Well, the previous ceasefire was essentially put in place just a few days before Trump came in.
Trump's people were instrumental in ensuring that that happened, and they put pressure on Netanyahu in order to get the Israelis to accept it.
But from the outset, the Israeli side said that they would not go to phase two because the phase two, the whole thing would actually lead to an end to the war.
And by March of this year, the Israelis violated that ceasefire and restarted the siege on Gaza, stopping the convoys of food getting in and started bombing again.
And that's what we have seen now.
The fighting continue, or frankly, it's not much of a fighting.
So the Israelis already back then, you had the IDF pointing out that there's no more military objectives, Gaza.
It was continued because of the political interest of Netanyahu and some people in his cabinet who wanted the fighting to go on for other reasons.
In this case, part of the reason why it may end up being different is because Trump has really personalized this issue.
He's really taking credit for it.
He's put his name on it.
And the hope is, the calculation is that that will make it more difficult for Netanyahu or cabinet members of his, such as Motridge and others, to pull out of this agreement.
This has been part of the demand from the Arab side that Trump really needed to step into this deal much, much more strongly than he did in the previous one in order to raise the cost for any party to walk out of this deal.
Let's take a look at what the White House is saying is the president's plan for Gaza, and then I'll have you comment on it.
It says this.
Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities of the people in Gaza.
A transitional governance of technocratic, apolitical, how does that work?
But bottom line is it's about taking control over the administration of Gaza, making sure that food gets in.
But these are important details.
But the larger picture, frankly, is more important, which is that this has to become an end to this round of, or this specific element of the conflict.
If it just ends up becoming a ceasefire, then it would be a tactical pause, meaning that you have a month, a couple of weeks of a ceasefire, and then the Israelis start the bombing again.
If that is the case, then this whole thing breaks down.
But even if we get to an end to this round of conflict, we still have to remember the current plan does not do anything to actually address the root causes of the broader conflict, which is the Israeli occupation.
As long as that continues, unfortunately, the conflict will also continue.
I find it very unlikely that Hamas will lay down weapons unless you also have similar type of restrictions on the Israeli side that they cannot restart the fighting.
I mean, you have to take a step back and recognize, yes, Hamas's attack on October 7th, of course, was a horrific, horrific attack.
On the other hand, though, the Israelis since then have, according to the United Nations, according to a very large number of experts, according to the filing of the South Africans and many other countries at the ICJ, have been engaging in genocide.
To not have any restrictions on what the Israelis can do will just continue this imbalance that has led to this conflict constantly flaring up.
It's not just about the security of the Israelis.
It has to also be about the security of the Palestinians.
Well, most likely that pressure behind the scene was to tell the Israelis that the United States will stop providing the weapons that the Israelis are using, stop providing the bombs, and stop providing the political and diplomatic cover to the Israelis at the UN and other international organizations.
It was probably done privately in the background in order to avoid the challenges that would bring about if you have an open conflict between the Israelis and the U.S.
And at the end of the day, Trump wants them to get along with it.
He's not looking to humiliate them at the end of the day.
But it is that type of the pressure that is the only thing that could bring about an end to this conflict.
That pressure was always possible to impose on the Israelis.
Biden could have done this throughout the two years that he was overseeing this conflict.
Trump could have done it earlier as well.
In fact, if he had done it back in March, perhaps there would never have been a breach of the ceasefire.
What did you make of the airstrike, the Israeli airstrike on Qatar in Doha that ultimately failed to kill the Hamas leaders who were negotiating there?
What did you make of that and how that might have spurred on this eventual ceasefire?
I think the Israeli strike on Qatar, the failed attempt at killing the negotiators, is a critical reason as to why we are here today with Trump pushing for a plan to end the conflict.
That was a major overreach by the Israelis.
It infuriated the United States.
We didn't see any clear cost imposed on the Israelis immediately, but it did unite much of the region to put pressure on Trump to say that this is unacceptable because essentially it meant that these countries that have been hosting U.S. bases have agreements with the United States as major non-NATO allies, were given an implicit security umbrella from the United States that apparently doesn't work if the Israelis decide to attack them.
And this deeply, deeply embarrassed the United States and put on the question the credibility of American promises.
