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Nov. 17, 2023 - The Culture War - Tim Pool

02:07:52

The Culture War #38 - Israel Vs. Palestine, US Foreign Policy, And Terror

Host: Tim Pool Guests: Scott Horton @ScottHortonShow (X) | AntiWar.Org Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain (X) Connect with TENET Media: https://www.tenetmedia.com/ https://twitter.com/watchTENETnow https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61552169295417 https://rumble.com/c/c-5080150 https://www.instagram.com/watchtenet/ https://www.tiktok.com/@watchtenet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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01:13:05

tim pool

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Speaker	Time	Text
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Oh boy, Israel and Palestine.
		This is a very, very serious subject that seems to get everyone's emotions cranked all the way up to 11.
		I can talk about how in the United States, domestic policy, you get the left, you get the right, but there are some people that can have a calm, reasonable conversation with you, and then as soon as the issue of Israel-Palestine comes up, it is Cranked instantly up!
		Emotions are running high, so I'm really excited that once again we're going to be having this conversation.
		But I do think it'll be interesting, especially considering the political ramifications of the domestic reaction to what's happening in Israel with Hamas, with Gaza, with the West Bank.
		You have a lot of people who had odds.
		You had rioting just the other day in front of the DNC.
		Police made, I believe, only one arrest, but several officers were injured.
		And these are left-leaning young people.
		So, we're now seeing polls that suggest 18 to 29 year olds, more than half, are at odds with the Democrat official foreign policy position on Israel, which is going to have some very serious ramifications for 2024.
		And that being said, We're going to start off just with the conversation around Israel and Palestine, the moral justifications versus the criticisms of military action, as well as, you know, IDF, Hamas, etc.
		And we've got two really awesome guests to have this conversation, of course, returning.
		We have Scott Horton.
unidentified		Happy to be here.
unidentified		Thank you, Tim.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Who are you, good sir?
unidentified		I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and the director of the Libertarian Institute, and I'm the author of this book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right on, and we have Will Chamberlain.
unidentified		Yes.
		My name is Will Chamberlain.
		I'm Senior Counsel at the Internet Accountability Project in the Article 3 Project and formerly have worked on the Ron DeSantis campaign most recently and in his governor's office.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right on!
unidentified		Not anymore though, that's important.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So your position here is to defend the actions of Israel?
unidentified		Yes, like I'm here to defend Israel's actions in Gaza and also just to defend Israeli policy more broadly.
unidentified		Although, I mean, there's obviously going to be cases where I think Israel did something wrong.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I have a ton of things here.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		First of all, I wanted to say, by way of disclaimer, I know a few people were saying things on Twitter, but my reputation as a debater comes from taking on Bill Kristol and Cathy Young, both of whom I absolutely despise and quite deliberately destroyed.
		And, but I like you.
		I don't know you, but you're a friend of a friend of mine, and I have no vendetta here, and so I want to be nice and start off nice, and I actually have a couple of gifts for you.
		First of all, this is Reclaiming the American Right by Justin Raimondo, my mentor at Antiwar.com, the late great.
		And it's about the real foundations of the American right and then the rise of the neoconservatives and how they stole it.
unidentified		And then this one is mine.
unidentified		Enough already.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Time to end the war on terrorism.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's all the wars from Jimmy Carter through Trump in the Middle East.
unidentified		Well, thank you.
unidentified		By me.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So I hope you like them, and that's my gift to start here.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And then also, I want to say, Tim, to your audience, which I know is gigantic, and most of whom don't know me, by way of disclaimer, I want to be very clear about this.
unidentified		I am not an anti-Semite, okay?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And the truth is, there are a lot of people who actually are, even in my mentions on Twitter, right?
		And the truth is, anyone who actually is an anti-Semite will be happy to tell you that they are, and will be happy to try to get you to be one too.
		And that just doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about here.
		I know that people kind of assume that, oh, if you're talking bad about Israel, it must just be because you hate Jews.
		But I'm just telling you that's stupid, and it's not where I'm coming from at all.
		Just so that people understand that about me.
		I'm against terrorism, even when it's backed by the United States and its allies.
		I obviously oppose what Hamas did on October the 7th.
		In fact, an extended family member of mine was kidnapped and killed by Hamas in that attack.
unidentified		I don't take it lightly at all.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I don't believe every claim by Hamas.
		They have a huge incentive to embellish.
		Increasing their victimhood was the reason for their attack in the first place here.
		So just because someone is sniped doesn't mean we know exactly who sniped them, and I'm not one to try to jump to those kind of conclusions.
		And it is also true that Hamas sometimes does hide behind civilians, although that is quite exaggerated and Israel's killed more than 10,000 people using that as a cheap excuse.
		But it is true that Hamas does fire from civilian areas.
		That's an accusation by me, no concession.
		And my last disclaimer here is I don't care at all what leftist protesters or college kids or TikTok wine moms say about anything and that association doesn't have anything to do with me and if anyone wants to hang that on me well then you're all gay married to Lindsey Graham and Bill Kristol and you should all sign up under the Foreign Agents Registration Act because you put Israel first.
unidentified		Just so we're even on the guilt by association thing.
unidentified		Okay, now, opening argument here.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Supporting Israel is not in America's interest.
		Joe Biden says if there was no Israel, we would have to invent it.
		He says it's an American aircraft carrier, an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
		But he never explains how.
unidentified		Israel, in fact, is nothing but a burden on our country.
unidentified		For example, right now, U.S.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		forces are being repeatedly attacked in Syria and Iraq.
		None have been killed yet, but many have already been injured.
		And the tit-for-tat, which is obviously a reaction to the strikes, what's happening in Israel-Palestine right now, And we already lost five guys, they say, in a training accident, Tim.
unidentified		I don't know exactly what happened to them.
unidentified		Maybe it was.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		But we already have five dead here.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And the strikes going back and forth in Syria and Iraq threaten to grow into a true regional war.
unidentified		We could have Iraq War 4.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		As the result of what's going on in Israel-Palestine right now and perhaps this is what James Mattis was referring to in July 2013 when he said quote I pay a military security price every day as the commander of CENTCOM because the Americans are seen as biased in support of Israel and when David Petraeus told Congress in 2010 The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests.
		The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S.
		favoritism for Israel.
unidentified		Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		partnerships with governments and peoples in the region and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.
unidentified		It's the smartest thing America's worst general ever said in his life.
unidentified		life.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Donald Trump said, quote, we should never have been in the Middle East.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		It was the single greatest mistake in the history of our country.
unidentified		Well, he doesn't know much about Woodrow Wilson, but he's close.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And it's interesting, Tim, that we still have troops in Syria, Because don't you remember Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, ordered them withdrawn in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
		in 2017, 2018, and 2020.
		And he was overruled by the Pentagon and the Israel lobby, Remember Joe Kent, the almost and future congressman from Washington State?
		His wife was killed in Syria after Trump ordered her withdrawn.
		And anybody watching this right now can just Google it.
		2008, Trump, Syria, Israel.
		And you'll find...
		2018, I meant to say.
		Sorry, thank you.
		2018, Trump, Syria, Israel, and you'll see all the headlines about how Trump is betraying Israel and leaving them high and dry if we pull our troops out of Iraq.
		So, what are they even doing in Syria in the first place?
		Okay, well therein hangs a tale.
		I'll try to do this as fast as I can.
		After the revolution in 1979, Israel still backed Iran.
		They weren't scared of Shiite fundamentalism then.
		And remember when Ronald Reagan backed Iraq against Iran, Israel backed Iran.
		And remember during Iran-Contra when Reagan actually backed Iran for a little while and sold them some missiles, he sold the missiles through Israel.
		They were the cutout because Israel were the ones who had maintained that relationship with Iran all through the 1980s, right?
		Well, then, after Rock War One, which Israel didn't start, that was the U.S.
		and the U.K.
		that got us into Rock War One, although they did support it.
unidentified		After Rock War One, Bush Sr.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		kept the troops in Saudi Arabia, but then he lost the election, and Bill Clinton's plan was to pull the troops out of Saudi Arabia and normalize relations with Iraq and Iran.
		And Iran, the old mean old Ayatollah, had died.
		The new Ayatollah was in and a more moderate president and they wanted to normalize relations.
		But Israel insisted on what was called the dual containment policy and it was inaugurated by a guy named Martin Indyk who had worked for Yitzhak Shamir, the Prime Minister of Israel.
		Now here he is working for Bill Clinton and he's the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is a spinoff of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
		And in a speech at Wynep, he announced the dual containment policy, America will stay in Saudi Arabia through the rest of Clinton's presidency in order to contain Iraq and Iran both.
		Why?
		Because America, well, first of all, Israel had helped build up Iran for 10 years, and now America, with Israel's support, had just beat up on Iraq.
		So now Iraq wasn't powerful enough to balance against Iran.
		So the Israelis insisted America had to stay in Saudi to contain them both.
		And that was the proximate cause of the provocation of the September 11th attack on the United States of America.
		And after Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a Netanyahu fan in 1995, Prime Minister Shimon Peres launched what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon.
		And Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of September 11th, and his friends from what's called the Hamburg cell of the pilot hijackers from September 11th.
		When that started, they signed their last will and testament and decided they're going to join essentially the army and go to war against the United States.
		And a few months later, when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war, called Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
		In there he went on and on about Grapes of Wrath and about the Kana Massacre where 106 women and children were killed in a UN shelter.
		And according to Lawrence Wright in his book The Looming Tower and Terry McDermott in his book Perfect Soldiers This was what convinced Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh and their friends to join al-Qaeda.
		And it was then that they decided to travel to Afghanistan and join the attack.
		So what happened on September 11th was some Egyptians were answering a call by a Saudi to avenge Lebanese killed by Israelis by crashing their planes into towers in the United States of America.
		And instead of explaining that to your mama, they said, Bush said literally, quote, And that was what they told the American people was that radical Islam makes people hate virtue and innocence and whiteness and people's love for their mama.
		When in fact what it was, was these were mercenaries who had fought for America, Saudi and Pakistan in the holy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
		They had fought for Bill Clinton in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya in the 1990s.
		And even though he supported them, he had not bought off their loyalty.
		And the Israeli-insisted policy of staying in Saudi to dual-contain Iraq and Iran and support for Israel and their war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon were the reasons brought for the September 11th attack, the motive for the attack.
		And I know everybody's going crazy because the wine moms on TikTok found the letter to America.
		Well, they should read the declarations of war from 96 and 98.
		The letter to America is after the fact.
		But what's important about that is that what they're saying in there is that... Well, as I saw you putting it on Twitter, Tim, that these women are like being convinced by Osama, like he's right or something.
		Well, I think that's a little bit overstating it, but the point is if he's so convincing to them, think how convincing he was to a bunch of Egyptians studying engineering in Germany and saying this is the enemy and this is what should be done about it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But it's not Wine Moms.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, whatever.
		I'm not on TikTok, but I'm saying people are getting this wrong.
		But the point is this, okay?
		And Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, emphasized this over and over again.
		That when the Ayatollah Khomeini denounced American culture, nobody really cared.
		But when Osama bin Laden pointed at specific American foreign policies, regardless of what he believed, This is what was successful recruitment schtick for him to recruit the likes of Mohammed Atta and them to attack the United States of America.
unidentified		Okay?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So you don't have to take Bin Laden's motive personally, what he believed.
		We don't know what he believed.
		We know what he told people to get them to do what he wanted to do.
		And this is what he did is he focused on American foreign policies and not America being a nice guy and not Israel being a nice little Jewish boy minding his own business, but America doing the wrong thing.
		Blockading and bombing Iraq.
		Supporting Israel.
		Bombing UN shelters full of women and children.
		This is what's called blowback.
		As Ron Paul pointed out, the CIA coined the term.
		It means long-term consequences of secret foreign policies that come back to bite us.
		As Ron Paul said in the Giuliani moment, we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 years before the September 11th attack.
		Now Tim, hang on one second, because the next day Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview to the New York Times where he said, quote, It's very good!
		Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.
		And he predicted the attack would, quote, strengthen the bond between our two peoples.
		So even though the attack was provoked by Israeli policies and Israeli-insisted policies, they saw a huge advantage.
		And then Ariel Sharon and his government, I'm almost done here, and the neoconservatives, what did they do?
		I'm actually not almost done here, but I swear to God I'll be quiet for 20 minutes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But wait, it's not even that.
		You've made so many points that I think are just wrong.
		And it's like, if you want to open the show by saying, I'm going to do an opening statement now 15 minutes in, and you've glossed over so many extremely important details as to what you're saying, How about this?
unidentified		What I want to get to is like, it's taken a long time, but we haven't talked at all about why you think Israel is wrong about the current conflict in Gaza, right?
		Like I feel like... Well that wasn't my opening statement, but I got plenty on that.
		If you want to zoom into that, that like, you know, and so we can... Well that's changing the subject from what I was talking about, which was American support for Israel causes these huge problems for us.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		If you want to go back over any of those statements, I'm happy to.
unidentified		I've been writing down in detail.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Or would you like to let me finish?
unidentified		Sure, go for it.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So then what happened was the neoconservatives, who are the neoconservatives?
		They're the vanguard of the Israel lobby in the United States of America, that's who they are.
		And inside the Bush government, this is what Colin Powell called the JINSA crowd, meaning the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Richard Perle and his friends.
		And Colin Powell said they set up a separate government inside the government.
		They created in the Pentagon something called the Office of Special Plans, where they laundered all the fake intelligence to lie us into war.
		And the reason they did it was because David Wormser and Richard Perle and Douglas Feith had this strategy called the Clean Break.
		It said if we get rid of Saddam in Iraq, totally nonsensically, this is the Rube Goldberg scheme we talked about last time Tim, if we get rid of Sunni Saddam in Iraq that will empower Jordan and Turkey there and then they will use their influence over the Shiite clergy in Najaf to quote wean Hezbollah away from Iran And make them start being friends with Israel.
