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00:04:21.700Suddenly in Janine, the refugee camps in the north of the West Bank, there are armsmen doing military marches with M-16s and masks on.
00:04:30.600And that was the second order of business.
00:04:31.900And the last thing that the Israelis believed was that Hamas firing some sort of like water pipe rockets into Israel was an indication of something to come, something much bigger to come.
00:04:49.200I mean, as you said, you could trace this all the way back to the British mandate or whatever.
00:04:54.980I mean, you could trace it as far back as you wanted, but you think this really began with clashes between both Israeli citizens, Arabs and Jews within Israel, and in 2021.
00:07:41.880Now you have to go from grit to governance.
00:07:44.840And that's fine, maybe for a year, maybe for two, because the next big battle is coming.
00:07:50.380What happens three, four, five years later?
00:07:54.240At some point, people are sitting there, they have a much lower quality of life than people in the West Bank.0.98
00:08:00.920Palestinians in the West Bank, at the very least, can come into Israel for years and years and years.
00:08:05.160Half of them illegally in work, make an Israeli salary, go back home.
00:08:09.040In Gaza, they didn't have a whole lot going for them.0.95
00:08:13.380And I think at some point in time, maybe around 2018, it became clear that I think people were kind of starting to ask the question is like, okay, if we picked you and you're supposed to fight and now we're just eating shit here, we might as well get the PA back.0.94
00:08:27.820And you say that you don't sit down with the Jews and you don't recognize the Jews and you're not going to make peace with them.0.96
00:08:32.200But like you talk to them on a weekly basis, you just have some Egyptian guy in the middle playing telephone tag.0.84
00:08:36.300And I think that the leader of Hamas, I think Yahya Sinwar, I think he understood that, I think around 2018, he began to understand that like, this is not a sustainable, this is not something sustainable.
00:16:12.840the next war is the fourth it can't end like the third which ended like the second and the first
00:16:19.840So for those who aren't steeped in this, why would the head of Hamas want the Israelis to take over Gaza?0.78
00:16:27.100I don't know at that point if he wanted the Israelis to take over Gaza, but I think he was pointing something.
00:16:35.840I think he was pointing to something that's quite like theoretically elaborate, like a very, very high level understanding of how history functions.
00:16:44.540Which is, he didn't want them to take over Gaza, but I think he understood that if there were to be another war, that it would be a disastrous war.
00:16:59.660And that it would force Israel into a corner where they would have two options.0.64
00:17:05.560Either we destroy this entire place and or we occupy Gaza.0.75
00:17:10.640But the problem is that the Israelis already occupied Gaza.0.93
00:17:13.280They already tried it, and they left, and they left for very good reasons.0.80
00:18:51.260So it sounds like you think that in planning
00:18:56.380the attacks of October 7th, he saw the long game
00:18:59.720and understood that it'd be hard for Israel
00:19:02.740to deal with those consequences over time.
00:19:07.460I think, to put it a little more specifically,
00:19:10.800I think Sinwad understood that the status quo that fell into place after 2014, this long silence, that it was poison for the Palestinian cause.
00:24:24.100I mean, there are people who probably know this better than I, but there was a document that circulated within Israeli intelligence called, I think, the Jericho Wall.
00:24:31.460there was an intelligence analyst i believe she was a female who sort of saw what was happening
00:24:38.420in gaza that there were certain military drills certain speeches and there was an indication that
00:24:43.520they were planning something really serious and uh the story goes that her higher-ups i think
00:24:48.200bergman reported on this if i'm not mistaken story goes that her higher-ups basically said like yeah
00:24:53.140yeah um that's cute but no we don't it's like inadmissible trash um you had also soldiers at
00:25:01.680the observation posts along the border who uh i don't know when exactly i don't know if this was
00:25:07.820in the weeks or the months leading up to october the 7th but that were reporting to their higher
00:25:11.780ups that like there were some strange little movements it commences and much has been written
00:25:20.640about and even more speculated about a so-called stand-down order or the israeli government
00:25:25.100response to it what what's your belief about what happened are you asking whether or not i think
00:25:31.720the israeli higher-ups wanted this to get out of control no i'm asking like what did happen
00:25:40.920what do you think actually happened like why why from an outsider perspective it seems like the
00:25:47.460response was inadequate it was certainly inadequate right why look i don't know but
00:25:55.180what's strange to me is that um i think it was in the week or two after tzachiyan negbi who was like
00:26:00.500the equivalent to the head of homeland security i guess or the national security council something
00:26:04.520like that um in israel he came out and admitted that i think three to four hours before the attack
00:26:10.480there you know certain intelligence officials and i think the general like they convened there was a
00:26:14.760discussion. It's not like they woke up at 6.30 a.m. So there was certainly something that happened
00:26:21.920among the highest echelons. One question I've had is why... Wait, do we know what they talked about?