And I think it shifted the balance within the White House, within the debate in the White House on how to approach this and prompted Trump to take the initiative to try to put an end to this.
Now, whether that plan leaves much to be desired, if it has flaws, clearly none of these things are going to be perfect.
But the reason why I think this came about, the trigger of it was that attack.
What also had been happening beneath the surface, and this is less reported on, is that over the course of the last couple of months, in particular, the standing and the numbers of Israel amongst the America first crowd, the core constituency of Trump, has just been tanking.
The war that Israel launched against Iran, the feeling that the Israelis are pulling the U.S. into more and more wars, that Israel is asking for everything and as a result is limiting Trump to be able to pursue the domestic agenda that these people elected Trump to pursue, and the fact that at the end of the day, the U.S. is a superpower and it should not be essentially taken advantage of in the way that they're perceiving Israel's conduct right now.
All of these things, combined, of course, with the horrific images coming out of Gaza, I mean, this is a situation in which the Israeli soldiers are essentially live streaming their own war crimes and happily doing so.
And this is ultimately having a profound impact.
That led to a situation in which Trump increasingly started to realize that Israel was being a political baggage for him, had a political cost for Israel to continue to do this, rely on the U.S. to provide the political and diplomatic support for it to do so, provide the weapons, provide the money.
The United States, according to the Congressional Research Service, covered one-third of Israel's entire military budget into 2024.
And Hamas did not exist before the Israelis occupied Palestine.
In fact, the Israelis themselves were instrumental in creating Hamas.
This was an effort that was done back in the 1980s by the Israelis in order to weaken what they at the time saw as a greater challenge, which was the PLO.
So they helped create Hamas as a way of creating a differentiation and division within the Palestinian movement.
But bottom line is, as much as it is absolutely correct to recognize that the Hamas has conducted numerous terrorist attacks against Israel, as long as the occupation continues to exist, there is going to be resistance, including armed resistance.
And according to international law, armed resistance is permissible.
Not terrorist attacks, not war crimes, but arms resistance is permissible if you are occupied.
Getting the hostages back, of course, is tremendously important.
The caller is absolutely right about that.
What I think perhaps is missing here, though, if you listen to the debate inside of Israel, the hostage families are tremendously angry at the Netanyahu government for having ignored the plight of the hostages.
We have, I think, only about 20 or so hostages that are remaining there that are alive.
Another 40 or so of the remains who have been killed as a result of the bombing that Israel itself has committed to a very large extent.
So the demand for getting the hostages out is absolutely essential.
And it's very interesting that Trump is emphasizing that almost more than the Israeli government is.
The Israeli government has had numerous opportunities to get the hostages out and has instead chosen to continue the fighting, which is part of the reason why there is so much anger in Israeli society against the Netanyahu Ben-Gavir government, because they accuse them of being more interested in reoccupying Gaza, occupying the West Bank, rather than actually getting the hostages.
So let me show you what the White House said about the economic plan for Gaza.
We'll put that on the screen.
It says a Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.
At the end of the day, the damage that has been done in Gaza is just astronomical in terms of the amount of the cost of it and the cost of rebuilding it.
We're talking about more than $50 to $60 billion that need to be poured in.
The international community is obviously going to have to be an essential part of this.
Many of the states in the GCC have financial means to be able to be helping.
But for instance, Qatari's already spent more than $4 billion rebuilding Gaza in the past.
What's the point of doing that if there isn't a long-term political solution that ensures that that rebuilding actually stands, that you don't have to go and pour more money into Gaza over and over again because the fighting resumes?
So to be able to get the commitment, the financial commitment of that scale, there absolutely needs to be a political solution.
And thank you so very much for C-SPAN and letting people speak freely.
I wanted to get Mr. Parsi's comments on a couple of things.
One is this history between Trump and Netanyahu goes back to Trump's first term.
And the only way I can describe it is for Benjamin Netanyahu in Trump's first term, every day was Christmas.
If he wanted something, Trump gave it to him all the way through the first term.
And now I think Trump has to cover for Netanyahu because you'll notice this plan is not called an Israeli peace plan or a Palestinian peace plan.
It's called a Trump peace plan because that's the only way for after so many years of supporting Netanyahu and the hardliners in Israel, after so many years of doing that, the only way that they can introduce peace is Netanyahu has to go to his hardline people and say, no, Trump is forcing me to do this.
