The Israel Attacks: Beyond the Obvious with Efrat Fenigson
Efrat Fenigson is an independent Journalist, Podcaster, Israeli Citizen & Covid dissident. In the wake of the October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel, she has provided insight into the situation from inside Israel on X (Twitter). Bret and Efrat discuss the current state of affairs and the situation unfolding as we speak. Due to the timely nature of this episode, it is important to note that this was filmed at 8PM Israel time on October 10, 2023, and released several hours later.It is...
I cannot say that I have the great pleasure of sitting with Ephrat Phoenixon this morning because it is under rather terrible circumstances, but I am honored to be speaking with her.
She is a independent journalist in Israel, and as I was watching events unfold in the aftermath of the attacks on October 7th, I spotted Her evaluation of the events, and my blood ran cold because suspicions that I could not quite shake that something about the story couldn't possibly be what it appeared, were reflected very clearly in her analysis.
And what's more, She has a special position from which to evaluate the conflict, having not only served in the IDF, but served on the Gaza border.
So she is in possession of knowledge about how things normally function there, and therefore her sense that something was quite wrong on the morning of October 7th struck me as an important piece of information for the world to understand.
So welcome, Ifrah.
Thank you for having me, Brett.
It's an honor.
I'm truly glad to be talking with you.
I should also tell our audience that I have just discovered that we have actually met already, which I am embarrassed to say that I did not remember.
But you and I met at a conference in Bath, England.
that was put on to gather COVID dissidents and so it turns out that we have a number of different threads that we are seeing in common and perhaps we will get to that COVID thread later in the discussion.
But let us start by having you realize my audience isn't inherently American, but most of them are not experts in the situation in the Middle East surrounding the tensions between Israel and its neighbors.
And could probably use a lot of basic information on who the players even are and how they end up in the situation they end up in before we get to the attacks that occurred on the 7th.
So can you just tell us what Gaza is, what Hamas is, and what relationship that has to the State of Israel?
I will try.
Thank you.
I'll do my best.
As I said to you before we started recording, as a common citizen in the street, I have the basic knowledge of our relationship with Palestine and how it came to be.
There is a lot of history behind this, but I can say that the Gaza Strip, which is a large area today populated by more than two million Palestinians, Most of them were historically refugees that did not receive home in any other Arab country.
And there are history stories telling you that many Arab countries did not want to take on The Palestinians, and so they ended up there and also in the Judea and Samaria area, the West Bank, what's called the West Bank.
So Palestine is essentially two pieces of land in the small area of Israel, which is very similar to New Jersey.
You have Gaza down south, near the beach with the Mediterranean, and then you have the West Bank, which is around the Jerusalem area, inland on the west area of Israel, and they're detached.
There is no There's a physical connection between those two areas, but they both belong to the same people, the same, I want to say state, but they don't have a state of their own yet.
The same population.
Exactly.
And they're being colonized or controlled by the Israeli government for many, many years.
Can I ask a question?
When you say that these people are refugees, are you talking about them being refugees in the aftermath of the formation of the State of Israel in, would it be, 1967?
Yes, many of them, but also I think from other Arab countries.
I don't know exactly, so I don't want to say the wrong thing, but I think they also came from other Arab countries.
There were Palestinians in other Arab countries that kind of left there.
I'm not sure of all the circumstances that led to that, but people that really didn't have a home.
And so, today you have a very large population, especially in Gaza.
They don't have their own permission from Israel to set up their own infrastructure, critical infrastructure.
They rely on Israel for a lot of their infrastructure and energy, sometimes water.
They don't have a port.
They don't have the permission from Israel to open their own port.
They do have an airport, but it's quite complicated.
They have to fly out to other Arab countries and fly out from there.
So their lives are very complicated and there is a very high population of children.
Like young population in Gaza because it's a society that just grows exponentially very, very fast.
And I think that they're probably safe to say that there wouldn't be many families Or people in the Gaza Strip that don't have a direct connection to loss of a family member or a friend, you know, that died during the past, I don't know, 40 years.
Because of the situation.
So I would say as a society, the society is, you know, traumatic, post-traumatic society.
They experience death.
They experience a lot of hardship.
They're very poor.
They're being allowed to come to Israel to work, some of them.
And they have to go through the border crossing in order to do that.
And you've asked also what Hamas is.
Hold on, hold on.
Before you get there, I want to react to what you've just said, because I expect that this, this is not strange to me, because I've had this experience many times talking to Israelis, that there appears to be A great deal more nuance in the conversation about the interaction with the Palestinian population than there is in the wider world.
The wider world has a cartoonish view of this conflict and assumes, frankly, that the empathy, which is evident in what you just said, is absent from the Jewish population looking at the plight of the Palestinians.
And that's just simply not the case.
There are those who have no empathy.
But a tremendous number of Israelis see the predicament with a high level of nuance.
So am I correctly inferring that you have?
I was really hoping that we would touch on this because The situation between Israel and Palestine is so explosive and it's so delicate and fragile.
I always call it an explosive barrel.
It's a detonator just waiting to be sparked.
And it's very easy to trigger hate and polarity when you speak about this subject because you have to take sides immediately.
and when you are an Israeli that I'm not saying I'm not taking sides I'm not saying anything about sides I'm just saying when you're an Israeli and you show empathy to other people that are your neighbors that are living you know 40 minutes away from you you are being attacked and and it's wrong and you shouldn't have that because you should be on one position only now the
I'm struggling with that because on the one hand I'm Israeli and my identity is firmly ground in Israel and my ancestors and everything and I'm Jewish and at the same time... Am I correct, you are the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors?
