one side
00:41:42.480
of one building very carefully, one at a time. And then one day we looked up and we had destroyed
00:41:47.740
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When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops.
00:42:52.400
So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients
00:42:57.680
that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird,
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on care. Did I mention that we care? We had destroyed half of the city of Mosul. And it's
00:43:21.340
not exactly carpet bombing, but yes, it's killing tens of thousands of innocent people. And based on
00:43:27.600
what? Probable cause that there's a fighter in there, a reasonable belief, right? Based on,
00:43:34.980
remember Barack Obama's intelligence, signature strike. If they're doing jumping jacks, if they're
00:43:39.300
driving a truck, if they have an antenna sticking out of their pocket, they're a terrorist. You can
00:43:43.440
kill them. So based on what intelligence? The Israelis assure us, well, we're only trying to kill bad
00:43:48.980
guys and bomb buildings that have tunnels under them. And you just have to believe us. But I don't
00:43:54.240
know based on what intelligence they're making those calls or why we should believe them. We
00:43:59.040
don't believe our government when they say anything, but we should believe the Israeli government when
00:44:02.400
they say every time they kill a kid, it was an accident. They couldn't help themselves. It was
00:44:06.160
just collateral damage. They were being as careful as they could possibly be, but it just happened
00:44:11.500
anyway. And I think, you know, there are obvious, you know, again, with the black and white thinking
00:44:17.360
where it's what we got a precision paradox, bomb the place to the ground and kill more than 10,000
00:44:23.940
civilians or do absolutely nothing and tell Hamas, please be our best friends from now on.
00:44:30.780
Right? Like I never said that. And I don't think that that's reasonable. And I don't know anybody who
00:44:34.360
really argued. And I don't think in any of those podcasts appearances, you heard me say that Israel
00:44:38.400
should do nothing at all in response. Certainly nothing violent that would upset anyone or anything.
00:44:43.160
I never said that, but what I'm talking about is falling into the trap and back to the point about
00:44:48.260
the reaction. And maybe people don't know this. Okay. I like to quote Saul Alinsky from rules for
00:44:53.140
radicals, page 74. He says in all asymmetric political activity, this would include terrorism.
00:44:59.260
The action is in the reaction of the opposition. So this is how a small group of bandits or criminals
00:45:06.240
or a militia gets a superpower to hurt itself is by giving their politicians an excuse to exploit a
00:45:14.780
crisis to exploit and overreact. And then with that reaction comes in the counter reactions. Now,
00:45:20.200
Hezbollah and every militia in the region and all the Sunni kings, everybody has to take a stand
00:45:26.460
and all the politics are mixed up. I want to make sure we can answer the previous one too.
00:45:29.300
All right. Okay. So there are a few of them. I can I, is it fair to characterize your position
00:45:32.900
is like what Israel should do here as like mark and reprisal effectively of Hamas, right? Assassinate
00:45:38.500
leadership. Is that a fair characterization? Yeah. Yeah. Anything else that you think they
00:45:42.260
should do in addition to mark and reprisal and trying to kill top leadership?
00:45:47.900
Yeah, I think it's a lot of it would be negotiable. In fact, I read Seymour Hersh had a
00:45:52.380
piece where he's talking to high level Israeli sources, uh, intelligent sources, and they're saying
00:45:56.640
they're negotiating with the political factions of Hamas who are at odds with some of the military
00:46:01.900
factions. And they're talking about possibly holding trials for them as, um, and, and I'm
00:46:07.880
so like criminal trial, criminal, like arrest and criminally prosecute. I don't know exactly
00:46:11.740
the, how the system works in Gaza, but, and I'm not saying that I know that this is credible,
00:46:15.860
but I'm saying Israeli intelligence officials are telling Hersh that they think that there's a way
00:46:21.920
that they can negotiate with the political guys and put pressure on the military guys,
00:46:27.120
even have them held accountable as this would be part of the process for hostage negotiations and,
00:46:32.340
and the rest. So I'm not saying I'm no negotiator. Okay. But I am saying that there's a hell of a lot
00:46:38.580
of gray area between black and white here where reasonable men could be much better than Benjamin
00:46:44.080
Netanyahu and George W. Bush at this. All right. Okay. So that was, that's enough to give me something to
00:46:48.860
say like here to respond to, right? Okay. So I don't think that's nearly adequate, right? And I
00:46:52.660
don't think the Israeli government thinks it's nearly adequate, obviously self-evidently, but
00:46:56.700
also that neither does the Israeli public. And I think there's a few reasons. I think first off,
00:47:00.980
there's a, there's a big distinction between the difference between Al Qaeda in 2001, after they
00:47:05.400
had attacked us and Hamas in Gaza. Um, Hamas is a much bigger organization numbers wise. It has much
00:47:10.780
more infrastructure in place is right on the border in a, in a small, but defined area. Um, you're not
00:47:16.360
invading an entire large country, the size of Texas. You're invading a area, the size of Las
00:47:20.500
Vegas. Um, and more to the point killing, you know, putting out just doing assassinations against
00:47:27.420
Hamas, you know, Hamas leadership, I guess in Qatar or, you know, in Gaza itself. I think those are
00:47:32.420
the guys they're trying to negotiate with are the guys hiding out in Qatar. Right. Like, so I mean,
00:47:36.440
that doesn't actually solve the fundamental problem. Like even if you took out the entire top
00:47:40.180
leadership of Hamas and that's all you did, well then there's still all the tunnels. There's still
00:47:44.460
the rank and file of tens of thousands of soldiers, still all the military equipment,
00:47:47.960
still all the rockets. I mean, it really is actually kind of insane when you think about
00:47:50.780
the fact that. Well, that's just, if you assume that we just go back only to the pure status quo
00:47:54.440
after that. Right. But like why, I mean, if you aren't willing to invade them and impose a new
00:47:58.620
status quo on Hamas, meaning you're gone, then why wouldn't they go back? They, they, they're committed
00:48:04.320
to the destruction of Israel. It's in their charter and it's in their actions on October 7th.
00:48:09.060
Was in their charter. Was in their, oh. Until I think what, a couple of years ago, they changed it.
00:48:14.860
Yeah. In 2017 they did. Yeah. Okay. Well, um, I mean, maybe I think that might've been some of
00:48:19.260
the faint that ultimately, you know, what they were doing in order to deceive the Israelis.
00:48:23.140
We can actually get to this Netanyahu thing, funding Hamas. Like, I think that's an interesting
00:48:26.880
discussion. Yeah, we should talk about that. Um, but I think I want to make one other point
00:48:30.160
because you also had, you had these other points about the bombing of civilians and right. Like
00:48:34.820
the fact that even if you're not targeting civilians, you're going to end up killing a good
00:48:39.700
number of them. I think Israel was conscious of that fact. I think two weeks of
00:48:42.980
evacuation notice jet demonstrates that. And I think, I think more to the point, you know,
00:48:48.660
you see the news reports coming out now that basically all the civilians in, in North Gaza
00:48:52.500
have evacuated to the South. It was perfectly feasible. They just weren't doing it because
00:48:56.680
either one, they didn't take Israel seriously or two Hamas was holding them in as, as Israel
00:49:01.680
has accused them of preventing them from evacuating. But like that's, that's on Hamas, right?
00:49:06.920
That's a war crime from Hamas preventing civilians from evacuating from a military
00:49:09.760
area where military operations are going on. So, I mean, I think because Israel has to respond
00:49:16.080
and cannot tolerate Hamas on its border after an event like this, they're doing the best that they
00:49:22.760
can under the circumstances. Well, I, I, I, I, I'm curious two weeks notice. That's not just a
00:49:28.640
civilians. That's two Hamas. Yes, correct. I mean, that's very generous that they aren't obligated to
00:49:32.960
do that. So right now, you know, they dropped more bombs on Gaza in five weeks than America
00:49:39.960
dropped on Afghanistan at the highest year of the war there in 2019, which is amazing that Trump
00:49:46.080
bombed Afghanistan in 2019 more than Obama did in 2010 and 2011 is incredible to me, but they dropped
00:49:52.120
more bombs on Gaza in this space of four or five weeks. You can't concede at all that some of this
00:49:57.960
is disproportionate or seemingly careless to civilian lives. But, but so I'm, what does that
00:50:03.680
mean? What does it mean? They bombed Gaza more? Well, they dropped more bombs in terms of tonnage,
00:50:08.360
but that doesn't mean anything to the intelligence, to the, to the military factors. I mean, Gaza,
00:50:13.540
look at the results. You got 12,000 dead people. Right, right. But this, this, this doesn't answer
00:50:18.400
the question of, of, of war, right? Afghanistan and Gaza are substantially different places with
00:50:23.820
different leadership, with different circumstances. And so I hear things like more people died here
00:50:28.640
than here. This is how many people died. And I'm like, we're right. I think all death is bad.
00:50:33.100
I mean, but take your analogy. Afghanistan is much bigger fighting a massive Taliban insurgency
00:50:37.480
at their height in 2019, which trying to stave off total defeat there, but due to massive air war,
00:50:44.420
which actually is my point. If Afghanistan is, is sparsely populated, then they're going to use less
00:50:50.760
bombs. Not sparsely populated, much more to Gaza. Gaza is the density. Per mile, but we're not
00:50:57.160
talking about density. We're talking about, they were bombed. Wait, in Afghanistan, they were bombing
00:51:00.820
the Helmand province and the Kandahar province, especially, and Nangohar. And they're bombing the
00:51:06.420
crap out of it. My point is the moral arguments of two completely different things doesn't mean it.
00:51:10.960
I don't understand the point other than to make it seem like one thing is bad based on a number
00:51:15.240
argument, which doesn't get to the core of the differences. The point is we're talking about the
00:51:20.140
amount of munitions dropped on a vaster battlefield over a much larger period of time against a much
00:51:27.020
larger enemy and take that same number of munitions being dropped on a smaller number of people in a
00:51:32.800
much shorter period of time in a much smaller area. How many people died in Afghanistan due to the
00:51:37.920
bombings over the... Nobody really knows. Hundreds of thousands over the 20 years. Nobody really knows.
00:51:42.900
So Israel's bombed Gaza more, but it's substantially less in terms of casualties. Correct. That's actually a
00:51:47.480
number that's come out. It's something like the ratio of building destruction to casualty. There's
00:51:53.240
a lot of buildings in Gaza that have been destroyed. Gaza is going to be in ruins after this. There's
00:51:55.960
just no gutting around that. But the ratio of casualties to building destruction is actually
00:52:00.200
a lot lower than in other wars. And I think a big part of it is because Israel gave them a huge amount
00:52:04.900
of time to evacuate. A huge amount, unheard of, in modern wars. America didn't do that,
00:52:09.900
right? We didn't do that in Iraq. We didn't do that. We certainly didn't do that ISIS.
00:52:13.200
Obama killed civilians. And just to throw this in there, made the argument that military aged males
00:52:20.240
were enemy combatants, even if they're just carrying buckets of water. Also, I think one
00:52:23.920
other point is that Hamas did something unique that we haven't seen in the history of modern warfare,
00:52:28.680
which is building an enormous castle underneath a city, right? That's a novel phenomena. And it
00:52:34.560
poses challenges to how are you going to deal with it as a military when you have an affirmative
00:52:38.480
obligation to your own citizens to destroy this organization? And they're all hiding out under,
00:52:43.740
you know, they built a castle underneath the city. Well, first, you got to get the people out of the
00:52:46.120
city because it's a war zone. All right. I want to go back to what you said about Iran and about how,
00:52:51.080
boy, and again, this is some black and white stuff. I sure hope I didn't imply, although I guess I could
00:52:56.400
understand why people might have heard it this way, that, oh, everything over there would just be
00:52:59.980
great for America if it wasn't for Israel. That's not the case. I mean, we've had nothing but
00:53:03.940
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really big on care. Did I mention that we care?
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And Biden's and McCain's in charge of this country for 30 years and and everything that
00:54:37.520
they touch turns to fire. And so I'm not saying that everything would be fine. But for example,
00:54:43.240
Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger's right hand man,
00:54:47.580
he wanted to build an oil pipeline across Iran from Azerbaijan in the 1990s. Israel said, no,
00:54:54.440
you can't do that. Dick Cheney, the head of Halliburton in the 1990s, committed the high sin
00:55:00.220
of going overseas and complaining about Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iran and saying, look,
00:55:06.300
these people are Shiites too. And God didn't see foot, see fit to put all the oil of the world
00:55:11.060
under wonderful Western democracies. And so we have to do business with these people.