And so I think we're all being kind of played for saps when we sit there and say, no, this is the Trump peace plan.
This plan that they're coming up with, and you especially saw it when you put the paragraph up about who's going to fund it, what they mean is they're going to use Arab money, okay?
They're going to use money out of Saudis.
They're going to use money out of the Gulf State partners.
They're going to use that money from outside sources to come in and try and do something with Gaza.
I think the caller is quite right about what happened during the first term.
And this is also part of the reason why Israel's standing within the America First constituency is plummeting, because Trump gave Netanyahu almost everything he wanted, moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,
accepted and recognized the occupation of the Golan, pushed all of these different countries to give concessions to Israel and also by normalizing, but also then gave those countries concessions, took Sudan off the terrorist list, sold F-35s to the Emiratis, accepted Morocco's control over West Sahara, all in order to get them to normalize relations with Israel.
And the question has been, what has been the return for the United States or for Trump himself?
And now then you have in the second term all of these demands for more weapons, costing the American taxpayers more than $20 to $30 billion to fund this war that makes no strategic sense for the United States.
In fact, it's destabilizing the region as a whole and risks bringing the U.S. into war, particularly if as we saw this past summer with the war that the Israelis initiated against Iran.
So there's an uneven balance sheet here in terms of what Trump has been given Netanyahu and what Trump and the United States have been given in return.
Why would you want to do it if Israel is going to blow it up in three months again?
So again, if you're going to do it, you're going to do it because you have some sort of a guarantee that this peace is going to last, some sort of a guarantee that the United States is going to put constraints on Israel.
Well, constraints such as making sure that there is no more sales of weapons, that there are political and diplomatic costs if the Israelis attack other Arab states.
I mean, again, Qatar is a major U.S. ally, and it was attacked by Israel.
And there's been no clear signs of any major cost imposed on Israel, except for the fact that Trump is pushing for this plan that the Netanyahu government is reluctantly agreeing to.
So if you're going to put all of this money in there, you want to have a stable situation.
You want to make sure that it stands for long term.
And you want to make sure that one thing that the Qataris and many of the GCC states have now said does not materialize.
They do not want to live under Israeli hegemony.
This is a term that they now, for the first time, are starting to use.
And I think all of that is going to have to be part of the package in order for this to work in the long run.
In fact, it's been profoundly refuted that the reason why aid has not come in is because of Hamas.
In fact, the fact that aid is now coming in is because the Israelis are lifting the siege and the blocks that they have put forward.
I mean, we have images of Israeli settlers going in, destroying the aid.
So to blame this on Hamas is one of these talk points that has been thrown out by the Israeli government that is really confusing the debate.
In regards to genocide, we have now a situation in which a majority of experts on genocide have concluded that this is a genocide taking place.
You just had last month the UN Commission coming out with the same conclusion.
The ICJ, the International Court of Justice, is now reviewing the matter.
One of the most difficult things to prove in the genocide case is intent that this is not just something that is happening accidentally, but this is something that is happening by design, that there is.
I mean, the case when it comes to the genocide, in my view, is actually the strongest when it comes to the expression of intent that took place immediately after October 7th, in which they're saying they're going to kill everything there.
It's not going to be anything left, referring to the Palestinians as animals.
All of these different things are in the court case.
There's 22 pages in the South African claim that is just designated to list the examples of intent expressed by the Israeli government officials themselves.
Now, whether it ultimately comes to a conclusion by the ICJ that it is or isn't, we will probably have to wait another year or so before we see that.
But I think we are now in a situation in which a majority of Americans, a majority of most populations in the world, including in Europe, have concluded that this is a genocide.
Let's talk to, is it St. Kofa in Marietta, Georgia, Independent?
unidentified
Yeah.
Hi, Mr. Carthy.
It's so nice to have you on because so many times we only get to hear people that are Zionist sympathizers.
You never hear anything really concrete on the other side.
But what I was calling about is that I'm very skeptical of this so-called ceasefire.
I don't believe that it's going to hold.
And the reason that I don't believe it, I think what they're doing right now is the most important thing is that they want to get the hostages back.
And I truly believe that once the hostages and their remains are back, that Netanyahu is going to start this war all over because Netanyahu was getting so much pushback in Israel because of the hostage.
