Journalist Exposes Netanyahu’s Funding of Hamas, the Murder of Palestinians, and Oct. 7th Foresight

0:04How long have you lived in Israel?

0:06Been there for about 10 years.

0:0710 years?

0:09So we're just talking off camera and I'm first of all, thank you for doing this. Pleasure, thanks for having me.

0:15It's impossible to really understand anything from the United States because the filters and the propaganda are just so restrictive.

0:24But it seems obvious that October 7th is the beginning of a global reshuffling certainly of the Middle East.

0:34We haven't spent enough time thinking through what that was.

0:38What was that?

0:42I think to properly understand October the 7th, you have to put together kind of a timeline.

0:48I think what's been lacking here, you know, I talk to a lot of Palestinians and they tell me a lot about how they portray the war as something that sort of began after October the 7, which is another problem we can get to at some point.

0:59The Israelis chalk it up to, you now, the act of a rabid anti-Semite.

1:04I have no doubt that he was quite possibly an anti-semite.

1:07He, you're speaking of, the leader of Hamas who's now dead.

1:13Um, but it doesn't mean that there wasn't a logic. It doesn't means that this happened when it happened and how it happens.

1:20So just to be clear about what you're saying, so from the Palestinian perspective, everything we're seeing now is a result of the events after October 7th and from the Israeli perspective October 7 happened just because they're hated unreasonably.

1:31Well, I guess what I often find is when I speak to Palestinians and they're not wrong to say that the backdrop of all this is that there's been an occupation for a very long time. We've been occupied since 48, which I understand, but it still doesn't explain the specifics of October the 7th.

1:45Right. It explains why at some point something like that could or quite possibly should have happened.

1:51And so that's been something I've focused on a lot and I think if you want to put together a proper answer, you have to put together a timeline, you to go back.

1:59You have to trace basically the existence and the trajectory of Hamas from the rise to power.

2:04But the real breaking point, I'll say, is 2021.

2:10What happened in 2021?

2:12Three things happened in 2020.

2:162021, you have tensions at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

2:19You have famously all the tensions that went on in Sheik Jarrah, where there are settlers taking Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.

2:26That caused a lot of tension.

2:28What happened it at the Al Aqsa complex that year. There were all kinds of clashes between Israeli border police and Muslim worshipers.

2:38And this went on for some time.

2:41It was also, it was May.

2:44And what happened was that three things happened.

2:50Hamas fired rockets into Israel, killing about 14 Israelis.

2:55Riots broke out in the middle of Israel, across the country actually, internal riots, between Arab Israelis and Israeli Jews.

3:01And suddenly the West Bank woke up from a very long slumber.

3:04Suddenly you had for the first time in a very longtime militants who were firing at IDF troops.

3:09I remember seeing videos of, I think it must've been hundreds of Palestinian men.

3:13Marching towards the border.

3:14Did I think they were going to answer?

3:16No.

3:17But I remember calling my father, I remember call him and saying, this video I'm seeing, this doesn't look good.

3:25This is an indication of something.

3:27And in the Israeli media, if you look back at the reports, the Israelis perceive this to be an indication that we have a big threat from within.

3:36This contributed also to the rise of the right in the years that followed.

3:39So the first order of business was we have Arab Israelis, and they're a problem.

3:44We have 2 million Palestinians within our borders.

3:46And the next thing that happened, and you saw the borders of Israel proper. Yeah, within the 48 borders.

3:51Yeah, yeah. Between the sea and the green line.

3:53And then you had over the next year or two, you might remember, increased operations by the IDF.

3:59Suddenly in Nablus, which used to be called the terror capital of Palestine, suddenly there was a new militia that formed, it's called Lion's Den.

4:06Suddenly in Jenin, the refugee camps in the north of the West Bank, there are armed men doing military marches with M16s and masks on.

4:15And that was the second order of business. And the last thing that the Israelis believed was that Hamas firing some sort of like a water pipe rockets into Israel was an indication of something to come, something much bigger.

4:32So what was this?

4:34I mean, as you said, you could trace this all the way back to the, you know, British Mandate or whatever, you can trace it far back as you wanted, but you think this really began with clashes between is both Israeli citizens, Arabs and Jews within Israel.

4:50And in 2021.

4:55So how did that lead to?

4:56Not exactly.

4:57What I think is that, and this is why you have to go a little further back.

5:01Sorry, this is a bit of a...

5:04I think that the internal riots were absolutely meaningless.

5:07I think what happened in the West Bank was somewhat meaningful, and I can explain later why I don't think it had any end to it, why it wasn't going to come to any significant end.

5:16But what happened in 2021, why Hamas fired rockets?

5:20No one bothered to ask, why are they suddenly firing rockets?

5:22Hamas came to power in 2007, I think it was 2007.

5:26They come to power, and this is a group that overthrew the PA.

5:30Right, the Palestinian Authority.

5:31The Palestinian Authority, they tossed them off. Fruit Tops took control of Gaza.

5:36And they came, why would people have wanted them, or why did they think that the Palestinians deserve them rather than the PA?

5:43They were saying, we're a resistance group. We're Palestinians, we were exiled in 48, and the whole purpose of our existence in one way or another is to get back.

5:54So unlike the PA, we're not going to sit and make peace with the Jews.

5:57We're not gonna sort of like coordinate with them, we are not going arrest people at their behest.

6:02We're going to fight.

6:03And that's what they did from 2007 to 2014.

6:08I think you have three to four ground invasions, if I'm not mistaken.

6:12And so they were doing kinda, they were fulfilling their promise.

6:16They didn't win, they didn't liberate Palestine, but what did happen is that Hamas didn't have a lot of political tension because they were either fighting, being bombed, or people were cleaning up the rebel.

6:29But in 2014, just bear with me a moment, in 2014 suddenly silence falls upon Gaza.

6:38I think this was a silence that, I don't know if Hamas even predicted such a silence whatever.

6:44Come upon Gaza, the Israelis certainly wanted it.

6:47It's the last war, it's called suketan in Hebrew.

6:50It's The Last War.

6:51The Israelis, you know, bombed a bunch of tunnels.

6:53There was some ground operations, lots of strikes.

6:56And it was kind of this thing where they came and said, look, we sent them back. I think the quote from the general at the time was, we send them back 50 years or a hundred years or to the Stone Age, whatever it was.

7:08But that's a bit of a problem for Hamas.

7:12You're a group of gritty, sort of nitty gritty resistance fighters.

7:16You came to power.

7:18You fought some wars.

7:19Didn't win.

7:21But you didn't get totally beat.

7:23And now you're just bureaucrats.

7:26Now you have to go from grit to governance.

7:29And that's fine.

7:30Maybe for a year, maybe for two, because the next big battle is coming.

7:35What happens three, four, five years later?

7:39At some point people are sitting there, they have a much lower quality of life than people in the West Bank.

7:45Palestinians in the west bank at the very least can come into Israel for years and years and years.

7:50Half of them illegally in work, make an Israeli salary, go back home.

7:54In Gaza, it's, you know, they didn't have a whole lot going for them. And I think at some point in time, maybe around 2018, it became clear that I think people are kind of starting to ask the question is like what 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.

8:12And 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, but like, you talk to them on a weekly basis, you just have some Egyptian guy in the middle playing telephone tag.

8:23And 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 something sustainable.

8:39Can't keep going like this.

8:44When do you think the planning for October 7th began?

8:49And what was the thinking?

8:53Look, in terms of the planning, if you're talking about the concrete steps, look, I'm not an intelligence analyst.

8:57From what we know, I think from what was released, we understand that sometime in October 2022, it might have, the real planning could have been underway.

9:08The conceptual planning for something of this sort, I had been working within Sinwar since he was probably a teenager.

9:18I mean, there's a famous quote.

9:19I think he did the interview in Hebrew. Which is like all the more eerie, it's a crazy interview and he's sitting on a plastic chair outside and they asked him something about, you know, do you want to kill us? Do you want war with us? And he goes, listen, right now, you're strong, you've got nuclear bombs, I can't, I can touch you, but in 20, maybe 15 years, you are going to be weak inside and that's I'm going to strike you.

9:52And in 2018, Yahya Sinwar gave an interview.

9:56It's crazy, because I think we were just talking about this before we started.

9:59Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, he put out a piece called Sinwar's Marsha Folly.

10:04I think it came out in the summer, August, September, and he ventured an argument as to why Sinwar could have done something so stupid.

10:13And I'm bracketing morals here.

10:14I'm not talking about whether he was good or bad. I'm just talking conceptually speaking.

10:18Like the pure analysis of it, yeah.

10:19Yeah, exactly.

10:21And he had this line, I must have read this piece four to five times, and unto this day I can't understand what he meant.

10:27He said something to the effect of Yahya Sunwar fell prey to Muslim Brotherhood supremacy, conspiracism, and he lacked reasoning capabilities.

10:43Something out of like a first year philosophy paper.

10:45He wrote a couple of books in prison. In the decades he spent in prison.

10:49He wrote one book?

10:50One book, a novel.

10:51Yeah, he's something of the road.

10:53I forget the name, the carnation and the eagle or something.

10:55Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And he was reading quite a bit. He'd have people, he'd read a lot, sort of like old.

11:01Right. Right, so he's not an illiterate savage, whatever you think, I'm not endorsing that. He could be a savage.

11:06But he wasn't an illitterate savage.

11:07He was definitely literate.

11:09Yeah, he definitely had reasoning capabilities.

11:11Yeah, you can use reasoning capabilities to do very, very bad things. People do.

11:15All the time. He did.

11:19But again, that's not the point.

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12:31So Goldberg's analysis, which is to say again, Goldberg is not even like a real person.

12:36He's like a symbol of the American ruling classes, conversations with itself, but he's reporting back to his masters.

12:43There's no reason behind this.

12:45He's just.

12:46I don't know if he was reporting back to his masters like I don't know Jeffrey Goldberg I don know who he reports to if you report in the media ecosystem in the United States that's considered like the highest level of So I don't know if he was reporting to anyone, but he certainly believes, I would assume he believes this, he wrote a whole essay on it, that this was all just rabid anti-Semitism and a failed, and the worst part about the piece is that he already determines the success.

13:15He claims it's his march of folly, meaning he failed.

13:18Not only was he stupid and he had no logic whatsoever, but he failed.

13:26And with him, all of his buddies, Hezbollah, Eran, they all failed.

13:30And it's over, it sucks, you had a good, you tried, but you failed.

13:36In 2018, and this is a very important quote, there was an Italian journalist who's since left journalism, which is crazy to me, but she went out with a bang, Francesca Barri or something.

13:47She did an interview with Yehison Awad in Gaza, 2018.

13:51The interview was later published by Ynet in a Hebrew paper.

13:55And it's a fascinating bit.

13:57This was, again, if we talk about the silence that came upon Gaza in 2014, this is at the height of the silence, 2018.

14:06Not a lot of people remember the wars that happened four years ago.

14:09And people are starting to feel a little antsy, a little jittery.

14:12Israel's super happy, because they're like, if we just keep feeding them, this will be great.

14:17We can ride this way forever.