00:55:15.400
The old Ayatollah is dead. The new Ayatollah is in there. President Rafsanjani and Khatami and
00:55:21.520
these guys, yeah, they're bad guys, but they're not any worse than the Saudis who we deal with
00:55:25.820
deal with across the Gulf. Of course, we could normalize relations with Iran. As I said, Israel
00:55:31.580
stayed friends with Iran after the revolution until they turned on him in 1993. Iran didn't start
00:55:37.120
backing Hamas until two years after that. And people can read all about that in Treacherous
00:55:41.820
Alliance by Trita Parsi, which is a fantastic book that covers that. So no, it doesn't mean
00:55:46.420
everything would be perfect, but could America get along with Iran or just, oh no, they all hate us
00:55:52.240
because of the coup of 53 and they'll never get over that. I don't think that's right. I think it's
00:55:56.240
the Americans who will never get over the revolution of 79 when they overthrew the government that we had
00:56:01.480
no right to foist on them in the first place. And Jimmy Carter was asked about it. He goes, oh,
00:56:06.200
1953, that's ancient history. It was just 25 years ago. What if they had overthrown Bill Clinton
00:56:12.860
and installed the Shiite dictator over America? We'd be used to it by now or over it by now.
00:56:19.180
It's completely crazy. But anyway, they've tried to come in from the cold over and over again,
00:56:24.460
and we could bring them into the cold. America's a superpower. All this stuff is negotiable. If
00:56:28.800
Alexander Haig and Dick Cheney want to do business with Iran, then that means it's at least within the
00:56:34.280
realm of possibility. But I wanted to get back to something than that. And I know I did bring up a
00:56:39.020
whole lot of stuff in my opening statement there about the terror war. But I wonder if you could
00:56:43.300
address this major conflict between the fact that America's enemies are these Wahhabi, Salafi,
00:56:51.900
Bin Ladenites, or at least led Bin Ladenites, the shock troops off and on of our Saudi allies,
00:56:59.720
but that Israel's enemies in the region are the Shiites. But it wasn't Hezbollah that knocked our
00:57:06.380
towers down. It wasn't Iran that knocked our towers down. And so they have us, for example,
00:57:13.040
under, as I said, in Syria, under heavy pressure from the Israel lobby in the United States,
00:57:19.000
backing Al-Qaeda headchopper suicide bombers because they hate the Shiites more. But why should
00:57:25.580
Americans hate the Shiites more? You know, David Stockman said, hell, we should ally with Iran and
00:57:30.300
Russia to kill Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They're the bad guys here. And what do they do? They spent 10 years
00:57:36.400
telling us that we were crazy because those Al-Qaeda terrorists are moderate rebels who are just trying
00:57:41.400
to save the people of Syria from the evil Shiites. And you got to admit that there's a division in
00:57:47.000
America, Israeli policy on that, right? There's a reason I didn't agree to a debate about American
00:57:51.580
policy in Syria. But that wasn't Israeli. I mean, Israel might have wanted it, but I think it's
00:57:58.760
overstating the case to say that it's at Israel's behest, right? Like we are an independent nation
00:58:03.720
and Obama had his own purposes. Our foreign policy establishment did those things in Syria for its own
00:58:09.640
reasons, even if Israel liking it too was maybe a cherry on top. Yeah, well, Scott, let me ask you.
00:58:15.420
I think it was more than a cherry on top. I think if you remember in 2013, after the first fake
00:58:20.400
sarin attack in Gouda and Barack Obama and John McCain said, come on, everybody, let's go to war.
00:58:25.940
And he said, hey, I need help from civil society. Come on, everybody. Let's help do this.
00:58:30.720
Only AIPAC and the Center for Security Policy and these most pro-Israel organizations in DC came out
00:58:37.240
and said, yeah, let's go to war in Syria. And remember, in fact, I bet you cover this at the time.
00:58:41.240
What did the army say and the Marines? They held up signs and said, I didn't join the army to go
00:58:45.400
fight for al-Qaeda in Syria. But let me ask you, I think there's a difference here.
00:58:50.020
Will, you're suggesting the United States is more directing Israel's actions or you're saying
00:58:53.940
Israel's lobby is directing US actions? I wouldn't say the United States is directing Israel's actions.
00:58:58.780
I mean, there's an interplay, right? We have influence over the Israeli government.
00:59:03.260
They have some influence over our government. I think a lot of the times the flea wags the dog
00:59:07.720
in a way that should not be. But it definitely goes both directions, right? Like our state
00:59:12.640
department and Anthony Blinken is not there even as well as much as it's saying, oh, Israel,
00:59:16.940
you can do what you want. They're not there to just give carte blanche to Israel. They've been
00:59:20.740
pushing for a lot of different things with the Israeli government. Well, and by the way,
00:59:24.360
you know, the pro-Israel hawks in America, the neoconservatives in America oftentimes are worse
00:59:30.120
than the Likud government in Israel. And they were worse than Ariel Sharon when he was in power on,
00:59:35.900
you know, he would try to compromise on some things and they would take him to task.
00:59:39.400
And, you know, Ehud Olmert, who was between Sharon and Netanyahu, who is not a great prime
00:59:44.820
minister, but not a lunatic. He was negotiating with Syria in 2006 and Bush sent Condoleezza Rice
00:59:52.500
to stop it when they could have negotiated. So America oftentimes is a negative influence
00:59:58.520
on Israel when they could be making progress. We're stopping them from doing so.
01:00:02.120
I definitely want to get into Hamas's funding because you brought that up a little bit.
01:00:05.940
But the first thing I just want to ask more lightly before we jump into that,
01:00:09.660
I know you mentioned, Will asked you about marking reprisal to go and take out the Hamas leaders.
01:00:15.260
Following October 7th, do you have a general idea of like, I'm not calling, I don't want to imply
01:00:21.620
you're a military leader who would have these ideas, but what do you think Israel's actions
01:00:24.720
should have been immediately following October 7th?
01:00:26.620
Okay. Well, so the first thing is you went about the right to defend themselves.
01:00:30.120
Clearly they had the right to kill any Hamas guy outside that gate and chase them back inside
01:00:35.540
at that point. That is quite literally defending themselves, right? But I have a friend, an Israeli
01:00:41.100
friend who is a military veteran of the 2006 war, who said to me right after this, he goes,
01:00:46.960
look, they're surrounded. Okay. This is Waco now. And no, David Koresh never went to town and killed
01:00:53.220
innocent people. And he never was going to. But anyway, the point is they are surrounded.
01:00:58.240
This is not a sovereign nation state next door. This is essentially a prison uprising or a ghetto.
01:01:06.900
And so time is on Israel's side. There's no, you're angry. You want to go in there and do
01:01:14.100
something horrible. And even if there's collateral damage and all of that, but to be perfectly clear
01:01:20.180
about this, for people who don't know about this story, the only reason Hamas was able to break out
01:01:24.480
on 8-7 was because the IDF and their commander in chief were derelict in their duty. Netanyahu had
01:01:30.720
called hundreds of, I think more than a thousand soldiers away from Gaza and sent them to the West
01:01:36.280
Bank. They're overly reliant on all this high tech sensors and, and automatic machine guns and all of
01:01:42.620
these things. The first thing Hamas did was take out a few cell phone towers and completely crippled
01:01:47.280
the Israeli response. So they were derelict in their duty. But then what happened? They called
01:01:53.360
up 300,000 reserves and every drone in the fleet, right? So no one's getting out of there now.
01:02:00.960
So it's just like at Waco, Texas, 30 years ago. What's the hurry here that we have to go in and
01:02:07.400
kill these people? What would you do though? What would you have Israel do? That's the core question.
01:02:10.900
Like, what would you have Israel do? I think the, they should do everything that they can
01:02:18.880
to try to negotiate with the political factions of Hamas to see what can be done to isolate the
01:02:25.860
military leaders. Now, if that's just going to lead to a coup and the Al-Qasim brigades take over the
01:02:31.060
whole thing and the political people are powerless and there's no choice, then I guess you have to use
01:02:36.580
violent action. But look, they use, there's video of this the other day I saw. They use one of these
01:02:41.440
Hellfire missiles with no warhead on it. It shoots swords out and kills people. That's how, I think that's
01:02:48.860
how they killed Sheikh Yassin in 2004, which we're about to talk about the history of Sheikh Yassin here,
01:02:53.280
I hope, and all of that. And they killed, what, him and one other person in the car with him.
01:02:58.860
So, you know, this is like, you could say that you get some really evil chess pieces, but Israel owns
01:03:04.680
the entire board here. IDF and Shin Bet and Mossad have essentially God-like omniscient power of life
01:03:12.720
and death over the people in that strip. And they can reach out and touch these guys one at a time.
01:03:17.560
The deal here is the doctrine became, we are going to completely root out and completely annihilate
01:03:25.460
the existence of Hamas now. And so now anything standing between this and that goal is permissible.
01:03:32.940
And I think that, you know, probably we're going to see at the end that they actually don't go that
01:03:38.320
far, but, and that this, a lot of this was for nothing. Are you saying that immediately following
01:03:42.660
October 7th, after Israel secures its, you know, as you mentioned, takes out any Hamas guy attacking
01:03:48.660
them, they secure that they should have not had any military strikes in Gaza. Well, if they had,
01:03:53.980
if they had cleared military targets with no collateral damage and they could do some reprisals,
01:03:58.260
then sure. So you said to negotiate. So, so, so I'm just trying to clarify, October 7th happens,
01:04:04.320
Israel pushes back the Hamas fighters, kills many of them, stops the fighting, secures,
01:04:08.640
it secures the, the, the, the border, whatever you want to call it. At that point, you think
01:04:12.440
Israel should begin negotiations and not military strikes, or are you saying?
01:04:16.820
Well, it depends if you have, you know, entire, uh, Hamas divisions separate from innocent civilians
01:04:22.660
that are easy to drop a hellfire on. What the hell do I care? You know, I don't know. Um,
01:04:28.480
I'm not a total pacifist here, but essentially what I'm doing is I'm preaching the minarchist
01:04:33.280
solution. What you want to do is the, the least amount of damage, especially to these innocent
01:04:38.780
civilians, as you possibly can and try to figure out a better way forward. Go ahead.
01:04:43.580
Yeah. I just think, I mean, so first off, I think that's, so I think that's the ethically
01:04:48.980
incorrect response for the perspective of Israel's government. And I also think it, I mean,
01:04:52.660
I could say it's politically impossible, but I think you'd probably agree with me
01:04:55.580
that that response by an Israeli government would be literally politically impossible.
01:04:59.100
The government that tried it would be tossed out instant elections, new government that is
01:05:03.160
willing to go to war. I'm not so sure about that. I mean, again, like there are,
01:05:06.160
I think you're very much underestimating the attitude of the Israeli public here.
01:05:10.080
Possibly, but I mean, there are Israeli intelligence professionals who are talking this way
01:05:13.520
to the papers too. So if you have the right technocrats in the Israeli national security
01:05:18.800
state explaining why they think this is wise, then you could do X, Y, or Z policy, I believe.
01:05:26.180
Sure. But I also, I mean, so I, I think that's a less interesting debate for us to have than
01:05:31.160
the, like the ethical one, right? Is it actually right for Israel to go ahead and invade and take
01:05:35.400
out Hamas? Because that's the central question. I think it is. I mean, I'm, I'm a nationalist.
01:05:40.260
I think America, the American government has its first obligation to protect American citizens.
01:05:44.540
And I think the Israeli government's first obligation is to protect Israeli citizens.
01:05:48.360
Well, I think Scott agrees, right? Scott said, hellfire the Hamas guys, if you can get them.
01:05:51.460
But look, I also said, well, this is on the last show that Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza
01:05:57.100
strip in 1967. They just won't give these people equal rights. So they live in this ghetto because
01:06:03.480
they're born with the wrong religion. And so they're stuck there. And so they don't have a state of their
01:06:09.280
own to protect them. You're a nationalist, but you're not a Palestinian nationalist.
01:06:13.560
No, certainly not. I don't think that Israel should give them a state. I'm not, we can talk
01:06:17.200
about the two state solution. That's a, that's an interesting separate question.