		And then by neutralizing Hezbollah's pressure on Israel on their northern flank, they will then not have to abide by the Oslo Accord and give the Palestinians an independent state.
		And they can get away with, this is the clean break, instead of land for peace, it'll be peace through strength.
		And we will dominate the region.
		But what happened?
		The neocons were fools, and they didn't empower Turkey and Jordan in Iraq.
		They empowered Iran in Iraq.
		And that was what that whole five-year war was for.
		It was what they call in soccer an own goal, where these neocons in fact empowered the Shiite Iranians and their axis.
		And which led to then, and this is so important for people to read, the redirection by Seymour Hersh from 2007 explains how then they turned around.
		In fact, this is in the WikiLeaks.
		People Google golden platter and you'll see where the Saudi king It's not all Israel here.
		The Saudi King told Zalmay Khalilzad, it used to be you and us and Saddam against Iran.
		Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
		And Khalilzad says, don't worry your highness, we're going to fix it.
		Hang on, I'm almost done, I swear to God.
		And this was the reason then, Tim, why Barack Obama backed al-Qaeda in Syria from 2011 through the end of his presidency.
		was because Bush put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad.
		So now they were trying to take them down a peg in Syria.
		And as I demonstrate in the book through block quote after block quote after block quote, this was the entire policy was Israel has been harmed by Iraq War II and the empowering of the Shiites.
		And now so to protect the Israelis, we have to tilt back toward the Sunnis.
		But the Saudis don't have a big infantry.
		They just have al-Qaeda shock troops.
		And that led to the rise of the Islamic State Caliphate and Iraq War III.
		All of this because of American support for Israel.
		When we don't have none of this would have happened without that.
		I don't know.
unidentified		yeah they'll well take it away all right so okay i want to just start out with like the basic core of my contention i'm certainly willing to defend america's general defense of israel in support of it but i think like the core of my argument at least certainly on twitter and elsewhere has been israel is justified in attacking uh in defending itself against hamas and And its actions in Hamas, against Hamas in Gaza, have been totally justified.
		I don't know what would be a more just war than fighting against the organization that decided to raid your country and murder, butcher, and kill 1,500 of your citizens, kidnap 240 more.
		I don't know what you would have a military for, if not to defend yourself against that.
		If this isn't justified military action, what would be?
		And it also gets to the point of like, why should, if Israel isn't willing to defend itself in these terms, then it should just fold up as a country.
		Because in any country that isn't willing to protect its citizens from an action like this, it's just going to fold.
		People will leave.
		And it would just be the end of their, it would be the end of their nation state.
		No country in the world would be expected to tolerate a Hamas-like organization on their border.
		If we had something like this in Tijuana or even on an Indian reservation, I know that Scott has liked to use kind of Indian reservations as an analogy, but if there was suddenly an Indian reservation that formed a Hamas-like organization and started attacking neighboring cities, this would be a similar response.
		We would not tolerate it.
		And if we did tolerate it, it would lead to at least the end of the current government, right?
		The, you know, the kicking out of the politicians who agreed to it, um, but also potentially people just leaving.
		So I think it's fundamentally justified.
		Um, I don't, I mean, I see a lot of people talking about Israeli genocide and things like that, that they're bombing indiscriminately or carpet bombing.
		I think that's total nonsense.
		Um, there's a, you know, I think something like the relative, you know, they've put first off and foremost, most obviously they essentially gave, you know, people in Gaza two weeks to evacuate North Gaza to move to the South portion of the strip.
		And they have, like, generally, they are clearly targeting Hamas.
		If they wanted to, they had the capacity to just essentially obliterate the Gaza Strip.
		It's not a large piece of land.
		It's roughly the size of Las Vegas.
		So Israel is a very strong military.
		If they wanted to simply obliterate it and leave nothing there, they could have done that.
		They didn't.
		They're being surgical and they're trying to target Hamas.
		And they're being righteous in doing so.
		And the calls for a ceasefire are nonsense, especially now, because most of the population of Gaza City has evacuated down to the south.
		The civilian casualties have dropped markedly in the last few days.
		I think there's a reason you haven't seen the same sort of stuff coming up in the media.
		It's because the only people left in North Gaza are mostly Hamas.
		And as a result, this is actually the perfect time to finish the job of dismantling all the terrorist infrastructure, dismantling the tunnels.
		I mean, I think people forget, essentially Hamas built a castle underneath Gaza City.
		That's where they built their fortifications.
		And the solution to that problem is tricky in terms of avoiding civilian casualties, but I think Israel's done anything that any country in their situation would do, and if not more so, by giving that much notice for people to evacuate.
		So that's my broad thesis about, since this is the current conflict, it's what's ongoing right now, I think Israel's perfectly justified in what it's doing.
		I think You know, in terms of what America is specifically doing in regard to this, I don't think their contributions to push for a ceasefire are helpful, because Hamas is an organization committed to the destruction of Israel, I don't, and has indicated it has the will to just, you know, kill every man, woman, and child in Israel.
		They just don't have the means right now, but after October 7th, who can question that they do want to do that?
		So that's, you know, that's the core of the question.
		Now, I mean, broadly speaking, I will answer the question of do I think it is in America's interest to support Israel?
		I absolutely think it is.
		It is a outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East.
		It is one of the most innovative technologically.
		Um, our military benefits enormously, and the strength and power of the United States is a good thing for us as American citizens.
		We do not want to live in a weak country.
		Whether or not, you know, I'm not pro-Iraq regime change war, I'm not, like, I'm, you know, I have as much contempt for Bill Kristol as you do.
		Maybe not quite as much, but almost as much.
		Um, so, I'm not, like, this isn't for a purpose of the regime change war, but it is good for American citizens that we live in a strong country with a strong military, is what it allows us to have the dollar remain as a reserve currency.
		There's a lot of benefits that come to American citizens from us being strong, and we shouldn't want ourselves weakened.
		And Israel does help us be stronger.
		It's the only source of intelligence we get on the Middle East, at least human intelligence.
		We get plenty of signals intelligence from all our tech, but Israel is uniquely good at having people on the ground in various countries, Arabic speakers, people who can actually get real human intelligence.
		And I think it's, you know, it's a country that is ultimately, you know, from the perspective of conservatives, you know, since we're talking about reclaiming the American right, it's one of the only right-wing countries in the Western world.
		The only one of the conservative countries.
		It's like them and Hungary and Poland for maybe like two months longer because Poland's about to be taken over by liberals.
		We should want to see, you know, a Western country that one that is able to, you know, actually, and one that isn't suffering these massive birth rate problems that all the other Western countries are suffering from.
		One that isn't so reflexively anti-American.
		Um, I think we should want them to survive.
		We should support them and we should see them as a good thing.
		Um, and I mean, there's, you know, again, your, your opening statement contained a huge, you know, like historical background into, you know, American relations in Israel.
		Um, I think it's, I mean, I could go down each of these in individual points, but I, I think I want to get to the, the heart of You know, if the core thesis of these arguments is that our support for Israel angers the Arab world, it is underlying, motivates people like Bin Laden, it motivates people to join Al Qaeda, etc.
		Right?
		I think the first obvious point is They wouldn't like us anyway.
		For example, Iran, of all people, is still not happy about the coup and Mossadegh and all that.
		They just wouldn't suddenly like us and be happy with us in a world where we stopped supporting Israel.
	It also ignores that they have motivations beyond blowback.
	I think one reason I'm not a libertarian anymore, and one reason I reject the libertarian thesis, Is there sort of a totalizing focus on blowback as the central question of how foreign policy works and how people operate, i.e., their motivations in attacking us are almost all reactive.
	They are all in response to what we do.
	And it ignores the fact that they have their own proactive agency, that there is plenty of motivation within The Islamic world to actually establish a caliphate, to establish Sharia law in places.
	That was what we saw in ISIS and all those videos.
	Like, no, this isn't a group that's just reactive.
	They have a worldview that they want to impose as well.
	And that's true of Hamas as well.
	They're not there just to have their own state.
	They want Israel gone.
	They want from the river to the sea.
	And the idea that merely us stopping supporting Israel would just solve all our problems in the Middle East, I think is naive.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So I'll address this too, because I mentioned in your opening statement, Scott, there are things that I believe you said that were wrong.
		And what I mean by that is nothing historical or factual.
		The issue I took primarily was you determining what their motivations were outside of the things they've said themselves.
unidentified		Who?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Al-Qaeda?
		So particularly, many of them, as well as Bin Laden himself, noting the Bin Laden letter has been going viral because, as you mentioned, TikTok Wine Moms, but it's like 17-year-olds, it's 20-year-olds, it's college students, and they're not just saying, he made some interesting points, or they're not just saying, I did not realize this perspective.
		These people are outright posting that he was correct.
		And so we can start with this.
		I'll give you a second to respond in just a moment.
		Will mentions the libertarian argument that it is wholly blowback.
		This is what happened last night on Timcast IRL when I was talking with Dave Smith and Clint Russell.
		It seemed that the libertarian perspective, something Glenn Greenwald tweeted, Glenn Greenwald tweeted that bin Laden's three main grievances were very, very specific U.S. military and foreign policy actions, including sanctions, invasion, etc.
		However, if you actually read the full text of his letter, not that you should take him seriously, it seems to be a great propaganda and recruiting tool, which hits a lot of points.
		The core component starts with Palestine specifically and then goes into what bin Laden meant by attack on us was the imposition of Western values over what should be Islamic Sharia states.
		He then dedicates half of the letter specifically to the amorality and immorality of the West, fornication, homosexuality, usury, etc.
		So, to Will's point, many libertarians are outright saying, oh, it's the military action, the foreign policy.
		If you were going to try and make that argument, you'd have to further assume Bin Laden didn't actually mean anything about Islam.
		I don't think we can make those assumptions.
unidentified		Well, look, I don't think everything is all so black and white.
		I don't think anyone denies that Bin Laden himself was a Salafi.
		You know, hardcore Wahhabi and all this, but it's like a rectangle and a square.
		All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares, right?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So there are millions of Salafis and Wahhabis who do not share Bin Laden's politics or terrorism at all.
		Look at the height of the ISIS caliphate that Barack Obama built for them.
		Well, first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama built for them in Western Iraq and Eastern Syria.
		At the height of their power, they had a couple hundred thousand fighters who had gone to fight.
		Out of 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, where are all the jihadis?
		They don't share Bin Laden's politics.
		Even, oftentimes, the most extremely fundamentalist Muslims are quietists.
		They obey the part of the Quran that says, whoever your king, he wouldn't be your king if Allah didn't want it that way, and it's not your job to care about that.
		It's your job to care about your afterlife.
		And that used to be the American tradition among Christian fundamentalists as well.
		They were quietists and stayed out of politics mostly.
		And so yes, bin Laden was a right-wing religious kook.
		And yes, as you said, he wanted to build a caliphate.
		As I explain in the book, the whole point was bin Laden at the time of September 11th, was 400 guys was al-qaeda bin laden and his friends hiding out in nangarhar province on the afghan pakistan border and in exile as far as you could get from anywhere in no man's land he had no ability to create a caliphate even in nangarhar
		Hell, the Taliban's great success in Afghanistan was due to the help of Saudi Pakistan and Bill Clinton's United States of America helped the Taliban in the 1990s because they wanted to build an oil pipeline through there.
		They wanted the Taliban to win.
		So, caliphate, shmaliphate.
unidentified		Look at the map.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The whole place is carved up with Westphalian nation-states.
		Run by a bunch of Sultans and Potentates and Dictators and El Presidentes who have nothing in common with each other and hate each other's guts.
		You got Sunni-Shia splits, Persian-Arab splits, and this and that.
		What gave the ability of 400 nobodies 400 bandits on the Afghan-Pakistan border, the ability within 15 years to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
		It was George Bush and Barack Obama doing what the Israel lobby wanted and going to war in Iraq and Syria.
unidentified		Sure, so I agree the Iraq war is a mistake, obviously.
		I don't think the relative feasibility of creating a caliphate is relevant to the discussion of what bin Laden's motives were and whether ultimately Israel is... I agree with you.
		Right.
		So, I mean, you know, getting back to like, why is, you know, basically the idea here is, okay, so I don't think you've actually refuted the underlying argument, which is that Blowback is not the, I mean, maybe you just agree, blowback is not the underlying, the only reason or the only motivation.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		What I didn't say is the, I never said it was the only anything, right?
unidentified		I mean, what's with all the black and white?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The point is these guys had a daydream about someday conquering the Middle East and they could have never gotten anywhere near that without getting America to Essentially, quote, fall for their scam because the scam was, I don't know if you've ever read this, but Bin Laden's son gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010 where he says, when Bush won, my father was so happy.
		This is the kind of president that he needs.
		One who will go to war and break the bank.
		This is what Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, wrote in Imperial Hubris.
		He said, America is completing the radicalization of the Middle East that al-Qaeda could never have achieved on their own.
		America and al-Qaeda are strategic allies and really, like, this is what makes me a reverse 9-11 truther.
		I think you could make a lot better case that the whole U.S.
		national security state were secretly working for al-Qaeda than the other way around.
		Because we're the ones doing their dirty work throughout the Middle East here this whole time.
unidentified		So let's take this to Israel.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Okay, good, because I do want to talk about Hamas a lot too, but I wanted to clarify about that.
unidentified		Because this is a point I've been thinking about, because I've listened to your podcast appearances, and one of the points that you've repeatedly made about how the Israeli government should act.
		Is that they need to, the goal of Hamas is similar to the goal of Al Qaeda.
		They were trying to, you know, inspire blowback against them and then rally the Muslim world to fight Israel.
		And so Israel, instead of, you know, needed to be thoughtful and, you know, should not have attacked, right?
		So, You know, doesn't want to act rashly.
		And so, the first thing I'd say is, I don't think Israel is actually acting rashly.
