Israel is the focus of the world's conversation, and yet it is a tiny country in the Middle East, with a population of 9 million people, a GDP of less than $1.5 billion, and a military budget of about $25 billion. Why is Israel so important to the world s attention?
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.
00:01:15.840But 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.
00:01:24.220What'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.
00:01:36.420Israel, 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.
00:01:48.200So 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.
00:02:21.600Here 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.
00:03:55.440And yet, despite its objective insignificance, it is the focus of the conversation, but it's also the focus of the spending.
00:04:03.420So right now, as we speak, tonight, there are two THAAD missile batteries in Israel.
00:04:11.360That's one quarter of the world's total supply of THAAD missile batteries.
00:04:15.680The THAAD missile battery is an American-made, very high-tech missile battery that takes incoming missiles out of the sky.
00:04:22.500And one quarter of the world's entire supply of these is in Israel right now, manned by U.S. troops, by Americans.
00:04:32.300In uniform or not, they are American military personnel.
00:04:35.860And they are manning these batteries to protect Israel.
00:04:38.660And that shouldn't surprise you, because since October 7, 2023, which is a little less than two years ago, the United States has spent, at minimum, $30 billion defending Israel.
00:04:51.000And for some perspective, the entire Israeli military budget before October 7th was about $25 billion.
00:04:59.320So the United States has put at least $30 billion into defending Israel in less than two years.
00:05:04.980Over the course of its existence, a little less than 80 years, the United States has put $300 billion, at least, those are just the on-books numbers, into supporting Israel.
00:05:40.060We are spending our time, our money, and we're taking enormous risks on behalf of a country that geopolitically is not significant at all.
00:05:51.800The interesting thing is most Americans have no idea that this is true.
00:05:56.860They don't know how disproportionate our attention to Israel and our spending on Israel is relative to the rest of the world.
00:06:04.340And if you want some sense of how disproportionate, India and China combined, neither of which is a strong ally at the moment, combined represent more than a third of the entire world's population.
00:06:16.040Both are rivals economically, both are rivals militarily, at least potentially.
00:06:19.520And our relationship with them has gotten worse or at the very least languished because of our relationship with Israel, because of the bandwidth consumed by tending to it, and also because of some of the inevitable conflicts that have arisen because of our support for Israel, which is engaged in an extremely controversial, which is to say hated war in Gaza, which is not even really a war.
00:06:41.420However, it's a massive displacement of people and killing on a grand scale of unarmed people, of unarmed combatants, of civilians, of women and children.
00:06:51.280And the world sees this, and the world rejects it, and the world hates it.
00:06:55.200And so Israel's really last remaining ally of size, other than the UK, is the United States.
00:07:03.240But again, most Americans have no perspective on just how disproportionate our commitment is because they marinate in lies about this relationship, mostly from our political class, also from the media.
00:07:16.520But really, if you were to lay the blame on one group in the United States, it's our elected leaders who continuously lie to us about the nature of this relationship, its significance.
00:07:30.140They've been doing it for many decades.
00:07:31.900Here, and this is just one example, but the most fun to watch.
00:07:36.300This is Nikki Haley at the Republican Presidential Primary Debate 2023, describing the United States' relationship with the state of Israel.
00:08:11.660In fact, it's one of those lies that's not three degrees off the truth.
00:08:15.500It is a complete inversion of the truth.
00:08:17.780And the truth, which is obvious to anyone who looks at the numbers or is paying any attention at all, is that Israel could not survive without the United States.
00:08:24.660That's not an argument for pulling all aid to Israel.
00:08:27.540It's just an acknowledgment of the physical reality.
00:08:30.820Israel fights its wars with American backing, with the guaranteed, the implied defense guarantee that we have provided for so many years, since at least 1973.
00:08:39.340And 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.
00:09:05.820And, 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.
00:09:31.580Politicians make nonsensical statements.
00:09:33.680Nobody wants to even ask a follow-up question for fear of being attacked.
00:09:37.780It is a state of perpetual intimidation.
00:09:41.100And everybody'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.
00:09:56.800And if you're wondering why there's an awful lot of lunatic anti-Semitic comment about Israel online, you have to wonder how much of that is organic.