01:06:19.920
So they, they don't get equal rights within the Israeli state that rules them as Netanyahu said,
01:06:24.640
and I have the exact quotes here as Netanyahu said, it will always be one state from the river
01:06:29.180
Jordan to the Mediterranean sea just will not be free. It'll only be free for Jews. And the
01:06:34.660
Palestinians are just going to have to learn to live with it. That's the, that's the Israeli
01:06:39.980
doctrine. Are there, are there Muslims who live in Israel who? Yes. 20% population of, uh, Israel is,
01:06:47.400
uh, Palestinian Muslim and Christian, but it's the, are they, are they free with equal rights
01:06:53.340
and everything? They have essentially second classes and shit. They're not allowed to intermarry.
01:06:57.700
They're not allowed to, uh, live wherever they want. They have some representation in the
01:07:01.660
Knesset. But up until the last, uh, regime before Netanyahu, the tradition had been for decades that
01:07:08.040
no government will form with the Arabs. They would rather lose and let the other guys form a government
01:07:13.980
than have Arabs in the ruling coalition. And they only broke that for the very first time,
01:07:18.620
the last time. So they've never had the government, uh, minister positions except, uh, once in the last
01:07:23.080
few years here, but then, so, and this is an important point, Tim, because you know, the pro-Israel
01:07:27.660
side always says, well, but look how well we treat the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
01:07:31.800
They get along fine and everything's just fine. Well, fine. So why don't you do that for all the
01:07:35.580
rest of them too? Instead, you're supposed to believe that if it's free from the river to the
01:07:40.020
sea, then no, that definitely 100% means that every Arab is going to kill every Jew until they're all
01:07:45.080
dead. But that's just a fact, not in evidence. Uh, I mean, I can, we can pull up the poll that just
01:07:49.440
came out. That was just, just done of Gaza and the West bank, but it showed that roughly 75% both in
01:07:55.440
Gaza and the West bank supported the 10 seven massacre. Agree that Hamas's actions were good.
01:07:59.900
Uh, if I mean, 75%. Oh, I don't, I don't know that that's right. I just read the win up poll,
01:08:06.260
uh, again, the Washington Institute for near East policy against interest. And they said that the
01:08:10.340
majority of people of Gaza reject Hamas and are stuck with Hamas and don't even like them at all.
01:08:15.880
I don't know. I mean, this, this poll looked fine to me and it, I mean, it, it tracks historically
01:08:20.480
like the West, I mean, there's a lot of hatred there. And you know what true that also is,
01:08:24.940
as I know you understand that is the rally around the flag effect when they're in the
01:08:28.660
middle of being bombed. It's the same as Americans giving George W. Bush and 90% approval rating when
01:08:33.560
he's torturing people to death and bombing innocent countries, but when you're being attacked,
01:08:37.920
they're being very nationalistic and rallying around their leader. But I bet you, if you,
01:08:42.120
if a pollster said, come on, you don't really think it was okay to kill those people at the
01:08:45.960
kibbutz. I bet you they'd answer affirmatively to that too.
01:08:48.940
Maybe, but can I, can I, I just want to actually, sorry, uh, lost my train of thought for a second.
01:08:54.180
Um, you could understand that the Israeli government might be willing to grant a state.
01:08:58.380
And you know what the core thing, when you're talking about granting a state is we talk about
01:09:01.160
a state and it's just this hypothetical thing. It means granting us the right to a sovereign
01:09:04.440
military to people who think the 10 seven miss massacre was a good idea though, because the
01:09:09.300
whole idea of the Palestinian state from 1979, all the way through was a state minus where they
01:09:14.640
would not have their own standing military force.
01:09:17.260
Then that's effectively what Gaza, no, it's not. No, come on, man. It's not, it's, it is. I mean,
01:09:23.140
other than Gaza, you know, consistently sending rockets. And so Israel having to put some
01:09:27.460
structures in place to defend themselves from consistent attack, but I mean, Israel evacuated
01:09:31.320
Gaza, right? Like they had people on the border.
01:09:33.520
I'm glad you brought that up. So let's talk about this in, in, uh, 2005, Ariel Sharon pulled,
01:09:39.160
uh, all the last of the Jewish settlers out of the Gaza strip and called it the unilateral
01:09:44.760
disengagement and his senior advisor, Dove Weissglass was being criticized. Um, and Sharon
01:09:51.480
was being criticized for giving away the whole store to the terrorists. And I don't know if
01:09:55.900
you're familiar with this quote, this is, everyone can look this up. It's Dove Weissglass with no E,
01:10:01.440
just D O V Weissglass. And this is what he told Haaretz. He said, quote, the significance of the
01:10:06.700
disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent
01:10:12.700
the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion of the refugees, the borders
01:10:18.020
and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it
01:10:23.680
entails has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with a U S presidential
01:10:29.960
blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde.
01:10:37.360
It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary. So there will not be a political
01:10:44.200
process with the Palestinians. The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently
01:10:50.740
in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes
01:10:59.320
our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. We educated the world to understand
01:11:06.560
there is no one to talk to. And we received a no one to talk to certificate. And that certificate
01:11:13.280
says, one, there's no one to talk to. Two, as long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic
01:11:18.680
status quo remains intact. And three, the certificate will be revoked only when Palestine becomes Finland.
01:11:28.160
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In other words, we get to keep gobbling up the West Bank because we don't have to deal with
01:13:03.300
the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. They're divided and conquered.
01:13:07.380
So that's entirely a separate question from the one I was talking about. Like we were,
01:13:11.600
You were saying when they withdrew, they created essentially a state for the people of Gaza.
01:13:16.920
The state minus that you're talking about, right? Like they had self-government. There
01:13:22.140
So it is the state minus that you described. Like if you don't think they should get us out of
01:13:25.420
That's not true. That's like saying that, that, you know, an Indian reservation is a nation and
01:13:30.180
has full independence, but it's not true. They don't have a port. They don't have an airport.
01:13:34.140
They're not, they don't control their own fishing rights. They're not allowed to fish more than six
01:13:38.180
miles off their own coast. They're not allowed international trade. They're under total siege
01:13:43.140
from the outside in Egypt. Egypt controls the Southern border in cooperation with the United
01:13:48.000
States travel and Gazans fly out of Cairo. Like it's the idea that this is a prison is wildly
01:13:52.880
overstated. It's just not right. It's the only prison in the world where there are no prison
01:13:57.560
I have just a general question. I'm curious about, uh, in this regard too, there are a lot of people who
01:14:02.500
are in the U S who are Palestinian or related to Palestinians or descended from Palestinians.
01:14:06.620
I just don't know the process by which you're born in Gaza. And then you find yourself living
01:14:10.260
in the United States as a citizen is, do they just apply to leave? And then I believe that
01:14:14.640
there's like a limited amount of permits per year. And then the question is whether you're
01:14:18.460
allowed back again. Cause the more, when, when Palestinians leave, the Israelis try to keep
01:14:23.920
There are, there are people that, uh, you know, I've met who are Palestinian in a born in the
01:14:28.560
area. Now they live in America and they're citizens. I mean, that's, that's, that's a,
01:14:32.860
Yeah. I mean, I just don't, I just don't know if it's not a prison. Like that's like,
01:14:36.380
that's a wild overstatement of the case. Like, yes, there is a wall and there's very,
01:14:41.640
very limited migration and controlled migration and controlled entry and exit from Gaza into Israel.
01:14:47.600
But that's not the only border. There's Egypt as well. There's a reason for that. IE the consistent
01:14:52.240
and almost, you know, nonstop rocket fire coming. I mean, think about this. Israel literally
01:14:57.820
invented a state of the art missile defense system in order to deal with the fact that
01:15:02.560
they had rockets coming from 50 miles away on a regular basis. And it's just a normal
01:15:06.800
thing in Israel for everybody to get into bomb shelters on a regular basis.
01:15:09.280
I had a, a, a friend in Israel, an Israeli friend, and I think it was protective. It was
01:15:14.780
around 2014. Was this, this was one of the first times the rockets actually reached Tel
01:15:18.260
Aviv. I don't know. I don't know a lot about it. All I know is I get a frantic message from
01:15:22.140
someone saying a rocket exploded over the house and they didn't think it was possible for
01:15:25.000
something like this to happen. Now there was just sheer panic. Remember the, uh, I guess
01:15:29.740
2008 war and John Stewart's interviewing, uh, or he's playing a clip on the daily show
01:15:36.640
from, I guess, CNN. And the guy's like, yeah, reporting live from Tel Aviv. And he's wearing
01:15:40.620
a pink polo t-shirt and he's like, yeah, rocket fire and all the danger. And they show the clip
01:15:46.260
from the guy in Gaza and he's wearing a helmet, a bulletproof vest. There's literally explosions
01:15:50.200
going off all, all around him. Like, you know, my, my Israeli friend sent me a picture
01:15:54.940
of, look, a rocket hit an apartment and it came right in the window and blew up a kitchen.
01:15:58.960
Like if a lady had been standing in that kitchen, she'd have been killed. But we're talking about
01:16:02.860
like, that's it. It would have, it would have messed up this room and maybe killed one or
01:16:07.000
two people in it. It's the, I don't, the relative strength of these explosives is,
01:16:12.560
let's address that. Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me want to go first.
01:16:15.400
Well, I mean, I, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure I understand the, the, the moral argument. I feel
01:16:20.600
like this is, this is a common, uh, among, I'm not trying to use this as a dig, uh, the left
01:16:25.940
argument of a press versus oppressor that morality is, uh, in some way morality is in, in large,
01:16:34.700
or at least a component of morality is the strength of, of one side versus the other.
01:16:39.360
I, I'm not sure I agree with that, right? Just because one person has more power.
01:16:43.060
Well, no, I don't think, well, if anybody ever said that is just who has more power,
01:16:47.640
but the question is who has the ability to make decisions to change the situation? It's just like,
01:16:52.840
I like to bring up the Attica prison uprising in, uh, what, 1974, whenever that was, Governor
01:16:59.380
Rockefeller sent the national guard in there to just massacre everybody, but he just didn't
01:17:04.620
have to do that, right? Like, yes, there are minimum security prisoners who were caught up
01:17:09.080
in this thing and there are very bad felons who've taken over the prison, but the whole
01:17:12.620
place is surrounded. Send in Sam Jackson to negotiate, man. And instead what they do, they
01:17:18.720
send in the national guard who killed innocent people, including guards, prison guards were
01:17:22.780
killed when they sent in the overwhelming force because you got to shore up your state and you
01:17:28.300
can't, you know, Governor Rockefeller had to prove who's boss there when it just isn't
01:17:33.000
necessary to go that far. And no, I'm not saying that Hamas somehow is, uh, what they're more
01:17:40.100
moral because their rockets are weaker. I'd never said that. And that wasn't even the implication
01:17:44.520
of what I'm saying. I'm just talking about their relative ability to inflict harm on the people of
01:17:51.140
Israel. It's almost negligible. And let's go back because you did bring this up and let's go back and
01:17:56.880
let's talk about where Hamas even comes from. Hamas was a charity that took care of education
01:18:03.340
and food for poor people. And then, and it was a breakup of the Muslim brotherhood.