		I think the rash response to something like the 10-7 massacre is, oh, we'll just nuke the place, right?
		That's the rash response.
		That's the, we'll just drop MOABs, we're just gonna, you know, enough, right?
		Gaza's not so big, we could just destroy it all.
		That's the rash response.
		That response got quashed within Israel and its military establishment.
		They said, no, we're not just going to carpet bomb.
		I know people have accused them of that, but that's not what they're doing.
		We are going to invade, you know, evacuate the civilian population, try and minimize civilian casualties, but we're going to tolerate some because ultimately we can't tolerate the continued existence of the Hamas organization right on our border.
		So, we are going to go in there, kill as many Hamas people as we can, dismantle all the terrorist infrastructure, and then who knows exactly how we're gonna handle de-Hamasification of Gaza going forward, but we're not gonna allow a return to Gaza coming back.
		That's, I think, a reasonable response, and I don't think... Do you mean Hamas coming back?
		Yeah, we're not gonna let Hamas come back, and I guess my point being that even if I guess there's two independent points, right?
		Hamas wants the reaction, okay?
		But sometimes you can do something that you force a reaction.
		Like in any game, there are things called forcing moves, where you make a move and it forces your opponent to respond in a certain way, because the alternatives are far worse, right?
		If you, as a terrorist organization, kill 1,500 and butcher them and maim them in a brutal way, that is a forcing move, if we're talking about it.
		You are forcing a response out of the Israeli government, because If they do not respond, they will lose all credibility.
		People will leave Israel.
		The whole state might as well fold.
		So they have to respond.
		And moreover, if the idea is, well, we can't respond, you know, like, first off, I'm not even sure that's what they're trying to do.
		It's not necessarily that they're trying to generate an Israeli response.
		They were trying to go viral.
		This is the equivalent of a Loomer stunt in the foreign policy world, right?
		It is an attempt to do something bizarre and outlandish and horrifyingly barbaric that it is going to go viral regardless of what Israel does, which is what indeed happened.
		If we allow that to succeed as a matter of foreign policy, what do you think will happen in the future?
		We will get more 10-7s non-stop.
		There has to be a massive disincentive to engage in the kind of conduct that Hamas has engaged in because there is obviously a benefit they are trying to achieve, which is going viral, bringing attention back to their calls.
		Wait, which side of the argument are you on?
		It sounds like you're saying we shouldn't be doing what they wanted us to do, which is bomb them the way- My side of the argument is consistent.
		Israel is right.
		Israel is right to go in there and punish them brutally, right?
		And punish Hamas brutally.
		So the idea is it the question of whether or not we do what Hamas wants I don't think you seem to be think that that's an important question in the sense of like oh we need to not fall into their trap.
		My point is that's an irrelevant question because one it's a forcing move and two the imperative of punishing this sort of stunt barbarism is overwhelming.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So you're making the point Scott that's Bin Laden wanted George W. Bush to go to war to use as a radicalizing force.
		Will is pointing out that Hamas is making a forcing move to try and, I would assume, trigger the West into moves which could radicalize.
		But I think Will takes it one step further saying, eradicate Hamas for this reason, so they can't do it again.
		Is that what you're saying?
unidentified		Yeah, and to deter this kind of tactic by being used by other groups in the future, right?
unidentified		So look, take the analogy back to Al-Qaeda.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		At the time of September 11th, Ron Paul issued a letter of marque and reprisal and said we should send special operations forces to target and kill Bin Laden and his friends and anybody who wants to get in between our guys and his guys.
		Not regime change Kabul and carpet bomb the posh tunes for 20 years.
		Sorry precision bomb the posh tunes for 20 years Okay, and then go to Iraq against Sunni Saddam who you know secular Sunni Saddam who didn't do it and then on to Libya and Syria and Yemen and the rest of this chaos and Iran that they spread and Iran if they get their way So
		That's if you want to just on the analogy back to Hamas here we all know and and our mutual friend Daryl Cooper has explained this well and he's a military guy and knows the history of this very well that and back to the analogy about Gaza being an Indian reservation and not the nation state next door.
		What that means is that Shin Bet and Mossad and the IDF can reach out and touch these guys one at a time.
		And that's how they dealt with terrorism for decades, was reach out and kill these guys, abduct them, and imprison them, execute them, assassinate them, one at a time, not bomb the whole place to the ground.
		And I want to talk about a couple of things that you mentioned here about things that other people are saying.
		I haven't been calling it a genocide.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		I think there's a question about whether they're going to let the people of Gaza come back.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They leaked some trial balloons about forcing them all into the Sinai and this kind of thing.
		I don't think it's clear that that's what's happening here, and I don't like to throw that term around wildly.
		You haven't heard me say that.
		I also have not been saying that they've been bombing indiscriminately.
		But the thing is, that's not really what counts.
		And we learned this from the Syria War and Iraq War 3, for example, where the Russians and the Syrians would bomb in a much more careless way than the Americans.
		But then what it turned out is the casualty rates on the ground were the same.
		And as Chris Woods and the guys from airwars.org showed, It's population density below, not the precision and the care of your strikes that really makes the difference.
		And Colonel Amos Fox from the U.S.
		Army wrote a study on what he called the precision paradox, where he talked about, geez, we were only hitting one building very carefully, sometimes even one side of one building very carefully, one at a time.
		And then one day we looked up and we had destroyed all of the city of Raqqa.
		We had destroyed half of the city of Mosul.
		And it's not exactly carpet bombing, but yes, it's killing tens of thousands of innocent people.
		And based on what?
		Probable cause?
		That there's a fighter in there?
		A reasonable belief?
		Right?
		Based on, remember, Barack Obama's intelligence.
		Signature strike.
		If they're doing jumping jacks, if they're driving a truck, if they have an antenna sticking out of their pocket, they're a terrorist.
		You can kill them.
		So, based on what intelligence?
		The Israelis assure us, well, we're only trying to kill bad guys and bomb buildings that have tunnels under them, and you just have to believe us.
		But I don't know based on what intelligence they're making those calls or why we should believe them.
		We don't believe our government when they say anything, but we should believe the Israeli government when they say every time they kill a kid it was an accident, they couldn't help themselves, it was just collateral damage, they were being as careful as they could possibly be, but it just happened anyway.
		Um, and I think, you know, there are obvious, you know, again with the black and white thinking where it's what we got a precision paradox, bomb the place to the ground and kill more than 10,000 civilians or do absolutely nothing.
		And tell Hamas please be our best friends from now on, right?
		Like I never said that and I don't think that that's reasonable and I don't know anybody who really argued and I don't think in any of those podcast appearances you heard me say that Israel should do nothing at all in response.
		Certainly nothing violent that would upset anyone or anything.
		I never said that but what I'm talking about is Falling into the trap and back to the point about the reaction and maybe people don't know this Okay, I like to quote Saul Alinsky from rules for radicals page 74.
		He says in all asymmetric political activity This would include terrorism the action is in the reaction of the opposition so this is how a small group of bandits or criminals or a militia gets a superpower to hurt itself and
		is by giving their politicians an excuse to exploit a crisis to exploit and overreact and then with that reaction comes in the counter reactions now Hezbollah and every Shiite militia in the region and all the Sunni kings everybody has to take a stand and all the politics are mixed up.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I want to make sure we can answer the previous point you made.
unidentified		All right okay so there are a few of them can I is it fair to characterize your position as like what Israel should do here as like mark and reprisal effectively of Hamas right assassinate top leadership is that a fair characterization?
unidentified		Anything else that you think they should do in addition to mark and reprisal and trying to kill top leadership?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think a lot of it would be negotiable, in fact.
		I read Seymour Hersh had a piece where he's talking to high-level Israeli sources, intelligence sources, and they're saying they're negotiating with the political factions of Hamas, who are at odds with some of the military factions, and they're talking about possibly holding trials for them.
		So like arrest and criminally prosecute them?
		I don't know exactly how the system works in Gaza, and I'm not saying that I know that this is credible, but I'm saying Israeli intelligence officials are telling Hirsch that they think that there's a way that they can negotiate with the political guys and put pressure on the military guys, even have them held accountable, as this would be part of the process for hostage negotiations and the rest.
		So I'm not saying, and I'm no negotiator, okay?
		But I am saying that there's a hell of a lot of gray area between black and white here where reasonable men could be much better than Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush at this.
unidentified		Alright, okay, so that's enough to give me something to say, like, here to respond to, right?
		Okay, so I don't think that's nearly adequate, right?
		And I don't think the Israeli government thinks it's nearly adequate.
		Obviously, self-evidently, but also that neither does the Israeli public, and I think there's a few reasons.
		I think, first off, there's a big distinction between the difference between Al-Qaeda in 2001, after they had attacked us, and Hamas in Gaza.
		Hamas is a much bigger organization, numbers-wise.
		It has much more infrastructure in place, is right on the border, in a small but defined area.
		You're not invading an entire large country the size of Texas, you're invading an area the size of Las Vegas.
		Um, and more to the point, killing, you know, putting out, just doing assassinations against Hamas, you know, Hamas leadership, I guess, in Qatar, or, you know, in Gaza itself.
		I think those are the guys they're trying to negotiate with, are the guys hiding out in Qatar.
		Right, like, so, I mean, that doesn't actually solve the fundamental problem.
		Like, even if you took out the entire top leadership of Hamas, and that's all you did, Well then there's still all the tunnels, there's still the rank and file of tens of thousands of soldiers, still all the military equipment, still all the rockets.
		I mean it really is actually kind of insane when you think about the fact that- Well that's just, if you assume that we just go back only to the pure status quo after that- Right, but like why, I mean, if you aren't willing to invade them and impose a new status quo on Hamas, meaning you're gone, then why wouldn't they go back?
		They're committed to the Destruction of Israel it's in their charter, and it's in their actions on October 7th was in their charter wasn't there Oh until I think what a couple years ago.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They changed it did they yeah?
unidentified		I don't know yeah 2017 they do yeah, okay, well I mean, maybe I think that might have been some of the faint that ultimately you know what they were doing in order to see We can actually get to this Netanyahu thing funding Hamas like I think that's But I think I want to make one other point because you also had you had these other points about the bombing of civilians and right like the fact that even if you're not targeting civilians you're going to end up killing a good number of them.
		I think Israel was conscious of that fact.
		I think two weeks evacuation notice demonstrates that.
		And I think more to the point, you see the news reports coming out now that basically all the civilians in North Gaza have evacuated to the South.
		It was perfectly feasible.
		They just weren't doing it because either, one, they didn't take Israel seriously, or two, Hamas was holding them in, as Israel has accused them of, preventing them from evacuating.
		That's on Hamas, right?
		That's a war crime from Hamas preventing civilians from evacuating from an area where military operations are going on.
		So, I mean, I think because Israel has to respond and cannot tolerate Hamas on its border after an event like this, They're doing the best that they can under the circumstances.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm curious, two weeks notice, that's not just to civilians, that's to Hamas.
unidentified		Yes, correct.
		I mean, that's very generous.
		They aren't obligated to do that under international law.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You know, they dropped more bombs on Gaza in Five weeks than America dropped on Afghanistan at the highest year of the war there in 2019, which is amazing that Trump bombed Afghanistan in 2019 more than Obama did in 2010 and 2011.
		It's incredible to me.
		But they dropped more bombs on Gaza in the space of four or five weeks.
		You can't concede at all that some of this is disproportionate or seemingly careless to civilian lives.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does that mean?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does it mean they bombed Gaza more?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, they drop more bombs in terms of tonnage.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But that doesn't mean anything to the intelligence, to the military factors.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Gaza... Well, look at the results.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You got 12,000 dead people.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		But this doesn't answer the question of war, right?
		Afghanistan and Gaza are substantially different places with different leadership with different circumstances and so I hear things like More people died here than here.
		This is how many people died and I'm like, we're right.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think all death is bad I mean, but take your analogy Afghanistan is much bigger fighting a massive Taliban insurgency at their height in 2019 which trying to stave off total defeat there but due to massive air war Which actually is my point.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If Afghanistan is sparsely populated, then they're going to use less bombs and less air.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Not sparsely populated.
		Much more populated.
		Well, per capita per mile, but we're not talking about density, we're talking about they were bombed, wait, in Afghanistan they were bombing the Helmand province and the Kandahar province, especially, and Nangarhar, and they were bombing the crap out of it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		My point is, the moral arguments of two completely different things doesn't mean anything, I don't understand the point.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Other than to make it seem like one thing is bad based on a number argument which doesn't get to the core of the differences.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The point is we're talking about the amount of munitions dropped on a vaster battlefield over a much larger period of time against a much larger enemy and taking that same number of munitions being dropped on a smaller number of people in a much shorter period of time in a much smaller area.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		How many people died in Afghanistan due to the bombings over the... Nobody really knows.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Hundreds of thousands over the 20 years.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Nobody really knows.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So Israel's bombed Gaza more, but it's substantially less in terms of casualties.
unidentified		Correct.
		That's actually a number that's come out.
		It's something like the ratio of building destruction to casualty.
		There's a lot of buildings in Gaza that have been destroyed.
		Gaza's going to be in ruins after this.
		There's just no getting around that.
		But the ratio of casualties to building destruction is actually, like, a lot lower than in other wars.
		And I think a big part of it is because Israel gave them a huge amount of time to evacuate.
		A huge amount, unheard of in modern wars.
		America didn't do that, right?
		Like, we didn't do that in Iraq.
		We didn't do that.
		We certainly didn't do that in ISIS.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Obama killed civilians and, just to throw this in there, made the argument that military-aged males were enemy combatants, even if they were just carrying buckets of water.
unidentified		Also, I think one other point is that, you know, Hamas did something unique that we haven't seen in the history of, like, modern warfare, which is building an enormous castle underneath a city, right?
		That's a novel phenomena, and it poses challenges to, like, how are you going to deal with it as a military when you have an affirmative obligation to your own citizens to destroy this organization and they're all hiding out under, you know, they built a castle underneath the city.