00:10:05.680Some of it, of course, there are always haters.
00:10:08.040But how much of it is not organic at all?
00:10:10.360How much of that, the lunatic, all Jews are evil, how 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, like hate, like David Duke level lunacy?
00:10:31.400Probably some, because it serves their interests.
00:10:36.180Now, that is a criticism of the state of Israel and its incredibly sophisticated propaganda campaign, which, again, the rest of us have been marinating in for a long time.
00:10:45.980But the true villain here, I would argue, is not the state of Israel, the Jews.
00:10:54.460It's our leaders who are putting up with this.
00:10:57.480Israel is a small country with very limited resources, and it is doing its best to serve its own interests.
00:11:03.960You'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.
00:11:23.400So if there's someone to be mad at, it's our leaders.
00:11:27.280And 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.
00:11:35.500It's breaking our society into pieces.
00:11:38.000It's truly hurting the Trump administration.
00:11:40.760The 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, the second thing we can do is get some freaking self-respect and stop being ordered around by a client state.
00:12:24.260Whether it's wise or not is a whole separate conversation.
00:12:26.420But 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.
00:12:55.840One 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, which was our arch rival, our foe at the time.
00:13:10.740And 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.
00:13:17.020And anyone who says anything about it is attacked.
00:13:27.140Why 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?
00:13:34.500And it's somehow shameful to say that?
00:40:19.480But you can't censor a live event, and you will not censor Megyn Kelly.
00:40:24.320She and I will be live on stage talking about the issues that matter and saying out loud the things we're told you can't say or think tough were Americans.
00:45:09.940And of course he wants to do it again.
00:45:12.420It's been part of Netanyahu's policy to pull the United States into repeated wars.
00:45:20.320This is why this whole relationship is so completely dysfunctional.
00:45:28.280Netanyahu back in 1996 with American political advisors actually came up with a document called Clean Break.
00:45:40.580Clean Break is a very strange but very clear statement of what has trapped the United States for nearly 30 years.
00:45:51.760Clean Break says, well, Israel's never going to compromise with its Palestinian Arab population in its midst and in the Palestinian lands.
00:46:05.700It's going to control all of those lands and it's going to control or expel or kill or ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.
00:46:17.880And that's going to create unrest and it's going to create a militant reaction.
00:46:24.560And then what Clean Break says is, yes, that's going to happen and we will go to war against any other country in the region that supports opposition to greater Israel.
00:46:41.060That is, Israel's control over all of Palestine.
00:46:45.540And there's just one footnote to that.
00:46:48.920But when Netanyahu said that we will go to war, what he meant was the United States will go to war for us.
00:46:57.960So Netanyahu has been the great champion of pushing America into endless wars for the last three decades.
00:47:09.340He was the big cheerleader of the Iraq War.
00:47:13.300People may remember that or they can refresh their memories, a devastatingly wrong war sold on completely phony pretenses that Netanyahu cheerlead.
00:47:26.420And one can even go online and find his testimony to Congress in October 2002 about how wonderful this war is going to be
00:47:37.860and how it's going to lead to a break out of freedom throughout the Middle East.
00:47:43.660He's full of it and he's been full of it for nearly 30 years.
00:47:49.600But he has had many wars in sight that he has actually dragged the United States into.
00:47:56.900The war in Syria, which goes on and started with Obama in 2011, ordering the or assigning the CIA the task to overthrow the Syrian government,
00:48:11.600was again at Netanyahu's and Israel's behest.
00:48:19.700The ongoing wars in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, the recent so-called 12-day war with Iran, which was a disgrace and a great danger.
00:48:33.360Even the wars in East Africa, in Sudan, in Somalia, and in Libya, were pushed by Netanyahu as meeting that we need to overthrow regimes that support opposition to Israel's control over the Palestinians.
00:48:57.640And in 2011, just to take another case, because Obama did double duty that year, he went to war with Syria in a completely weird way of assigning the CIA the overthrow.
00:49:13.320But he also launched a war against Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.
00:49:21.240This was the Obama-Hilary Clinton teamwork to drag America into more wars.