00:26:28.060No, but there's a quote that circulated in Israeli media that apparently the general
00:26:31.600at the time got out of bed and his wife was sort of like, what's going on? And he just
00:26:37.840apparently turned around and said, Gaza's going to be destroyed. That's a quote that circulated
00:26:42.960around uh israeli media i don't know at what time this happens could have been at you know 6 29 i
00:26:49.340doubt it though because apparently the people were convened before i don't know i know what i saw
00:26:54.960on october the 7th i know where i was so what did you see and what's your conclusion
00:27:00.960one thing i'll say is that three weeks before october the 7th i met with a journalist he's a
00:27:12.940And he'd come like a year and a half before, and he was starting out fresh.
00:27:18.260I don't think he knew Israel-Palestine super well.
00:27:21.020And I wanted to become a mainstream journalist at the time,0.97
00:27:23.100so I thought he could help me scratch each other's backs.
00:27:26.160And we would talk a lot about what was going on.
00:27:27.840And for about a year and a half, I was telling him that something's going to happen,
00:27:30.660like there's something weird that's going on.
00:27:35.000And he'd listen to me, and he'd help me out.
00:27:36.940And about three weeks before October the 7th, we met for a beer in Jerusalem,
00:27:40.440And that was the same day in which the Palestinians, I believe it was three weeks before, were doing these marches of return.0.78
00:27:46.480You know, when they flood the borders, they throw incendiary balloons, burn some fields, and wait for the Israelis to come back and be like, okay, what will it take you?0.93
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00:34:05.180Once that happened, once those attacks happened, was it always inevitable, the response? Was Gaza always going to get leveled once that happened?0.97
00:34:14.760If that operation, if that attack were to be successful,0.54
00:34:18.280and I think if we follow Sinwar's thread,0.69
00:34:21.500I think it's fair to assume that he knew.0.50
00:34:23.500What do you mean by that this war will take with it
00:34:26.020or burn with it all the green and all the dry?
00:39:05.160If you can time them and modulate them to serve your personal motives, well, it's a win-win.
00:39:15.540So, have you heard anybody articulate plans for, just to be totally clear on this, for moving the more than one, probably fewer than two million people in Gaza anywhere?
00:39:29.100No, but I have something else that I don't think has ever been released, actually.
00:39:32.960I was working with the Washington Post
00:39:35.900until they fired their whole foreign desk
00:40:59.040So I heard that the plan was to have, to sort of like rotate, take a population from an area, move them away, build a massive complex, as it were, could be condominiums, could be apartments, I don't know what, and then move them back and continue doing this rotation for however long it takes.
00:41:16.640It means that you are fundamentally altering the urban planning with the demography and private property of Gaza.0.73
00:41:27.960If you have a building on a swath of land, on a plot of land that used to have five to seven bits of private property, you have to reconfigure and you have to suspend that private property and create a new precedent.
00:41:42.120I was told by someone very, very high up in the PA that this was intended, that there was going to be a suspension of private property for a period of maybe seven years.
00:51:10.760But I think right now you have this logic being pushed around by Bibi, which is, you know, peace through strength.0.56
00:51:16.640I think the Israelis have this sense that if we push long enough, let's say we do manage to change the regime in Iran, not topple it, but change it.
00:52:07.000I believe that in some dim recess, it might not actually be an active strategy, but I do believe that in some dim recess, Israel would like civil war in Lebanon.
00:52:16.860Because between you and me, if I'm being totally honest, the only way to deal with Hezbollah, Hezbollah is not just a paramilitary group.0.67
00:52:24.640They are demographically entrenched in the country.
00:52:27.380They are South Lebanon and they are the Shiite population that was also oppressed for a very long time.
00:52:31.680And there are a lot of Shiites in Beirut now.
00:52:34.760Yeah, and so I think there is a desire for potentially civil war in Lebanon.
00:52:40.680For sure, and that, I mean, you've seen this, well, you saw it in Syria, you know, you've seen it in a lot of the same strategy.
00:52:47.080I'm just saying, and I'm not attaching values to any of this, like what's right or wrong, or even what's good for the United States, or any of that.
00:52:52.900I just think, as a general principle, that's day trading, that's like a short-term strategy that doesn't work long-term, but maybe people think it does work long-term, like you can do that forever, I don't think you can.