01:18:07.880
Okay. One point at a time. Right. Right. Okay. So we'll, we'll want it to address the
01:18:12.060
proportionality. Right. So, um, again, I mean, I think actually Tim, you made this point pretty
01:18:16.800
well, right? Like the strength, the weakness does not equate to morality. Right. I think you agree
01:18:21.000
with that. Sure. Right. Like, so I must, despite being substantially weaker is engaged in immoral
01:18:25.720
action. I think the second point is that even if like currently unmolested, Hamas doesn't have the
01:18:31.560
ability to just kill everybody. You know, they lack the means to do what they would want to do
01:18:35.320
in Israel, which is actually genocide, by the way. Like, I don't know if you agree with me that
01:18:38.320
Hamas's goals in Israel are genocidal. Do you agree with that? Yes. No. Well, they had said in
01:18:45.240
the past, look, Sheik Yassin in January of 2004, it's in the London independent said, I'm ready. I'm
01:18:50.600
old and I'm tired of this. And I'm ready to sign on the dotted line for a 67, uh, two state solution
01:18:56.060
within 67 borders. And two months later, the Israelis killed him. Right. That's like, which is the
01:19:01.380
same thing they did in Lebanon when Arafat, Arafat said he wanted to negotiate. So they
01:19:05.500
invaded Lebanon. You're trying to, so trying to dodge, get out of the pocket. Well, I'm
01:19:08.740
not, no, I'm saying, I'm saying Hamas, I'm saying Hamas when their leader said he wanted
01:19:13.840
to deal, they murdered the guy. Okay. So if you're asking me about like right now, the
01:19:18.500
current leadership of Hamas, are they very bad guys who should be killed rather than dealt
01:19:24.200
with? Do you think their goal is a genocide in Israel? Well, I don't, I don't think that's
01:19:27.940
a fair characterization because I think it is right. I wouldn't necessarily say it's
01:19:32.340
an unfair one. I don't, they have not said that I have heard recently that their goal
01:19:37.260
is to destroy the entire state of Israel. I do know, and they may have, right. They
01:19:41.140
may have, but I do know that I have seen Hamas leaders for years say they're willing
01:19:46.640
to accept a two state solution within 67 borders and recognize Israel as part of that final
01:19:53.400
SAS solution. I saw one of them say it on the Charlie Rose show years ago, John McCain,
01:19:57.920
said that that was true. And that maybe we should negotiate with them on that basis in
01:20:01.920
the past. So I'm not saying that the guys who are currently in charge, cause I don't
01:20:05.300
know the names of all the guys currently in charge over there, but I do not think that
01:20:09.220
it is just a fact. In fact, Al Qaeda has for years denounced Hamas as a bunch of progressives
01:20:15.480
and liberals and wimps and Westerners for participating in democracy at all for negotiating with the West
01:20:21.160
at all. So they're not exactly the same as Al Qaeda.
01:20:24.920
I think post 10, seven, that should, I think it's pretty straightforward.
01:20:28.320
Post 10, seven, post 10, seven, we're in a very difficult situation, but what's the alternative?
01:20:34.980
You know, you're going to drive every fighting age male out of Gaza, and then you're going to
01:20:40.260
I mean, you're going to destroy and just like Hamas and basically prevent the organization
01:20:44.520
from coming back into power. And I mean, this isn't Iraq. It's not the size of, you know,
01:20:48.820
this isn't the size of Texas. This is a place the size of Las Vegas, a little bigger than
01:20:54.160
Tallahassee where I live. Like, I think Israel has, is very much within its capability to achieve the
01:20:59.800
objective it has set out, which is the destruction of Hamas.
01:21:02.400
And then what, the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip permanently?
01:21:07.440
You know, in the medium term. Yeah. It has to be. I mean, what's the, what's the alternative
01:21:11.520
if your goal is to prevent this from happening again so that people can live in Southern Israel
01:21:15.440
Do you have any kind of idea for a solution to this one state, two state by national state,
01:21:19.480
or just they should all have to go live in the Sinai Peninsula or what?
01:21:22.660
I think it's, uh, someone else takes either, either Israel takes sovereign responsibility over
01:21:26.300
the Gaza Strip or somebody else does. Egypt, Jordan can take some sovereign responsibility over
01:21:29.940
the West Bank. But I think there's a reason that the two state solution has been,
01:21:35.560
I find it, you know, you're so critical of Clinton and Indyke and all these other people
01:21:40.640
who like, who, for whom the two state solution was this beacon, this lodestar. And yet you're
01:21:45.980
like, you, you propose the very, very same solution that is like the ultimate neoliberal
01:21:51.140
solution to, to Palestine. I think, I think the entire point of the two state solution, the
01:21:55.540
two state solution is a con and the drive toward it is actually a continuous generator of
01:22:00.380
war. We don't have people, you know, the sort of irredentism and revanchism in places
01:22:04.840
like Poland and Germany and Algeria and you name it. Um, and I think, I think the correct
01:22:10.660
answer here is, you know, not a two state solution. I certainly don't think that the
01:22:15.400
Palestinian, a Palestinian state that would ultimately probably be controlled by Hamas
01:22:18.620
is a good idea at all. Um, I don't think, I think the Israelis think it's just completely
01:22:22.960
out of the question now. I think even if you gotten rid of Netanyahu, they'd think it's
01:22:27.000
Well, I don't think anybody's talking about a two state solution with Hamas in charge
01:22:32.400
of the thing. I've never heard anyone propose anything like that at all.
01:22:35.260
Yeah, but the problem is that's the likely end result, right? Like the PA doesn't have
01:22:38.800
any real constituency. So the likely end result of what would happen in, in, you know, Gaza
01:22:44.000
and likely the West bank in a world where there wasn't the rest of the world holding it desperately
01:22:48.360
together, uh, would be a, would it be Hamas taking over? And it's a risk that I don't think
01:22:54.460
the Israelis can really take, like the bottom line security control.
01:22:57.720
The bottom line will about the two state solution is that it was always an illusion. It was
01:23:01.720
a lie. The peace process that said, we're going to eventually give you a state was a scam because
01:23:07.760
what the Israeli right wants, and I don't mean every Israeli citizen, I mean the right wing
01:23:13.140
nationalist factions in charge, they want the West bank. They call it Judea and Samaria.
01:23:18.960
And they said that the Bible says that they can have it. And if millions of Palestinians live
01:23:23.540
on it, that's just tough. And they don't want a two state solution. If Bill Clinton wants a two
01:23:29.320
state solution, well then we'll tell him that sure, Bill will work on a two state solution. And I
01:23:35.000
actually have the whole thing here. I'm sure you've seen the secret recording of the candid
01:23:38.740
camera recording of Netanyahu talking about how he took advantage of Bill Clinton.
01:23:41.180
I really don't care that Netanyahu or, and the entire Israeli government lied to Bill Clinton over
01:23:46.400
some nonsense. I don't care about Bill Clinton either. The point is it's like this. Okay. In
01:23:54.020
the 1960s, when the national government said to the South, Jim Crow is over. You guys are going to
01:24:00.380
desegregate. If Mississippi had said, actually, no, we are not going to desegregate and give blacks
01:24:07.260
the equal rights in Mississippi, but I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll give them Northern Mississippi.
01:24:13.440
will be an independent black state. And then they can guarantee their own rights. And then
01:24:19.480
they never did that. And then for 30 years and 40 years, they had a peace process all about turning
01:24:25.480
over Northern Mississippi to the black someday. Meanwhile, they're colonizing more and more of
01:24:30.280
it, building more and more white only farms in that territory. And they still never gave them
01:24:37.300
their equal rights. That is what the two state solution is, is it was an illusion. And this is why,
01:24:41.880
hang on one second. This is why in 2020, when Netanyahu almost officially declared annexation,
01:24:49.800
but back down, but he did say explicitly, there will always be one government that controls all
01:24:57.100
the land from the West bank. I mean, pardon me from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
01:25:02.120
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that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch,
01:26:36.340
all three put out reports saying this is officially apartheid now, because as long as we're not
01:26:42.360
pretending... I need to be able to respond at some point. Okay, but I mean, I'm just saying as long
01:26:47.280
as we're not pretending that we're giving up a Palestinian state as a two-state solution anymore,
01:26:51.980
then it is apartheid. We're half the country controls the other half. We'll go way back to
01:26:56.680
the question of Hamas's intention, and we're talking about the two-state solution. This is from
01:27:01.400
the Hamas Charter Wikipedia, from its charter in 1988. The charter states that...
01:27:07.960
Which I will. It's all in here. In 1988, the charter states that our struggle against the Jews is very
01:27:13.260
great and very serious and calls for the eventual creation of Islamic State in Palestine in place of
01:27:17.160
Israel, and the Palestinian territories, and the obliteration and dissolution of Israel.
01:27:21.600
The actual article, which is known as Article 7, summarized on Wikipedia, talks about how
01:27:26.660
they want to eradicate the Jews. The final quote of the actual article says,
01:27:31.440
the day of judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, killing the Jews,
01:27:35.060
when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say,
01:27:38.360
O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Garkad tree...
01:27:43.560
Tim, everybody's heard this a hundred times. What's the point? Why don't you read the
01:27:46.660
Likud Party Charter, where it says that all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea
01:27:52.820
will always belong to Israel, and they're coming for Lebanon and Jordan too.
01:27:56.220
I'm not saying it doesn't. That's not the point.
01:27:56.940
So it's not the point. How come one party platform counts, but the other party platform doesn't?
01:28:01.420
The point is, a question was asked, did Hamas intend to kill the Jews? And you said,
01:28:05.320
I don't know. Maybe they did. I'm reading you. They did.
01:28:09.720
No, the question was present tense. And then I talked about more recent past where they had said
01:28:16.340
that they dropped all that. Forget the party platform. We were willing to sign within the 67
01:28:22.440
Will made the point that Hamas's charter says they want to eradicate Israel and the Jews. I said it
01:28:26.440
was changed in 2017. You said, maybe they said that I'm not sure. I pulled it up to show you they did.
01:28:31.140
The charter in 2017 changed this, and that is a fair point to be made.
01:28:35.320
Take for it what you will. I think we're confused here. I wasn't disputing that their
01:28:41.140
previous charter said horrible things in it. I guess I would dispute that party platforms really
01:28:45.620
mean anything. On that very, very point, 10-7 demonstrates that whatever commitment the top
01:28:52.500
level political guys made in that charter was a fig leaf. They're willing to go into Israel and
01:28:58.020
butcher and maim and rape and kidnap Israelis. But yeah, but you're leaving out, you're truncating
01:29:02.360
all the antecedents such as the Netanyahu doctrine, which was we're no longer pretending
01:29:07.340
there's going to be an independent state. As he said in his UN speech just two weeks before
01:29:11.780
the 10-7 attack, he got up there and he showed a map that had one state of Israel between the
01:29:16.760
river and the sea. No West Bank carved out there, no Palestinian anything. And he said,
01:29:21.540
this is the Netanyahu doctrine. The Arab Sunni states had always promised they would not normalize
01:29:26.740
relations with Israel until they gave up independence or citizenship for the Palestinians.
01:29:33.500
And what Jared Kushner figured out was the American taxpayer can pay the price. So we give F-16s to
01:29:40.280
Bahrain, we give F-35s to UAE, we give debt forgiveness to Sudan, and we give northern western
01:29:47.020
Sahara to Morocco for all of them to sell out the Palestinians. And Hamas, and I'm sorry, I have here
01:29:53.400
somewhere that quote, where the Hamas spokesman says, this is the greatest emergency. These Abraham
01:29:58.440
accords, we are being completely sold out and left behind here, which is what Netanyahu says in his
01:30:03.980
speech. Nobody's coming for you. Now that the Palestinians know that they've been completely
01:30:09.040
sold out, no one has their back anymore. Now they're going to have to essentially give up their
01:30:14.240
dream of having an independent state or anything like citizenship in one state. They're just going to
01:30:20.260
have to learn to how to be permanent fourth class, not even citizens under foreign military occupation
01:30:27.500
in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem from now on. And they're just going to have to learn to
01:30:32.500
get used to it. That was his big victory speech at the UN. Then two weeks later, they broke out of
01:30:39.140
their pen and killed all these people in order to force this crisis in order to try to undermine
01:30:44.540
those accords. So you're saying that, look, they're genocidal fine. They obviously butchered
01:30:50.520
civilians. As I said in my introduction here, an extended family member of mine was abducted and
01:30:55.720
killed by Hamas in this thing when they did what they did. They're perfectly willing to butcher
01:31:00.660
civilians, obviously. But the point is to zoom out and ask what is going on here that this is even
01:31:07.880
a situation. You know, most Americans, and you know, whether you agree with my Indian reservation
01:31:12.800
analogy or not, most Americans would be under the impression that Palestine is a country.
01:31:20.040
You talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, of course they have a country. Everybody has a
01:31:25.240
country, but they don't. Not everybody has a country.
01:31:27.780
They don't. Well, I mean, I'm just saying, listen, I'm just saying that's what most Americans think.
01:31:32.860
And if you show them a picture of Israel, it looks like the Arabs have invaded and taken this
01:31:39.040
chunk, the West Bank, out of Israel. When that's all that's left, that they haven't conquered yet.