		Well, first you got to get the people out of the city because it's a war zone.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		I want to go back to what you said about Iran and about how boy, uh, and again, this is some black and white stuff.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I sure hope I didn't imply, although I guess I could understand why people might've heard it this way that, Oh, everything over there would just be great for America if it wasn't for Israel.
unidentified		That's not the case.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we've had nothing but Clintons and Bush's and Biden's and McCain's in charge of this country for 30 years.
		And everything that they touch turns to fire.
		And so I'm not saying that everything would be fine.
		But for example, Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger's right hand man.
		He wanted to build an oil pipeline across Iran from Azerbaijan in the 1990s.
		Israel said, no, you can't do that.
		Dick Cheney, the head of Halliburton in the 1990s, committed the high sin of going overseas and complaining about Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iran and saying, look, these people are Shiites too and God didn't see fit to put all the oil of the world under wonderful Western democracies and so we have to do business with these people.
		The old Ayatollah is dead.
		The new Ayatollah is in there.
		President Rafsanjani and Khatami and these guys, yeah they're bad guys, but they're not any worse than the Saudis who we deal with across the Gulf.
		Of course we could normalize relations with Iran.
		As I said, Israel stayed friends with Iran after the revolution until they turned on them in 1993.
		Iran didn't start backing Hamas until two years after that.
		And people can read all about that in Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi, which is a fantastic book that covers that.
		So no, it doesn't mean everything would be perfect, but could America get along with Iran?
		Or just, oh no, they all hate us because of the coup of 53 and they'll never get over that?
		I don't think that's right.
		I think it's the Americans who will never get over the revolution of 79 when they overthrew the government that we had no right to foist on them in the first place.
		And Jimmy Carter was asked about it.
unidentified		He goes, oh, 1953?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's ancient history.
		It was just 25 years ago!
		What if they had overthrown Bill Clinton and installed a Shiite dictator over America?
		Would we be used to it by now?
		Or over it by now?
		It's completely crazy.
		But anyway, they've tried to come in from the cold over and over again, and we could bring them into the cold.
		America's a superpower.
		All this stuff is negotiable.
		If Alexander Haig and Dick Cheney want to do business with Iran, then that means it's at least within the realm of possibility.
		But I wanted to get back to something that, and I know I did bring up a whole lot of stuff in my opening statement there about the terror war, but I wonder if you could address this major conflict between the fact that America's enemies are these Wahhabi Salafi Bin Ladenites, or at least led Bin Ladenites, the shock troops off and on of our Saudi allies, but that Israel's enemies in the region are the Shiites.
		But it wasn't Hezbollah that knocked our towers down.
		It wasn't Iran that knocked our towers down.
		And so they have us, for example, under, as I said in Syria, under heavy pressure from the Israel lobby in the United States, backing al-Qaeda headchopper suicide bombers because they hate the Shiites more.
		But why should Americans hate the Shiites more?
		You know, David Stockman said, hell, we should ally with Iran and Russia to kill Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
		They're the bad guys here.
		And what do they do?
		They spent 10 years telling us that we were crazy because those Al-Qaeda terrorists are moderate rebels who are just trying to save the people of Syria from the evil Shiites.
		And you've got to admit that there's a division in American Israeli policy on that, right?
unidentified		There's a reason I didn't agree to a debate about American policy in Syria.
		Okay, okay.
		But that was an Israeli... I mean, Israel might have wanted it, but I think it's overstating the case to say that it's at Israel's behest.
		We are an independent nation, and Obama had his own purposes.
		Our foreign policy establishment did those things in Syria for its own reasons, even if Israel liking it too was maybe a Yeah well Scott let me ask you.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think it was more than a cherry on top.
		I think if you remember in 2013 after the first fake sarin attack in Gouda and Barack Obama and John McCain said come on everybody let's go to war and he said hey I need help from civil society come on everybody let's help do this.
		Only AIPAC And the Center for Security Policy and these most pro-Israel organizations in D.C.
		came out and said, yeah, let's go to war in Syria.
		And remember, in fact, I bet you covered this at the time.
		What did the Army say and the Marines?
		They held up signs and said, I am joining the Army to go fight for al-Qaeda in Syria.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But let me ask you, I think there's a difference here.
		You're suggesting the United States is more directing Israel's actions, or you're saying Israel's lobby is directing U.S.
		actions?
unidentified		I wouldn't say the United States is directing Israel's actions.
		I mean, there's an interplay, right?
		We have influence over the Israeli government.
		They have some influence over our government.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think a lot of the times the flea wags the dog in a way that should not be.
unidentified		But it definitely goes both directions, right?
		Like our State Department and Anthony Blinken is not there even as well as much as it's saying, oh Israel you can do what you want.
		They're not there to just give carte blanche to Israel.
		They've been pushing for A lot of different things with the Israeli government.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, and by the way, you know, the pro-Israel hawks in America, the neoconservatives in America oftentimes are worse than the Likud government in Israel.
		And they were worse than Ariel Sharon when he was in power on, you know, he would try to compromise on some things and they would take him to task.
		And, you know, Ehud Olmert, who was between Sharon and Netanyahu, who is not a great prime minister but not a lunatic, he was negotiating with Syria in 2006 and Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to stop it when they could have negotiated.
		So America oftentimes is a negative influence on Israel.
unidentified		When they could be making progress, we're stopping them from doing so.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I definitely want to get into Hamas's funding because you brought that up a little bit, but the first thing I just want to ask more lightly before we jump into that, I know you mentioned Will asked you about mark and reprisal to go and take out the Hamas leaders.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Following October 7th, do you have a A general idea of like, I'm not calling, I don't want to imply you're a military leader who would have these ideas, but what do you think Israel's actions should have been immediately following October 7th?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, so the first thing is you went about the right to defend themselves.
		Clearly they had the right to kill any Hamas guy outside that gate and chase them back inside at that point.
		That is quite literally defending themselves, right?
		But I have a friend, an Israeli friend, who is a military veteran of the 2006 war, who said to me right after this, he goes, look, They're surrounded.
		Okay?
		This is Waco now.
		And no, David Koresh never went to town and killed innocent people.
		And he never was going to.
		But anyway, the point is, they are surrounded.
		This is not a sovereign nation-state next door.
unidentified		This is essentially a prison uprising.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Or, you know, a ghetto.
		And so, time is on Israel's side.
		You're angry, you want to go in there and do something horrible and even if there's collateral damage and all of that.
		But to be perfectly clear about this for people who don't know about this story, the only reason Hamas was able to break out on 8-7 was because the IDF and their commander-in-chief were derelict in their duty.
		Netanyahu had called hundreds, I think more than a thousand soldiers away from Gaza and sent them to the West Bank.
		They're overly reliant on all this high-tech sensors and automatic machine guns and all of these things.
		The first thing Hamas did was take out a few cell phone towers and completely crippled the Israeli response.
		So they were derelict in their duty.
		But then what happened?
		They called up 300,000 reserves and every drone in the fleet, right?
		So no one's getting out of there now.
unidentified		So it's just like at Waco, Texas 30 years ago.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		What's the hurry here that we have to go in and kill these people?
unidentified		What would you do though?
		What would you have Israel do?
		That's the core question.
		Like, what would you have Israel do?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think they should do everything that they can to try to negotiate with the political factions of Hamas to see what can be done to isolate the military leaders.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Now, if that's just going to lead to a coup and the Al Qasim brigades take over the whole thing and the political people are powerless and there's no choice, then I guess you have to use violent action.
unidentified		But look, there's a video of this the other day I saw.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They use one of these Hellfire missiles with no warhead on it.
		It shoots swords out and kills people.
		That's how, I think that's how they killed Sheikh Yassin in 2004, which we're about to talk about the history of Sheikh Yassin here, I hope, and all of that.
		And they killed him and one other person in the car with him.
		So, you know, this is like, you could say that you get some really evil chess pieces, but Israel owns the entire board here.
		IDF and Shin Bet and Mossad have essentially god-like omniscient power of life and death over the people in that strip and they can reach out and touch these guys one at a time.
		The deal here is the doctrine became we are going to completely root out and completely annihilate the existence of Hamas now and so now anything standing between this and that goal is permissible and I think that You know, probably we're gonna see at the end that they actually don't go that far, and that a lot of this was for nothing.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Are you saying that immediately following October 7th, after Israel secures its, you know, as you mentioned, takes out any Hamas guy attacking them, they secure that they should have not had any military strikes in Gaza?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, if they had cleared military targets with no collateral damage and they could do some reprisals, then sure.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So you said to negotiate, so I'm just trying to clarify, October 7th happens, Israel pushes back the Hamas fighters, kills many of them, stops the fighting, secures the border, whatever you want to call it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		At that point, you think Israel should begin negotiations and not military strikes?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends.
		If you have, you know, entire Hamas divisions separate from innocent civilians that are easy to drop a hellfire on, what the hell do I care?
		You know, I don't know.
		I'm not a total pacifist here, but essentially what I'm doing is I'm preaching the minarchist solution.
		What you want to do is the least amount of damage, especially to these innocent civilians, as you possibly can, and try to figure out a better way forward.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Yeah, I just think, I mean, so first off, I think that's, I think that's the ethically incorrect response from the perspective of Israel's government.
		And I also think it, I mean, I could say it's politically impossible, but I think you'd probably agree with me that that response by an Israeli government would be literally politically impossible.
		A government that tried it would be tossed out, instant elections, new government that is willing to go to war.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I'm not so sure about that.
unidentified		I mean, again, like there are... I think you're very much underestimating the attitude of the Israeli public here.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Possibly, but I mean, there are Israeli intelligence professionals who are talking this way to the papers too, so if you have the right technocrats in the Israeli national security state explaining why they think this is wise, then you could do X, Y, or Z policy, I believe.
unidentified		Sure.
		But I also, I mean, so I think that's a less interesting debate for us to have than the, like, the ethical one, right?
		Is it actually right for Israel to go ahead and invade and take out Hamas?
		Because, you know, that's the central question.
		Um, I think it is.
		I mean, I'm a nationalist.
		I think the American government has its first obligation to protect American citizens, and I think the Israeli government's first obligation is to protect Israeli citizens.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think Scott agrees.
unidentified		Right?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Scott said, hellfire the Hamas guys if you can get them.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		But look, I also said, while this is on the last show, that Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
		They just won't give these people equal rights.
		So they live in this ghetto because they're born with the wrong religion and so they're stuck there and so they don't have a state of their own to protect them.
		You're a nationalist but you're not a Palestinian nationalist.
unidentified		No, certainly not.
		I don't think that Israel should give them a state.
		We can talk about the two-state solution.
		That's an interesting separate question.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So they don't get equal rights within the Israeli state that rules them, as Netanyahu said, and I have the exact quotes here, as Netanyahu said, it will always be one state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, just will not be free.
		It will only be free for Jews, and the Palestinians are just going to have to learn to live with it.
		That's the Israeli doctrine.
		Are there Muslims who live in Israel who Yeah, so 20% population of Israel is Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Are they free with equal rights and everything?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They have essentially second class citizenship.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They're not allowed to intermarry.
unidentified		They're not allowed to live wherever they want.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They have some representation in the Knesset, but up until the last regime before Netanyahu, the tradition had been for decades.
		That no government will form with the Arabs.
		They would rather lose and let the other guys form a government than have Arabs in the ruling coalition.
		And they only broke that for the very first time the last time.
		So they've never had the government minister positions except once in the last few years here.
		But then, so, and this is an important point, Tim, because, you know, the pro-Israel side always says, well, but look how well we treat the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
		They get along fine and everything's just fine.
		Well, fine.
		So why don't you do that for all the rest of them too?
		Instead, you're supposed to believe that if it's free from the river to the sea, then no, that definitely 100% means that every Arab is going to kill every Jew until they're all dead.
		But that's just a fact not in evidence.
unidentified		I mean, I can, we can pull up the poll that just came out that was just done of Gaza and the West Bank.
		But it showed that roughly 75% both in Gaza and the West Bank supported the 10-7 massacre, agreed that Hamas's actions were good.
		Wow.
		What was the percent of that?
		75%.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I don't know that that's right.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I just read the WinUp poll, again, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy against interest, and they said that the majority of people of Gaza reject Hamas and are stuck with Hamas and don't even like them at all.
unidentified		I don't know.
		I mean, this poll looked fine to me, and I mean, it tracks historically.
		There's a lot of hatred there.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And you know what's true?
		That also is, as I know you understand, that is the rally around the flag effect when they're in the middle of being bombed.
		It's the same as Americans giving George W. Bush a 90% approval rating when he's torturing people to death and bombing innocent countries.
		Sure, but you can understand- It's when you're being attacked, they're being very nationalistic and rallying around their leader.
		But I bet you if a pollster said, come on, you don't really think it was okay to kill those people at the kibbutz, I bet you they'd answer affirmatively to that too.
unidentified		Maybe, but I just want to actually... Sorry, lost my train of thought for a second.
		You could understand that the Israeli government might be willing to grant a state.
		And you know what the core thing when you're talking about granting a state is?
		We talk about a state and it's just this hypothetical thing.
		It means granting the right to a sovereign military.
		Two people who think the 10-7 Massacre was a good idea.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not, though, because the whole idea of the Palestinian state from 1979 all the way through was a state minus, where they would not have their own standing military force.
unidentified		That's effectively what Gaza opposed?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not!
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, come on, man, it's not.
unidentified		It is!
unidentified		I mean, other than Gaza, you know, consistently sending rockets, and so Israel having to put some structures in place to defend themselves from consistent attack, but I mean, Israel evacuated Gaza.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm glad you brought that up.
		So let's talk about this.
		In 2005 Ariel Sharon pulled all the last of the Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip and called it the unilateral disengagement and his senior advisor Dov Weiss-Glass was being criticized And Sharon was being criticized for giving away the whole store to the terrorists.