00:53:04.480No, probably not. I think they're hoping that either this all turns out exactly the way they want it, which is highly unlikely, or that you have enough chaos. There's a desire for chaos that all of these places should be at least uncertain. If we can't determine what the best possible reality for us, then the very least, the reality should be indeterminate. It should be in flux.
00:53:28.580Right. No, I get it. I totally get it. And again, I'm not even judging this or that's wrong. This is not a lecture. I just mean like as a kind of almost a physics principle, over time, chaos is bad for you. It's bad for everybody. It's bad to have chaos nearby you. It's bad to have your neighbor get divorced. That actually increases the chances you get divorced.
00:53:51.020There's a way in which chaos is a virus and it hurts you in the end, even though you think you can control it, you can't.
00:53:58.680I think that's a pretty stable principle of history.0.94
00:54:02.460I think the big weak point of Israel, I think sometimes when you look strategically at the surrounding countries, there's another point here, which is Israel on the interior.0.73
00:54:51.920One of the only real genocides in history was the Romans in 70 AD in Jerusalem.0.86
00:54:57.140And one of the reasons that they were able, that siege was successful is because of the almost unbelievably barbaric fighting between Jewish factions within Jerusalem.0.89
00:55:08.160Like the Romans got through because the defenders were fighting each other.0.96
00:55:12.120I just think that's also another principle.
00:55:13.660It's like if you destroy, if you don't have a unified country, you're much weaker than you think you are, I guess.
00:55:39.140He talked about scraping away at Lebanon, which is fine if you're Bibi or if you want to be with Bibi, that's the doctrine.
00:55:46.940But you have this thing within the Israeli opposition that Bibi has put them in a corner that over the course of the war, they have had no choice but to parrot his speech.
00:56:03.160No, that's certainly what it seems like looking from the outside.
00:56:06.180Can I ask about the, I mean, again, this is an outsider's perspective, non-Hebrew speaking perspective, but it seems like the core division is religious, non-religious, or it has been.
00:56:19.200The idea that, you know, a certain percentage of the country doesn't serve, doesn't participate meaningfully in the economy, and there's deep resentment toward them by people who do, that has been true for a while.
00:58:33.080But what it does mean is that you can't understand the conflict between the Israelis or the Jews and the Palestinians without realizing that this is a struggle for nativity.
00:58:45.680And that in some way they are the mirror images of each other.0.82
00:58:48.980And in many ways the Palestinians are the new Jews.0.96
00:58:52.760And neither one really wants to admit it, especially the Israelis.0.92
00:59:25.040If the Jews came back after 2,000 to 3,000 years and didn't forget, though there were periods of forgetting, why do you think that the Palestinians won't do the same?
01:08:52.940So I'm having trouble fitting this into a category.
01:08:54.800So the two motives that you always hear here in the U.S. or when I've been in Israel are either these are, you know, religious people who are sort of acting out some kind of millennialist vision, or there are people who want cheaper housing and housing in Israel.0.59
01:09:09.460Those are two separate categories of settler.0.82
01:09:20.800What I'm describing is a part of the broader category of settlers who are there to, at the forefront, who are forwarding, who are pushing the settlement forward, as opposed to the people who want cheap housing who just literally go into Tel Aviv, you know.
01:09:35.300Yeah, yeah, no, I got it, I've seen that, yeah.
01:09:38.080Where it all comes from, I don't know, but I think that it's a big commitment to move to a hilltop surrounded by concertina wire, like, you don't do that by accident.
01:09:48.040But if you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old,
01:15:39.020I guess it just seems unimaginably radical from an American...0.56
01:15:44.800If you think of Israel, the post-67 Israel that most Americans learned about, visited, all of a sudden you have these guys, these two Ashkenazi guys sound really, really radical.
01:16:01.540Or it seems like a departure from anything Americans have ever heard an Israeli government official say.
01:16:07.400I think what you're hearing is what you often hear behind closed doors all over Israel, what you can hear at a cafe in Tel Aviv.