01:31:44.920
Right? But Americans are told land for peace. The terrorists are trying to extort land out of the
01:31:51.480
Israelis' land, and they won't give them peace and stop terrorizing them unless the Israelis give
01:31:57.160
them territory. That's not the land for peace formulation at all. That's the formulation delivered
01:31:59.940
to Israel to tell them how to make peace. That's what led them giving Egypt to Sinai back. That's
01:32:06.900
the whole basis of Indyke and the Bill Clinton. The idea is not like the Palestine is trying to
01:32:13.760
blackmail themselves into a state. I mean, the argument that we're telling that the American people
01:32:18.880
are seeing that is accurate is the Palestinians want Israel gone, period, end stop, from the river
01:32:25.280
to the sea. They want them gone. And like, wait, who's they though? You're not speaking for the
01:32:30.960
Palestinian people of, of all the West Bank and Gaza. I'll send you the link to it. Well, I did pull
01:32:36.500
it up. Uh, however, it's from I-24 and it's, uh, uh, Berzat University. I believe it'll be
01:32:42.680
immediately dismissed by a pro-Palestinian side. Well, I don't know. Uh, Berzat University poll
01:32:46.980
finds Palestinians too. Look, in the middle of a war, in the middle of a war, people answer questions
01:32:50.460
stupid. The fact of the matter is I've met plenty of Palestinians. I know plenty of Palestinians.
01:32:54.360
They're just normal people like you and me. They want to live in peace. You want to talk about
01:32:58.180
armed factions of armed, uh, Islamists who want to kill people. That's one thing. That's not the
01:33:04.300
same as the population of the people of Palestine. It's this propaganda that these people are barbarians
01:33:09.880
from, you know, the other side of Pakistan from here. Palestinians in the West Bank were surveyed
01:33:14.540
about the, uh, over their support for October 7th. And it was found that Hamas, uh, received a
01:33:19.680
generally lower score of 76%. As in their views of various entities, residents answered overwhelmingly
01:33:24.720
in support of the military wings of terror organizations, Palestinian Islamic Jihad with
01:33:28.460
84%. Al-Aqsa martyrs brigades, 80%. Al-Qassan brigades with 89%. Hamas 76. That's terrible. I'd like to
01:33:35.460
know what those numbers were previously. Um, you know, in, when you're not in the middle of a violent
01:33:40.520
conflict and, and honestly, guys, I think it's just, isn't it only fair that we recognize that
01:33:46.060
we're having this conversation deep into the future now when it's 2023 and the Netanyahu doctrine is
01:33:52.280
clearly shipwrecked on fire here. And this could have been resolved. I mean, Colin Powell tried to
01:33:59.060
get George W. Bush to do a Palestinian state 20 years ago and Sharon's men stopped them. The, the
01:34:05.640
Jinsa crowd, as Powell called them, stopped them. And Sharon's men bragged that we saw the whites in
01:34:11.500
Bush's eyes. He blinked first. Ha ha ha. We got away with it. My, my, so let me, let me, let me
01:34:17.420
throw something in here. That was a question. Like, don't you think that they could have,
01:34:20.440
should have solved this 20 years ago when Colin Powell tried to get Bush to do it then?
01:34:24.280
I think it's pretty obvious now that a Palestinian state would have always been a bad idea for the
01:34:29.100
state of Israel. That it's quite obvious that in their own interests, just literally from the
01:34:32.880
core perspective of protecting their citizens from terrorism, it would be a terrible idea for there
01:34:37.660
to be a Palestinian state. So in the West Bank, I think it would be absolutely irresponsible of
01:34:42.040
them. What year was this guy? I am, I am not a two state solution. 2002 and three. Right. So
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The first thing I want to say is. I don't care about Israel or Palestine. I care about as much
01:36:21.700
I care as much as I care as much as I do about Burma, Myanmar and Azerbaijan and Armenia, in which
01:36:29.220
that I deeply care about the death, the human suffering, the war, the conflict, the American
01:36:33.880
foreign policy of funding and these things. But the fascinating thing to me is the self-identification
01:36:39.240
of one or the other that we see from Americans in this. The fascinating thing to me is you absolutely
01:36:45.160
do have pro-Zionist and more loosely more just pro-Israel factions in the United States. And then
01:36:51.260
you have pro-Palestinian and the arguments typically come from a self-identification with
01:36:55.720
one or the other. Now, it's it's it's I much prefer the more libertarian of like I don't look it's a
01:37:02.560
foreign country. You know, I understand the U.S. military apparatus and their interests in the
01:37:06.460
region, as well as all the other countries they're funding and why they're funding it.
01:37:10.000
But it is strange to me that we often see and I'm not accusing either of you of doing this,
01:37:15.960
but I think this is an interesting point in the in domestic policy. There are protesters,
01:37:19.540
you know, trying to storm the DNC. There's children marching through through halls of their high
01:37:23.420
schools, identifying with one of these other groups. When I was in Northern Ireland, I'm in
01:37:31.100
Belfast at the Peace Wall. On one side of the Peace Wall, they're they're aligned with Palestine.
01:37:35.920
And on the other side, they claim to actually be a lost tribe of Israel. I'm like, what is up with
01:37:41.360
this conflict? I can just say this. Oh, you know what? At the end of the day, like it my view
01:37:48.300
often of the morality and the question of the two state solution is how about we secure our borders?
01:37:54.020
We bring jobs back to the United States. We stop spending all this money overseas.
01:37:56.960
America first. Look, when it comes to identifying with these people, I have to tell you, I am a
01:38:01.080
libertarian. And to me, there's only two kinds of people in this world, government employees and
01:38:05.740
everybody else. I mean that sincerely. I absolutely identify with the civilians of the population of
01:38:13.580
Israel just as much as the Palestinians. Or if you want to put it negatively, I don't identify with
01:38:19.960
the Palestinians or the Israelis any more than with any other group of people in the world.
01:38:25.740
To me, noncombatants or noncombatants, they have my sympathy arm. And by the way, Hamas is not a
01:38:33.380
government, but they are an armed militia of terrorists who would very much like to be a
01:38:37.380
government. So that counts to me. So so I am. That's whose side I'm on is on the side of innocent
01:38:43.540
suffering caught between these armed men fighting over lines on a map. And I agree with that for all
01:38:49.320
regions. I agree with that with the Uyghur Muslims, the camps. I agree with what's going on,
01:38:52.860
you know, my armor of Burma and Azerbaijan with the Christians and Armenia.
01:38:56.280
Nagorno-Karabakh right now is horrible what's going on.
01:38:58.800
And so I have an I actually have an I have an answer for for the Israel-Palestine conflict.
01:39:04.560
I think it solves all of our problems. I think it should have been proposed a long time ago. And
01:39:09.220
it's I don't care. Do whatever you want. We are the United States. Let your conflict be your
01:39:13.840
conflict. Yeah, this is the, you know, I'll go with you that far. But we're implicated in all this.
01:39:19.960
Right. Well, I mean, but there's there's a point to that that's true, right?
01:39:22.720
I agree, by the way, like we don't I don't think our interventions, you know,
01:39:27.960
essentially this attempt at diplomacy with the two state solution. I don't think any of that's
01:39:31.240
been helpful. And in fact, I think the actual way to like the two state solution and the sort
01:39:35.700
of insistence on creating a new state where there's currently a sovereign that's ultimately
01:39:40.520
a generator of war. Like I think one interesting tension in sort of your overall worldview and my
01:39:44.960
from my perspective is this like you are broadly speaking anti-war, right? You want to see fewer
01:39:50.020
wars, fewer conflicts. Am I right? Like that you're antiwar.org or antiwar.com. But I think
01:39:56.480
that the this position on the on the conflict, this sort of like in blaming Israel for the failure
01:40:02.420
to give a Palestinian state out of the territory they're currently sovereign over and insisting
01:40:07.400
that I think that that is itself the generator of war and the ultimate way to peace here, the
01:40:12.600
elegant and simple way to peace that is happened everywhere else historically in the world is for
01:40:17.720
everybody to say, you know what? Israel is sovereign over the territory that was formerly
01:40:21.460
in the mandate. They're the sovereign. And if you want something different, you need to negotiate it
01:40:25.220
with them. And if you want to go to fight with them, well, you better be ready for what they're
01:40:28.380
going to do in response. And we don't care. Including the West Bank and Gaza. Including the West Bank and
01:40:32.260
67 in a war that they started, even though that's totally against the UN Charter that they signed and
01:40:37.760
the fourth Geneva Convention. We can get into history there, but Egypt and Syria are responsible
01:40:42.340
for the Casaspelli in that war. They're the ones who blockaded the states of Tehran. I got the quote
01:40:47.020
from Begin here talking about how they started. If you want to get into that, man. I'm pretty deep
01:40:52.520
on the 67. Okay, good. But my question is, to this point, history, history, history, all these all
01:40:58.180
these different facts and all these different people come up. All right, let's say that outside of my I
01:41:02.780
don't care, you're not United States, do whatever you want argument. People actually think, well,
01:41:06.080
there's a real risk of regional conflict escalating and pulling in other factions. So
01:41:10.300
there is a point of, we're there in some degree. We have to at least have some kind of plan for this.
01:41:17.860
Wait, we need to talk about Netanyahu's support for Hamas. This is a big deal.
01:41:22.460
Let me make this point and we'll get that. So if we go back and we keep trying to make
01:41:29.020
arguments about who invaded whom, we have Max Blumenthal and Tim Kastirel argue that it was
01:41:35.480
actually a Jewish kingdom that was invaded and conquered by Muslims and the Jewish people there
01:41:41.720
were forced to convert by threat of death. And that's why the Zionists wanted to return, et cetera,
01:41:47.280
et cetera. And what he said was, I hope I'm not getting his argument wrong, but my general
01:41:51.500
understanding was the people who are currently in Palestine are the people who have always been
01:41:55.260
there, who are forced under threat of death to convert. And the people who have come back as the
01:41:59.320
Zionists are the descendants of those who are expelled, refusing to convert.
01:42:02.040
And I'm like, well, it sounds like we've got a multi-generational thousand year war and there's
01:42:06.700
no moral argument for who are who, like, if you, but that's kind of a cop out though, Tim,
01:42:11.180
because honestly, look, the Zionist project started in the late 19th century.
01:42:14.780
But my point is not that, and this is what I find frustrating. I don't care at all.
01:42:19.860
Well, whatever. You're trying to say, look, they've been fighting about this for thousands
01:42:22.740
a year. What I'm saying is right now, as Will pointed out, Israel is, is in control. And this
01:42:29.380
argument of, of inflating or empowering Palestine into greater numbers will exacerbate the problem.
01:42:34.980
I don't care who's right. I don't care who's wrong. I don't care who invaded first. I don't
01:42:38.560
care who's always been there. I care about how do we end conflict and why first my point, I don't
01:42:43.980
care. Do whatever you want. We're not involved. If we have to be, then the issue is why would we
01:42:48.480
make the problem worse by expanding Palestine? Well, how about we're making problems worse by
01:42:55.260
protecting the Israelis while they steal all that's left of Palestine? Why don't you frame
01:43:00.220
it that way? My point, my first point is we shouldn't be involved at all. Okay. Then why
01:43:04.980
would there be an argument from anti-war activists to give Palestine more? What to give them more?
01:43:10.600
The argument is stop abetting Israel, taking what they have left, Tim. If, if the United States
01:43:16.080
completely is out of the equation, does Israel, what does Israel do? Well, I don't know for sure,
01:43:20.320
but I'll tell you if America's completely out of the equation and they go ahead and finish
01:43:25.740
cleansing the land and stealing all that land, then at least it's not on us. So my point is,
01:43:31.940
I don't presume that though. I think, as I said before, when the, the, the Connelly's a rice example,
01:43:36.420
and there are others that America oftentimes disincentivizes the Israeli government from seeking
01:43:43.180
peace, I think they might've figured out a way to negotiate their way out of this crisis a long
01:43:48.740
time ago. If America, if Joe Biden and John McCain weren't always there to cash a check and save their
01:43:55.520
ass. My point is why, why even have a conversation about a two state solution or any kind of negotiating
01:43:59.680
at all, instead of a don't care, do whatever you want. Well, look, I am a libertarian. I'm a total
01:44:04.900
non-interventionist. That's my premise. One is I don't want a U S government to exist at all,
01:44:10.440
much less do anything to anyone. We're arguing all other things being equal in the current
01:44:18.780
situation. What's going on here. And in fact, I'm not dead set on having a two state solution.