14:21And she asked him this question about the next war.

14:25And it's crazy that, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg didn't quote Sinwar once in his entire piece.

14:30Seriously?

14:31As far, I might be wrong, but I believe that he didn't quote Sinbar once in his whole piece. And there's a plethora of quotes.

14:36And they're all very, very useful in trying to understand what the hell happened.

14:41And he says, he says something to the effect of, and I quote, The next war or in the next war, victory for Netanyahu will be worse than defeat.

14:57This is a guy who apparently already knew that Netanyah would still be in power.

15:03You might ask, because the next war is the fourth war.

15:09Which cannot be and cannot end like the third, which ended like the second and which ended like the first.

15:18And his closing line is they should take over Gaza.

15:25Who should take over Gaza?

15:27Israelis.

15:30The next war is the fourth, it can't end like the third, which ended like the second and the first.

15:34So for those who aren't steeped in this, why would the head of Hamas want the Israelis to take over Gaza?

15:42I don't know at that point if he wanted the Israelis to take over Gaza, but I think he was pointing to something that's quite theoretically elaborate, like a very, very high level understanding of how history functions.

15:58Sounds that way. Um, which is...

16:06He 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, and that it will force Israel into a corner where they would have two options.

16:20Either we destroy this entire place, and or we occupy Gaza.

16:25But the problem is that the Israelis already occupied Gaza.

16:28They already tried it, and they left, and left for very good reasons. It was economically taxing, it was unsustainable.

16:35Israeli soldiers could die.

16:36There were RPG attacks on settlements.

16:39And I think he understood that he would, in the next war, if there were to be a next war.

16:45Put the Israelis in a position where they would be forced to grope around in the gray for a very, very long time.

16:51Even if it would appear otherwise from inside, even if it could be sold to the population otherwise.

16:59And along these lines, there is another quote, if you don't mind.

17:04About a year before October the 7th, don't quote me on this, but I think a year before October 7th.

17:11Sinwar did a speech and he convened the leaders of his factions and various Imams in Gaza.

17:18And it's like, it's a pretty boring speech and he has no rhythm and he's screaming way too loud.

17:23But there's one point that tons of people have cropped and isolated on Instagram.

17:28And he has this line and he says, He goes, by God, I see it with the sight of my eyes.

17:46A regional, religious war that will burn with it the green and the dry.

17:56You mean the one we're in right now?

17:58Yeah, the one that will go on for a very, very long time, even if it appears to have ended.

18:06So it sounds like you think that in planning the attacks of October 7th, he saw the long game and understood that it would be hard for Israel to deal with those consequences over time.

18:22I think, to put it a little more specifically, I think Sinuad understood that the status quo that fell into place after 2014, this long silence, that it was poison for the Palestinian cause.

18:38The notion of Palestinian resistance, if your cause is that Palestinians should just live, go to work, bring their bread home, then it's certainly antithetical to that.

18:46I think he understood that this was poison, and that if he continued on this way...

18:52What will the next generation say when they didn't grow up with any wars?

18:56How long can you go on putting on marches for martyr children with cardboard tanks and fake RPGs?

19:03How long you can go on convening your Imams to talk about the day after?

19:08Who's going to be the next Imam of Al-Aqsa after we liberate Palestine?

19:10How long could you go with the foaming platitudes?

19:13It can't go on.

19:15And the longer you let it go on, the weaker you get.

19:17And I think he understood that one thing was certain.

19:22You know, when you shake a snow globe, you can shake it, shake it shake it the flakes fly everywhere. And the one thing of which you can be certain is that the flakes won't fall in the same place.

19:34That's the one think you can know.

19:37And I think he understood that in that that an attack like this, it's like it's the 9-11 of the of this conflict, that whatever was before won't be after.

19:48And that's why he caught a bloodbath.

19:50You rinse the slate clean.

19:51And it's having or likely to have similar effects to the effects of 9-11 in the U.S.

19:57It draws the country into all kinds of unanticipated conflicts that weaken the country and cause internal division within the country.

20:05Yeah. That'd be my guess.

20:07So to that extent, it's successful.

20:09It is strategic.

20:11In the short term, it's been successful, certainly.

20:13And I think in the long term, I think everyone, especially Israelis, have to wait.

20:18There's a status quo that dies.

20:20And there's this notion in Israel now that the status quo died and we immediately established a new one.

20:27Meaning, they broke the last status quo where we had peace and we had these little boxing rounds every two years with Hamas or whatever.

20:33But now we're strong.

20:35Now we do whatever we want.

20:37We bombed them, we bombed that, we bombed in Lebanon, we bomb it on.

20:40We're in control But you don't decide when a new status quo comes into birth.

20:46That's history.

20:48There are millions of variables that come into that decision.

20:51Gaza's not even being rebuilt, currently Hamas has control of I think 46, 48% of Gaza.

20:58So Israelis are groping around, I think they're entering into probably what will be, in retrospect, the darkest and most sp- the establishment of the state.

21:08They're groping around in the gray.

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22:28So I want to hear where you think that's going and why it is as dark as it's been in almost 80 years, but.

22:37Back to October 7th itself.

22:39Yeah, sure.

22:41So that was, you said you thought it was probably in the planning phases for at least a year. It would have had to have been just given its scale.

22:49I would.

22:51I think if you also look in October 2022, this is what the Israelis say, I think they found some kind of binder on the border, October 2022 on it, but that was the year in which Hamas repaired their relations with the Shia axis.

23:03That's the year when suddenly you had, I had Haneeya going to Moscow, they repaired relations with Syria, and that was kind of I think the key into getting the back into the fold with people like Nasrallah.

23:13Suddenly you have Islamic Jihad and Hamas are meeting with NasrAllah on a regular basis.

23:17I think they were invited to Iran also at a certain point.

23:20And I think so those are some pretty serious indications.

23:23I mean, Israeli intelligence being as effective as it is clearly must have picked up signals this was going on.

23:34That's already been released.

23:35Yeah.

23:38I mean, there are people who probably know this better than I, but there is a document that circulated within Israeli intelligence called, I think, Jericho Wall.

23:47There was an intelligence analyst, I believe she was a female, who sort of saw what was happening in Gaza.

23:53There were certain military drills, certain speeches, and there was an indication that they were planning something really serious.

24:01And the story goes that her higher-ups, I don't think it was Glenn Bergman, reported on this if I'm not mistaken. The story goes that our higher ups basically said like, yeah, yeah, that's cute.

24:12It's like inadmissible trash.

24:15You had also soldiers at the observation posts along the border who, I don't know when exactly, I don't know if this was in the weeks or the months leading up to October the 7th, but that were reporting to their higher ups that like there was some strange little.

24:32It commences and much has been written about and even more speculated about a so-called stand down order or the Israeli government responds to it.

24:41What's your belief about what happened?

24:44Are you asking whether or not I think the Israeli higher-ups wanted this to get out of control?

24:52No, I'm asking like, what did happen?

24:56What do you think actually happened?

24:58Why from an outsider perspective, it seems like the response was inadequate.

25:05Yeah, it was certainly inadequate, right? Why?

25:09Look, I don't know, but what's strange to me is that I think it was in the week or two after Tzachia Negbi, who was like the equivalent to the head of Homeland Security, I guess, or the National Security Council, something like that, in Israel, he came out and admitted that I thinks three to four hours before the attack, there are certain intelligence officials and I think the general, like they convened, there was a discussion.

25:31It's not like they woke up at 6.30 a.m.

25:34So there was certainly something that happened among the highest echelons.

25:39One question I've had is why...

25:41Wait, do we know what they talked about? No, but there's a quote that circulated in Israeli media that apparently the general at the time got out of bed and his wife was sort of like, what's going on? And he just apparently turned around and said, Gaza's going to be destroyed.

25:56That's a call that circulate around Israeli media.

25:59I don't know at what time this happens. Could have been at 629, I doubt it though, because apparently the people were convened before. I don't know.

26:09I know what I saw on October 7th, I know where I was.

26:13So what did you see and what's your conclusion?

26:21One thing I'll say is that three weeks before October the 7th, I met with a journalist.

26:26He's a British journalist.

26:28And he'd come like a year and a half before and he was starting out fresh.

26:33I don't think he knew Israel-Palestine super well.

26:36And I wanted to become a mainstream journalist at the time, so I thought he could help me scratch each other's backs.

26:41And we would talk a lot about what was going on. And for about a year-and-a-half, I was telling him that something's going to happen.

26:45Like there's something weird that's going on And he'd listen to me and he'd help me out. And about three weeks before October the 7th, we met for a beer in Jerusalem. And that was the same day in which the Palestinians, I believe it was three weeks before we're doing these marches of return.

27:01You 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?

27:07What's your price?

27:08What will it takes you to shut the fuck up?

27:12And he asked me, he's like, what, why do you think this is happening?

27:14And I remember distinctly looking at him and saying, I don't know.

27:18Because after 2021 or 2022, I believe, Benet, Naftali Benet lifted the permit, what do you call it? The permit ceiling, as it were, like the quota, it's like some 20, 22,000 Gazans proceeds permits to come to Israel after years of them not having any.

27:41Um, and so usually they would do these sorts of antics to get something. We want construction materials. We want work permits.

27:46We want something, but there was nothing really to ask for.

27:51And so he, when we said goodbye that day, I remember, I'll never forget this. He looked at me and he said, you know, all right, I think you're a really smart guy.

27:59Um, And I appreciate you've taught me a lot, but I just think you've misunderstood this place.

28:06I think you're a bit apocalyptic.

28:09I looked at it and I said, Tom, I think you've spent a little too much time with the Israelis.

28:15And so if I could have come to those conclusions with the limited amount of information I had, I'm sure there are many people within the intelligence establishment that had some idea.

28:25Do I think that Bibi allowed 3,000 or 2,000 Hamas militants to enter the country and kill people? I'm a little doubtful.

28:37From an American perspective or the perspective of anyone who's visited that border, which I have Pretty secure border looks like the southern border so like how How did that happen?

28:49Does anyone fit?

28:50Let me rephrase has there been What you consider an honest and reliable accounting of how it happened?

28:57Like how did these guys get in here?

29:01I think it's known.

29:02What do you mean by how?

29:03I think physically speaking, people know how they got in.

29:06I mean, the border was largely, I mean people were in their bunks sleeping. It was also a Jewish holiday.

29:11There was no increased level of alertness as far as I've heard.

29:16You certainly didn't have drones or anything in the air, which could have solved this entire problem of course, like 15 minutes.

29:21If you have enough guys enough RPGs, enough explosives, you break through concrete.

29:26Oh, I know that, but you just imagine that the border with Gaza, when there are, you know, credible intelligence reports, it's something weird is going on. Maybe we don't know what it is, but they would be on, you know, sufficient alert to have stopped this at the line.

29:39Why something didn't happen between that meeting, which I've heard was between certain members of intelligence at maybe three in the morning, why there weren't drones that were put in the air or a helicopter or heightened alertness, significantly heightened alert, I don't know.

29:55But what I have learned over many, many years in Israel is that you would be surprised by what people can get away with.