00:49:28.880This has its roots in Netanyahu's doctrine, which is we will control all of Palestine.
00:49:46.520But it will lead to challenges to Israel.
00:49:50.500And we will confront those by overthrowing the governments that support the militancy against Israel's control over Palestine.
00:50:01.720And the U.S. has played along until today.
00:50:04.880And I have to say, even though we saw just that tape of President Trump saying that, no, Israel will not annex the West Bank.
00:50:17.180First of all, don't hold your breath, because we've not yet seen an American president for 30 years that has resisted Israel.
00:50:28.300And I am still fearful that Trump is the same, because frankly, what we have right now, and Netanyahu said so, Israel's involved in seven wars right now.
00:50:46.980They're all over the Middle East in war.
00:50:50.240And so far, the United States has funded, armed, and diplomatically supported all of this.
00:51:19.140And the United States has absolutely not, and in this government, and it's true of the previous ones as well, not said a word about the state of Palestine, which is absolutely key to peace.
00:51:36.740There needs to be a state for the Palestinian people, alongside a state for the Israelis.
00:51:46.560It's absolutely obvious to almost every country in the whole world.
00:51:51.120But the United States listens to Netanyahu.
00:51:54.960And by United States, I don't mean the people, because just as you said, the American people are against all of this, by the way, by large majorities.
00:52:03.420This is not being driven by American public opinion.
00:52:07.200This is our American political class telling Americans what to believe, not what Americans actually believe.
00:52:16.940Americans want the United States to recognize the state of Palestine.
00:52:21.580The United States public opposes what Israel's doing by large majorities.
00:52:28.840But unfortunately, it includes the White House, and it includes the Congress, and it hasn't stopped yet.
00:52:35.980And the situation in the Middle East is explosive, and Netanyahu is working overtime to pull us into yet another war.
00:52:44.500Can you ask, you said a moment ago that no American president has ever constrained Israel in a meaningful way.
00:52:52.340I think George H.W. Bush kind of tried, and there was talk of an assassination attempt against him, and he lost, of course, after one term.
00:53:06.260Why is a country of 9 million people able to dictate terms to a country of 350 million people?
00:53:14.380Well, first of all, there's no legitimate reason for that.
00:53:18.220In other words, there's no intrinsic U.S. interest in any way, whether it's military or security or economic, for this to be the case.
00:53:33.480There's no moral reason for this to be the case.
00:53:37.800In other words, one could support Israel without supporting Israel's reckless extremism and militarism and all its wars.
00:53:49.700And so there's no reason for the United States government to have given a blank check, actually handed our military and our intelligence over to Israel to tell us what to do.
00:54:04.560There's no legitimate reason for this.
00:54:09.100The question why this is the case is, of course, I think to all of us, even no matter how much on the inside we are or how many decades we've watched this, a bit of a mystery.
00:54:24.240And because I've seen this close up for more than 50 years.
00:54:31.640And if you ask me, am I really sure why Netanyahu, who is an absolutely disgusting warmonger, who has dragged us into terrible wars, who is committing massive war crimes, why he gets 57 standing ovations in the U.S. Congress.
00:54:55.020If you ask me in my heart, do I really understand that?
00:54:59.300Is it the APEC lobby, the Israel lobby?
00:55:26.660Is it the mainstream media, which, for a lot of reasons, owned by a lot of billionaires that tend to be rather arted Zionists?
00:55:41.320Is it the larger Christian Zionist vote base, which is also a real thing?
00:55:49.240To tell you the truth, none of it really adds up in full because this is not in America's interest.
00:56:00.420It's not in America's interest to be isolated in the world together with a murderous rogue state, which is sad to say what the Israeli government has become.
00:56:15.480It is the most lawless state in the most lawless state in the world right now.
00:57:37.960And third, if it is the money, the lobbying, the mass media propaganda, the really strange beliefs of some people, whatever it is, even all of that, for my mind, doesn't add up because a president of the United States should be able to figure this out a little bit better.
00:58:03.100That this is absolutely not in America's interest and we do not have a military that is to be handed out to another country to do whatever reckless things that country is doing.