01:44:24.440
It ain't my problem. But what I am saying is the current situation is the people of Palestine are
01:44:30.340
under not just martial law, but under foreign military occupation law. That is, they live in
01:44:36.060
a totalitarian state. They've been under total occupation since 1967. I mean, before that they had
01:44:43.060
been sold out in a secret deal to the King of Jordan, the people of the West Bank, but they've
01:44:48.100
been under Israeli military occupation since 67. And that's the, the proximate cause of the problem
01:44:56.220
here, man, is that they don't have independence and they don't have citizenship. They're just occupied
01:45:01.500
and completely screwed. And real quick on 1967, Bagan said in June 67, we again had a choice.
01:45:08.100
The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really
01:45:13.540
about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. And he said
01:45:20.040
that. And Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin too, said, I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions
01:45:26.300
he sent into Sinai on May 14th would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He
01:45:31.540
knew it and we knew it. And in 1972, uh, general Paled told Haaretz the thesis that the danger of
01:45:38.180
genocide was hanging over us in June, 1967, and that Israel was fighting for his physical existence
01:45:43.480
is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war. Um, and I mean, that just ignores the,
01:45:50.940
I mean, the basic problem that Egypt decided to put a blockade on the Straits of Tehran and shut off
01:45:54.940
is all Israeli shipping to Asia. I mean, I don't know if you, we have a map or something that you
01:45:58.660
could show it, but the Southern tip of Israel touches the Straits of Tehran, which attached to
01:46:02.820
the Red Sea. Yeah. Right. And that's Israel's only sea access to straight to the Middle East and to
01:46:09.300
Asia. Otherwise they have to go all the way around Africa from their Mediterranean ports and Egypt
01:46:13.920
decided. But that's not what they said though. And what they said at the time was that Egypt attacked
01:46:17.340
them and they were defending themselves. Not, well, we have a problem at our port here.
01:46:21.020
They said Egypt had its military on the border, which it did. It kicked out the
01:46:24.860
Egypt kicked out the peacekeepers, put its military into the Sinai Peninsula along the
01:46:28.800
border with Israel. And remember it was Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic together
01:46:33.040
that, or Egypt and Jordan, Egypt and Syria, I forget. One of those.
01:46:36.480
I think it was Egypt and Syria. Um, they were both going to attack it and Israel, you know,
01:46:41.240
had to, as a result of all this activity, the blockade, the, the moved troops had to activate
01:46:46.140
all its reserves. Israel is a reserve based army. It can't keep those people activated forever
01:46:50.060
because they have to go back to work. It's their, in almost their entire work. Like it's
01:46:54.440
a huge chunk of their working age population. They can't just keep the, keep, you know, stay
01:46:57.780
active forever. So Egypt, Egypt, Egypt, Egypt, put them in impossible, give them a spell and
01:47:05.120
I need to know more about this because it is very complicated, but I know that there was
01:47:08.600
a previous deal with United Nations forces were agreed by peacekeepers were agreed by Egypt
01:47:14.340
to keep the port of Akuba open. And there was, I forgot exactly how it happened, but there was
01:47:20.780
previous controversy there. The Israelis hadn't even agreed to allow those UN forces there.
01:47:25.720
And then when the Egyptians pulled them out, that was when the Israelis took that as their
01:47:30.100
casus belly. But in other words, though, it wasn't a real one.
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01:49:01.560
And that was why they were able to destroy the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. It was because
01:49:06.440
it was sitting on the ground. Well, let's jump back to the one thing we keep saying we're going
01:49:10.460
to talk about. Netanyahu's support of Hamas. Yes, let's talk about this. So I urge people to look
01:49:15.340
up, especially Richard Sale in UPI. This is the prehistory of this. Okay. Sheikh Yassin,
01:49:21.140
the old man in the wheelchair. Hamas was not created by Israel. It was created by the Muslim
01:49:26.600
Brotherhood. And it was mostly a charity at first. And the Israelis built them up through direct
01:49:33.100
financing and through arresting and persecuting their competition, built them up. As they said
01:49:38.320
explicitly, in fact, I have a statement here. I have a quote here from the New York Times in 1981,
01:49:44.100
where they first talk about how, yes, we're starting to finance all the mosques. We're trying to build up
01:49:49.880
a right-wing religious alternative to the PLO, which was sort of half commie, half nationalist,
01:49:58.060
right? And so that was the policy. So if you read Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal and
01:50:05.480
Richard Sale in UPI, also Robert Dreyfuss has a great treatment of this in his book Devil's Game,
01:50:12.020
how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam. And it's about how the whole point was to
01:50:17.140
divide and conquer the Palestinians by promoting this right-wing religious alternative to the PLO.
01:50:24.780
And so this is very important, too, for the Iraq War. I don't know if you know this one,
01:50:29.420
but it is true. As I mentioned before, in January of 2004, Sheikh Yassin said he wanted peace and he
01:50:36.180
wanted to sign on the dotted line and they assassinated him. And when they assassinated him,
01:50:41.660
remember, Tim, the riot in Fallujah where the Blackwater guards were lynched and their bodies
01:50:47.140
burned and hung from a bridge in April of 2004? That was in revenge for Israel's assassination of
01:50:53.500
Sheikh Yassin. And the guys who did it called themselves the Sheikh Yassin Brigade, and they
01:50:57.960
passed out flyers saying that was their motive. And they dragged a guy's body through the streets in a
01:51:03.760
car with Sheikh Yassin in the windshield. And it was that lynching of those Blackwater guards in
01:51:08.600
reaction to Israel's assassination of their old sock puppet ally, Yassin, that was the proximate
01:51:17.280
cause for George Bush ordering James Mattis to go in there and smash that city.
01:51:21.180
I don't mean to distract you, but I don't think, I mean, we're trying to get to the focus on
01:51:29.620
It is important that their assassination of Sheikh Yassin severely disrupted American plans and
01:51:36.020
policies in Iraq War II. But you're right. I'll leave that aside.
01:51:38.220
So here's the thing about Netanyahu. Okay. I have all these quotes here from Netanyahu.
01:51:46.960
I'll try to get to only the very best ones from Netanyahu and his finance minister.
01:51:53.800
But I have, in fact, if people go to antiwar.com slash Scott, my last article is called
01:51:59.680
Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired. And it has the entire collection of quotes here
01:52:05.860
for people who want to look at this. Okay. But first, this is Bezalel Smatrich. This is the leader
01:52:11.160
of Israel's Religious Zionist Party. He's the current finance minister. And he said this in 2021.
01:52:17.140
He said, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field,
01:52:25.080
in this game of delegitimization, think about it for a second. The PA is a liability and Hamas is an
01:52:33.220
asset. It's a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it. Nobody will give it status at the
01:52:39.780
ICC, the International Criminal Court, and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN,
01:52:45.320
which would cause us to need an American veto. I'm not sure at all that given the current situation
01:52:51.000
and the current fact that the central playing field that we're playing in is international,
01:52:55.660
Abu Mazen, that is a boss of the PA, is costing us serious casualties. He means political or PR
01:53:01.980
casualties. And Hamas in such a situation would be an asset. And now the questioner had asked him,
01:53:08.280
yeah, but isn't Hamas dangerous? And he ended with, I don't think we need to be afraid of Hamas.
01:53:15.780
And then Netanyahu, I have, sorry, I'm paging down here. This is the, uh, geez, I hope I can find it.
01:53:22.500
Netanyahu, I'll have to find the exact quote here. Netanyahu says, um, we must, oh, here it is.
01:53:29.320
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering
01:53:38.220
Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians
01:53:46.720
in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank. It's impossible to reach an agreement with them.
01:53:52.940
Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames. Okay. So this is absolute imperial
01:54:01.660
hubris and arrogance. And it goes to show what a dirty, like cynical game that these guys are
01:54:08.020
playing here. They want to colonize that West Bank. They don't want to negotiate independence.
01:54:13.560
They call it Judea and Samaria. They want to take it. And so as long as they have a perfect little
01:54:19.800
enemy in Gaza, they can point to the, to Hamas and say, well, we have no partner for peace.
01:54:27.380
You don't expect us to negotiate with these terrorists. Do you? And it works because of
01:54:31.940
course you don't expect them to negotiate with a bunch of terrorists. And so it's the perfect plan.
01:54:36.420
As I said before, Hamas are very bad guys, but they're just pawns on Israel's chessboard here.
01:54:41.720
So I want to make a few points, right? So again, the question ultimately was like Netanyahu,
01:54:48.720
allowing Qatar to give money and allow money to go to asking them to, right? I don't know if it was an
01:54:54.000
asking. I think it was like, you know, Qatar asked Netanyahu and Netanyahu and Likudik.
01:54:58.340
Not according to Avigdor Lieberman, who said that they were, that, that Qatar and Turkey were sick
01:55:03.420
and tired of Hamas's antics and Netanyahu went over there and begged them. That was according to
01:55:07.920
his own defense minister at the time. In any event, Netanyahu will certainly suffer
01:55:11.380
the myths politically. Like I think you've seen in the polling in Israel, the domestic opinion polling,
01:55:15.860
that if the election were held again today, Gantz would come in. Gantz who leads,
01:55:19.620
I think blue and white or the, the Israel one of United for Israel. Sorry to interrupt. So we do
01:55:24.680
concede that this is part and part. We agree. This is part and parcel of the Netanyahu doctrine
01:55:29.340
is keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, bolstering them in order to thwart a Palestinian state.
01:55:36.200
As far as I can tell, I think you are correct on the fact that there was this
01:55:38.640
divide and conquer approach to the PA and Hamas. Does that change your perspective of the situation
01:55:44.360
at all? Not in particular. I mean, it's one of the reasons, you know, this is, hold on,
01:55:47.920
let me explain. So you are, I mean, it basically, it means that what Netanyahu and Shemotric and the
01:55:55.040
they made a serious and very bad miscalculation on behalf of their people. That's, we call that bad
01:56:00.280
statesmanship. Like you thought you were doing something good and it turns out you enabled
01:56:03.920
the growing of this terrorist group that go, go and kill them. However, that terrorist group now did
01:56:09.420
go ahead and butcher 1500 civilians. Agree. Right. And the Israeli public is unified on the need to
01:56:16.160
eliminate this terrorist group. 12. 12. Okay. 1200. So I'm overstating. The survey you referenced
01:56:19.880
earlier says 12. 12. Okay. So 1200, butcher 1200, kidnap 200 more. Yeah. Right. Um, so there's a
01:56:26.920
unified, um, front. And so, and here's the thing, and this critique that you're making of Netanyahu is
01:56:32.400
sort of in tension with your other arguments, i.e. your critique is they did too much to prop up and
01:56:38.640
fund, especially recently, this group that was actually a terrorist group and a huge danger to them.
01:56:43.040
Should they have cut off all funding and isolated them and tried to eliminate them beforehand?
01:56:47.720
Should they have, I mean, because now the Israeli public and the Israeli government is like, okay,
01:56:52.000
we agree. We got Hamas wrong. We're going to go in and take them out. And you're opposed to that.
01:56:56.520
Right. Like you're opposed to the invasion, or I guess maybe you're just supportive of some
01:56:59.260
market reprisal stuff that I don't think would really get the job done, especially given all the
01:57:02.920
money that went in. So I think, you know, your argument, you have identified something,
01:57:08.560
a mistake made by Netanyahu as Israeli statesmen. But the, the logical conclusion of like, okay,
01:57:15.600
if that was a mistake, then the answer now is going to be, okay, we're not going to do that again.
01:57:19.680
And we're going to need to eliminate this group that we thought we could control. We thought we
01:57:23.480
could control the height of the flame. We were wrong. Turns out they butchered 1500 of our citizens.
01:57:27.500
Now we're going to make sure that never happens again. Isn't that the right answer for Israel?
01:57:31.000
Like that, which is goes back to my original point. Like, what is my core thesis? Israel is
01:57:35.140
acting reasonably and righteously right now, but you're just taking it from one direction. The
01:57:39.680
other answer would be, it's time to throw out Likud, get somebody like Gantz in there, who is
01:57:45.640
a general and less ideological and go ahead and negotiate that state. I think the Israeli public,
01:57:52.660
put the PA, wait, go ahead and let a boss take control of the Gaza strip so that you do have
01:57:58.640
someone to talk to so that you can negotiate independence for these people. I mean, Will,
01:58:03.820
you're saying they can't have citizenship and equality. They can't have independence.