		And I don't know if you're familiar with this quote.
		This is, everyone can look this up.
		It's Dov Weissglass with no E, just D-O-V Weissglass.
		And this is what he told Haaretz.
		He said, quote, the significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.
		And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion of the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem.
		Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.
		And all this with a U.S.
		presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
		The disengagement is actually formaldehyde.
		It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.
		The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure.
		It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.
		We educated the world to understand there is no one to talk to, and we received a no one to talk to certificate.
		And that certificate says, one, there's no one to talk to, two, as long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact, and three, the certificate will be revoked only when Palestine becomes Finland.
		See you then and shalom.
		In other words, we get to keep gobbling up the West Bank because we don't have to deal with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
		They're divided and conquered.
unidentified		So that's entirely a separate question from the one I was talking about.
unidentified		Like we were, you were asking.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You were saying when they withdrew, they created essentially a state for the people of Gaza.
unidentified		The state minus that you're talking about, right?
		Like they had self-government.
		There was no Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, but they're completely surrounded.
unidentified		It is the state minus that you described, like if you don't think they should get a separate military.
unidentified		No, that's not true.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's like saying that, you know, an Indian reservation is a nation and it has full independence, but it's not true.
		They don't have a port.
		They don't have an airport.
		They don't control their own fishing rights.
		They're not allowed to fish more than six miles off their own coast.
		They're not allowed international trade.
		They're under total siege from the outside in Egypt.
		Israel is the southern border in cooperation with the United States and Israel.
unidentified		And Gazans travel?
		And Gazans fly out of Cairo?
		The idea that this is a prison is wildly overstated.
		It's just not, right?
		It's the only prison in the world where there are no prison guards inside the prison.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I have just a general question I'm curious about in this regard too.
		There are a lot of people who are in the US who are Palestinian or related to Palestinians or descended from Palestinians.
		I just don't know the process by which you're born in Gaza and then you find yourself living in the United States as a citizen.
		Do they just apply to leave and then?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I believe that there's like a limited amount of permits per year and then the question is whether you're allowed back again.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Because the more when when Palestinians- I mean if the Israelis try to keep them from coming back.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		There are people that I've met who are Palestinian, born in the area, and now they live in America, and they're citizens.
		That exists, right?
		I just don't know enough about it.
unidentified		It's not a prison.
		That's a wild overstatement of the case.
		Yes, there is a wall, and there's very, very limited migration, and controlled migration, and controlled entry and exit from Gaza into Israel, but that's not the only border.
		There's Egypt as well.
		There's a reason for that, i.e.
		the consistent and almost, you know, non-stop rocket fire coming.
		I mean, think about this.
		Israel literally invented a state-of-the-art missile defense system in order to deal with the fact that they had rockets coming from 50 miles away on a regular basis, and it's just a normal thing in Israel for everybody to get into bomb shelters on a regular basis.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I had a friend in Israel, an Israeli friend, and I think it was protective, I think it was around 2014.
		This was one of the first times the rockets actually reached Tel Aviv?
		I don't know a lot about it.
		All I know is I get a frantic message from someone saying a rocket exploded over their house and they didn't think it was possible for something like this to happen.
		There was just sheer panic.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Remember the, I guess, 2008 war, and Jon Stewart's interviewing, or he's playing a clip on the Daily Show from, I guess, CNN, and the guy's like, yeah, reporting live from Tel Aviv, and he's wearing a pink polo t-shirt, and he's like, yeah, rocket fire and all the danger, and they show the clip from the guy in Gaza, and he's wearing a helmet, a bulletproof vest, there's literally explosions going off all around him.
		You know, my Israeli friend sent me a picture of, look, a rocket hitting an apartment.
		And it came right in the window and blew up a kitchen.
		Like, if a lady had been standing in that kitchen, she'd have been killed.
		But we're talking about... Like, that's it.
		It would have messed up this room, and maybe killed one or two people in it.
unidentified		The relative strength of these explosives is... Let's address that.
unidentified		You wanna go first?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean...
		I'm not sure I understand the moral argument.
		I feel like this is a common among... I'm not trying to use this as a dig.
		The left argument of oppressed versus oppressor, that morality is in some way...
		Morality is, in large, or at least a component of morality is, the strength of one side versus the other.
		I'm not sure I agree with that, right?
		Just because one person has more power?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I don't think, well if anybody ever said that, it's just who has more power.
		But the question is, who has the ability to make decisions to change the situation?
		It's just like, I like to bring up the Attica prison uprising in, uh, what?
		1974, whenever that was.
		Governor Rockefeller sent the National Guard in there to just massacre everybody.
		We just didn't have to do that, right?
		Like, yes, there are minimum security prisoners who were caught up in this thing, and there are very bad felons who've taken over the prison, but the whole place is surrounded
		Send in Sam Jackson to negotiate man and instead what they do they send in the National Guard who killed innocent people including guards prison guards were killed when they sent in the overwhelming force because you gotta shore up your state and you can't you know Governor Rockefeller had to prove who's boss there when it just isn't necessary to go that far and no I'm not saying that Hamas somehow is What, they're more moral because their rockets are weaker?
		I never said that and that wasn't even the implication of what I'm saying.
		I'm just talking about their relative ability to inflict harm on the people of Israel.
		It's almost negligible.
		And let's go back because you did bring this up.
unidentified		Let's go back and let's talk about where Hamas even comes from.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Hamas was a charity that took care of education and food for poor people.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think Tim, you made this point pretty well.
unidentified		Weakness does not equate to morality.
unidentified		I think you agree with that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		- Okay, go ahead. - So, Will wanted to address the proportionality.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		- Okay, go ahead.
unidentified		- So, again, I mean, I think actually, Tim, you made this point pretty well, right?
		Like the strength, the weakness does not equate to morality, right?
		I think you agree with that.
		- Sure. - Like, so, despite being substantially weaker, is engaged in immoral action.
		I think the second point is that even if, like, currently unmolested Hamas doesn't have the ability to just kill everybody, you know, they lack the means to do what they would want to do in Israel, which is actually genocide, by the way.
		Like, I don't know if you agree with me that Hamas's goals in Israel are genocidal.
		Do you agree with that?
		Yes?
		No?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, they had said in the past, look Sheikh Yassin in January of 2004, it's in the London Independent, said I'm ready, I'm old and I'm tired of this and I'm ready to sign on the dotted line for a two-state solution within 67 borders and two months later the Israelis killed him.
unidentified		Right?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Which is the same thing they did in Lebanon when Arafat said he wanted to negotiate, so they invaded Lebanon.
unidentified		You're trying to dodge, get out of the pocket.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I'm saying Hamas, when their leader said he wanted to deal, they murdered the guy.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So if you're asking me about like right now, the current leadership of Hamas, are they very bad guys who should be killed rather than dealt with?
unidentified		Do you think their goal is a genocide in Israel?
		I think that's a fair characterization, because I think it is.
		I wouldn't necessarily say it's an unfair one.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They have not said that I have heard recently that their goal is to destroy the entire state of Israel.
		I do know, and they may have, but I do know that I have seen Hamas leaders for years say they're willing to accept I saw one of them say it on the Charlie Rose Show years ago.
		John McCain said that that was true and that maybe we should negotiate with them on that basis in the past.
		So, I'm not saying that the guys who are currently in charge, because I don't know the names of all the guys currently in charge over there, but I do not think that it is just a fact.
		In fact, Al-Qaeda has for years denounced Hamas as a bunch of progressives and liberals and wimps and Westerners for participating in democracy at all, for negotiating with the West at all.
		So, they're not exactly the same as Al-Qaeda.
unidentified		I think post-10-7, I think that's pretty straightforward.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Post 10-7 we're in a very difficult situation, but what's the alternative?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You know, you're going to drive every fighting-age male out of Gaza, and then you're going to call that peace?
unidentified		I mean, you're going to destroy Hamas and basically prevent the organization from coming back into power.
		I mean, this isn't Iraq.
		This isn't the size of Texas.
		This is a place the size of Las Vegas.
		A little bigger than Tallahassee, where I live.
		I think Israel is very much within its capability to achieve the objective it has set out, which is the destruction of Hamas.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And then what, the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip permanently?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I mean... Under military occupation?
unidentified		You know, in the medium term, yeah, has to be.
unidentified		I mean, what's the alternative if your goal is to prevent this from happening again so that people can live in southern Israel again?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any kind of idea for a solution to this one state, two state, binational state, or just they should all have to go live in the Sinai Peninsula, or what?
unidentified		I think it's someone else takes, either Israel takes sovereign responsibility over the Gaza Strip, or somebody else does, Egypt, Jordan can take some sovereign responsibility over the West Bank.
		But I think there's a reason that the two-state solution has been, I find it, you know, you're so critical of Clinton and Indyk and all these other people who, like, for whom the two-state solution was this beacon, this lodestar, and yet you're like, You propose the very, very same solution that is like the ultimate neoliberal solution to Palestine.
		I think the entire point of the two-state solution, the two-state solution and the drive toward it is actually a continuous generator of war.
		We don't have people, you know, this sort of irredentism and revanchism in places like Poland and Germany, And Algeria, and you name it.
		And I think the correct answer here is, you know, not a two-state solution.
		I certainly don't think that a Palestinian state that would ultimately probably be controlled by Hamas is a good idea at all.
		I think the Israelis think it's just completely out of the question now.
		I think even if you got rid of Netanyahu, they'd think it's completely out of the question.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think anybody's talking about a two-state solution with Hamas in charge of the thing.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I've never heard anyone propose anything like that at all.
unidentified		The problem is that's the likely end result, right?
		The PA doesn't have any real constituency, so the likely end result of what would happen in Gaza and likely the West Bank in a world where there wasn't the rest of the world holding it desperately together would be a Would it be Hamas taking over?
		And it's a risk that I don't think the Israelis can really take.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The bottom line, Will, about the two-state solution is that it was always an illusion.
		It was a lie.
		The peace process that said, we're going to eventually give you a state, was a scam.
		Because what the Israeli right wants, and I don't mean every Israeli citizen, I mean the right-wing nationalist factions in charge, They want the West Bank.
		They call it Judea and Samaria.
		And they said that the Bible says that they can have it.
		And if millions of Palestinians live on it, that's just tough.
		And they don't want a two-state solution.
		If Bill Clinton wants a two-state solution, well then we'll tell him that, sure Bill, we'll work on a two-state solution.
		And I actually have the whole thing here.
		I'm sure you've seen the secret recording of the candid camera recording of Netanyahu talking about how he took advantage of Bill Clinton.
unidentified		I really don't care that Netanyahu or the entire Israeli government lied to Bill Clinton over some nonsense.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I don't care about Bill Clinton either.
		The point is, it's like this, okay?
		In the 1960s, when the national government said to the South, Jim Crow is over, you guys are going to desegregate.
		If Mississippi had said, actually no, we are not going to desegregate and give blacks the equal rights in Mississippi.
		But I'll tell you what we'll do.
		We'll give them Northern Mississippi.
		We'll be an independent black state and then they can guarantee their own rights.
		And then they never did that.
		And then for 30 years and 40 years they had a peace process all about turning over northern Mississippi to the blacks someday.
		Meanwhile, they're colonizing more and more of it, building more and more white-only farms in that territory and they still never gave them their equal rights.
		That is what the two-state solution is.
		It was an illusion and this is why, hang on one second, this is why in 2020 when Netanyahu almost officially declared annexation, but backed down.
		But he did say explicitly, there will always be one government that controls all the land from the West Bank, I mean, pardon me, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
		And it was after that, that B'Tselem Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, all three put out reports saying this is officially apartheid now.
unidentified		Because as long as we're not pretending... I need to be able to respond at some point.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but I mean I'm just saying as long as we're not pretending that we're giving up a Palestinian state as a two-state solution anymore, then it is apartheid.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Where half the country controls the other half.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		We'll go way back to the question of Hamas's intention and we're talking about the two-state solution.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		This is from the Hamas Charter, Wikipedia, from its charter in 1988.
unidentified		The charter states that... Why don't you read the 2017 one?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Which I will.
		It's all in here.
		In 1988, the charter states that our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious and calls for the eventual creation of Islamic State in Palestine in place of Israel and the Palestinian territories and the obliteration and dissolution of Israel.
		The actual article, which is known as Article 7, summarized on Wikipedia, talks about how They want to eradicate the Jews.
		The final quote of the actual article says, Tim, everybody's heard this a hundred times.
		What's the point?
		until Muslims fight the Jews, killing the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.
		The stones and trees will say, "Oh Muslims, oh Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Only the Gar-Kad tree event. - Tim, everybody's heard this a hundred times.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		What's the point?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Why don't you read the Likud party charter, where it says that all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea will always belong to Israel, and they're coming for Lebanon and Jordan too.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's not the point.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So it's not the point.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		How come one party platform counts but the other party platform doesn't?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The point is, a question was asked, did Hamas intend to kill the Jews?
		He said, I don't know, maybe they did.
		I'm reading you, they did.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, the question was present tense, and then I talked about more recent past, where they had said that they dropped all that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Forget the party platform.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		We were willing to sign within the 67 borders.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Will made the point that Hamas's charter says they want to eradicate Israel and the Jews.
		I said it was changed in 2017.
		You said, maybe they said that, I'm not sure.
		I pulled it up to show you they did.
		The charter in 2017 changed this, and that is a fair point to be made.
		Take for it what you will.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think we're confused here.
		I wasn't disputing that their previous charter said horrible things in it.
		I guess I would dispute that party platforms really mean anything.
unidentified		On that very, very point, 10-7 demonstrates that whatever commitment the top-level political guys made in that charter was a fig leaf.
unidentified		They're willing to go into Israel and butcher and maim and rape and kidnap Israelis.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		But yeah, but you're leaving out, you're truncating all the antecedents such as the Netanyahu doctrine, which was, we're no longer pretending there's going to be an independent state.