30:01I know people in the West Bank who have fake Israeli IDs, who slip in illegally and stolen Israeli cars to smoke hash with their friends on the other side and then Go back.

30:11You'd be surprised.

30:13So the myth of Israeli government efficiency is a myth.

30:17Yeah, I don't doubt it, yeah.

30:23So security's not as competent as people imagine it is.

30:26When it wants to be competent, it's very competent.

30:28I mean, if you ask yourself, for example, in Lebanon and Iran right now, how is it that they have thousands upon thousands of targets that are readily available?

30:36That's exactly right.

30:37It's because they wanted to have them.

30:40They set their sights on Iran and Lebanon, and they neglected Gaza.

30:45Yeah, and that's the central question is why.

30:50And so once it's in progress, there is a stand-down order. What was that?

30:57Why did they do that?

30:59Well, you can't flood the area with IDF because look, you're talking about a lot of troops, especially for the holidays or maybe in the North, it might be two, three hours away.

31:06So I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect that they would have flooded the whole place with troops. It's harder, people have to get their guns and get equipment, it's logistical mayhem.

31:16There were soldiers in the first two weeks of the war that didn't even have helmets. You had Jewish communities that were sending basic equipment because there were massive shortages.

31:24The real question, in my opinion, is why, if there was some kind of indication around 3 a.m., why the Air Force wasn't involved, why helicopters, drones, or fighter jets weren't involved?

31:35Because that doesn't take a whole lot of time as far as I'm concerned.

31:40And we don't know the answer.

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32:50Once that happened, once those attacks happened, was it always inevitable the response?

32:55Was Gaza always gonna get leveled once that happened?

32:59If that operation, if that attack were to be successful, and I think if we follow Sinwar's thread, I think it's fair to assume that he knew, well, what do you mean by, you know, that this war will take with it, or burn with it all the green and all the dry?

33:14It's called scorched earth.

33:16Yeah. I think, yeah, I think there was an assumption that something of this nature would happen.

33:21The exact extent, no one can predict. Right, of course not.

33:26But that there would be massive change, potentially even of borders.

33:31Long term, potentially.

33:33In Gaza, certainly.

33:35I think the talk of border changes, for example, in Syria and Lebanon, I think it's a bit overblown.

33:41I think that's a big overblow.

33:42Yeah, I have no idea.

33:43We'll see.

33:45But, you know, things change.

33:48Well, I just have to pause and ask what at this stage, you now, years later, what is the plan for Gaza?

33:57Do you think the Nanyahu government's plan for God's got all these people living there?

34:02He said on television this morning, we're going to go with the Trump plan to move them all out of Gaza.

34:08Highly doubt that that's going to happen. Well, I kind of do.

34:10That too.

34:13I think there's this myth that certainly circulates in the Arab world, but definitely here in America too, that there's a whole lot more strategy, that is a whole a lot more foresight in Israel.

34:25Yes, but people definitely believe that this is part of a plan, Greater Israel, this is a strategy.

34:31I think you're over-exaggerating.

34:33Estimating the the foresight.

34:35Well, I wouldn't be surprised if I am not you specifically But I don't think there's a massive plan in Gaza There are certainly plans that have been thrown around but right now as far as you can see and this is precisely what's in water I know that the Israelis had zero, this is a fact, they had zero plan at least communicated to the United States for what would happen after the Ayatollah was killed in Iran.

34:55They didn't have a good government and waiting or any kind of.

34:58Because it doesn't matter to them.

35:00Well, clearly.

35:01What matters to Israel, what's useful for Bibi Netanyahu specifically is simply chaos. And the more definition that is given to the chaos, the more he has to account for the shape that it's taken.

35:11Right, smart. That's right.

35:14The difference between Iran and Gaza though is Gaza is like on your border.

35:19So would they want, would he want chaos in Gaza?

35:23Well, if you look at the border right now, I mean, you have a ton of buffer.

35:28It's not really bordering Israel anymore.

35:30True.

35:32And so in that sense, I think, and there's not a ton of chaos, meaning Hamas is, I don't know if they're in shambles. I think there are a lot of tunnels that are still left, for example.

35:40They have light weapons, they have AK-47s, they like tiny rockets they can sometimes send in.

35:45They're collecting taxes, apparently. So, they're functioning.

35:51Are they a threat to Israel at this moment in time?

35:54No, in that sense, Bibi did the minimum he would have to do and still stopping short of actually determining a reality because then he would have to explain to the Israelis, why did I do X and not Y?

36:09So you don't think that there anybody has a clear picture of where Gaz is in 10 years.

36:16But I do think that Bibi and the administration and the IDF alongside probably have an idea where Gaza, what they will do in Gaza if X happens with Iran, if Y happens with Lebanon.

36:32Bibi's playing sort of musical wars.

36:36Why does he have a war?

36:37Why did they time Lebanon right now? It's a fail safe for Iran.

36:41If Trump decides to pull out of Iran, if Iran doesn't go the way Bibi needs.

36:45Then he always has Lebanon.

36:48And if all of that doesn't go the way he needs, he could go back into Gaza.

36:53So you're suggesting that he has to have a war.

36:57At least until he gets elected next, I think so.

37:00You really think that's the motive.

37:05I think there are many motives.

37:06I think this is certainly the timing of a lot of things.

37:10The strange thing about Bibi is that, look, on the one hand, there's a national interest that lines up with a personal interest.

37:18It's not just that Bibi's doing something that wouldn't in any way benefit the national security of the country.

37:25I believe that as far as Israel's concerned, striking it on is quite possibly a great idea.

37:30You have one of the largest proxy networks in the history of the Middle East.

37:35That's bent on doing something to Israel, destroying them forever, I don't know if that was exactly the case. You have a massive paramilitary group on your border with Lebanon.

37:43Those are valid, relatively objective, strategic goals.

37:48But if you could tinker with them, if you can time them and modulate them to serve your personal motives, well, it's a win-win.

38:01So, have you heard anybody articulate plans for just to be totally clear on this, for moving the...

38:09More than one, probably fewer than two million people in Gaza anywhere?

38:14No, but I have something else that I don't think has ever been released, actually.

38:19I was working with the Washington Post until they fired their whole foreign desk, as you saw.

38:24And we were doing a lot of interviews on the day after, specifically reconstruction, and trying to follow the money.

38:32Because that's what Gaza's about right now. It's all about money.

38:35And it's not just American money or Israeli money, it's the Gulf countries, it is Egypt.

38:39The PA wants to get their finger in there as well.

38:42And I confirmed this with two, actually quite possibly three sources, if I'm not mistaken.

38:48And this might not end up being the case, but I understood that the center that was put together by the American Army and Kiryat Gat, to map out or sort of strategize about Gaza and assist the Israelis, that they were making calls, that their lawyers were making calls to certain organizations to look into the status of private property Gaza.

39:11Basically the thing, among many things, I heard that the plan was, have you ever seen the flyers that the Israelis drop in Gaza or the evacuation notices?

39:19Yeah. And they usually divide it into sort of blocks, you have numbered blocks and those are private properties, right?

39:26Now if you have an entire swath of territory, entire neighborhoods that are upside down are backwards that no longer follow the logic of a grid.

39:35You can't expect that some Qatari or Saudi or whatever company is going to come in and rebuild gas identically to the way it was before.

39:43No. So 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, it 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.

40:00What does that mean? It means that you are fundamentally altering.

40:06The urban planning and with the demography and private property of Gaza.

40:13If 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 suspend that private property and create a new precedent.

40:26I 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?

40:39What does that mean?

40:41It quite possibly, and this is the most cynical possible conclusion you could draw, it could I mean, that.

40:50It could mean basically that Israel, look, in the West Bank, it's sometimes Israel struggles to take certain parts of swaths of land or to build actual settlements.

40:59Sometimes they'll have caravans in certain areas, but not houses.

41:01And the reason is that to some degree Israel still beholden to Ottoman and Jordanian legal precedent.

41:07And they can wiggle around, you can maneuver, but it can't be nullified.

41:12It's very hard. You see us in East Jerusalem. Exactly.

41:14All the time.

41:16So what happens, I'll pose you the question I guess, what happens in Gaza if you suspend all of private property and you're going to say in seven years we're going revisit it, or it will be reconfigured by legal experts who by then will have disappeared.

41:29You break a massive precedent.

41:31It's just a reset.

41:32Exactly.

41:33It's a golden opportunity.

41:34Will that happen?

41:35I don't know.

41:37But based on everything I've heard, it is within the realm of possibility.

41:42And it makes logical sense as well.

41:45So it's a, yeah, did people in Israel take the Trump administration's plan for redevelopment with casinos and beachfront condos, they take that seriously?

41:57Like citizens in Israel, people?

41:58You think the government did.

42:06Like that's not going to happen.

42:08I highly doubt it.

42:10Yeah.

42:11It's still run by a militant group.

42:13There's still some, there's hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that have been dealt with by the IDF, which they also lied about.

42:19I spoke to a general, his name is Itzhak Breik.

42:22Have you heard of him?

42:23No.

42:24It's strange because he's not, I think his English is a little bad, so we don't hear from him a lot in the West, but he was a guy who went on three months before October the 7th and said, quote, there will be a massacre here.

42:36This is a guy who was a reserve general who also audited, he was tasked with, I think, for many, many years, auditing troops, he worked for the IDF audit, meaning he would go between fronts, between units, and assess troop readiness, routines, equipment.

42:52He knew the IDS inside and out, and he worked under several generals leading up to October the 7th, and for years he was screaming that we are, we're not really Ready for anything.

43:02And we're cutting our ground troops because we want to be a compact, technologically adept.

43:09But we're basically rendering ourselves naked on the ground.

43:13And he went down to the Gaza border and he sees that basically the soldiers treat it like summer camp.

43:17You have girls and doing TikTok videos.

43:22It's like summer Camp.

43:24It reached a point again, back to the status quo where Israelis genuinely believed that the conflict was kind of over.

43:31This is just, it's gonna be this way. There's gonna to be a big wall.

43:34They're gonna be there. We're gonna to here. ...

43:39I sat with him a lot about a year ago, and he was telling me he was getting calls from a lot of soldiers who work in the tunnel units, and I spoke to several soldiers who either worked in the tunnels or were tasked with guarding them, supervising the work.

43:54That there was tons left, tons left.

43:57He said, this general said 75%.

44:00I don't know if that's definitely true, but I heard from a lot soldiers that the material used to totally destroyed tunnels is very expensive and perhaps in short supply.

44:11And so a lot of what was happening was sort of sealing the tunnels.

44:15You pour concrete inside and it just takes probably some dudes, however many days later to come and undo the concrete, break the concrete.

44:24And I also heard from soldiers that Hamas was repairing tunnels during the war.

44:30In the midst of fighting, there were tunnels that were being, or shafts that were being repaired.

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45:35It is the message this country needs most. Find us today on tuckercarlsonbooks.com There was a big debate in this country about, uh, whether or not the Israeli government sent money, not its own money, but the money of the United States and Qatar to Hamas, whether Netanyahu did that, um, and then it seemed to have been confirmed.