00:58:19.380And right now, Israel is not only doing reckless things, it is committing a genocide.
00:58:26.140And that is not my opinion, that is the opinion pervasively of both scholars and specialists in this matter and in Israeli human rights organizations, in countless observers inside Israel and observers all over the world.
00:58:50.840So the U.S. is actually, and I'm sorry to say it, complicit in genocide right now.
00:59:04.020And so when you ask me this question, I can give you a list of answers, but somehow it doesn't add up for me because this is not so hard to figure out that we are on a terribly wrong track.
00:59:20.080I've thought about it a lot and you don't have to hate Israel, which I don't, to ask like why the serial humiliation rituals and no one ever says, you know, Basta, ever.
00:59:33.200And I do think there's, people perceive a deep threat.
00:59:38.800I wonder if the attack on Doha, on Qatar, and in general, the kind of nonstop effort to malign Qatar, Qatar, is the most important player in U.S. politics.
01:00:06.380I wonder if that was the beginning of the end for Bibi.
01:00:08.620I have to say there's been a lot that should have been the beginning of the end going back 30 years, going back to the Iraq war and even before that.
01:00:24.620Starving a population in Gaza, as Israel is doing right now, should have been enough, even without the bombing of Qatar.
01:00:39.280But yes, Qatar was an extraordinary event.
01:00:44.320Israel says we don't have to obey any laws anywhere.
01:02:02.900But what it was about was Israel trying to stop a negotiated solution to the question of Iran's nuclear program.
01:02:17.440And people should remember that the U.S. bombing of Iran took place a couple days before what was supposed to be the sixth round of negotiations with Iran that were reportedly progressing productively.
01:02:40.920There were serious things to be discussed, and Israel typically went in and assassinated as many people as it could that were involved in those negotiations that were in senior reaches of the Iranian government.
01:02:59.380And then the United States joined in, by the United States, I mean President Trump and the military joined in, in the midst of a negotiating process.
01:03:15.760Israel murdered the negotiators of Hezbollah.
01:03:20.280Israel has repeatedly murdered counterparts who would negotiate.
01:03:25.660Israel's right murdered its own prime minister who was trying to negotiate a peace, Yitzhak Rabin.
01:03:33.040This is the mode of operation of this extremist Israeli government that our politicians support to the hilt.
01:03:45.260And they do it knowing that what Israel is propounding is an absolutely extraordinary and deadly policy.
01:03:58.960And just to put it one more time, what Netanyahu and his coalition represent is a claim that is called Greater Israel, or Eretz Yisrael Hashlema, which in Hebrew is the Greater Israel.
01:04:20.580And the claim is that Israel will control all of the lands that were the British-Palestine.
01:04:31.940Britain, after World War I, took imperial control over Palestine.
01:05:36.880And so, again, Netanyahu came to the United Nations last week, and he was very clear for any of these defenders of Israel in the United States.
01:05:51.100Netanyahu said, there will never be a state of Palestine.
01:05:58.420Now, are we really signing up to that?
01:06:01.880Because that's signing up to mass war crimes, to genocidal actions, and to perpetual war for the United States.
01:06:13.420But honestly, until today, President Trump hasn't said anything about that.
01:06:23.800The whole vast majority of the world says, of course, there needs to be a state of Palestine.
01:06:36.560The U.N. Security Council says this, except the United States government, which says, no, we protect Israel in this murderous path that they're on.
01:08:00.680Its effect is to really distort American politics.
01:08:04.900I thought we agreed during the Russia hysteria of the last administration that it was wrong and illegal, actually, for a foreign government to control our politics.
01:08:16.420Like, I thought we all agreed on that.
01:08:24.840And now, it seems like our entire national conversation is about this tiny, totally irrelevant little country with one great city, Jerusalem, but geopolitically irrelevant country.
01:08:36.600And that's at the behest of a foreign government who's openly saying, you don't agree with us, we're going to censor you.
01:09:01.600There are so many big lies in all that is said day by day, but the biggest big lie in this regard is, as you noted rightly, to say that those who are against Israel are anti-Semites.
01:09:23.800I'm aghast at what Israel is doing because Israel is a state.