		As he said in his UN speech just two weeks before the 10-7 attack, he got up there and he showed a map that had one state of Israel between the river and the sea, no West Bank carved out there, no Palestinian anything, and he said, this is the Netanyahu doctrine.
		The Arab Sunni states had always promised they would not normalize relations with Israel until they gave up independence or citizenship for the Palestinians.
		And what Jared Kushner figured out was the American taxpayer can pay the price.
		So we give F-16s to Bahrain, we give F-35s to UAE, we give debt forgiveness to Sudan, and we give northern western Sahara to Morocco.
		For all of them to sell out the Palestinians.
		And Hamas, and I'm sorry I have here somewhere the quote, where the Hamas spokesman says, this is the greatest emergency, these Abraham Accords, we are being completely sold out and left behind here, which is what Netanyahu says in his speech, nobody's coming for you.
		Now that the Palestinians know that they've been completely sold out, no one has their back anymore, now they're going to have to essentially give up their dream of having an independent state, Or anything like citizenship in one state, they're just going to have to learn how to be permanent, fourth class, not even citizens under foreign military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem from now on.
		And they're just going to have to learn to get used to it.
		That was his big victory speech at the UN.
		Then, two weeks later, they broke out of their pen and killed all these people in order to force this crisis, in order to try to undermine those accords.
		So you're saying that, look, they're genocidal, fine, they obviously butchered civilians.
		As I said in my introduction here, an extended family member of mine was abducted and killed by Hamas in this thing when they did what they did.
		They're perfectly willing to butcher civilians, obviously.
		But the point is, To zoom out and ask what is going on here that this is even a situation.
		You know most Americans, and you know whether you agree with my Indian Reservation analogy or not, most Americans would be under the impression that Palestine is a country.
		You talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, of course they have a country.
		Everybody has a country.
unidentified		Not everybody has a country.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They don't.
		I'm just saying that's what most Americans think.
		And if you show them a picture of Israel, it looks like the Arabs have invaded and taken this chunk, the West Bank, out of Israel.
unidentified		When that's all that's left, that they haven't conquered yet.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Right, but Americans are told land for peace.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The terrorists are trying to extort land out of the Israelis' land and they won't give them peace and stop terrorizing them unless the Israelis give them territory.
unidentified		That's not the land for peace formulation at all.
		That's the formulation delivered to Israel to tell them how to make peace.
		Like that's what led them giving Egypt to Sinai back.
		Like, that's the whole basis of Indyke and Bill Clinton.
		The idea is not that Palestine is trying to blackmail themselves into a state.
		I mean, the argument that the American people are seeing that is accurate is the Palestinians want Israel gone.
		Period.
		End stop.
		From the river to the sea.
		They want them gone.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Wait, who's they though?
unidentified		You're not speaking for the Palestinian people of all the West Bank and Gaza.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, I did pull it up.
		However, it's from I-24 and it's Berzate University.
		I believe it will be immediately dismissed by a pro-Palestinian side.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know.
		In the middle of a war, in the middle of a war, people answer questions stupid.
		The fact of the matter is, I've met plenty of Palestinians.
		I know plenty of Palestinians.
		They're just normal people like you and me.
		They want to live in peace.
		You want to talk about armed factions of armed Islamists who want to kill people, that's one thing.
		That's not the same as the population, the people of Palestine.
		It's this propaganda that these people are barbarians from the other side of Pashtunistan from here.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Palestinians in the West Bank were surveyed over their support for October 7th, and it was found that Hamas received a generally lower score of 76%.
		Asked on their views of various entities, residents answered overwhelmingly in support of the military wings of terror organizations.
		Palestinian Islamic Jihad with 84%, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades 80%, Al-Qassam Brigades with 89%, Hamas 76%.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's terrible.
		I'd like to know what those numbers were previously, you know, when you're not in the middle of a violent conflict.
		And honestly, guys, I think it's just, isn't it only fair that we recognize that we're having this conversation deep into the future now when it's 2023 and the Netanyahu doctrine is clearly shipwrecked on fire here and this could have been resolved a long time ago.
		I mean, Colin Powell tried to get George W. Bush to do a Palestinian state 20 years ago, and Sharon's men stopped him.
		The Jinsa crowd, as Powell called them, stopped him, and Sharon's men bragged that we saw the whites in Bush's eyes.
		He blinked first.
		Ha ha ha.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		We got away with it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So, let me throw something in here.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That was a question.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Don't you think that they could have, should have solved this 20 years ago when Cole and Powell tried to get Bush to do it then?
unidentified		I think it's pretty obvious now that a Palestinian state would have always been a bad idea for the state of Israel.
		That it's quite obvious that in their own interests, just literally from the core perspective of protecting their citizens from terrorism, it would be a terrible idea for there to be a Palestinian state so in the West Bank.
		I think it would be absolutely irresponsible of them.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What year was that, Scott?
unidentified		I am not a two-state solution guy.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		2002 and 3.
unidentified		Right.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So the first thing I want to say is...
		I don't care about Israel or Palestine.
		I care as much as I do about Burma, Myanmar, and Azerbaijan and Armenia, in which that I deeply care about the death, the human suffering, the war, the conflict, the American foreign policy of funding, and these things.
		But the fascinating thing to me is the self-identification of one or the other that we see from Americans in this.
		The fascinating thing to me is you absolutely do have pro-Zionist, and more loosely, more just pro-Israel factions in the United States, and then you have pro-Palestinian, and the arguments typically come from a self-identification with one or the other.
		Now, it's, it's, it's, I much prefer the more libertarian of like, I don't, look, it's a foreign country, you know, I understand the U.S.
		military apparatus and their interests in the region, as well as all the other countries they're funding and why they're funding it.
		But it is strange to me that we often see, and I'm not accusing either of you of doing this, but I think this is an interesting point in domestic policy.
		There are protesters, you know, trying to storm the DNC.
		There's children marching through halls of their high schools, identifying with one of these other groups.
		When I was in Northern Ireland, I'm in Belfast at the Peace Wall.
		On one side of the Peace Wall, They're aligned with Palestine.
		On the other side, they claim to actually be a lost tribe of Israel.
		I'm like, what is up with this conflict?
		I can just say this.
		Oh, you know what?
		At the end of the day, my view often of the morality and the question of the two-state solution is How about we secure our borders, we bring jobs back to the United States, we stop spending all this money overseas.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		America first.
		Look, when it comes to identifying with these people, I have to tell you, I am a libertarian and to me there's only two kinds of people in this world.
		Government employees and everybody else.
		I mean that sincerely.
		I absolutely identify with the civilians of the population of Israel just as much as the Palestinians, or if you want to put it negatively, I don't identify with the Palestinians or the Israelis any more than with any other group of people in the world.
		To me, non-combatants are non-combatants.
		They have my sympathy.
		And by the way, Hamas is not a government, but they are an armed militia of terrorists who would very much like to be a government, so that counts.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		To me.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		So that's whose side I'm on, is on the side of innocent suffering caught between these armed men fighting over lines on a map.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Always.
		And I agree with that for all regions.
		I agree with that with the Uyghur Muslims at the camps.
		I agree with what's going on in Myanmar, Burma and Azerbaijan with the Christians and Armenia.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Nagorno-Karabakh right now.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I have an answer for the Israel-Palestine conflict.
		I think it solves all of our problems.
		I think it should have been proposed a long time ago, and it's, I don't care, do whatever you want.
		We are the United States.
		- Let your conflict be your conflict.
unidentified		- Yeah, this is the, you know. - I'll go with you that far, but we're implicated in all this.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		This is our money and our weapons. - Now you can both yell at me.
unidentified		- Right, well, I mean, but there's a point to that that's true, right? - I agree, by the way.
		- Like, we don't, I don't think our interventions, you know, essentially this attempt at diplomacy with the two-state solution, I don't think any of that's been helpful.
		And in fact, I think the actual way to... The two-state solution and the sort of insistence on creating a new state where there's currently a sovereign, that's ultimately a generator of war.
		I think one interesting tension in sort of your overall worldview, from my perspective, is this... You are, broadly speaking, anti-war, right?
		You wanna see fewer wars, fewer conflicts.
		Am I... Right?
		That you're antiwar.org or antiwar.com.
		But I think that this position on the conflict, this sort of blaming Israel for the failure to give a Palestinian state out of the territory they're currently sovereign over, and insisting that... I think that that is itself the generator of war, and the ultimate way to peace here, the elegant and simple way to peace that has happened everywhere else historically in the world, is for everybody to say, you know what?
		Israel is sovereign over the territory that was formerly in the mandate.
		They're the sovereign, and if you want something different, you need to negotiate it with them, and if you want to go to fight with them, well, you better be ready for what they're going to do in response, and we don't care.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Including the West Bank and Gaza.
unidentified		Including the West Bank and Gaza.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They took in 67 in a war that they started, even though that's totally against the UN Charter that they signed and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
unidentified		Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
		I mean, we can get into history there, but Egypt and Syria are responsible for the casus belli in that war.
		They're the ones who blockaded the states of Tehran.
		I got the quote from Begin here talking about how they started, if you want to get into that, man.
		I'm pretty deep on the 67.
		Okay, good.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But my question is, to this point, history, history, history, all these different facts and all these different people come up.
		All right, let's say that outside of my, I don't care, you're not the United States, do whatever you want argument, people actually think, well, there's a real risk of regional conflict escalating and pulling in other factions.
		There is a point of, we're there in some degree, we have to at least have some kind of plan for this.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Wait, we need to talk about Netanyahu's support for Hamas.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Let me make this point and then we'll get that.
		If we go back and we keep trying to make arguments about who invaded whom, we have Max Blumenthal and Tim Castile argue that it was actually a Jewish kingdom that was invaded and conquered by Muslims, and the Jewish people there were forced to convert by threat of death.
		And that's why the Zionists wanted to return it, etc, etc.
		And what he said was, I hope I'm not getting his argument wrong, but my general understanding was, the people who are currently in Palestine are the people who have always been there, who were forced under threat of death to convert, and the people who have come back as the Zionists are the descendants of those who were expelled, refusing to convert.
		And I'm like, well, sounds like we've got a multi-generational thousand-year war, and there's no moral argument for who are who, like, if you're...
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's kind of a cop-out, though, Tim, because honestly, look, the Zionist project started in the late 19th century.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But my point is not that.
		And this is what I find frustrating.
		I don't care at all.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, whatever.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You're trying to say, look, they've been fighting about this for thousands of years.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What I'm saying is, right now, as Will pointed out, Israel is in control and this argument of inflating or empowering Palestine into greater numbers will exacerbate the problem.
		I don't care who's right.
		I don't care who's wrong.
		I don't care who invaded first.
		I don't care who's always been there.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		What's your point then?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		How do we end conflict and why first?
		My point, I don't care.
		Do whatever you want.
		We're not involved.
		If we have to be, then the issue is why would we make the problem worse by expanding Palestine?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, how about we're making problems worse by protecting the Israelis while they steal all that's left of Palestine.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Why don't you frame it that way?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		My first point is we shouldn't be involved at all.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Then why would there be an argument from anti-war activists to give Palestine more?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		What to give them more?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The argument is, stop abetting Israel taking what they have left, Tim.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If the United States completely is out of the equation, what does Israel do?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know for sure, but I'll tell you.
		If America's completely out of the equation, and they go ahead and finish, Cleansing the land and stealing all that land then at least it's not on us.
		So my point is... I don't presume that though.
		I think as I said before with the the Connolly's of Rice example, and there are others, that America oftentimes disincentivizes the Israeli government from seeking peace.
		I think they might have figured out a way to negotiate their way out of this crisis a long time ago if America, if Joe Biden and John McCain weren't always there to cash a check and save their ass.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		My point is, why even have a conversation about a two-state solution or any kind of negotiating at all instead of a don't care, do whatever you want?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Look, I am a libertarian.
		I'm a total non-interventionist.
		That's my premise.
		One is I don't want a U.S.
		government to exist at all, much less do anything to anyone.
unidentified		You want a Palestinian government to exist?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		We're arguing all other things being equal in the current situation, what's going on here.
		And in fact, I'm not Dead set on having a two-state solution, it ain't my problem.
		But what I am saying is, the current situation is the people of Palestine are under not just martial law, but under foreign military occupation law.
		That is, they live in a totalitarian state.
		They've been under total occupation since 1967.
		I mean, before that they had been sold out in a secret deal to the King of Jordan, the people of the West Bank.
		But they've been under Israeli military occupation since 67 and that's the the proximate cause of the problem here man is that they don't have independence and they don't have citizenship.
		They're just occupied and completely screwed and real quick on 1967 Begin said in June 67 we again had a choice the Egyptian army Concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us We must be honest with ourselves.
		We decided to attack him and he said that and Yitzhak Rabin, too, said, I do not believe that Nasser wanted war.
		The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14th would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel.
		He knew it and we knew it.
		And in 1972, General Peiled told Haaretz the thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.
unidentified		I mean, that just ignores the, I mean, the basic problem that Egypt decided to put a blockade on the Straits of Tehran and shut off all Israeli shipping to Asia.
unidentified		I mean, I don't know if you, we have a map or something that you could show it, but the Southern tip of Israel touches the Straits of Tehran, which attach the Red Sea.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Right.
		And that's Israel's only sea access to straight to the Middle East and to Asia.
		Otherwise they have to go all the way around Africa from their Mediterranean ports.
		And Egypt decided... But that's not what they said, though.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		What they said at the time was that Egypt attacked them and they were defending themselves.
unidentified		Not, well, we have a problem at our port here.
		They said Egypt had its military on the border, which it did.
		Egypt kicked out the peacekeepers, put its military into the Sinai Peninsula along the border with Israel.
		And remember, it was Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic together, or Egypt and Jordan?
		Egypt and Syria, I forget.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Egypt and Syria, I believe.
unidentified		I think it was Egypt and Syria.