01:58:08.540
They're just going to have to learn to live under foreign military occupation, martial law,
01:58:13.200
or F off to Egypt or the go, go burn in the Sinai desert somewhere.
01:58:19.420
They're going to have the most they're going to get is limited self-government, right? Like
01:58:22.560
they're not going to get a state, right? But limited self-government in the sense of like,
01:58:25.660
you can collect your own taxes and you can spend, you can have your own internal police force
01:58:29.320
and you can handle. Okay. Now we're talking, so now we're talking about a bi-national state where
01:58:33.080
they would have their own police. You could have maybe one. That's what's in the PA, right? They
01:58:36.680
already have their own police in the PA as far as. Well, sorry. I mean, look, there's, there's a big
01:58:40.520
discrepancy between what the Palestinian authority sovereignty is versus what a bi-national state
01:58:47.080
would truly look like. I mean, the PA was created by Israel and America to be the subcontractor of the
01:58:52.120
occupation. It's not exactly a Palestinian popular sovereignty type of organization, much less Hamas.
01:59:00.100
But you know, the reality is, and this is where we go back to that, the secret or the candid camera
01:59:06.720
recording of Netanyahu, where he's talking about how, again, this, I'm not defending Bill Clinton's
01:59:12.160
honor. He doesn't have any. Okay. But what he's saying is, ha ha ha. I sexually assaulted Bill Clinton
01:59:18.020
right in the face. And I got him to do whatever I wanted. And all I had to do was lie to him and tell
01:59:22.840
him that, oh, don't worry, Bill, they're going to have their state and everything. They'll have all
01:59:27.760
this territory. All I need is my special little military security areas. And then ha ha ha. My
01:59:35.100
special little military security areas are all of area C, two thirds of the West Bank. And that sucker,
01:59:41.580
Bill Clinton, I got over on him. And then the lady says, geez, but are you going to get away with
01:59:46.060
that? And he says, don't worry. I know how to handle America. America's easily moved. 80% of
01:59:52.220
them support us. It's absurd. He says, mocking American support for him screwing over our leaders,
02:00:00.080
trying to hold him to his government's signature on documents and promised positions that they would
02:00:06.820
implement. I mean, I don't think that's Likud ever really agreed to that. I mean, part of why Likud came
02:00:11.020
back into power in the first place is because the Israeli. Well, he's talking about what he signed at,
02:00:15.060
why he's talking about what he signed at the Y river accord and how he didn't live up to it.
02:00:20.020
Like, I, again, I think that I don't, I don't, I don't know enough about the Y river accord to even
02:00:25.040
speak to that. Well, you've seen the video of Netanyahu mocking how he got over on Bill Clinton.
02:00:28.880
Yeah. Like I just, I just, again, I don't, you know, that's where I've said before. And I agree.
02:00:32.360
I still don't care that he like mocked and got one over on Bill Clinton. I think that the entire
02:00:36.400
American diplomatic track under the Clinton years was absurd and ridiculous and very much,
02:00:41.580
obviously something that Israel would have been insane to support. So, uh, I think that instead,
02:00:47.640
like, I want to see peace. I think the, the world in which Palestine gets a state is not one where
02:00:54.240
there's peace. Dear Lord, I think it's one where there's actually a much bigger and larger war in
02:00:58.740
a world where whatever government ends up arising and taking control of the West Bank and Gaza is able
02:01:03.660
to build up a sovereign military. I mean, you look at what they do with just a militia.
02:01:07.760
Look, that's such a, that's such a red herring. The entire discussion. It's the core of the
02:01:11.620
discussion. No, it's not. No, it's not. It never has been ever at all since the takeover of the
02:01:16.680
West Bank and Gaza Strip in 67, since Camp David in 79, since Madrid in 92 and Oslo in 93 and Camp
02:01:23.260
David in 2000 and all the way through Annapolis under W. Bush. Nobody ever said the Palestinians get to
02:01:30.220
have a standing army. That was always excluded. The debate, that was never even part of the debate,
02:01:36.400
Will, and you must know this. The debate was whether they get East Jerusalem or whether they
02:01:41.280
get Abu Dis, this tiny little suburb of East Jerusalem. The question was whether they get
02:01:45.860
67 borders or how much land do they swap? The question was how many refugees living in squalid
02:01:52.660
camps in Lebanon and Syria are allowed to come home or not? The question was never the size of
02:01:58.000
their standing military force. I understand that that's not the question, but I'm saying like any real
02:02:02.820
session of sovereignty is going to just increase security risks. Yeah, real sovereignty was never
02:02:07.600
in question here. Always the best that they were ever. That's certainly not what the way that the
02:02:11.800
Palestinians have ever talked about. That's not true. And all you got to do is read the Palestine
02:02:15.480
papers. That was never even a topic of argument in any of these debates. And when it comes to even
02:02:21.700
the borders, the land swaps, East Jerusalem and the right of return, the Palestinians under Abbas have
02:02:27.880
been absolutely obsequious and willing to sign on the dotted line for everything. That's why they
02:02:33.060
needed Hamas in Gaza so that they could say they have no partner for peace because under Abu Mazen, they
02:02:39.360
absolutely do have one. And that was why they say we can't let the PA rule Gaza or else the Labor Party
02:02:45.540
will tell us to give up a Palestinian state. So we got to keep the bad guys in power in Gaza.
02:02:51.540
Gaza in 2005, the PA was in charge. Then Hamas threw them out. It wasn't like...
02:02:56.640
No, well, what happened was there was a coup. There was an election and Hamas won, unlike what you hear
02:03:01.920
in the propaganda, Hamas won a plurality. They did not win a majority in a single district in that
02:03:08.460
election. And by the way, at the time, the majority population of Gaza was minors. Is that
02:03:14.660
even such a thing? The majority are minors? 44.45 percent. Yeah. So they did get a majority in the
02:03:22.000
parliament, but that meant that they had to form a coalition government with the PA. And then America
02:03:26.880
and Israel intervened and said no coalition government allowed. And then what'd they do? They
02:03:31.700
punished the PA, not Hamas. They refused to let the PA get any of their tax money and they
02:03:37.860
completely emasculated them. You got to read this great article if you've never read it. It's called
02:03:41.940
The Gaza Bombshell by David Rose. I know it's in Vanity Fair, which sounds ridiculous, but it's a
02:03:48.000
great piece. And you know what? I was amazed by this. I just reread it the other day and I totally
02:03:52.660
forgotten. He quotes in there David Wormser, the guy that wrote the clean break plan for Netanyahu
02:03:59.280
and was Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor who said, we've got to do Iraq War II. And he quotes David
02:04:04.900
Wormser, who's appalled at the attempted coup where Elliott Abrams, the neocon, worked with
02:04:11.460
Ehud Olmert's government to try to build up a Fatah military force to attack Hamas in the Gaza
02:04:21.180
Strip and drive them out. But it backfired because they knew all about it and they got a hold of some
02:04:25.700
of the weapons. And so Hamas kicked their ass and drove them out. And it was only then that Hamas
02:04:30.600
was able to take over the Strip. At the time, there was a question of if we're going to create a
02:04:34.820
coalition government, maybe we can use this to try to get Hamas to moderate and come toward the PA.
02:04:40.020
But the Israeli government refused to allow that to happen. And they punished the PA.
02:04:44.580
Why would they though? I mean, Hamas is like, at the time it was Bush. It was Bush and Omer who
02:04:49.620
forced them to hold the election in the first place. And then Condoleezza Rice goes, oh, whoops.
02:04:54.180
We didn't think that was going to happen. Hillary Clinton said, if we're going to hold an election,
02:04:57.500
we got to make sure who's going to win it. You know how she is about democratic elections. Oh,
02:05:01.620
by the way, I saw a thing that you did on Mike Flynn and his framing. That was really great.
02:05:05.020
Oh, well, thank you. I'm a big anti-Russiagate guy. I really like that.
02:05:10.640
I just, once I get on a Hillary tangent. I want to bring something up because we were talking,
02:05:16.000
I think Will asked for a map. I pulled up a map of the Gaza Strip. And what I've been looking at is
02:05:22.920
the various views you can get of Gaza. And I do think one thing that a lot of left activists,
02:05:32.280
a lot of the more pro-Palestine activists in this country, I don't, I'm not referring to the
02:05:35.940
people who actually learned it on the issues. When we see these kids on TikTok say things like,
02:05:39.680
you know, they read the Bin Laden letter and they agree with him or whatever.
02:05:42.160
These are the kind of people I'm talking about who don't actually know anything about the good
02:05:46.760
and the bad of Gaza. And you can make all the political arguments, but on the, on the macro,
02:05:50.980
when people say it's an open air prison, they make all these references. In fact,
02:05:54.640
I can't remember who I was talking to, but I asked them about farms and they told me that there were no
02:05:58.500
farms and it's, well, there absolutely are. There's a bunch of farms. I don't know if there's
02:06:02.780
enough farms. And I said, how did they get food? A lot fewer than before. Cause these Israelis keep
02:06:06.760
moving the fence in and in and in and stealing more of that farmland. But my point was it's a,
02:06:11.480
it's one of the most densely populated places in the world with 2.2 to 2.5 million people.
02:06:15.840
Where do they get enough food? And I hear from some of the activists, oh, it has to be imported
02:06:19.900
and brought in. And then I see these videos from, you know, Al Jazeera where they say,
02:06:23.700
oh, they can't get these things. Well, there are farms there. I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying it's
02:06:27.380
important to understand this context. And additionally, there's actually, uh, there's
02:06:32.020
luxury in, in Gaza, I think is important to bring up as well that connected, but, but I'm not trying
02:06:37.580
to justify anything, or I think it's important to have a more, uh, holistic picture of some of the
02:06:43.220
things that exist in, uh, in Gaza. It is not all the, you know, we, we see these photos constantly
02:06:48.860
of a poverty and ghettos. And, uh, you know, let me just try and see if I can pull up, uh, any of
02:06:56.420
these resorts or whatever, you know, some of these things are actually, uh, quite beautiful,
02:07:00.940
quite nice that, that, that exists here. So I just don't want, I, I, what I'm trying to say is
02:07:06.020
this is not a moral statement on, is it doing well? Is it doing bad? It's just important to
02:07:10.800
bring up. If you actually go and look at some of the territories, the regions, the buildings,
02:07:16.020
Part of this was Trump's deal of the century, right? Remember Jerry Kushner said, what we're
02:07:19.840
going to do is we're just going to give them a bunch of money for economic development
02:07:23.000
through the Qataris was part of it, uh, for economic development. And they're just going
02:07:26.980
to have to learn to accept that instead of having the right to vote and the right to participate
02:07:32.080
in the government that rules over them. Instead of having independence or citizenship, we're
02:07:36.620
just going to give them money. And it didn't work. This was part of the net, not part of
02:07:40.980
the Netanyahu doctrine, the Abraham Accords bolstering Hamas and bribing the Palestinians. And look
02:07:46.380
what it's resulted in is this absolute catastrophe.
02:07:48.720
Well, I mean, I guess here's, here's part of the point I want to make off of this. Right.
02:07:51.760
And it's again, the like Gaza is not an open air prison, right? Just demonstrably. So Israel,
02:07:57.380
the idea that this is like, I mean, focus on the Potemkin parts of it, but a lot of it is
02:08:03.840
It's run by Hamas. They have, I mean, Israel does not govern Hamas, right? Like inter, and
02:08:11.120
it doesn't govern the Gaza Strip. It has security around it, but it doesn't govern it. Right.
02:08:15.800
Hamas is totally in charge prior to 10-7 of what happens inside the Gaza Strip. So like
02:08:23.040
when you talk about how I'm sitting here thinking like a Palestinian state is a terrible idea
02:08:28.120
because we're worried about military buildup and the ability to build up a military. Well,
02:08:32.540
that's the one thing that's really lacking in the Gaza. That's the only thing they didn't
02:08:36.400
really have outside of like negotiation over these border things and these fishing rights.
02:08:40.580
Like they can leave through Egypt. They just can't come into Israel unless they have a permit
02:08:45.420
for obvious reasons, given the intifadas, given the endless bombings and rockets and you name it.