45:58Will you tell us what you know about that and what the motive was?

46:02Are we talking about the money that came in before October the 7th?

46:06Of course, before October 7th.

46:06Oh, the suitcases of cash.

46:08Exactly.

46:09Well, yeah, I know that there was tons of cash, I don't actually have the numbers, I forget.

46:13What was the thinking?

46:15I mean, I think it's confirmed now that was considered very Controversial pictures of them.

46:18There are pictures of the suitcases and no money going into yeah.

46:21Yes, definitely confirmed The thinking was we keep them happy and fat and they don't bother us Which is again the logic of the marches of return. We're gonna come we're gonna make some noise until these rails come and say What's your price? What will it take to get you to shut up more money more work permits construction materials?

46:42It was part of maintaining a status quo And someone probably soon want to realize that this, if I get too fat, if we get too fat, we won't be able to move anymore.

46:53Right.

46:54I think, I think it's that simple.

46:57So from thousands of miles away, it seems like Israel seems like a pretty tough project to keep going over generations because of the numbers, just tiny countries surrounded by people who don't like it or recognize its legitimacy, some of whom are motivated to do harm.

47:17So that's like, that's not a good ratio over time, like it's hard to maintain that.

47:22It's like, from the Israeli perspective.

47:26Think ever think of that?

47:28No, but I think there's about there may be two or three ways of looking at this. On the one hand there's a demographic perspective.

47:34Yeah, that's what I mean.

47:35That's one perspective.

47:37And if you look at the numbers, so like how many Jews are there in Israel?

47:40I think there's seven, seven, something like that.

47:44You have two million Palestinians who have citizenship.

47:48But I think the proper calculation is within the area under control, under Israeli control, what's the population divide?

47:57And at that what you have fifty fifty. If you take the West Bank, where there are also Jews living, but also Gaza, because these are all areas that impinge upon Israel and which are under Israeli control tacitly, or actually, you have 7 million Palestinians, two in Israel, three in the West bank, two in Gaza, so seven, you've 7 million Jews.

48:19It's halved right now, it's split, half-half.

48:22Demographically speaking, that is a problem.

48:26Do I think that will be what brings Israel to its knees if it is ever brought to his knees?

48:31I was thinking more the macro demographic problem of the Arab world, the Muslim world, almost two billion.

48:39So when I hear Netanyahu say we're fighting a seven front war, whatever number of fronts it was, seven fronts recently, I think you don't have the economy, you don't have the manpower, and you no longer have the goodwill to sustain that for very long at all.

48:55Like ultimately, if you have enough enemies and there's too few of you and enough them you're going to lose. People have been saying that for a long time.

49:03Well, it's.

49:04It hasn't even been there 80 years, so.

49:07I think they bet on a few things.

49:08They have nuclear weapons, they have a great intelligence agency, and they bet on the incompetence of the Muslim countries around them.

49:18But there's also a sense in which you can't fight everybody.

49:22And so I don't see, when I talk to Israelis and just when I watch, I don't see any long-term strategy that rests on real alliances.

49:32Like you have to have, this is true, not just for Israel, but for each one of us as a person in this world, you have have more powerful friends than you do enemies or else ultimately you get destroyed. And I don't see that realization at all. It seems almost deranged.

49:46I guess we have no who cares if you have nuclear weapons. So does everyone else like so what everyone else does.

49:51Have nuclear weapons.

49:51But I mean, a lot of people have nuclear, including in your region.

49:54That's true.

49:56But I think right now you have this logic being pushed around by Bibi, which is, you know, peace through strength.

50:01I 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.

50:09We could have an arrangement.

50:10The Gulf countries, because they've felt very exposed right now, maybe there'll be tension with the United States. Maybe this will also bring other golf countries closer to us.

50:20There are already tacit relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

50:23They exchange intelligence among other things, but maybe this will bring them closer.

50:26I think they have pretty...

50:27Yeah.

50:29Well, the Saudis have been pushing for this.

50:32Yeah They're on the same side as Israel, basically, on this question.

50:36And in Lebanon, what was the aim when Israel went into Lebanon in the 80s? The aim was we want to change the demography, we're going to change the government, we are going to put the Christians in power and make peace.

50:47The opposite happened.

50:48The opposite happens.

50:49And what are they doing now?

50:51I believe that in some dim recess, it might not actually be an active strategy, but I do believe that, in some civil war in Lebanon, because between you and me, if I'm being totally honest, the only way to deal with Hezbollah is not just a paramilitary group, they are demographically entrenched in the country. They are South Lebanon, and they are the Shiite population that was also oppressed for a very long time.

51:16And there are a lot of shits in Beirut now.

51:18It's not just the South, yeah.

51:20Yeah, and so I think there is a desire for potentially civil war in Lebanon.

51:25For sure.

51:26And that, I mean, you've seen this, well, you saw it in Syria, you know, you've see it in a lot of the same strategy. I'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.

51:37I 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, or you can do that forever.

51:48I don't think you can.

51:49No, probably not.

51:50I 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.

52:00There's a desire for chaos.

52:01Right. That all of these places should be at least uncertain.

52:04If we can't determine what the best possible reality for us, then the very least the reality should be indeterminate.

52:12It should be in flux.

52:13Right. No, I get it. I totally get it and again, I'm not even judging this or that's wrong.

52:18Not this is not a lecture.

52:19I just mean like as a, as a kind of almost a physics principle in the end or over time, chaos is bad for you.

52:28It's bad for everybody.

52:29It is bad to have chaos nearby you.

52:32It's Bad to have your neighbor get divorced that actually increases the chances you get divorced.

52:36There's a way in which chaos is a virus and it, it hurts you in the end, even though you think you can control it, you can't.

52:43That I think that's a pretty stable principle.

52:46Of history.

52:47I 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, Israel psychologically.

53:02The Israeli psyche.

53:03Exactly.

53:04I think that, that is the actual weak point, if anything brings Israel to its knees, Which doesn't mean it will be.

53:13Exterminated or extinguished that it will die as a state, but the thing that will fundamentally shatter the foundation Either to end the country or to start a fresh status quo for the country It will be internal.

53:26I believe that and if you want to understand That dynamic I think you have to look to the West Bank And to say this is so often overlooked, one of the only like real genocides in history was the Romans in 70 AD in Jerusalem.

53:41And one of reasons that they were able, that siege was successful is because of the almost unbelievably barbaric fighting between Jewish factions within Jerusalem.

53:53Like the Romans got through because the defenders were fighting each other. I just think that's also another principle.

53:58It's like if you destroy, if you don't have a unified country, you're much weaker than you think you are, I guess.

54:03I mean, yes and no, sometimes I do think about that. On the other hand, Israelis do, at least until now, they've shown a pretty serious ability to just put all of their problems aside. I mean if you look at Bibi's opposition, Yair Lapid, he was asked I think two weeks ago about greater Israel and he couldn't even reject that as a political position.

54:23He 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.

54:31But 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, to use his language, and he buried them in so doing.

54:47No, that's certainly what it seems like, looking from the outside.

54:51Can I ask about the, I mean, again, this is an outsider's perspective, non-Hebrew speaking perspective, but it seems the core division is religious, non-religious, or it has been.

55:01Is that still true?

55:02Where is that?

55:04The 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.

55:13Is that's still true, is it more true, less true?

55:16I think it's where it was a year ago, probably where it was two years ago, tensions, they rise and they fall.

55:21I'm also not like the greatest expert on that, but I think- But you live there, or does that seem like a crisis in the country?

55:29I don't think it has reached the point of a crisis, it could, it could.

55:33But again, I don't think if you'd permit me to go back to something else, I think you were mentioning the Romans, and it reminds of exile, and I think What you see in the West Bank, if you're talking about long term, in the darkest depths of the Israeli psyche, what is going to affect the longevity of the country?

55:54It's the interplay, the psychological interplay between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

55:59In the West bank?

56:00It manifests itself most in the west bank because in Tel Aviv, you have like a bunch of schmucky lifestyle yuppies in Tel-Aviv who just want to forget, Tel Avive is the subconscious of the subconscious of Israel.

56:11Right. But the West Bank is where the complexes at the bottom of the Israeli psyche, it's where they play out.

56:21And so, at the end of the day, you have a strange problem, which is that the Israelis come back, the Jews come back after two to three thousand years as, you know, they were exiles.

56:30We don't have to debate when exactly, how many years.

56:33But what happens is you have people who have a kind of, not a native right, but of Native claim, who come back in colonial costume.

56:43There's a reason why the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jews is different than that of between the Palestinian and the British and the Ottoman, because the Ottomans never came and said like, this is our homeland, we're coming back, now it's all ours.

56:53Nor did the British, that's what the Israelis did, that what the Jews did.

56:59And again, I don't want to debate sort of like what is right or what is clean. I think by and large, it's fair to say that the Jews have some kind of relationship with the land. Meaning there are many Palestinian villages that you could trace their names back to Jewish ancient settlements.

57:14Does it mean that an Israeli or a Jew can come and take it?

57:16No, but 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.

57:30And that in some way, they are the mirror images of each other.

57:33And in many ways, the Palestinians are the new Jews.

57:37And neither one really wants to admit it, especially the Israelis.

57:41And so in the West Bank, I've been in the west bank a lot the last few months. The new Jews in what?

57:44Sense, the people who have the moral authority of victimhood, like the world looks at them and says, we feel sorry for you, you've been mistreated. Treated, not about that, it's a tale of exile and nostalgia.

57:54The differences that the Palestinians are exiled on their own land, which also makes it very hard for the Israelis to deal with this problem.

58:01For them, it is a problem.

58:03We have people, and I always say to Jews, to Israelis in Israel, I'm like, look, if you guys, if the Jews came back after 2,000 to 3,000 years and didn't forget that there were periods of forgetting, why do you think that the Palestinian's do the same.

58:21And they're right on the borders, they can see it.

58:23Couldn't see Israel from Europe, but you can see from Gaza, you can it from the West Bank.

58:29What do they say when you say that?

58:33They just go silent.

58:34They don't want to understand.

58:35There's a point.

58:36The problem in Israel is that I used to have some Israeli sort of religious friends who would come to my dorm when I'd have my Arab friends with me and we'd have some really nice conversations.

58:46They even befriended each other.

58:48But at some point, my Israeli friends stopped speaking to them.

58:53Because there's a point in any Israeli dialog, there's point at which an Israeli has to make a decision, left or right.

59:03Am I going, if I go down this path and really try to understand the other side, I risk exposing certain things with the grounds of my own identity here, but the foundations of the country that risk my identity.

59:18And the other option is I'm just going to stop it here, turn around and forget this happened.

59:24In the West Bank right now, there's some very, very weird trends.

59:30You have, you know, the number of outposts in the West bank has increased, I don't know by how many, hundreds of out posts, almost every other hill in the west bank has a shack on it.

59:42The scale is insane.

59:44And I visit some of these outpost and what you see is a little bit of a strange thing.

59:49You have something called the hilltop youth. Have you heard of this?

59:51Of course.

59:52So this is like the third mutation of settlers.

59:56The first settlers were kinda like kibbutznik people, right?