Could you also speak to the Hannibal directive and the economy that was going on in Israel itself?
There is, without a doubt, a significant risk that once the hostages are out, that we will see the same pattern that we've seen before, that after a while, Trump's attention shifts elsewhere.
At the same time, there's a very, very strong support for releasing, for getting the hostages back.
Once all of the hostages are out, I think the question is, of course, going to be the issue of Hamas and whether it is disarmed or not.
And that is going to be a continuing thing that is going to be used, but you have to also be very clear that from the standpoint of some of the people that are in the Israeli government, the plan for a greater Israel, an reoccupation of or complete control of Gaza, the creeping annexation of the West Bank that is taking place right now is a primary objective.
And these are elements that have been pushing to be able to get to this situation in the past, even when there were no hostages of this kind.
So I think that this skepticism is warranted.
And it all depends, to a very large extent, whether Trump sustains the pressure to make sure that this deal lasts.
And this is again part of the reason why you're seeing so many of the Arab states, including Hamas, emphasizing that Trump has to be personally involved.
It is the only guarantee that they can come up with.
It's not a strong guarantee in any sense of the word, but it's the only guarantee that they can point to that would actually help ensure that this deal is sustained.
I mean, if you compare this to the Biden years, Biden never put this type of a pressure on Israel.
Trump is a different type of a president.
He is willing to give the Israelis way more support than Biden was, for instance.
He agreed to bomb Iran, something that Biden had rejected, something that Trump himself had rejected in his first term, Obama had rejected, and Bush had rejected.
So he's willing to go further than any other president in supporting Israel.
Again, he's the one who moved the embassy, recognized Golan, etc.
But he also has the capacity of pressuring Israel in a way that Biden at least did not exhibit in the two years that he could have done this.
It has been confirmed that the Israelis issued the Hannibal Directive on October 7th, which was in order to prevent hostages from taking, it is permissible to kill, for the Israelis to kill their own people.
On the one hand, of course, there's a strong desire to get the hostages out, but it's not been the guiding star in any way, shape, or form.
And we've seen, again, the issuance of the Hannibal Directive.
But there's also another thing that has happened that I think also is something that worried Trump.
Not because of any particular sympathy for either side, but because of the cost this would have on the U.S. For years, the Israelis have pointed to their diplomatic and political acceptance in the international community as a sign of their success, as a sign of their acceptance.
This is all starting after the Oslo Agreement, in which a large number of countries, particularly in the global south, normalize relations with Israel.
Now you've seen the Israelis at a tremendous point of isolation.
They're on the path towards permanent pariah unless they change course.
And that pariah would have a tremendous cost on the United States because it's the U.S. that is expected to defend Israel politically and diplomatically, to expend political capital, diplomatic capital, constantly for the defense of Israel.
And seeing them going in this direction and then having the Israeli prime minister actually embrace that isolation, saying that Israel now be the little Sparta or super Sparta is a remarkable shift because in the past it was pointing to its international integration as a point of success and now is actually embracing and celebrating isolation.
And the bill for that ends up at the feet of the United States and American taxpayers.
And I think this is another reason why Trump went in this direction.
In fact, he told Sean Hannity on his show that he had told that Trump had told Netanyahu that you can't continue just fighting the entire world.
I want to first know if he's a combat veteran and if he's ever been in combat in the Middle East, because it seems a lot of his speaking talking points are anti-Israel.
They've been defending themselves for decades with not a lot of help from anybody but us.
So I don't have a lot of faith in what he says, especially here with academics saying they're a doctor.
Mark, you're saying that if he has not had combat experience, he wouldn't understand Israel's situation?
unidentified
Or what are you saying exactly about that?
I don't have a lot of faith in these people that are academics that have never been there, done that, seen it.
You know what I mean?
So for somebody to spew what I think he's saying that only Israel's doing genocide, if October 7th happened, the first thing Joe Biden should have done on October 8th was demand our hostages come home.
And he was weak and he didn't do it.
I carte blanche, I love BB Netanyahu.
I'm a Christian.
I'm not even Hebrew, but I will go to war with the Jews and Israel to defend themselves because look at the anti-Semitism here in America in our college campuses.
Is that okay?
Does Mr. Parsi defend that?