01:09:29.200It is, first of all, not a religion, and least of all is it a reflection of 2,000 years of Jewish culture, which is not what Israel is about at all.
01:09:42.420And to say that it's anti-Semitic to oppose a genocide or to oppose all of these wars that Israel is provoking is obviously a big lie.
01:10:00.920And it's really, it's strange to hear this, especially because when one understands the history of Israel and the history of Zionism, which is the political philosophy calling for the state of Israel,
01:10:22.240people should know, it may sound a little strange in our current context, religious Jews were against Zionism at the start.
01:10:34.440This was not, this wasn't even a Jewish religious movement at all.
01:10:40.320This was a group of basically secular Jews in Eastern Europe, and the rabbis of the day told them, no, don't do this.
01:10:57.280This is just going to create a tremendous amount of trouble.
01:11:02.060And so this idea that being critical of Israel is somehow being anti-Semitic, which is what is being used as a cudgel against American society right now and against American universities, but pretty much across the board, is not only wrong and absurd, but completely against the true history of these issues.
01:11:29.240And there's a lot that can be said about it, but one thing that is an illustration of this point.
01:11:38.480Israel emerged from British imperialism.
01:11:43.860Actually, the modern Zionism, so-called, which was the idea of creating a Jewish state, was a British Christian idea in the 19th century.
01:12:29.900And there was not only no mass call to have a Jewish state, that was viewed as heretical, a term that you used earlier.
01:12:43.180In one of the guiding texts of religious Judaism, the Talmud, there is a part called the Three Oaths, which rabbis in the early centuries AD wrote and compiled.
01:13:00.900And this part, Ketubot 111 says, don't return to Israel en masse, don't, because it'll just create trouble.
01:13:16.940That's actually a Talmudic injunction that the rabbis followed for a couple thousand years, basically.
01:13:24.060So this whole idea of the modern state of Israel was actually a Christian idea, specifically a British Christian idea.
01:13:38.480And it was an Anglican reverend who kind of gave this idea to Theodore Herzl, who was a secular Jew in Vienna in the last years of the 19th century.
01:13:54.460Well, just without going into all of the detailed history, in 1917, Britain did a typical British imperial thing.
01:14:06.500During World War I, it promised Palestine repeatedly to different groups.
01:14:13.220Britain is nothing but deceitful in its imperial methods.
01:14:18.780So it promised the land of Palestine to the Arabs, first in what are called the McMahon-Sharif letters.
01:14:27.620It promised the Middle East to be divided with the French in what's called the Sykes-Picot Treaty.
01:14:36.040And then in 1917, under lobbying pressure of British and American Zionists, or British Zionists who said, let's bring America into this war, thinking that it would be good, announced in what's called the Balfour Declaration,
01:15:01.780that there should be a Jewish homeland, that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine after World War I.
01:15:07.960Remember, this was not even British land, this was Ottoman territory, but Britain, being the British Empire, said, we're going to determine the fate of this,
01:15:17.580and announced in the Balfour Declaration that there should be a Jewish homeland.
01:15:22.380Now, there was one Jew in the British cabinet in 1917, Edwin Montague.
01:15:33.480What was that one Jew's reaction to the Balfour Declaration, which was issued by the Foreign Secretary?
01:15:41.680It was to oppose strongly, strenuously, the Balfour Declaration.
01:15:47.100What did Montague say in a famous letter?
01:16:08.580I happen to be Jewish, but I'm British.
01:16:10.680And if you say that now, oh, no, the Jews are in the state of Palestine, that's where their homeland is, you're going to make it seem like I'm less British.
01:16:25.580And this is how many people have felt over time.
01:16:30.740And I, as an American, completely, totally resent when Netanyahu says we're the state of the Jewish people.
01:17:05.980And so the history of all of this is completely different from what is thought.
01:17:13.140And the claim that it is anti-Semitic to be against the ghastly things that Israel is doing, stopping food shipments into Gaza to starve people, destroying all of the infrastructure to make Gaza a place of 2 million people, unlivable, murdering more than 60 million people, the significant majority of whom are women and children.