59:59What's their goal?

60:00The goal of the kibbutznik is I need to revive some kind of relationship with the land.

60:05The first generation settlers were not going down the hill and like pug roaming people.

60:10They had their hill, they had their barbed wire.

60:12You know, self-improvement seemed like one of the main goals of the first, of the kibbutz generation. Yeah, we're going to like improve ourselves by making it green and growing things.

60:23I think a lot of it also had to deal with the exile thing, that we haven't been here. It's like a prisoner who comes home after 30 years, walks into the kitchen, sees his wife and kid and says like, hey, honey, how you doing? Sits down as if nothing happened.

60:36That was the design, you know, but there's 30 years to make up for.

60:39In this case, you have two to 3,000 years to make it up for her.

60:41So part of the kibbutzik ideologically was like, we have to revive some sort of connection with the land. But my point is that the third mutation of the settlers, which is now the hilltop youth, They're strange.

60:53I mean, they now wear Palestinian kofi, the Palestinian headdress that Atifat used to wear.

61:00They're wearing those things.

61:01Black ones.

61:02The white and black with the Palestinian ones, which is kind of strange because if you even dressed up for Halloween like that in Tel Aviv, people would say things.

61:09People are very sensitive.

61:10It's a symbol of terrorism in Israel. And you have the settlers running around, throwing stones, wearing the very thing that once frightened them as children.

61:17And you have another trend, which is now they want donkeys.

61:21Or there's a lot of shepherding, but with machine guns.

61:24Or you have, you know, settler chic, which are like young outpost women who are what they call Israelite fashion.

61:34Do you see where I'm going? Do you where I go?

61:36Be more specific for those of us who live in the United States, what's Israelite fashion?

61:41It's kind of like in Hebrew they use words like sort of villagey, Israelite or pastoral, which is also the word in Hebrew used to describe the vibe you get in areas that used to have Palestinian villages that are now either forests or towns, lots of wild, natural shrubbery and foliage.

62:02The point being is that what you see in the West Bank now is an attempt to double down on Nativity.

62:12And so I was in a Palestinian village, it's called Tur Mos Aya, it gets attacked quite a bit.

62:16I don't know if you saw, there was a report maybe six months ago, if I'm not mistaken, of like three to 4,000 olive trees that were cut down in the West Bank.

62:23So it was a big story.

62:26And I was there when this happened, that weekend by chance.

62:30And I remember sitting with one of these Palestinian guys and we were attacked by settlers once and they went back, they burned about four houses down right in front of me.

62:38I saw it, they stabbed a bunch of sheep.

62:40This is the first time I ever saw this with my eyes, saw videos all the time, but I actually saw the smoke billowing out of the houses.

62:47And the guy said something pretty interesting. He looked at me and he was very calm and he said, you know, they want, they wanted all that once.

62:57I said, what do you mean?

62:58He goes, he goes, you, they kind of want to be like us, you they want they want shepherd, but they also have machine guns.

63:07And they want the olive trees, but they don't see that we pave our roads around olive trees.

63:13They want it all at once. They want to slice the mountain, get the barbed wire on, you put your houses there.

63:18They want the compensate for 3,000 years. They want get back to some point where they were 3,00 years ago. They want all that once.

63:25They want now.

63:26And they don't t want anyone to be there to disturb them.

63:30And so it puts the settlement movement into a strangely, I'd call it an autoimmune Position.

63:37Sort of autoimmune because these people are simply taking hill after hill after hill hoping that there will come a day one fine morning when they wake up and it's empty and they have quiet.

63:48But even when that happens they don't have enough people to populate.

63:50People don't want to live in the West Bank.

63:52Why?

63:54The average Israeli does not want to be sitting on a hilltop surrounded by Palestinians.

63:59The average Israeli wants to, you know, sit in Tel Aviv.

64:03Blacks, maybe smoke a joint.

64:04Make money, buy a house in Greece.

64:09The keffiyeh is very confusing to me.

64:12Settlers dressing as Palestinians.

64:15So is the message we're the real Palestinians?

64:17I think what's going on is subconscious.

64:20I don't think they're actually conscious of it.

64:22Because I went to a settlement, I went a fresh outpost a few weeks ago.

64:27I'm surprised they let me in.

64:28Someone pulled a gun on me when I went in. And then they realized I, you know, my name's Aryeh Chaim Flanzerashin. They're like, oh, you're right, come in.

64:35We got to talking and this guy's wife is one of these settler-chic influencers.

64:39And I wanted to talk to her about the fashion. I wanted her to hear like, how do you explain this?

64:43So that I could then put it into a piece.

64:46And her husband is also sort of this lumberjack guy.

64:48He's got blue eyes, dirty blonde hair.

64:51He's like towing the fields, which I'm pretty sure belong to people just down the hill.

64:56And- Where are they from originally?

64:59One of them is actually from the West Bank, was born in another settlement in the West bank.

65:02And I believe she is from somewhere inside Israel, maybe Jerusalem, but I might be wrong.

65:07Times of Israel did a piece on her, actually like a week before I was there.

65:11And they got real weird with me.

65:14They asked like what do you want?

65:15I was like, I'm just here to talk about fashion and then her husband gave her a look She walked off went completely silent and he sat down with me alongside the guy who pulled his gun on me And the guys kind of looking me like who are you? What do you? Want I was in the journalists. He said can I see your work? I said, yeah, I write about like security matters This is for a magazine piece Long story short, they kicked me out They said you should probably get out of here.

65:40And when I went outside to smoke a cigarette before leaving The guy who pulled his gun on me is just sitting there and I said can I ask you a question? He goes, yeah.

65:46I said, why can't we have a conversation?

65:53Because I told them, like, I'm wondering about this nativity thing, and the guy looked at me and he was kind of, he knew something was off, because he's like, it's not that many people who do that.

66:00So the fact that you know it, that you're aware of it, probably means that I triggered him a little bit.

66:06And when we're outside smoking a cigarette, I asked him, why can't we talk? He goes, you know, it could have gone a lot worse for you today.

66:14He goes, you know what I mean?

66:16I said, are you threatening me?

66:18He said, no, but there are people who would do a serious number on you.

66:23And I said even to a fellow Jew?

66:26And he said, it's beyond ideology.

66:28He said this is beyond ideology and I spent the whole car ride home thinking about what he could have possibly meant by that.

66:35What is it about then?

66:39When he said, this is beyond ideology, and I already laid out sort of like the nativity dynamics, but within the settlement movement, what could he possibly mean by this is beyond ideology?

66:50Are these religious people?

66:53That's another question about the settlers in the West Bank.

66:56They're not entirely religious.

66:58You know, you have a lot of religious, there are religious people.

67:01There's also a lot of people who aren't that devout or pious that religion in certain cases becomes a kind of esthetic thing or a vehicle for sort of nationalistic ends.

67:12I mean the settlement that I was in with this sort of the settler fashionista, a week after she had a DJ at the outpost, it's an outpost there's two people living there, it's a shack, a DJ and a bunch of women dressed in Israelite clothing doing a meditative been like.

67:30Like trans disco kind of like party.

67:35What?

67:36Yeah, it was kind of strange.

67:37So I'm having trouble fitting this into a category.

67:39So the two motives that you always hear here in the US 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 they're people who want cheaper housing and housing in Israel. Those are two separate categories of settler.

67:56Right, but you're describing a third category that's kind of like cosplay, kind of, like, what are you describing?

68:04Why are they doing this?

68:05What I'm describing is a part of the broader category of settlers who are there to, at the forefront, who are forwarding, who were pushing the settlement forward, as opposed to the people on cheap housing who just literally go into Tel Aviv, you know, where it all comes from, I don't know.

68:25But I think this is a big commitment to move to a hilltop surrounded by concertina wire like You don't do that by accident.

68:33But if you're a 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, if you in your early 20s, you want to be king of the hill?

68:38Want to play cowboy?

68:40Yeah, so is that what you think it is? I think in many cases, again, like the hilltop youth, I found them once, you know, these snot-nosed BDIs, like kids with their heads shaved, driving a stolen Palestinian car on the Sabbath, tell me to get the fuck out or I'm going to get beat.

68:56Like, it's fucking weird.

69:00Where are the Israeli authorities?

69:04Sometimes absent, sometimes present.

69:07And even when they're present, they can be quite absent.

69:11If I'm running Israel, I'm paying a very, I'm getting close attention to these people because they could be a threat to me.

69:20Armed people who are increasingly radical and nobody's kind of controlling their behavior, they could form a militia and overthrow my government. That would be my thought if I were Netanyahu.

69:30I'd be worried about them.

69:32I've thought about that quite a few times. I mean, there's a few things going on here, right?

69:37In the security establishment in Israel, there are a lot of voices who are very concerned.

69:42And this is just what you hear publicly.

69:43You can imagine that behind closed doors, there's lot more talk.

69:47They are concerned.

69:49Bibi, in order for his coalition, also has to keep serving them whatever they want.

69:55The real problem in the West Bank is that you have these guys who are armed and that you had Abraham on the other day.

70:01And he said that, I believe that at some point or another, the settlements will be collapsed.

70:06I would agree with him.

70:09But the question is not whether or not they'll be collapsed, the question, is what is gonna have to happen for that to happen?

70:15What will happen on the way before you reach that point where the settlements are collapsed?

70:20Will it be some sort of civil chaos?

70:22Will it a third Intifada?

70:23There's a lot of talk in Israel about a third intifada.

70:26But my sense is that what happens next is not something that follows the sequence of intifadas, But you know, kind of like what happened in Gaza, this shattering of the status quo, I think there will come a point where something analogous, logically speaking, happens in the West Bank. Will it look like Gaza? Not at all.

70:43But will it be equally as cataclysmic, maybe?

70:47Quite possibly, that's my sense.

70:52But I mean, it's a different dynamic in the West Bank.

70:55I mean isn't it?

70:56I mean it's first of all, it's richer than Gaza ever was.

70:59It's more kind of established series of towns.

71:05Which is why, oh, in terms of the settlements you mean? No, no, no.

71:08The Palestinian population in the west bank.

71:11I mean that's not, I don't know.

71:12It's just harder to imagine something like that happening.

71:15Because I don't think, as I said, I don't think what happens there is going to look like, be like what happened in Gaza, but I think, if you permit me a few minutes, you know, there's a reason why October the 7th came from Gaza and not from the West Bank.

71:31I spent last summer I was in the Janine refugee camp, if you've heard of it.

71:35The first question.

71:36Um, and I sat with the, who was then the leader of Islamic Jihad, who's the Amir, the prince of Islamic jihad.

71:43And I sat out with a few other guys from the various other factions.

71:46And what I understood was that the resistance in the West Bank, basically there's a thread going all the way back to 48.

71:56You're exiled and you want to get back and you wanna fight.

71:59And then there is serious amounts of terrorist attacks.

72:02And then eventually there's a political process.

72:05And you'd assume that any resistance movements or any kind of, you know, terrorist operation, whatever you want to call it, that they would eventually want to yield some kind of political outcome, but Oslo eventually fails.