01:16:12.900meaning that the notion of yeah maybe they could go somewhere the palestinians maybe they just like
01:16:21.220they could be gone the question of uh those are questions that come up you hear it regularly these
01:16:27.280aren't like completely insane conversations to hear you can hear it from like a hippie at a cafe
01:16:32.260in tel aviv smoking a joint that's what changes that suddenly you are hearing it more and more
01:16:37.380on tv i remember i heard one news commentator news anchor ask about transfer and i was like
01:16:46.140this is a bit insane like imagine if someone on cnn came on and sort of talking about transferring
01:16:51.400another an entire other population who aren't illegal right people who are born there have been
01:16:58.520there for thousands of years maybe hundreds maybe thousands i don't know but it doesn't matter they
01:17:03.100were there when when when the israelis came yeah doesn't matter how long they've been there for
01:17:07.620um so yeah what about i mean it used to be in my living memory there was a significant population
01:17:18.120of israelis who who had totally different views they're like no that's wrong human rights or a
01:17:23.940thing you can't do that how big is that and oven berg i think is the kind of israeli i remember
01:25:57.300Meaning you got to clean up the mess, either like destroy them or plant trees, put parks in their place, which is why you have many parks all over Israel.0.88
01:26:07.360And people didn't really understand.0.75
01:37:06.820Yeah, that was a platform. There were signs in the West Bank about that. We're the landlords now. Yeah, we're going to be the landlords. And the problem in Israel is that, especially in the West Bank, is that there's a lot of focus on lording over the land and not really dwelling.
01:37:22.780Ben Gavir's election slogan was, we're going to be the landlords. We're dealing with lack of self-awareness now, to say something like that out loud.
01:37:30.500Quite the opposite. He was very, very aware. It was very strategic and very tactical.
01:37:36.080Especially within the settlement population, of course. You're in a place where you don't feel0.98
01:37:40.440like you're really the Lord. You don't feel, except for the gun, you don't feel like I'm
01:37:45.340really the king of the hill. There's a guy who's saying, I'm going to make you king. I'm going to
01:37:48.820put the crown on your head. It's tempting, especially to naive, young, potentially troubled
01:37:53.520youth who are you know running around the hilltops interesting yeah how long can israel go with all1.00
01:38:02.260this territory that's not part of their country but that they control like what with gaza and the0.54
01:38:09.040west bank and now southern lebanon and parts of syria like does that just go on forever do people
01:38:16.220envision a time where the official borders of israel expand and like this is our country like0.73
01:38:20.940No, I mean, look, if Israel can't manage Gaza, I don't think they can manage South Lebanon. I don't think that what's happening in South Lebanon is going to be permanent. There might be a post or two on the border. You could potentially expect that. Are they going to take large swaths of Lebanese territory? No, but what they will do is render them uninhabitable, which is a kind of way of doing not this, but not that.0.67
01:45:31.240I have issues with American Jews, but they're also my people.
01:45:35.160And this is, I think, the overarching sentiment.
01:45:37.340At the end of the day, there are many disagreements between the two peoples, but they are also a single people.
01:45:42.760It's just like you have disagreements with your family, I'm sure, but they're still your family.
01:45:46.760And that's, by and large, if I had to sum it up, that's the dynamic.
01:45:51.940But there is certainly a generational break right now.0.50
01:45:54.860I think the younger generation of liberal Jews, I think they're beginning to see, and this isn't the majority of Jews right now, the majority of younger generation Jews I think are still following in the footsteps of their parents, but there is a significant population of young Jews who I think are looking at Israel and saying, we don't like what you're doing and it doesn't necessarily matter that you're family.
01:46:19.620What changed that view, do you think? Gaza?
01:47:12.160But on like the subway in Toronto, you can hear people talking through each other about their various moral beliefs that they've never had to act upon in their lives.
01:49:17.480Do you think, again, purely speculative, but if Donald Trump went to Bibi tomorrow and said, we're shutting this down with Iran, it's terrible for markets, it's terrible for me, my political party, could he make Bibi stop?
01:49:34.540i think he probably could but bb would probably want to find a kind of middle ground meaning
01:49:41.980they had a ceasefire in lebanon but there were still israeli strikes in lebanon on
01:49:46.460on an almost daily basis right yeah i think you could call that the israeli ceasefire
01:49:52.100yeah in hebrew called the war between the wars um for but so funny when you know growing up here
01:49:58.860we were taught that Israel had wars in 48, 56, 67, 73, 82,
01:50:49.140I mean, I don't, I think there should be, there's probably going to be some attempt to activate people to try to get protests stirred up again.
01:51:03.860Yeah, I find it hard to believe that the Israelis put all this together without the hope or without some expectation that when things quiet down, things internally will begin to sort of move again.
01:51:19.140I don't know if you can expect people to go and protest while there are strikes.0.53
01:51:24.840The strikes should, I think they would expect, lay the groundwork for something to happen.
01:51:29.700Do you have any idea how the Israeli government winds up with so many agents of influence and just agents in all these hostile countries?
01:51:38.740How many, there's so many people in Iran working for Israel, same in Syria, same in Lebanon.