01:17:43.140And then to be told, no, you can't say you're against that.
01:18:00.520It is a political ideology and the extremist Zionism of Netanyahu and his cronies, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir in particular, who are murderous members of this government.
01:18:19.740And this is an extremism that is completely disgusting and has nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish beliefs or Jewish ethics.
01:18:32.200I think one of the reasons that religious authorities in Europe at the time of the Balfour Declaration, some of them thought this was a bad idea, is because, you know, the point of being in the land of Israel, biblically, was because the temple was in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, right, where Abraham brought Isaac.
01:18:51.200And that was the center of the religion until 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the city and the temple.
01:18:57.440And now, so, and then subsequently, of course, the rise of Islam, Al-Aqsa Mosque, third holiest place in Islam, was built on that site.
01:19:06.460And the foundation is called the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, all our politicians go to.
01:19:11.280The question of rebuilding the temple is almost never discussed publicly in the United States, but there is a huge effort, by the way, bankrolled by a lot of Christians, just to be completely clear, in the state of Texas, for example.
01:19:24.560There's a whole foundation, a number of foundations designed to abet this.
01:19:28.760But there is this kind of behind-the-scenes push to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, which would require destroying the third holiest place in Islam, the mosque, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
01:19:40.140I've talked to a bunch of people about this who think that it's imminent, that it's not crazy to think that that mosque would be blown up in order to make way for the third temple.
01:20:19.940It murders foreign leaders where and when it wants to.
01:20:25.620It acts with complete impunity and disdain.
01:20:29.820And Netanyahu thinks that he controls, and maybe he does, the U.S. government, so that whatever he does, he thinks he can get away with.
01:20:40.560So there's no doubt that there is a third temple movement that is part of this coalition.
01:20:50.360No doubt that there are people in this government who have absolutely no limit, who talk openly about, well, they've already said, to make Gaza completely uninhabitable and unlivable.
01:21:07.540That is ethnic cleansing or genocide or a combination of the two.
01:27:14.600The 10, of course, are Israel and the United States.
01:27:18.560And then Micronesia, Nauru, Vanuatu, Polau, Papua New Guinea.
01:27:34.580If people want to follow them on a map, these are tiny dots in the Pacific Ocean.
01:27:41.160These are states where the U.S. simply buys the vote because there are maybe 10,000 people, 12,000 people in Nauru or some count like that.
01:27:55.920Or in the case of Micronesia, they're bound by compact to vote with the United States.
01:28:01.020And the only countries of any size that have voted any size at all other than these tiny, tiny dots with the U.S. and Israel have been Argentina, Paraguay, and once in a while, a country or two in Europe.
01:28:25.100The whole rest of the world is clear about all of this.
01:28:31.640And when you add up the populations in the countries on these two sides of the vote, and I've done that each time, of course, it's about 95% of the world population saying, get on with it.
01:28:47.760Two states, a state of Palestine, a state of Israel.
01:29:34.160And people should also understand there are so many lies that are told, especially in our own Zionist-dominated mass media that has been recklessly pro-Netanyahu and this extremism for a long time.
01:29:55.940But one of the repeated lies is, there's no one to talk to, there's no way that there could be a peaceful Palestinian state.
01:30:06.680There's no way that there's no way that the Arabs could ever be a partner in this.
01:30:12.940Completely, ridiculously the opposite.
01:30:16.080Since 2002, there has been what is called the Arab Peace Initiative, which has said that based on two states, there would be normal relations between the Arab countries and Israel.
01:30:34.200In other words, normalization and peace based on a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.
01:30:43.240And that has been propounded by Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab countries nonstop.
01:30:52.140It has been supported nonstop by what's called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which is the 57 Muslim-majority countries of the world.
01:31:32.380Now, the United States has used its muscle, its dollars, its threats, even giving visas.
01:31:42.040It denied visas to the Palestine authority to come to the United Nations.
01:31:47.280This is what the United States has used to be part of the debate about this issue.
01:31:53.520It wouldn't even grant visas because the U.S. has been so in lockstep protecting this extremism up until now that we just are stuck.