72:16You have the first intifada, you have the second, and the second intifade is basically a lashing out, meaning the thread has reached its end.

72:25And the West Bank at that point was faced with, the factions in the West bank were faced with sort of two options.

72:31Either we pause and take a breath and figure out what the fuck we're doing here, we're just going to keep shooting aimlessly, just like shooting to make it look like we're doing something.

72:41We're going to do military marches, we're going to act really cool.

72:44But the guys are just like hood boys.

72:46They're just putting on headbands and like with a Marlboro red in their mouths and just shooting, usually not even to hit.

72:53The aim is usually just to die.

72:55The logic of the camps, the logic of the resistance in the West Bank is completely backwards, which means I don't think there's to be like an October 7th in the West Bank.

73:03But when I was in these villages that were getting attacked by the settlers, there's one line that kept coming up.

73:10And I'm talking about a line I was hearing from your average Palestinian farmer or peasant, which was, there will come a day.

73:19There will come day when we are pushed a little too far.

73:25And at that point, the question is, how many minutes does it take for a bunch of people to run up to a hill and maybe overwhelm the settlement?

73:32An old man told me that we're going to chew them like dogs.

73:35I would think that's coming.

73:36I mean, based on the behavior.

73:38You're describing it's quite possible. I wouldn't discount it What do you make the two most famous in the US, the two most famous cabinet ministers in the Netanyahu government are Smotrash and Ben Gavir.

73:54Are they powerful figures in Israel? How are they regarded?

73:58What's, what's their motive strategy plan?

74:05I don't think that they're close to as popular as they were.

74:09I think Bibi's popularity has increased actually over the course of the war, because Israelis have a very short memory, especially when it comes to warfare.

74:20But I don't really know what to tell you about Smotrich and Bengvia, it's not really my specialty.

74:23Um...

74:25It just seems unimaginably radical from an American.

74:29If 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.

74:46Or it seems like a departure from anything Americans have ever heard an Israeli government officials say.

74:52I 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, meaning the notion of, yeah, maybe they could go somewhere, the Palestinians, maybe just like they could be gone.

75:07The question of, those are questions that come up.

75:10You hear it regularly.

75:11These aren't like completely insane conversations to hear.

75:14You can hear it from like a hippie at a cafe in Tel Aviv smoking a joint.

75:19What changed is that suddenly you were hearing it more and more on TV.

75:24I remember I heard one news commentator, news anchor, ask about transfer, and I was like this is a bit insane.

75:32Like imagine if someone on CNN came on and sort of talking about transferring another, an entire other population who aren't illegal.

75:40Right, people who were born there, have been there for thousands of years. Maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, I don't know.

75:47But it doesn't matter. They were there when the Israelis came.

75:50Yeah.

75:51It doesn't a matter how long they've been there for.

75:54So yeah.

75:57What about, I mean, it used to be in my living memory, there was a significant population of Israelis who had totally different views.

76:06They're like, no, that's wrong.

76:07Human rights are a thing, you can't do that.

76:10How big is that?

76:13Berg I think is the kind of Israeli I remember from 25 years ago, there were a bunch of people like that. How many are left?

76:21I think the left is dead.

76:23The left is dead, the Israeli left is dead.

76:27And the question as to why they died is because they spent, I think, a bit too much time beating the horse of Oslo dead.

76:34Oslo obviously failed.

76:36And the left was unwilling to concede that fact, which meant that for many, many years, I think unto this day, the left never re-evaluated.

76:44They never came with another proposal or another plan or another way of thinking about the conflict.

76:50They kept beating the horse of Oslo dead.

76:53Meanwhile, the Israeli right continues to churn out active propositions.

76:58We're going to reform the judiciary.

77:00We want to take the West Bank.

77:01Very concrete things that a right-winger in Israel will tell you what they want.

77:07A left winger in Israel will tell you how they feel.

77:11And, uh...

77:14I think that's the long and short of it.

77:17It's a good explanation.

77:19Do Israelis have a sense of what the rest of the world thinks of Israel?

77:25Yeah, I think they have a sense the question is is how deeply do they think about the sense and how much merit are they willing to give?

77:32Do they care?

77:34I think deep down they care No one likes to be hated I don't think anyone likes to Be hated But I think the more you feel like you're hated The more you want to hate everyone else or just completely discount them the more You want to dig your heels in and double down?

77:52That's interesting.

77:53Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm often attacked for hating Israel.

77:56I don't hate Israel at all.

77:59I feel sorry for Israel.

78:00I think they're in trouble.

78:01They don't seem to agree, but I think there are.

78:04But whatever my views.

78:07A lot of people hate Israel, like around the world. I hear it a lot.

78:11When I travel, I feel like the moderate one.

78:13And I think that's a big change.

78:15And I always wonder, do the Israelis know that? Do they care?

78:19I think the Israelis are probably the most hated people in the world right now. That's my impression.

78:24Full stop.

78:26One of the greatest things I ever did was not get an Israeli passport, and I feel bad for friends who have them. I would be scared.

78:33I'm going to be totally honest.

78:34I would get scared right now.

78:35I'm sometimes scared to even say I'm Jewish. I'm lucky enough that I have Arabic, and if I'm in Europe, I just tell people I'm Palestinian, which some people might not like, but I think I put in the time to warrant it.

78:47Sometimes I'm scared to say that I'm a Jewish, and then I would definitely be scared to have an Israeli passport.

78:52I think that's totally fair.

78:54That's fair, and I'm not, I'm the last person to whine about anti-Semitism, but I think Israelis literally hate it.

78:59So I agree with you completely.

79:01I just, I just all, again, just once more I just want to be clear.

79:07You don't think Israelis have the sense that that's a bad thing and we should be worried about it, or that we played any role in that.

79:15I think the Israelis, there are Israelis who, you have a small liberal population of Israelis, many of whom I hear talking about the fact that they don't see a future for themselves in the country anymore.

79:28This is about two to three years in the making, even from the judicial reform, I had a lot of people telling me left-leaning, decent Israelis who were like, I don't know if I can have more kids here, or I don't want my kids to be in the army, or don't want my kids to have to deal with whatever the consequences of the judicial form and now this entire war.

79:49The rest of the Israeli population I think by and large are bent on, they've all Double down.

79:56Really?

79:58I think a lot of people.

79:59So B.B. Reflect.

80:01Population he represents you think I Don't think a lot of people have Problems with anything that BB represents. I think people have problems with The fact that he might have a corruption case, which I think is right right negligible But you're never at dinner and people say, man, I can't believe all those kids who were killed in Gaza.

80:19That's bad.

80:20I'm sorry we did.

80:22I don't hear it a lot, but what you can say, no, you might hear, it might be a symbolic gesture, like a virtue signal, but it's immediately followed with, you know, that's what you got to do.

80:33I mean, they came to kill us, or they're anti-semites.

80:40Where do Israelis think anti-Semitism comes from?

80:45I often hear it invoked, so-and-so's an anti-Semite, you're an anti Semite.

80:49How do they define it and where do they think its root is?

80:54I think the root is age old as far as Israelis are concerned.

80:58People hate us because people have always hated Jews.

81:00You hear this a lot in synagogues also across North America.

81:03You have a message being pushed constantly that people just hate us.

81:07And I think there are a lot of people who just hate Jews.

81:09And there's a lot of people are waiting for an excuse to hate Jews, but specifically when- Why do they hate Jews?

81:16But the question is, is there a distinction between those people and Palestinians?

81:21Are the Palestinians fundamentally anti-Semitic?

81:25You can spare me quotes from an imam here or an imaam there, or the fact that they conflate Jew and Israeli.

81:31By and large, is this a people who has premised its existence on killing Jews as Jews?

81:39And I do not think that that's the case.

81:43Yeah, I wouldn't know.

81:45I mean, I, I would know.

81:48But I just think there are a lot of anti-Semitic people and they hate Jews. I agree with that.

81:52And I think it's wrong.

81:53That's what I think.

81:55But I also think it worth that.

81:57Like, what is that? Is it a spiritual thing?

82:00I mean we say, well, it's always existed.

82:04I believe that.

82:05But what's its, I mean what's it's cause?

82:08And I've never heard one person ask that question. And I think I believe in asking.

82:14Or trying to understand the cause of everything.

82:17You can't often, but it's always worth doing.

82:21I wanted to know why Al-Qaeda attacked the US on 9-11.

82:25I thought it was horrible.

82:26I had a friend killed, but I still wanna know why.

82:29And I never heard anybody ask that question.

82:31You haven't heard anyone ask about the the sort of like the bottom root of antisemite.

82:36Not one time, other than to say, and by the way, I'd be willing to believe that it's spiritual in nature.

82:45What does spiritual mean?

82:48That there's a belief among Jews and some Christians that Jews are distinct among peoples because God made them distinct and that there is a spiritual reaction.

83:02That is a religious belief that some people have, Many people have.

83:06And I'd be willing to believe, I don't know if it's true, that this is like a reaction against that from evil.

83:13So that's one explanation, but I never even hear anybody ask the question. Like what I hear instead is people say, it's just, it's always been there, it always will be there.

83:23What does that mean?

83:25I guess that's what I'm asking.

83:30Within the European context, and look, I'm not an expert on anti-Semitism, within the European context you have a people who are also forced into the margins of society.

83:40They're easily scapegoated.

83:41They also maintain a certain level of distinction from the rest of society and those are people that are very easy to hate, but I can't give you an historiography of anti-semitism.

83:53I can tell you why I think it's on the rise right now. Why is it on the rise right now?

83:58We have a bit of an issue, right?

84:00I mean, you have Israel doing what Israel does, it's getting record amounts of attention.

84:04There's record amounts of sympathy with the Palestinian cause.

84:07I mean there are many people, if you would have asked them 20, 30, 40 years ago, if they understood what actually was the fate of the Palestinian people, they wouldn't have understood, they wouldn'd have known.

84:16You know, there's a famous quote by Ben-Gurion, who following 48, you know, there were 600, some 600 villages that were destroyed.

84:26And I remember there's a somewhere in the archives, there's quote which says, people are soon going to come visit this country and we don't want them to see, have superfluous thoughts.

84:41To use the word superfluos, meaning 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.

84:52And people didn't really understand.

84:53I didn't know that.

84:55How did I not know that?

84:57So parks you've seen us are often on the physical spot of a former Palestinian village.

85:03In many cases, yes, in many cases yes, which is also bound up with the JNF, the Jewish National Fund.

85:10And so I remember hearing from someone in Toronto that I think the government was going to start sanctioning the J&F and people were really up in arms about this.

85:19And I said, sort of, the end of the day, you have to decide what your relationship with Israel is.

85:26You can't, it's hard to have.

85:29It's hard to expect people from without to understand why, at a synagogue, you also have an Israeli flag there if you don't also wanna bear the brunt of what's happening in Israel, take some responsibility.

85:39And I'm saying, from without, you can't expect people to understand that.

85:44I think there's a sense within the Jewish American community specifically, but also in Israel.

85:48People expect everyone else to understand them from within.

85:54It's why it should be very obvious.

85:56Why Israelis believe it should be obvious what we're doing.