02:08:52.040
So I think it's perfectly reasonable to sit here and say like get under, after 10-7, given what
02:08:58.760
Gaza had pre-10-7, which is, you know, like self-government without full sovereignty.
02:09:05.180
Why would we want them to have full sovereignty? It would be insane. And I think, I guess that gets
02:09:12.160
back to, you know. It's not really self-government. Again, we're talking about essentially, you know,
02:09:18.880
the strongest gang in the prison took it over when the warden and his guards retreated to the
02:09:24.680
perimeter. It's not like the people of Palestine have anything like a democratic system or process here
02:09:32.220
where they chose these people. This is just, and look, if you, if you read your Rothbard,
02:09:37.340
this is virtually the case of every state anywhere in the world. It's this most powerful armed gang
02:09:42.400
has control and seized it. And the people don't have the ability to overthrow them any more than
02:09:47.480
we have the ability to overthrow our government. They're stuck with them.
02:09:50.480
I mean, yeah, they're, they're stuck with Hamas. I don't see how this is an improvement.
02:09:54.700
I mean, I don't see how the, what the distinction is between the two state solution you suggest is like
02:10:00.920
the option that should have been negotiated vert and how that has, what that state would look like,
02:10:06.420
because you agree, you essentially can see that it shouldn't have a, shouldn't be militarized.
02:10:10.360
And what Hamas had in Gaza, I mean, in terms of like the rights that were allowed to it by Israel,
02:10:20.040
Well, I think so. They don't have a seaport or an airport or, you know, their, their travel is
02:10:25.800
completely restricted. Their ability to negotiate trade agreements with other nations is completely
02:10:31.540
restricted. I mean, they are under all the international laws and strictures. They are
02:10:35.840
still considered to be occupied territory. Right. But I mean, that's, you know, that's,
02:10:40.540
that's just an international title. Like the actual substantive life would be
02:10:43.740
I think saying that they have self-rule under Hamas is an overstatement here. And they are
02:10:50.400
essentially still under siege, under the control of the Israelis. And you can say that it's a
02:10:55.220
prosperous Indian reservation. It's not the Warsaw ghetto, but it is a ghetto and it is not independent.
02:11:02.420
And the people there have no representation given all the aid that controls them, given all the aid
02:11:07.080
that went to the Gaza strip over the past two decades, even under Hamas rule, if they had a one
02:11:11.920
decent statesman running the place, like let's say Nayib Bukele. All their decent statesmen are in
02:11:15.840
prison, man. I mean, they're talking right now about trying to release this guy, uh, uh, Barghouti
02:11:21.180
or whatever. No, Barghouti is the one in, in, in, uh, exiling Qatar. There's, I'm sorry, I forgot the
02:11:26.120
guy's name, but there's this guy who's like widely renowned as could be considered the leader of
02:11:31.060
the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And he's locked in an Israeli prison
02:11:35.380
right now. And look what happened in 2018. Everybody always says, Oh, you guys are just terrorists.
02:11:39.360
Why not try some civil disobedience? Well, in 2018, they did the great March of Return and
02:11:44.800
Israeli snipers just shot them, killed 200 something of them and maimed a thousand, uh,
02:11:50.360
killed journalists and, and healthcare workers. You know, Thomas L. Friedman, who, uh, is considered
02:11:56.340
for some reason, like, uh, one of the top public intellectuals in America from the New York
02:12:00.220
Times, who's not a neoconservative. Um, but is, you know, was a hawk on Iraq, for example,
02:12:06.040
there's no bleeding heart. Um, he said, listen, it's for the people of Gaza. This is what they
02:12:11.800
need to do. They need to get on some Gandhi and some MLK and they need to do an unarmed peaceful
02:12:16.420
march up to that Gaza fence. And at that point, Israel will have no choice. They'll have to open
02:12:22.240
the gate and let them in. And it said what they do. They just sniped them all. And then Thomas
02:12:26.760
Freeman didn't say anything. Look, they killed them dead. We learn anything from that. It's that
02:12:31.460
Thomas has no idea what he's talking about. And of course the Israeli government's not just going to let
02:12:34.920
people approach. It's border given what just happened. It wasn't fully peaceful. Oh, come
02:12:40.980
on. They're throwing a couple of rocks and one guy lit a kite on fire. You don't get to do that.
02:12:45.200
This is like, this is just apologizing for like attacking the military. Anyone can go look at
02:12:50.080
the footage of the great March of Return. It was a mostly peaceful protest. Nothing, nothing like
02:12:56.760
Minneapolis. That was a joke for you, Tim. I will say that. It is in fact, was in fact a mostly
02:13:00.860
peaceful protest, which is the problem. It was, look, there were a couple of rocks
02:13:04.740
thrown. It was thousands of unarmed civilians marching peacefully. Last question. And I'll
02:13:11.560
ask Will first. I think Scott will have a, perhaps a more robust answer. If the border
02:13:17.400
surrounding Gaza was immediately removed instantly all at once, and the government of Israel said
02:13:24.580
all of the Gaza are free to move about the entire state of Israel, what do you think would
02:13:29.080
happen? One of the biggest pogroms in world history would happen. It would be October 7th
02:13:35.820
times a hundred. I think you'd see a mass slaughter of Israelis.
02:13:39.580
Wait, he didn't say the Israelis had to lay down all their arms first, did he?
02:13:42.780
Doesn't matter. It's not like, like Israeli gun ownership ain't that high, man. Like that's
02:13:46.820
what they found. That's, they had to do some like reactive stuff on 10-7.
02:13:50.240
Well, they're completely outnumbered and outarmed. So that's not true.
02:13:54.760
What do you think would happen in that circumstance?
02:13:56.460
Well, I'm certainly not recommending that they just tear down the fence and tell Hamas to run
02:14:00.880
wild. But what would happen? No, I mean, the hypothetical is crazy. Hamas is still there
02:14:05.000
and Hamas is still dangerous. Nobody who says there should be a one state solution or a two
02:14:09.520
state solution or a bi-national state solution says that I dream of Jeannie should just tear
02:14:14.860
down the fence and let Hamas run riot and do whatever they want, Tim. That's not the argument.
02:14:19.940
The argument is that through negotiation with the PA, or I don't know exactly how you get
02:14:26.040
there with the current situation in Gaza, but if the PA was in charge in Gaza on with
02:14:31.020
Israeli help, that then it would be possible to negotiate either a one state solution, a
02:14:36.600
two state solution, or some kind of bi-national type state. You know, they pulled this off in
02:14:41.720
Bosnia where tens of thousands, I think the numbers are exaggerated, but certainly high tens
02:14:48.280
of thousands of people were butchered for years by Serbs, Muslims, and Croats committed terrible
02:14:54.780
atrocities against innocent civilians. And then they stopped and they worked it out. And in fact,
02:15:00.080
I was reading the memoir of the last ambassador to Yugoslavia, where he talked about how, and we
02:15:07.060
don't even think about this. We don't even know this, but I mean, you know, as soon as I say it,
02:15:11.100
but otherwise you wouldn't think about this. There are millions of ethnic Germans that live inside
02:15:15.700
France right now, since the end of the Second World War. And talk about bad blood. These guys
02:15:22.200
have hated and fought each other for centuries, but because they are free, because they have
02:15:26.740
essentially a minarchist state, and the French regime is not forcing Frenchness on these Germans,
02:15:33.280
they're getting along. As we discussed earlier, 20% of the population of Palestine are Arab, Muslims,
02:15:40.480
Muslims, and Christians. And they get along just fine. They're not terrorists. They don't go around
02:15:44.900
murdering people all the time. Of Palestine. No, of Israel. I didn't know if you were doing like
02:15:50.360
an Israel is Palestine thing. Oh, I might have screwed up some words if I misspeak sometimes. But what I
02:15:54.960
meant to say was 20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians, and they get along perfectly fine.
02:16:02.900
Now, I'm not saying that they should, what, have a 60% majority and then get to lord it over all the
02:16:07.440
Israeli Jews. I mean, if you're going to have a state at all, it should be a very minarchist state
02:16:12.180
where it shouldn't matter who the police force is because their powers are so limited to only
02:16:17.700
protecting people's rights and that kind of thing. But we have, there are very, very few pure ethnic
02:16:24.180
states in the world anymore, anywhere. All the borders are drawn in crazy places, and they get along.
02:16:30.520
They figure it out. And including in places where there have been very bad civil wars and grudges
02:16:37.480
going back for decades and centuries. So it is not the case that it's always 10-7, and we'll never be
02:16:44.180
able to find a way out of this other than the total subjugation of the Palestinian people.
02:16:48.980
Will, if you want to respond and then give your final thoughts.
02:16:50.980
Yeah. I think that this, the point you make about the French and the Germans and Alsace and like all
02:16:56.880
these other places where, you know, there's been changes in the borders and changes in who lives
02:17:00.880
there. And there's no talk of a new state. There's no talk of violence and revolution. Those are all
02:17:05.980
indications of how badly we as America have messed up, messed this up in Israel in terms of pushing
02:17:11.860
a two-state solution. It is, that goes back to the point I-
02:17:14.760
But you don't support a one-state one either though, right?
02:17:16.180
I support Israel having sovereignty over the territory that is the mandate of Palestine and granting whatever
02:17:21.880
self-government they want to negotiate with the Palestinians.
02:17:24.220
And granting as little to zero rights to the Palestinians as they feel like.
02:17:29.640
Whatever the Palestinians can negotiate. I think that that's the way to peace, right? That's the
02:17:33.080
way to saying in a world where the entire, it's the entire world being so invested and so wanting
02:17:38.780
to pressure Israel into ceding something here that creates the underlying instability. And so the world
02:17:44.620
where everybody simply recognizes, no, Israel is sovereign over the former territory of the British
02:17:47.860
mandate, whatever, you know, and it's your problem to negotiate whatever you can't want in terms of
02:17:51.540
self-government. That's the world that leads to peace. That's the world that leads to what we saw
02:17:55.460
in France and Germany and all these other things.
02:17:57.840
That's the world that leads to what happened on 10-7. The Palestinians, as Netanyahu said in his
02:18:01.660
speech, they're just going to have to learn to live with their total defeat.
02:18:04.520
They only did it because they wanted attention. We started this in the beginning.
02:18:07.880
And it's the idea that like, if people didn't care-
02:18:10.600
The peace of desolation didn't work. The peace of their total defeat and capitulation did not take.
02:18:18.060
I think that that's ultimately because, you know, we've seen the enormous protests throughout the
02:18:24.200
world and the enormous protests to try and put enormous diplomatic pressure on Israel.
02:18:28.220
That's the stuff that gives, makes Hamas think that this sort of butchery works. Anyway, so-
02:18:36.900
George Washington said that a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.
02:18:42.420
Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases
02:18:48.560
where no real common interests exist, and infusing into one the enmities of the other betrays the
02:18:55.560
former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or
02:19:01.060
justification. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to their
02:19:07.120
favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium,
02:19:14.160
sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearance of a virtuous sense of obligation,
02:19:19.960
a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good,
02:19:24.880
the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. End quote.
02:19:31.700
Well, all right, gentlemen, this has been a, this has been a blast. I think we have actually solved
02:19:42.620
Yeah. The most important project on the internet is antiwar.com, where all my guys do such great
02:19:47.740
work all the time. Libertarianinstitute.org. I've done almost 6,000 interviews going back to 2003,
02:19:54.080
all of which are available at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow. And you can
02:19:59.980
follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at scotthortonshow.
02:20:03.720
Yeah. Follow me on Twitter at Will Chamberlain. Also, of course, follow the projects I'm involved
02:20:08.780
with, the Article 3 project and the Internet Accountability Project.
02:20:13.760
Had a blast. We're actually going to go have cheeseburgers and skateboard now,
02:20:16.380
because Scott brought his board. It's going to be fun.
02:20:18.080
Everybody, thanks for hanging out. Make sure you subscribe to Tenant Media on all the social media
02:20:22.260
platforms. Next week will also be a blast. We are going to have a pre-recorded episode up for you,
02:20:27.060
because I believe next, it's Black Friday, right? Yeah. So we will have an episode,
02:20:30.940
and it's going to be a whole lot of fun. Thanks for hanging out, and we will see you all then.
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