Is America committing genocide and that makes it okay for those people to do the genocide flags here?
I'm not a combat veteran, so I don't have any experience fighting war in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.
I do have experience in trying to solve conflicts, however.
I think the sentiment the caller was expressed, though, is not an uncommon one in the sense that there is a loss of faith in the American public for much of the foreign policy elites of the United States and what has been happening there.
So I understand that part of it.
The view he expresses, however, of a desire for the United States to fight with Israel, for instance, is a view that was strongly held in many quarters in many different constituencies in the United States.
But it is a view that is becoming increasingly small in a minority view, even amongst Christian evangelicals, particularly amongst young Christian evangelicals.
It's actually very fascinating to see the huge gap between where older Christian evangelicals are on their view of Israel and Palestine and what's happening right now and the younger Christian evangelicals.
They still tend to favor Israel, but the gap is roughly 40%, 41%, where older Christian evangelicals are and where younger are.
And then when you take a look at it on the Democratic side, it's even much, much sharper than that.
But then you have less of a gap between the demographics in the sense of the age difference, but a massive shift away from the position of thinking that Israel is just defending itself, for instance.
Let's talk to Crystal in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Democrat.
Hi, Crystal.
unidentified
Hi, good morning.
I would just like to say that the young man that just got off the phone saying that he would have a difficult time relating to Mr. Parsi because he didn't fight in the military.
Similarly, it would be difficult for a people that have never been oppressed or occupied or living in apartheid conditions to understand what the Palestinians have been going through.
I just want to say that I personally viewed Hamas as a militant group that was opposing occupation from the time of the event.
And they have been called barbarians consistently in Israel and in the media in the United States.
So if Hamas killed 1,100 people on October 3rd, 7th, 2023, and Netanyahu has since killed 70,000 people, 83% civilians, what does that make him?
Who is the barbarian?
Who is wanted for war crimes?
And who has been accused of genocide by the legitimate international criminal court and international court of justice?
I think the view expressed by the caller here is actually reflective of how the debate on Israel and Palestine has just shifted dramatically over the last two years.
Questions that are now being asked by the American public about this conflict, about Israel's conduct, about what the Palestinians have endured, what the Palestinians have done and not done.
I've been teaching the geopolitics of the Middle East for more than 15 years at U.S. universities.
And it is just a remarkable shift how things have changed.
And it's changed to the disadvantage of Israel as well, of course.
But it is to a very large extent, if not almost exclusively, because of the manner in which Israel has conducted all of this.
As the caller pointed out, Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defense minister of Israel, Galand, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, as are the leaders of Hamas that now have been killed.
But this is a very crucial detail that is very rarely mentioned in U.S. media, in U.S. mainstream media, that when his name is being mentioned, that it is not also added to that this is a very crucial detail about his conduct, that he has actually landed himself in the International Criminal Court.
It takes quite a lot for a leader of a country, particularly a leader of a Western country, to be accused of that by the International Criminal Court.
And so that is a detail that, again, has helped change the perceptions of the American public about this conflict.
I think it's the type of a move that the White House, as well as many of those who negotiated this deal, find to be essential in order to make sure that there is as clear of a deterrence against any party, but particularly the Israeli side, the Israeli government, to violate this deal.
Because what they will be doing in that case is that they will essentially be undermining and sabotaging something that Trump has gone beyond anything else he's done so far to put his signature on.
And this is a key guarantee that is being demanded.
So there's a tremendous amount of valid criticisms that can be put forward.
However, the caller is making a mistake, I think, in not recognizing that throughout this entire period, Gaza has remained occupied by Israel.
Because by the international law definition of it, since Israel has continued to control the airspace, the borders, the maritime borders of Gaza, that means that the territory is still occupied by Israel.
And the Israelis have made it very clear what they're allowing in and what they're not allowing in.
They're being complete control of it.
So there's a significant limitation to what any government in Gaza could have done in order to be able to get the living standards up.
But I think we also have to recognize that if you're under occupation, whether jobs exist or not, historically we have seen that populations resist.
No country is, no population accepts being under occupation.
And as a result, even if the living standards were better, it would have been very unlikely to expect that the population would have accepted that their political faith is in the hands of some other state, of some other people.
And so this conflict would have endured even in those situations.