85:59All this should be obvious.

86:01The fact that you're asking questions is itself potentially an indication that you are against us, that you just want our demise.

86:09When I ask people questions in Israel, the first thing is like, why are you asking?

86:13If I want to interview someone as a journalist in Israel, I have to be very careful with the language I use.

86:19If I use the word West Bank, to the Judean Samaria.

86:23Within a certain demographic or act.

86:26Seriously, I tend to say we and not you because if I say you they're like, what do you mean you I thought we're all in this together No, I'm not an Israeli citizen.

86:35Even that is a bit sensitive You're describing narcissism the belief that other people should just understand what I'm feeling.

86:45In a health, a healthy person understands that each one of us is sort of locked away in our own private traumas. And that's why we communicate. And I need to understand you. It's very important to understand to you.

86:55And I want you to understand me, but it's not natural, right? That's the basis of a relationship.

87:00It's an isolated and solipsistic society. Solipsistic is a better word, that's exactly right.

87:05In many ways, yeah.

87:07There's something, in many cases, I find this thing a bit delusional about the mentality.

87:14It's just the fact that, for example, Arabic isn't spoken in the country.

87:18It used to be.

87:20I mean, those were because they were Arab Jews.

87:22Who came from Arabic countries.

87:23But I think there were also Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Arabic.

87:26I think that was more common.

87:28I think, that was my impression.

87:30Whole lot. Maybe if they were there, for example, before the establishment of the state.

87:34But as of the establishment to the state, you didn't have people really learning Arabic.

87:38The changes that have taken place, or maybe it's just a change in my perception, but I just remember a country that was much more open to the world, but a lot has happened in that time.

87:49By the way, I should ask you, since you live there in Israel, how much damage has been done during this war? We get no sense of it at all, or I don't trust anything I see on the internet, but do you get a sense it's a country at war there is rubble on the street in Tel No, no.

88:08In fact, I think the last round during June, for example, you know, I'm based in Jaffa at the moment.

88:13There are massive strikes in a place called Bat Yam, just south of Jaffas, where you saw I think there's a three block radius of damage.

88:20Look, you do have damage, relative mistakes, minimal damage within its role right now.

88:28Does life seem normal-ish?

88:33Yeah. Ish.

88:34Really? The Jews like the ish.

88:37Yes, it's true.

88:38I'm pro-ish myself.

88:41So it doesn't feel like a country under siege?

88:44Under siege?

88:45Yeah, the war is being fought about 2000 kilometers away.

88:48Correct.

88:50Yeah, certainly not besieged.

88:52Is there a sense that there's a physical risk?

88:55Do people you know feel like, wow, we could get hammered by missiles, drones?

89:01No, I don't think there's like an apocalyptic sense, but there is a sense like damage can be done. These are ballistic missiles.

89:09People can die.

89:11But if you're smart, if you take the necessary steps, if you go down to your shelter, you're probably going to be fine. Like a 99% chance that you will be just fine.

89:21Do you talk to people who have a sense of how this will be resolved?

89:25Do people expect it to end soon, the war with Iran?

89:29I don't think so.

89:31I think people want it to go on. I think that people want the job done, but what's a bit strange to me, what's ironic here is that in America, it strikes me, the perception is more zero-sum.

89:43In America, I think there's the sense that if we went through all this and the regime doesn't fall, then this was for naught.

89:50We wasted our time.

89:51We jeopardized our, for the GOP, we jeopardized, our base or whatever else. You're a better expert in this than I am.

89:57Within Israel though, it's not a zero-sum game.

90:01If Israel, if this war ends because Trump decides it has to end because of internal pressure, economic pressure, and the regime hasn't fallen, Bibi is none the worse for it.

90:12It's not the ideal outcome, it's the best possible outcome, but it's something he can work with.

90:19It's a good enough show.

90:20It's what you call in Hebrew an image of victory.

90:24It's the phrase that Netanyahu has been using since the beginning of the war, an image of victory.

90:30Part of our problem in the US may be that we take our own rhetoric more seriously or perhaps too seriously.

90:35And so in order to justify this and the previous exchange in June, we had to endure like weeks of hearing that we were all about to be killed by Iran, by this regime, which some people didn't believe, including me, but some people did believe and we have a whole TV channel devoted to telling Americans their single biggest risk.

90:57Is Iran, so if that regime is still there, it's kind of hard to walk down from that, if you see what I mean.

91:03I think in America, the big problem is that Americans are fundamentally divorced from history.

91:11They forget that they're actually inside of history.

91:13That's for sure.

91:15I think that's a, for a non-American, that's perceptive observation.

91:19And the Jews think that history's over.

91:22Yeah, I think Israel believes that sort of, you know, he got back to the land, we have our state, and it's kind of done now.

91:29History's over.

91:31I think that's the distinction between Israel and America.

91:33America forgets that they're at the center of history, and the Israelis believe that they are enjoying the aftermath of history as if there can't be another exile, as if they can't be another catastrophe.

91:44And that's short-sightedness.

91:48Where does, um, among...

91:53Is there any discussion of like restoring the third temple that would seem obvious at least from my reading of No, the torah. No, that's not even know.

92:02But I personally think if you're going to ask me, I personally think it would be great to build a third temple just on like another hill.

92:10I don't think you can do it on another hill. I bet you could get a rabbinical precedent.

92:14You could definitely pay some guy off to let you.

92:17If you're gonna have a third temple, I'm strongly in favor of putting it on another hill, just because then you avoid global religion.

92:23Yeah, but it would also be a shame to come back to the homeland after 3,000 years and leave potentially without having built something, you know, sweet.

92:32Is there any effort to do that that you know of?

92:38No, but there are a lot of people recently, it's funny, there's, you know, the Messiah patches that a lot Israeli soldiers have. I do, yes.

92:44There's now on the back of cars, there are these stickers now that are sort of like the image, it looks like a Greek or like a Roman temple, but it's a temple image.

92:51Oh, I've seen it.

92:52Oh, you've seen the sticker.

92:53Yes, I have.

92:54So, that's blown up as of the last year or two, do I think it will actually happen?

92:59But before the last year or two, or let's just say before October 7th, there was none of that.

93:06You had guys trying to like secret in like red heifers every now and again.

93:11They're a serious minority in the country.

93:14And as Avra mentioned, you had people, there were attempts several times to- Five, he said.

93:18Five. I didn't know that.

93:19Yeah. I knew about one.

93:20I didn't know about five.

93:22But again, I think this is not, there's no state level or institutional policy that's working towards the construction of a third temple.

93:31I mean, look at the buildings in Tel Aviv.

93:33I don't think the Israelis right now are in a position to build a big, beautiful temple. The best buildings in Tel Aviv were built by Arabs in the Ottoman era.

93:40I knew that.

93:40I knew that. There's been a, I think Israel's done, you know, it was an amazing society in some ways.

93:46They built a lot considering how young it is.

93:49Architecture has not been on the top of the, of the achievement list, I would say. That's why you put the city beside the sea.

93:55Yeah. No, it's it, but it's still not.

93:59It's, yeah.

94:00So I share, I share your view of the local architecture.

94:06It is fascinating.

94:07So how has the country, just big picture, How has it changed so in there? Seven and a half years you were there before, two and a Half since.

94:15Yeah. October 7th, like what changes have you noticed in people's attitudes?

94:23You know, there was, at the height of the war, I went to buy a new laptop from a kid. He was like 18, 19 years old.

94:31And it turned out that he's a soldier, he works with the Navy.

94:33So he's like a young thing, he looks very, very young.

94:36I went and we started talking and I explained that I'm a journalist, that I do some work.

94:40And he said, listen, after October the 7th, we can't trust the Arabs.

94:45I said really like I was like, I have a question, like, where do you travel within Israel?

94:52And he goes, you know, back in the day, my father would go to a place called Kalkili, which is on the other side of the Green Line.

94:57And he says, but we, with the family, would go a place Kfar Qasim, which is the Israeli side of Green Line, we're like right snug on the line.

95:05And he said, but ever since the war, I stopped going to Kfar Kasim.

95:09And I was, like do you go to another place called Tira, which was even closer to Tel Aviv?

95:12And he's like, no, I won't risk it. I don't even like going to Jaffa. And I told him, I said like...

95:19What's going to be left to you if you keep operating this way?

95:24Like you're king of the hill as it were, you're the landlord, but you're scared. It's like owning a house and being scared to walk into four out of the five rooms in the house.

95:34It's not a way to live, it's not the way to be a homeowner, right?

95:39You have this thing, Ben-Yver's big platform when he was running for elections was we're going to the landlords now.

95:44In Hebrew, Balea bite the landlords actually.

95:50How loudly he said that?

95:51Yeah, that was a platform.

95:52There were signs in the West Bank about that. We're the landlords now.

95:56Yeah, we're going to be the landlords.

95:58And the problem in Israel is that, especially in the west bank, is that there's a lot focus on lording over the land and not really dwell.

96:07Ben Gavir's election slogan was we're going to be the landlords.

96:11We're dealing with lack of self-awareness now.

96:14Like that out loud.

96:15Quite the opposite.

96:16He was very, very aware.

96:17It was very strategic and very tactical.

96:21Especially within the settlement population, of course.

96:23You're in a place where you don't feel like you're really the Lord.

96:27You really don't, except for the gun, you don't really feel like I'm the king of the hill.

96:31There's a guy who's saying, I'm going to make you king. I'm going to put the crown on your head.

96:35It's tempting, especially to like naive, young, potentially troubled youth who are running around the hilltops.

96:45How long can Israel go with all this territory that's not part of their country, but that they control?

96:51Like what?

96:52With Gaza and the West Bank and now Southern Lebanon and parts of Syria, like, does that just go on forever?

97:00Do people envision a time where the official borders of Israel expand and like, this is our country, like?

97:06I mean, look, if Israel can't manage Gaza, I don't think they can manage South Lebanon.

97:12I don't think that what's happening in South Lebanon is going to be permanent.

97:16There might be a post or two on the border. You could potentially expect that. Are they going to take a large swath of Lebanese territory?

97:22No, but what they will do is render them uninhabitable, which is a kind of way of doing not this, but not that.

97:29How do you do that?

97:30It's the art of indecision, which Bibi's art. You don't occupy it, but you leave it unoccupiable.

97:36Unoccupiable because it's just there's nothing there.

97:38Well, that's what the Lebanese border is right now. In many cases, not across the border, but there are many spots on the border in which everything is completely razed.

97:44Those were also houses used in many cases by Hezbollah.

97:47So like, I kind of get that.

97:50In Syria as well.

97:52Like, I don't think that's a permanent decision. I think it's leverage that could potentially be used against Jolani to come to some sort of agreement, which I think will eventually come.

98:01Not a peace deal, but something, an understanding.

98:03Jalani being the new head of Syria.

98:05Exactly.

98:06Who a lot of people assumed was installed there with the agreement of Israel, I assume that.

98:11I still think it, but now they're against him?

98:13What is the truth there?

98:15Who said they're again him?

98:18I don't know. I've heard recently that the Israelis are troubled with Johnny. I don't t know if that's true or not.