01:32:09.080And everything that's said that this is anti-Semitic, that there's no one to talk to, that there's no possibility of peace, it's all lies.
01:32:18.940And now about 155 countries formally recognize Palestine, including, despite the ardent U.S. pressure of recent months, Britain and France and Australia and a number of other European countries, just last week said there has to be a state of Palestine.
01:32:44.040But until this moment, the Trump administration won't say the obvious truth, because to this moment, we're still trapped in this hold of this extraordinary giveaway of American foreign policy and the whole American military and intelligence operations to an extremist rogue government.
01:33:11.040Netanyahu is despised, I think, by a lot of people in the U.S. government bragging that you control Donald Trump.
01:33:21.640It's hard to imagine a more self-destructive thing, but he did that a lot, including recently.
01:33:28.280So I just wonder how long, since he basically serves at the pleasure of the United States, that country couldn't exist without, not for a week without U.S. backing, how long can Bibi keep his job if he's despised by the U.S. government and he's got a fractured, he's got a lot of political problems within Israel and he's despised by the world.
01:34:03.540I'm sure that he is despised, but he actually, to this day, continues to get his way, including in the last few days.
01:34:14.720Even when President Trump put forward a plan for Gaza, which was a kind of half a plan, but it had, and it has certain things right, especially stopping the fighting and disarmament of Hamas, completely right.
01:34:39.300But it leaves out the most crucial point, which is a state of Palestine, to live their lives.
01:34:50.600That was, of course, Israel's continued and Netanyahu's continued power.
01:34:57.100And what happened was the administration, President Trump, briefed Arab leaders at the end of last week on this plan.
01:35:07.900They said, well, there are a number of things that are good with this.
01:35:11.960And then Trump met with Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, who is one of these forces of right-wing extremism in Israel.
01:35:25.980And he's an American-born advisor to Netanyahu, who was Israel's ambassador to the United States for a long time.
01:35:33.680He knows how to pull strings of American politicians wherever those strings and however they arise.
01:35:43.200And they changed the plan as they met and basically rewrote key parts of what Trump had told the Arabs to say, oh, oh, yes, yes, and we should remember that Israel will remain in control over Gaza.
01:36:01.000They changed what they had actually briefed the leaders and then unilaterally announced something different.
01:36:07.540And this is just now being disclosed in recent hours.
01:37:52.700How can the United States say it won't allow Israel to do something?
01:37:56.300Well, the fact is, the United States can say it, because Israel can't take one step without the U.S. protection.
01:38:04.900And just as a very practical matter, Palestine, which is recognized by more than 150 countries, applied 14 years ago for membership in the United Nations.
01:38:19.660And in that process, you make an application to the Secretary General of the U.N., then the Secretary General refers it to a membership committee, which is the U.N. Security Council acting as a membership committee based on the recommendation of that membership committee.
01:38:36.800Then the U.N. Security Council considers this.
01:38:39.700So 11 years ago, 14 years ago in 2011, Palestine made its application, and the committee of membership said, yes, Palestine has all of the attributes of statehood.
01:39:00.620It has boundaries, which are the legal boundaries of the 4th of June, 1967, not the boundaries of Israeli illegal occupation, but the legal boundaries, 4th of June, 1967.
01:39:15.640And it wants to enter the U.N. as a U.N. charter-abiding country.
01:40:51.940So there was a unanimous vote, 12 to nothing against, two abstentions, and the U.S. veto.
01:41:00.200And then it went to the General Assembly, where I already explained, you had an overwhelming vote of the whole world community for Palestinian statehood.
01:41:08.260But in the U.N., you need membership, a vote of the U.N. Security Council, where the U.S. has a veto.
01:41:17.400So just to say, not only can President Trump stop annexation of the West Bank, as he said he intends to do, bravo,
01:41:29.660he could also make a state of Palestine within about 10 minutes.
01:41:33.440He would convene the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council and lift the U.S. veto.
01:41:39.340And there would be a unanimous vote of the U.N. Security Council.
01:41:42.840And Palestine would enter as the 194th U.N. member state.
01:41:47.380And on that basis, Israel would have to withdraw because Israel would then be in a fight with the whole world, which it can't be in.