		They were both going to attack it, and Israel, as a result of all this activity, the blockade, the moved troops, had to activate all its reserves.
		Israel's a reserve-based army, it can't keep those people activated forever because they have to go back to work.
		It's a huge chunk of their working age population, they can't just stay active forever.
		So, Egypt put him in a possible bind.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I need to know more about this because it is very complicated, but I know that there was a previous deal with United Nations forces were agreed by, peacekeepers were agreed by Egypt To keep the port of Akuba open.
		And there was, I forgot exactly how it happened, but there was previous controversy there.
		The Israelis hadn't even agreed to allow those UN forces there.
		And then when the Egyptians pulled them out, that was when the Israelis took that as their causus belli.
		But in other words, though, it wasn't a real one.
		And that was why they were able to destroy the Egyptian Air Force on the ground.
		It was because it was sitting on the ground.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's, let's, let's jump back to the one thing we keep saying we're going to talk about.
unidentified		Yeah.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Who's supportive of Hamas?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Yes, let's talk about this.
		I urge people to look up, especially Richard Sale in UPI.
		This is the prehistory of this.
		Sheikh Yassin, the old man in the wheelchair.
		Hamas was not created by Israel, it was created by the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was mostly a charity at first.
		And the Israelis built them up through direct financing and through arresting and persecuting their competition built them up as they said explicitly.
		In fact, I have a statement here.
		I have a quote here from the New York Times in 1981 where they first talk about how yes, we're starting to finance all the mosques.
		We're trying to build up a right-wing religious alternative to The PLO, which was sort of half commie, half nationalist, right?
		And so that was the policy.
		So if you read Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal and Richard Sale in UPI, also Robert Dreyfuss has a great treatment of this in his book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
		It's about how the whole point was to divide and conquer the Palestinians by promoting this right-wing religious alternative to the PLO.
		And so this is very important too for the Iraq War.
		I don't know if you know this one, but it is true as I mentioned before in January of 2004 Sheikh Yassin said he wanted peace and he wanted to sign on the dotted line and they assassinated him.
		And when they assassinated him, remember Tim, the riot in Fallujah where the Blackwater guards were lynched and their bodies burned and hung from a bridge in April of 04?
		That was in revenge for Israel's assassination of Sheik Yassin and the guys who did it called themselves the Sheik Yassin Brigade and they passed out flyers saying that was their motive and they dragged a guy's body through the streets in a car with Sheik Yassin in the windshield.
		And it was that lynching of those Blackwater guards in reaction to Israel's assassination of their old sock puppet ally Yassin that was the proximate cause for George Bush ordering James Mattis to go in there and smash that city.
unidentified		I don't mean to distract you but I don't think, I mean we're trying to get to the focus on Israel and Netanyahu.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		It is important that their assassination of Sheikh Yassin severely disrupted American plans and policies in Iraq War II, but you're right.
		I'll leave that aside.
		So here's the thing about Netanyahu, okay?
		I have all these quotes here from Netanyahu.
		I'll try to get to only the very best ones from Netanyahu and his finance minister.
		But I have, in fact, if people go to antiwar.com slash Scott, my last article is called Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired.
		And it has the entire collection of quotes here for people who want to look at this, okay?
		But first, this is Bezalel Smatric.
		This is the leader of Israel's Religious Zionist Party.
		He's the current finance minister.
		And he said this in 2021.
		He said, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset.
		On the international playing field, in this game of delegitimization, think about it for a second.
		The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset.
		It's a terrorist organization.
		Nobody will recognize it.
		Nobody will give it status at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN, which would cause us to need an American veto.
		I'm not sure at all that given the current situation and the current fact that the central playing field that we're playing in is international, Abu Mazen, that is a boss of the PA, is costing us serious casualties, he means political or PR casualties, and Hamas in such a situation would be an asset.
		And now the questioner had asked him, yeah, but Isn't Hamas dangerous?
		And he ended with, I don't think we need to be afraid of Hamas.
		And then Netanyahu, I have, sorry I'm paging down here, this is the, geez I hope I can find it, Netanyahu, I'll have to find the exact quote here, Netanyahu says, we must, oh here it is, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.
		This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
		It's impossible to reach an agreement with them.
		Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.
		Okay, so this is absolute imperial hubris and arrogance and it goes to show what a dirty, cynical game that these guys are playing here.
		They want to colonize that West Bank.
		They don't want to negotiate independence.
		They call it Judea and Samaria.
		They want to take it and so as long as they have a perfect little enemy, In Gaza, they can point to Hamas and say, Will, we have no partner for peace.
		You don't expect us to negotiate with these terrorists, do you?
		And it works because, of course, you don't expect them to negotiate with a bunch of terrorists.
		And so it's the perfect plan.
		As I said before, Hamas are very bad guys, but they're just pawns on Israel's chessboard here.
unidentified		So, I want to make a few points, right?
unidentified		So, again, the question ultimately was, like, Netanyahu allowing Qatar to give money and allow money to go to Hamas.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Asking them to.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		I don't know if it was an asking.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		I think it was like, you know, Qatar asked Netanyahu and Netanyahu and Likud exceeded.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Not according to Avigdor Lieberman, who said that they were, that Qatar and Turkey were sick and tired of Hamas's antics, and Netanyahu went over there and begged them.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That was according to his own defense minister at the time.
unidentified		In any event, Netanyahu will certainly suffer from this politically.
		I think you've seen in the polling in Israel, the domestic opinion polling, that if the election were held again today, Gantz would come in.
		Gantz who leads, I think, Blue and White or United for Israel.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Sorry to interrupt, but so we do concede that this is part and parcel, we agree, this is part and parcel of the Netanyahu doctrine, is keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, bolstering them in order to thwart a Palestinian state.
unidentified		As far as I can tell, I think you are correct on the fact that there was this divide and conquer approach to the PA and Hamas.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Does that change your perspective of the situation at all?
unidentified		Not in particular.
		I mean, it's one of the reasons.
		Hold on, let me explain.
		So, you are, I mean, basically it means that what Netanyahu and Smotrik and the, they made a serious and very bad miscalculation on behalf of their people.
		That's, we call that bad statesmanship.
		Like, you thought you were doing something good, and it turns out you enabled the growing of this terrorist group.
		Go ahead.
		Twelve.
		The survey you referenced earlier says twelve.
		group now did go ahead and butcher 1500 civilians agree right and well actually but the Israeli public is unified on the need to eliminate this terrorist group 12 12 okay 1200 so the survey you referenced earlier says 12 12 okay so 1200 but 1200 kidnapped 200 more yeah right um so there's a unified um front And so, and here's the thing, and this critique that you're making of Netanyahu is sort of in tension with your other arguments, i.e.
		your critique is they did too much to prop up and fund, especially recently, this group that was actually a terrorist group and a huge danger to them.
		Should they have cut off all funding and isolated them and tried to eliminate them beforehand?
		Should they have, I mean, because now the Israeli public and the Israeli government is like, okay, we agree.
		We got Hamas wrong.
		We're going to go in and take them out.
		And you're opposed to that, right?
		Like you're opposed to the invasion, or I guess maybe you're just supportive of some mark and reprisal stuff that I don't think would really get the job done, especially given all the money that went in.
		So I think, you know, your argument, you have identified something, a mistake made by Netanyahu as an Israeli statesman.
		But the logical conclusion of like, okay, if that was a mistake, then the answer now is going to be, okay, we're not going to do that again.
		And we're going to need to eliminate this group that we thought we could control.
		We thought we could control the height of the flame.
		We were wrong.
		Turns out they butchered 1500 of our citizens.
		Now we're going to make sure that never happens again.
		Isn't that the right answer for Israel?
		Like, that just goes back to my original point, like, what is my core thesis?
		Israel is acting reasonably and righteously in Gaza right now.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		But you're just taking it from one direction.
		The other answer would be, it's time to throw out Likud, get somebody like Gantz in there who is general and less ideological.
		And go ahead and negotiate that state.
		I think the Israeli public... Put the PA, wait, go ahead and let Abbas take control of the Gaza Strip so that you do have someone to talk to so that you can negotiate independence for these people.
		I mean, Will, you're saying they can't have citizenship and equality, they can't have independence, they're just going to have to learn to live under foreign military occupation, martial law, or F off to Egypt, Or go burn in the Sinai Desert somewhere.
unidentified		The most they're going to get is limited self-government, right?
		Like they're not going to get a state, right?
		Limited self-government in the sense of like, you can collect your own taxes, and you can have your own internal police force, and you can handle... Okay, so now we're talking about a binational state where they would have their own police, That's what's in the PA, right?
		They already have their own police in the PA.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		There's a big discrepancy between what the Palestinian Authority sovereignty is versus what a binational state would truly look like.
		The PA was created by Israel and America to be the subcontractor of the occupation.
		It's not exactly a Palestinian popular sovereignty type of organization, much less Hamas.
		You know, the reality is, and this is where we go back to that secret or the candid camera recording of Netanyahu, where he's talking about how, again, I'm not defending Bill Clinton's honor, he doesn't have any, okay, but what he's saying is, ha ha ha, I sexually assaulted Bill Clinton right in the face and I got him to do whatever I wanted and all I had to do was lie to him.
		and tell him that oh don't worry bill they're gonna have their state and everything they'll have all this territory all I need is my special little military security areas and then ha ha ha my special little military security areas are all of area C two-thirds of the West Bank And that sucker Bill Clinton, I got over on him.
		And then the lady says, geez, but are you going to get away with that?
		And he says, don't worry.
		I know how to handle America.
		America is easily moved.
		80% of them support us.
		It's absurd.
		He says, mocking American support for him, screwing over our leaders, trying to hold him to his government's signature on documents and promised positions that they would implement.
unidentified		I mean, I don't think that's Likud ever really agreed to that.
		I mean, part of why Likud came back into power in the first place is because the Israeli... Well, he's talking about what he signed at Y. He's talking about what he signed at the Y River Accord and how he didn't live up to it.
		Like, again, I think that I don't, I don't, I don't know enough about the Y River Accord to even speak to that.
		Well, you've seen the video of Netanyahu mocking how he got over on Bill Clinton, right?
		Yeah, I just, again, I don't, you know, that's what I've said before and I agree.
		I still don't care that he, like, mocked and got one over on Bill Clinton.
		I think that the entire American diplomatic track under the Clinton years was absurd and ridiculous and very much obviously something that Israel would have been insane to support.
		So, I think that instead, like, I want to see peace.
		I think the The world in which Palestine gets a state is not one where there's peace.
		Dear lord, I think it's one where there's actually a much bigger and larger war in a world where whatever government ends up arising and taking control of the West Bank and Gaza is able to build up a sovereign military.
		I mean, look at what they do with just a militia.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Come on, man.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's such a red herring.
unidentified		It's the core of the discussion.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not.
		It never has been ever at all since the takeover of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 67, since Camp David in 79, since Madrid in 92, and Oslo in 93, and Camp David in 2000, and all the way through Annapolis under W. Bush.
		Nobody ever said the Palestinians get to have a standing army.
		That was always excluded.
unidentified		That was never even part of the debate, Will, and you must know this.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The debate was whether they get East Jerusalem or whether they get Abu Dis, this tiny little suburb of East Jerusalem.
		The question was whether they get 67 borders or how much land do they swap.
		The question was how many refugees living in squalid camps in Lebanon and Syria are allowed to come home or not.
unidentified		The question was never the size of their standing military force.
unidentified		I understand that's not a question, but I'm saying like any real session of sovereignty is going to just massively increase security risks.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, real sovereignty was never in question here.
unidentified		That's certainly not the way that the Palestinians have ever talked about it.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's not true.
		And all you got to do is read the Palestine Papers.
		That was never even a topic of argument in any of these debates.
		And when it comes to even the borders, the land swaps, East Jerusalem, and the right of return, the Palestinians under Abbas have been absolutely obsequious and willing to sign on the dotted line for everything.
		That's why they needed Hamas in Gaza, so that they could say they have no partner for peace.
		Because under Abu Mazen, they absolutely do have one.
		That was why they say we can't let the PA rule Gaza or else the Labor Party will tell us to give up a Palestinian state.
unidentified		So we gotta keep the bad guys in power in Gaza.
		When they withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the PA was in charge.
		Then Hamas threw them out.
		It wasn't like...
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		No, well what happened was there was a coup.
		There was an election and Hamas won, unlike what you hear in the propaganda, Hamas won a plurality.
		They did not win a majority in a single district in that election.
		And by the way, at the time, the majority population of Gaza was minors.
		Is that even such a thing?
		The majority are minors? 44.45%.
		Yeah, so they did get a majority in the parliament, but that meant that they had to form a coalition government with the PA, and then America and Israel intervened and said no coalition government allowed, and then what'd they do?
		They punished the PA, not Hamas.
unidentified		They refused to let the PA get any of their tax money.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And they completely emasculated them.
		You've got to read this great article if you've never read it.
		It's called The Gaza Bombshell by David Rose.
		I know it's in Vanity Fair, which sounds ridiculous, but it's a great piece.
		And you know what?
		I was amazed by this.
		I just reread it the other day and I totally forgotten.
		He quotes in there David Wormser, the guy that wrote the clean break plan for Netanyahu and was Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor who said, we've got to do Iraq War II.
		And he quotes David Wormser, who is appalled at the attempted coup where Elliott Abrams, the neocon, worked with Ehud Olmert's government to try to build up a Fatah military force to attack Hamas.
		in the Gaza Strip and drive them out, but it backfired because they knew all about it and they got a hold of some of the weapons and so Hamas kicked their ass and drove them out.
		And it was only then that Hamas was able to take over the Strip.
		At that time there was a question of, if we're going to create a coalition government, maybe we can use this to try to get Hamas to moderate and come toward the PA.
unidentified		But the Israeli government refused to allow that to happen and they punished the PA.
		Why were they though?
		I mean Hamas is like Look, it was Bush and Omer who forced them to hold the election in the first place.
