00:00:00.000There's a lot going on in the world right now, but if you're on social media, and of course you are, because it's really America's only remaining news source, you know there's only one story going on, and it's Israel.
00:00:10.640Everyone online is arguing about Israel, and really they fall into one of two camps, generally speaking.
00:00:17.500So probably the more aggressive side are the deranged Taliban-level ethno-narcissists who are telling you that any criticism of the secular government of Israel is tantamount to blood libel against the Jewish people.
00:00:30.000And if you think that maybe it was not a great idea to arm Joseph Stalin, the greatest murderer in history, then you're a Holocaust denier! Shut up!
00:00:39.480And then on the other side, a group every bit as obsessed with Jews are the people who hate Jews who are telling you that anyone who's Jewish is bad by virtue of being Jewish. It's a blood thing.
00:00:51.100Two things are interesting. One, there are very few kind of conventional Christian voices saying, wait a second, this is a secular government, another country.
00:01:00.000And it has probably nothing to do with my religion or anybody's religion, and we should never judge people on the basis of their immutable qualities because guilt and virtue are not passed down genetically.
00:01:16.020But almost no one is saying that. So you really have the ethno-narcissists and the anti-Semites, and they're at war with each other.
00:01:21.660So that's the online picture. What's even more interesting and maybe even more distressing is that in the U.S. government, the conversation, while much more muted, is a mirror of this in that a lot of the conversation is about Israel.
00:01:36.440Israel, a tiny country in the Middle East, not critical to our national security, by the way, but the conversation, the bandwidth is consumed by questions of Israel.
00:01:48.180So wherever you stand on Israel, whether you're on one of the two sides just described or neither one of them, you know in your gut that this is bad.
00:01:56.660If a country like ours, supposedly the most powerful in the world, is devoting all of its time internally to conversations about Israel, it's probably not going in a good direction.
00:02:06.160There's probably a lot being neglected in favor of this very specific boutique conversation about this tiny little country.
00:02:14.660It's just not good for anybody, including Israel, by the way.
00:02:17.720So what's the antidote to this? How do you fix it?
00:02:21.600Here are four things you can do to make the conversation about Israel and the relationship with Israel a lot healthier than it currently is.
00:02:33.020The first is get some global perspective on what we're talking about.
00:02:37.400The United States is a nation of 350 million people.
00:02:41.480It has some of the deepest natural resources in the world that would include energy and water, agricultural products.
00:02:48.540The United States, however it's managed, is a powerhouse globally and always will be because its strength is inherent.
00:02:55.480It's a huge, decisive country in the scope of world history.
00:03:00.500The United States makes things happen.
00:03:02.900Israel is not an insult, merely an observation.
00:03:04.880The United States, by contrast, is a tiny and inherently insignificant country, at least geopolitically, in that it has only 9 million people and no natural resources, no meaningful natural resources.
00:08:39.320And its social services are made possible, which are quite generous, made possible by American subsidies.
00:08:46.980In other words, every dollar that goes to the Israeli military from the United States is a dollar that the nation of Israel can spend on its own people.
00:08:56.300And so there is no world in which America needs Israel more than Israel needs the United States.
00:09:05.660And, of course, Nikki Haley was never asked to explain how exactly that could be true.
00:09:10.200What are you talking about, Governor Haley?
00:09:11.840Not one person asked her that question.
00:09:13.760And no one asked her that question because anyone in whose mind that question appeared would have paused for fear of being attacked as an anti-Semite for asking a question about geopolitics.
00:09:25.320That has been the state of play in the United States for my entire life, over 50 years.
00:09:31.620Politicians make nonsensical statements.
00:09:33.680Nobody wants to even ask a follow-up question for fear of being attacked.
00:09:37.260In fact, it is a state of perpetual intimidation.
00:09:41.720Everybody's afraid of Israel, afraid of the topic, afraid, in some cases, of the state itself.
00:09:48.340We have not had an honest conversation about this ever, certainly not in my lifetime.
00:09:54.660And that suits the Israelis just fine.
00:09:57.020And if you're wondering why there's an awful lot of lunatic anti-Semitic comment about Israel online,
00:10:03.480you have to wonder how much of that is organic.
00:10:05.560Some of it, of course, there are always haters.
00:10:08.060But how much of it is not organic at all?
00:10:10.640How much of that, the lunatic, all Jews are evil,
00:10:16.920how much of that is being ginned up on purpose to make legitimate questions about the U.S. government's relationship with the government of Israel seem like crackpot stuff,
00:10:28.020like hate, like David Duke level lunacy?
00:10:32.300Probably some, because it serves their interests.
00:10:35.560Now, that is a criticism of the state of Israel and its incredibly sophisticated propaganda campaign,
00:10:43.140which, again, the rest of us have been marinating in for a long time.
00:10:46.220But the true villain here, I would argue, is not the state of Israel, the Jews.
00:10:54.480It's our leaders who are putting up with this.
00:10:57.460Israel is a small country with very limited resources, and it is doing its best to serve its own interests.
00:11:03.800You'd think every country would act that way, and most do.
00:11:06.740But there are some that don't, and ours would top that list.
00:11:10.620And so the true shame here, the actual villain in this story, is the leadership of the United States that is putting up with serial humiliation for decades.
00:11:23.200So if there's someone to be mad at, it's our leaders.
00:11:26.700And that leads to the second thing that we can do to fix this truly unhealthy relationship, this poisonous relationship, which is getting worse, by the way.
00:11:35.440It's breaking our society into pieces.
00:11:38.000It's truly hurting the Trump administration.
00:11:41.140The second thing we can do after getting global perspective on what we're actually talking about here, a tiny country that is, in the deepest sense, insignificant to the United States,
00:11:49.520the second thing we can do is get some freaking self-respect and stop being ordered around by a client state.
00:12:26.720But if you're going to have that relationship apparent to a child, you cannot be yelled at, humiliated, spied upon, bossed around by the child, by the person in the inherently subordinate position.
00:12:55.860One of them very famously was caught, Jonathan Pollard, who's an American citizen, taking real secrets, like actual military secrets, and sending them to Israel, which promptly sent a bunch of them to the Soviet Union,
00:13:07.500which was our arch rival, our foe at the time.
00:13:11.240And that happened, and he went to prison, and then somehow he got out of prison and went to Israel, where he continues to denounce the United States.
00:13:16.960And anyone who says anything about it is attacked, oh, you're an anti-Semite.
00:13:21.380It's nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
00:13:26.860Why would we put up with the attack on the USS Liberty that everyone's so afraid to talk about, clearly targeted on purpose by a country we're supporting, Israel, and it's somehow shameful to say that?
00:13:39.520Who knows why it's shameful to say that, but it shouldn't be.
00:13:42.780And until we have some self-respect, not anger or hate, but just dignity, it will continue.
00:13:49.180In June, for example, during the 12-day war, such as it was with Iran, the U.S. and Israel versus Iran, bombing on all sides,
00:14:00.560during that short conflict, IDF officers in the Pentagon, foreign military officers in the Pentagon,
00:14:07.220and by the way, they're not the only foreign military officers in the Pentagon, to be clear.
00:14:10.660There are NATO officers, they're from other countries, British, but there are a bunch of Israeli Defense Force officers in the Pentagon that week.
00:14:22.840And during that week, ask anyone who works at the Pentagon, they enraged American Pentagon staff by just barging into meetings, giving orders, making demands,
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