98:25I don't know if they're, I mean, he's moved troops toward the Lebanese border, and there are rumors that he would be willing to fight Hezbollah.

98:32There's a common enemy.

98:35I think the Israelis fear Jolani long-term, and they also used to have a very good understanding with Assad.

98:43The problem is that Assad was also embedded with Iran and Hezballah, so there's a bit of a problem.

98:46I don't think the Israeli's ever had a problem with Assad, I think, as far as I know, before the civil war, there were also secret talks going on. The Israelis were also preparing to make some kind of agreement with Assad.

98:56In the short term, I think Jolani and the Israelis can work together relatively well because it'll take Joliani a very long time until he will be able to build or, as it were, cement the ground beneath him.

99:09Yes.

99:10He can't start problems with Israel right now, but in 20, 30 years he might be able to.

99:17What's the typical Israeli view of the United States?

99:23From got it right.

99:24Like stupid Americans, stupid.

99:27They sometimes want to live like you.

99:30You know, I think they wanted they want to speak English.

99:32They want certain, some kind of American lifestyle.

99:38But they don't want to be they think you're naive.

99:42Is there affection or mostly contempt?

99:45A lot of affection.

99:47From what I hear, a lot of infection.

99:49I mean, definitely over the last year or two, I think this has a lot to do with Bibi.

99:53There has been a kind of retic of like, who's the United States to tell us what to do?

99:59They shouldn't be telling us what do.

100:03And Israelis get frustrated when there's talk of that, like Bibi's going to bend to Trump.

100:08Or that America says, like Biden says, you can't do this.

100:11This is the red line.

100:14I think there's a deep frustration inside of Israel because they want to have their cake and eat it.

100:18They want the money, but also total attitude. They want support, but I think they want American knowledge that we're, in a way, doing your bidding. I think a lot of Israelis believe that we're doing your bidding. We're doing something good for you.

100:28Doing the hard work that you won't do.

100:31They feel that way.

100:33I can speak for the whole country.

100:34But I mean, you hear that.

100:35I hear that, yeah.

100:37What about Trump?

100:39What's the view of Trump?

100:42Yeah, a lot of Israelis love Trump.

100:45Again, I'm speaking from my experience.

100:46What do they like about him?

100:48They like that he's willing to take the gloves off for once.

100:51I think they saw Biden as a pussy.

100:53Yeah.

100:54As a feckless pussy who wasn't willing to make a decision, wasn't able to do it.

100:59For example, Bibi is willing to do, even though Bibi was also a pussy for a very long time.

101:05And so, yeah, I think it's refreshing to them. And I think that they don't see.

101:09Look, as Avram also said, Israelis don't have a very good understanding of what happens on the American interior, of American culture.

101:17Most Israelis do not speak English.

101:20I think this is like a delusion people have because they go to Tel Aviv and people speak English outside of Tel Avive, there's not a whole lot of English being spoken.

101:27And so there is a sense in which all they see Trump as is what he has done for for the fact that he would be more willing to help us.

101:38And that's what matters.

101:39If you're an Israeli, you care about Israel just like you.

101:41Aren't American and care about America. That's right.

101:43That's always been my favorite thing about Israel is they're nationalists.

101:47What's the view of the Gulf States?

101:51You have to be more specific.

101:53What do they think of Dubai and Abu Dhabi UAE?

101:56They love the UAE.

101:58They love the UAE.

102:00The UAE also loves them, but I don't think the government is a big fan of Israel.

102:06I've heard from people, for example, that like Emirati diplomats are a bit shocked when they come to Israel. And they're also, in some cases, mistreated at the airports.

102:14I think they find Israeli society a bit shocking in its rudeness at times.

102:21I think, they're not given the kind of respect that they're accustomed to having within Gulf countries that have pretty, you know.

102:26Standard royal hierarchies and in different manners.

102:31Those are elaborately polite societies with all kinds of rituals around manners.

102:37Yeah, no, I think they are shocked.

102:39Yeah, so Israelis love the UAE, and there are very, very close relations between the UAE and Israel.

102:44What do they think of the sound?

102:52I couldn't really tell you, I think a lot of Israelis...

102:57I mean, they house Hamas as far as a lot of Israelis are concerned.

103:01I don't hear people saying that Qatar as a country is our enemy.

103:05I don't think Israelis think a whole lot about Qatar.

103:09Yeah, I believe that.

103:10I just don't think they think about them a lot. What do they think, Sue, Israel has a lot of high profile defenders in the United States? Are they well known in Israel?

103:18Well, I don't know, Ben Shapiro or...

103:21No. No.

103:23Unknown. Mark Levin.

103:26No one's ever heard of them.

103:28I'm sure there's many people have heard of them are there do you have like the average rarely average Israeli listening to Mark Levine or Ben Shapiro? Absolutely not because also Ben Shapira was speaking in the name of if anything American Jewry, right?

103:41His conversation is maybe about Israel, but it's between Western Jews or English-speaking Jews.

103:46It doesn't really impinge upon the Israelis To Israelis, what's their view of American Jews specifically?

103:55I don't know if I could give you that in a sentence or two.

103:59There's all kinds of different relationships.

104:02I'm avoiding falling into certain kinds of banalities or stereotypes.

104:06Totally. Totally, I just of course.

104:08Well, you can't generalize actually about most cats, but I'd say if there's like an overwhelming And they're also mixed feelings.

104:14They're mixed feelings, I have issues with American Jews, but they're also my people.

104:19And this is, I think, the overarching sentiment.

104:22At the end of the day, there are many disagreements between the two peoples, but there are also a single people.

104:27It's just like you have disagreements with your family, I'm sure, but they're still your family.

104:31And that's by and large, if I had to sum it up, that's the dynamic.

104:36But there's certainly a generational break right now.

104:40I think the younger generation of liberal Jews, I think they're beginning to see, and this isn't the majority of Jews right now.

104:49The 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 your family.

105:04What changed that view, do you think, Gaza?

105:07Yeah.

105:08And the fact that it's also unpopular, if you're a liberal Jew in a liberal circle, you don't want to be the guy who's liberal on every single point, but stops at Gaza.

105:19It's socially awkward.

105:21In many cases, it's a social decision. I don't think it's major theoretical.

105:25Right, this is not a question of principle, it's just like it's becoming unacceptable to be pro- It could be both, but also, you know in America are a big part of sociality or social life.

105:34They certainly are.

105:37That's true for any society, I think.

105:40Especially America.

105:41You think so? Yeah. I think people like touting their morals quite a bit in America.

105:47Really? Yeah.

105:48I've never sat with an Arab and he tells me like, you know, I believe in this and I believe that.

105:52And I think this is really wrong.

105:54I don't hear that.

105:57On 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.

106:05That is, that is a very wise observation.

106:09I've never sat with an Arab and he's like, I think this is wrong.

106:13Getting in here.

106:13Yeah, that's a bit.

106:14Like, I'm sure the Arabs have moral opinions. Of course they do.

106:17Of course, they do, it's not that they don't have standards, but they're not throwing them at you at dinner.

106:20They don't, but they're just not the foundations of their identity.

106:26Well, there is a certain self-righteousness in the West.

106:28That's not necessarily the same as righteousness. I mean, it's just- Yeah, definitely.

106:32There's a posturing that goes on.

106:35Here's my last question.

106:36How do you think, and it's impossible to know, but like in five years, what does the landscape look like is in the Middle East?

106:44Is the United States still as closely lad with Israel as it is today?

106:48Is Lebanon- territorially intact?

106:52Is Israel safer?

106:53Have we gotten the seven front war down to two fronts, say, or no fronts? Is Bibi still in power?

106:59Like what current trends continue?

107:01What does it look like?

107:03Bibi very well could be in power in five years. I think he'll probably get elected in October.

107:08Yeah, I think it's highly likely that he'll get re-elected.

107:12And I think everything that's happening right now is in some way or another engineered for that to happen.

107:18Again, as we said, the personal ambitions of Bibi happen to align with some of the strategic ambitions of the state.

107:24And if you can just modulate that, then it's a perfect recipe to win elections.

107:32In terms of Lebanon, do I think the Israelis will be highly active deep inside Lebanon? No.

107:37And I think a lot of these, Bibi doesn't want a ton of war. I think after Bibi gets into, if he gets re-elected, I think you'll see Lebanon sort of come to a close.

107:49Even Iran could come to close.

107:51He'll wanna just sort of like bring in a new status quo that will be useful to him.

107:56And when he has to turn up the heat, he'll turn up to heat.

108:02Do you think, again, purely speculative, but if Donald Trump went to BB tomorrow and said, we're shutting this down with Iran, it's terrible for markets, it is terrible for me, my political party, could he make BB stop?

108:21I think he probably could, but Bibi would probably want to find a kind of middle ground, meaning they had a ceasefire in Lebanon, but there were still Israeli strikes in Lebanon on an almost daily basis.

108:34Yeah. I think you could call that the Israeli ceasefire.

108:37Yeah. In Hebrew, you call it the war between the wars.

108:41It's so funny when, you know, growing up here, we were taught that Israel had wars in 48, 56, 67, 73, 82, and then the Intifadas.

108:52That's the official history of it, right? And then you get older and you realize, nah, it was kind of a war continuously.

109:00I don't know if I'd call it a war, but there is fighting or there are strikes, like there's activity. I don't know if i'd call a war.

109:08But I do think you could potentially see a situation and it depends on the conditions of the end of the war, if there's an agreement, what the stakes are and the stakeholders.

109:19But there could be a situation, I can envisage a situation in which Israel, for example, is still striking not necessarily on a daily basis, but that they operate in the of Tehran?

109:29That they strike?

109:30As needed.

109:32And there's still a lot to be seen.

109:34I mean, I think there should be.

109:37There's probably going to be some attempt to activate people, to try to get protestored up again.

109:44I wouldn't be entirely surprised.

109:47In Iran.

109:48Yeah, 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...

109:59Will begin to sort of move again.

110:04I don't know if you can expect people to go out and protest while there are strikes.

110:09The strikes should, I think they would expect, lay the groundwork for something to happen.

110:14Do you have any idea how the Israeli government winds up with so many agents of influence and just agents in all these hostile countries?

110:23How many there's so many people in Iran working for Israel?

110:27Same in Syria, same in Lebanon.

110:28Like how do they do that?

110:30People are easy to buy.

110:34People are easy to buy.

110:36Apparently they are. I mean, I like to say that the best spies in the Arab world all work for the Mossad.

110:40Apparently they do. That's why they don't have good intelligence agencies.

110:45How do they do that?

110:46I mean, it's just remarkable.

110:48The United States pulls that off?

110:50They could if they wanted to.

110:51I think the CIA is probably just lazy.

110:54The stakes aren't as high in many cases.

110:58You find someone's weakness.

111:01We are homosexual.

111:03We only do that in the Senate here.

111:06We haven't bothered to do it in Iran, I guess.

111:10That day might come. You never know.

111:13All right, thank you very much.

111:14That was interesting as hell.

111:15Thanks for having me.

111:16Appreciate it.