		Then Condoleezza Rice goes, oh whoops, we didn't think that was going to happen.
		Hillary Clinton said if we're going to hold an election, we've got to make sure who's going to win it.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You know how she is about Democratic elections.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Oh, by the way, I saw a thing that you did on Mike Flynn and his framing that was really great.
unidentified		Oh, well thank you.
		I'm a big anti-Russiagate guy.
		I really like that.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Just once I get on a Hillary tangent.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I want to bring something up because we were talking, I think Will asked for a map, I pulled up a map of the Gaza Strip, and what I've been looking at is the various views you can get of Gaza.
		And I do think one thing that a lot of left activists, a lot of the more pro-Palestine activists in this country, I'm not referring to the people who actually learned it on the issues.
		When we see these kids on TikTok say things like, you know, they read the Bin Laden letter and they agree with him or whatever, these are the kind of people I'm talking about who don't actually know anything about the good and the bad of Gaza.
		And you can make all the political arguments, but on the macro, when people say it's an open-air prison, they make all these references.
		In fact, I can't remember who I was talking to, but I asked them about farms, and they told me that there were no farms.
		Well, there absolutely are.
		There's a bunch of farms.
		I don't know if there's enough farms.
		And I said, how do they get food?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		A lot fewer than before, because the Israelis keep moving the fence in and in and in, stealing more of that farmland all the time.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		My point was, it's one of the most densely populated places in the world with 2.2 to 2.5 million people.
		Where do they get enough food?
		And I hear from some of the activists, oh, it has to be imported and brought in.
		And then I see these videos from, you know, Al Jazeera, where they say, oh, they can't get these things.
		Well, there are farms there.
		I'm not saying it's good.
		I'm saying it's important to understand this context.
		And additionally, There's actually, there's luxury in Gaza.
		I think it's important to bring up as well.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Further connected.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But I'm not trying to justify anything or I think it's important to have a more holistic picture of some of the things that exist in Gaza.
		It is not all, you know, we see these photos constantly of poverty and ghettos and, you know, let me just try and see if I can pull up any of these resorts or whatever.
		You know, some of these things are actually quite beautiful, quite nice, that exist here.
		So, I just don't want, what I'm trying to say is, this is not a moral statement on, is it doing well, is it doing bad?
		It's just important to bring up, if you actually go and look at some of the territories, the regions, the buildings, there are nice places there.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Part of this was Trump's deal of the century, right?
		Remember, Jared Kushner said, what we're going to do is we're just going to give them a bunch of money for economic development, through the Qataris, was part of it.
		For economic development, and they're just going to have to learn to accept that instead of having the right to vote and the right to participate in the government that rules over them.
		Instead of having independence or citizenship, we're just going to give them money.
		And it didn't work.
unidentified		This was part of the Netanyahu doctrine.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The Abraham Accords bolstering Hamas and bribing the Palestinians.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And look what it's resulted in is this absolute catastrophe.
unidentified		Well, I mean, I guess here's part of the point I want to make off of this, right?
		And it's again, the like, Gaza's not an open-air prison, right?
		Just demonstrably so.
		Israel, the idea that this is like... Well, not when you focus on the Potemkin parts of it, but a lot of it is a horrible ghetto where people live in squalor.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Are we able to pull this up?
unidentified		Israel does not govern Hamas, right?
		And it doesn't govern the Gaza Strip.
		It has security around it, but it doesn't govern it, right?
		Hamas is totally in charge prior to, you know, 10-7 of what happens inside the Gaza Strip.
		So, like, when you talk about how I'm sitting here thinking, like, a Palestinian state is a terrible idea because we're worried about military buildup and the ability to build up a military.
		Well, that's the one thing that's really lacking in the Gaza.
		That's the only thing they didn't really have outside of, like, negotiation over these border things and these fishing rights.
		Like, they can leave through Egypt.
		They just can't come into Israel unless they have a permit, for obvious reasons, given the intifadas, given the endless bombings and rockets and you name it.
		So, I think it's perfectly reasonable to sit here and say, like, after 10-7, given what Gaza had pre-10-7, which is, you know, self-government without full sovereignty, Why would we want them to have full sovereignty?
		It would be insane.
		And I think, I guess that gets back to, you know... It's not really self-government.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Again, we're talking about essentially, you know, the strongest gang in the prison took it over when the warden and his guards retreated to the perimeter.
		It's not like the people of Palestine have anything like a democratic system or process here where they chose these people.
		This is just... And look, if you read your Rothbard, this is virtually the case of every state anywhere in the world.
		This most powerful armed gang has control and seized it.
		The people don't have the ability to overthrow them any more than we have the ability to overthrow our government.
		They're stuck with them.
unidentified		I mean, yeah, they're, they're stuck with Hamas.
		I don't see how this is an improvement.
		I mean, I don't see how the, what the distinction is between the two state solution you suggest is like the option that should have been negotiated and how that has, what that state would look like, because you, you essentially concede that it shouldn't have a, shouldn't be militarized and what Hamas had in Gaza.
		I mean, in terms of like the rights that were allowed to it by Israel, like, is there a meaningful distinction?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think so.
		They don't have a seaport or an airport or, you know, their travel is completely restricted.
		Their ability to negotiate trade agreements with other nations is completely restricted.
		I mean, they are, under all the international laws and strictures, they are still considered to be occupied territory.
unidentified		Right, but I mean that's just an international title.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		I think saying that they have self-rule under Hamas is an overstatement here, and they are essentially still under siege under the control of the Israelis.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		You can say that it's a prosperous Indian reservation.
unidentified		It's not the Warsaw Ghetto, but it is a ghetto.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		And it is not independent.
unidentified		And the people there have no representation in the government that controls them.
unidentified		Given all the aid that went to the Gaza Strip over the past two decades, even under Hamas rule, if they had one decent statesman running the place, like let's say Nayib Bukele.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		All their decent statesmen are in prison, man.
		I mean, they're talking right now about trying to release this guy, uh, uh, Barghouti or whatever.
		No, Barghouti's the one in, in, in, uh, exile in Qatar.
		There's, I'm sorry, I forgot the guy's name, but there's this guy who's like widely renowned as could be considered the leader of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
		And he's locked in an Israeli prison right now.
		And look what happened in 2018.
unidentified		Everybody always says, Oh, you guys are just terrorists.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Why not try some civil disobedience?
		Well, in 2018, they did the Great March of Return, and Israeli snipers just shot them, killed 200-something of them, and maimed a thousand, killed journalists and healthcare workers.
		You know, Thomas L. Friedman, who is considered, for some reason, one of the top public intellectuals in America from the New York Times, who's not a neoconservative, but was a hawk on Iraq, for example.
		There's no bleeding heart.
		He said, listen, It's for the people of Gaza, this is what they need to do.
		They need to get on some Gandhi and some MLK, and they need to do an unarmed, peaceful march up to that Gaza fence.
		And at that point, Israel will have no choice.
		They'll have to open the gate and let them in.
		And instead, what did they do?
		They just sniped them all!
unidentified		And then Thomas Friedman didn't say anything!
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Look, they killed him dead!
unidentified		If we learn anything from that, it's that Thomas Friedman has no idea what he's talking about.
		And of course the Israeli government's not just going to let people approach its border, given what just happened.
		It wasn't fully peaceful.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Oh, come on.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They're throwing a couple of rocks and one guy lit a kite on fire.
unidentified		You don't get to do that.
		This is just apologizing for attacking a military border.
		Don't do it.
		Anyone can go look at the footage of the Great March of Return.
		It was a mostly peaceful protest.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Nothing like Minneapolis.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That was a joke for you, Tim.
unidentified		Actually, I will say that.
unidentified		It was in fact a mostly peaceful protest.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That was a joke for you, Tim.
		Which is the problem.
		Look, there were a couple of rocks thrown.
		It was thousands of unarmed civilians marching peacefully.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Last question, and I'll ask Will first.
		I think Scott will have perhaps a more robust answer.
		If the border surrounding Gaza was immediately removed One of the biggest pogroms in world history would happen.
		all at once.
		And the government of Israel said all of the Gaza are free to move about the entire state of Israel.
		What do you think would happen?
unidentified		One of the biggest pogroms in world history would happen.
		It would be October 7th times 100.
		I think you'd see a mass slaughter of Israelis by Palestinians.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Wait, he didn't say the Israelis had to lay down all their arms first, did he?
unidentified		Doesn't matter.
		It's not like, Israeli gun ownership ain't that high, man.
		That's what they found.
		They had to do some reactive stuff on 10-7.
		Well, they're completely Outnumbered and out-armed, so that's not true.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What do you think would happen in that circumstance?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm certainly not recommending that they just tear down the fence and tell Hamas to run wild.
		No, I mean the hypothetical is crazy.
		Hamas is still there and Hamas is still dangerous.
		Nobody who says there should be a one-state solution or a two-state solution or a bi-national state solution says that I Dream of Jeannie should just tear down the fence and let Hamas run riot and do whatever they want, Tim.
		That's not the argument.
		The argument is that through negotiation with the PA, I don't know exactly how you get there with the current situation in Gaza, but if the PA was in charge in Gaza with Israeli help, that then it would be possible to negotiate either a one-state solution, a two-state solution, or some kind of bi-national type state.
		You know, they pull this off in Bosnia.
		Where tens of thousands, I think the numbers are exaggerated, but certainly high tens of thousands of people were butchered for years by Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, committed terrible atrocities against innocent civilians, and then they stopped.
		And they worked it out and in fact I was reading the memoir of the last ambassador to Yugoslavia where he talked about how and we don't even think about this we don't even know this or but I mean you know as soon as I say it but you otherwise you wouldn't think about this there are millions of ethnic Germans that live inside France right now since the end of the Second World War and talk about bad blood
		These guys have hated and fought each other for centuries, but because they are free, because they have essentially a minarchist state, and the French regime is not forcing Frenchness on these Germans, they're getting along.
		As we discussed earlier, 20% of the population of Palestine are Arab, Muslims, and Christians.
		And they get along just fine.
		They're not terrorists.
		They don't go around murdering people all the time.
		Of Palestine?
		No, of Israel!
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I didn't know if you were doing like a Israel is Palestine thing.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Oh I might have screwed up some words.
		I misspeak sometimes but what I meant to say was 20% of the population of Israel are Palestinians and they get along perfectly fine.
		Now I'm not saying that they should, what, have a 60% majority and then get to lord it over all the Israeli Jews.
		I mean, if you're going to have a state at all, it should be a very minarchist state where it shouldn't matter who the police force is because their powers are so limited to only protecting people's rights and that kind of thing.
		But we have, there are very, very few pure ethnic states in the world anymore, anywhere.
		All the borders are drawn in crazy places.
		And they get along, they figure it out, and including in places where there have been very bad civil wars and grudges going back for decades and centuries.
		So it is not the case that it's always 10-7 and we'll never be able to find a way out of this other than the total subjugation of the Palestinian people.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Will, if you want to respond and then give your final thoughts.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Um, I think that this, the, the point you make about the French and the Germans and all sauce and like all these other places where, you know, there's been changes in the borders and changes in who lives there and there's no talk of a new state.
		There's no talk of violence and revolution.
		Those are all indications of how badly we as America have messed this up in Israel in terms of pushing a two-state solution.
		That goes back to the point... But you don't support a one-state one either though, right?
		I support Israel having sovereignty over the territory that is the mandate of Palestine and granting whatever self-government they want.
		And granting as little to zero rights to the Palestinians as they feel like?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		in granting as little to zero rights to the Palestinians as they feel like.
unidentified		Whatever the Palestinians can negotiate.
		I think that's the way to peace, right?
		That's the way to saying in a world where the entire, it's the entire world being so invested and so wanting to pressure Israel into seeding something here that creates the underlying instability.
		And so the world where everybody simply recognizes, no, Israel is sovereign over the former territory of the British mandate, whatever, you know, and it's not And it's your problem to negotiate whatever you can't want in terms of self-government.
		That's the world that leads to peace.
		That's the world that leads to what we saw in France and Germany.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		That's the world that leads to what happened on 10-7.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The Palestinians, as Netanyahu said in his speech, they're just going to have to learn to live with their total defeat.
unidentified		They only did it because they wanted attention.
		We started this in the beginning.
		And it's the idea that if people The piece of desolation didn't work.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		The piece of their total defeat and capitulation did not take.
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		They continued to resist.
unidentified		I think that that's ultimately because, you know, we've seen the enormous protests throughout the world and the enormous protests to try and put enormous diplomatic pressure on Israel.
		That's the stuff that makes Hamas think that this sort of butchery works.
		Anyway, so Yeah, final thoughts, response?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		George Washington said that a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.
		Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interests exist.
		and infusing into one the entities of the other betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification and it gives to ambitious corrupted or deluded citizens who devote themselves to their favorite nation facility to portray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium sometimes even with popularity
		Gilding with the appearance of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation." End quote.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right, gentlemen, this has been a blast.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I think we've actually solved all of the Middle Eastern's troubles.
unidentified		Thank goodness!
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		One would hope.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Scott, do you want to shout anything out?
scott horton ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the most important project on the internet is AntiWar.com, where all my guys do such great work all the time.
		LibertarianInstitute.org.
		I've done almost 6,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
		And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Follow me on Twitter at Will Chamberlain.
		Also, of course, follow the projects I'm involved with, the Article 3 Project and the Internet Accountability Project.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right on.
		Gentlemen, thanks for hanging out.
		Had a blast.
		We're actually going to go have cheeseburgers and skateboard now because Scott brought his board.
		It's going to be fun.
		Everybody, thanks for hanging out.
		Make sure you subscribe to Tenet Media on all the social media platforms.
		Next week will also be a blast.
		We are going to have a pre-recorded episode up for you because I believe next, it's Black Friday, right?
		Yeah.
		So we will have an episode and it's going to be a whole lot of fun.

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