Correct.
And my grandparents, after the Second World War, when they came to Israel, they essentially built kibbutzim in Israel and they were the people that really helped build the new Israel after 1948.
And so it's very, you know, what I have is the ability, I guess, to hold a very complex problem And not to try and deterministically find the answer or the solution.
I'm okay with holding the complexity without trying to, you know, have one answer or one clarity.
I don't think it's possible.
The situation is so complex that you have to look at everything.
I mean, it's not easy, but when you zoom out and you look at things from, you know,
Far out you can try and find some empathy and and also realize that you know evil is everywhere and Bad is everywhere in any society and it doesn't mean that everyone is bad doesn't mean that everyone's evil and we've seen some evil stuff in the past few years, but but it's you know, you've got to do this distinction or separation between the Palestinian people and the Hamas or terrorists, and there are many terrorists, there are many bad people.
Yes, so let me translate a little bit of that into language that my viewers will be familiar with from our podcast.
There is a tension between two versions of the way the world may function.
One of them I describe, maybe incorrectly, but for lack of a better term, I describe as the West.
The idea of the West It's not that we should forget where we come from, but that where you come from, what population you come from, should not provide you advantages and it shouldn't dictate with whom you cooperate with.
That we should put those things aside.
We should put our lineage aside and collaborate with those who bring things to the table that would be useful in our collaboration.
That is the idea of the West, and it is a superior way of being.
It's fairer, it's less violent, it is more liberating.
And then there is the way that the world has worked until the West, which is lineage against lineage competition.
And the predicament for Israel, as I see it, and again, I am no expert in the situation of Israel, but if I view it through that lens, Israel firmly has one foot in each of these worlds, and it does not freely have the ability to choose which world it lives in, because neighboring states are at least historically hell-bent on
Effectively, the rules of the prior world and the unfortunate thing about the superior putting lineage aside way of interacting is that it is very powerful.
It generates a tremendous amount of wealth.
and well-being, but it is fragile.
And that means that those who wish to opt out of it have veto power over it.
And so Israel, I see, is caught in this bind and the tendency of people to default to thinking of this conflict in lineage terms is so unfortunate because it misses the opportunity that exists if only we can figure out how it might be architected.
So I see this as Like a never-ending tragedy.
The opportunity for the Middle East to step away from lineage and to be enriched across the board exists.
Yeah.
But we fail to move in the right direction decade after decade.
And I will also say before you answer my question about what Hamas is, taking sides is artificially narrowing of perspective.
On the other hand, You know, I'm told by people who wish to change my perspective that what I saw on my various screens as the attack unfolded is propaganda.
And I believe I have thrown out as much propaganda as I can manage.
But what I'm left with are things that Hamas itself uploaded, wished me to see.
And these things were so barbaric that You know, there is one part of this story that is utterly ambiguous and there is only one right side.
Anybody who committed these acts or planned these acts or allowed these acts is diabolical.
And anybody who understood what took place and celebrated it is similarly, I think, in an indefensible position.
That said, those who wish to generalize that view onto an entire population of people they know nothing about are committing a grave error, at the very least.
They are failing to understand the nature of what happened.
So, I'm looking forward to hearing your reactions to either of those things that I've just mentioned.
Well, first of all, thanks for translating my words to a lot more sophisticated points of view.
I love it.
It's so difficult, 'cause what you're saying is true.
There was a deadly barbaric act committed in the past few days.
And it's so easy to look at it and say, okay, we need to wipe out Gaza now.
But then you look at Gaza, like the whole of Gaza, what we just spoke about.
Is that the solution?
I think there is a solution out there, like you said, and it can be found, but I think the people that are pulling the strings are having a hard time controlling the beast that was created, right?
With time.
And so they may be, and maybe, I'm very careful in saying maybe, they may be Allowing things to unfold that will help them create a new pathway to creating a new order in that area.
And so if that's the case, then I think the prime minister of Israel is in a very tough position, both from the West-West, meaning the Biden administration and meaning the Biden administration and the U.S., who is the biggest ally for Israel.
And on the other side, from BRICS nations, including Saudi Arabia, that are trying to find a way to make the Middle East more peaceful.
that Because they need the Middle East and Israel specifically as a super strategic point to pass commodities around, to control the world, to, you know, to have infrastructure of gas and oil, etc.
And Israel is, for that reason, I think the Prime Minister of Israel is getting pressured from both sides.
And that's why I also think that what we're seeing happening right now It should be.
Maybe it's early that we're having this discussion, I don't know, but it should be detached from the horrible incidents that we've seen in the past few days and then looking at it from a zoomed out perspective of what are the bigger powers here that are trying to control this area and why.
And so, yeah, I fully agree with you that Looking at it from a lineage point of view, we'll end up in the same place that we ended up many, many times before.
And if what we want is to create something new and to bring peace, then we have to change something in how we look at it.
And there is in fact a very Long history of Arab states experimenting with the idea of a new world in which lineage does not dominate our interactions.
And I remember, I wasn't expecting this to be emotional for me, maybe for you, but I remember the assassination of Sadat, who attempted to partner.
I'm sorry.
No, that's fine.
We are being pushed into a tragedy.
What is about to happen in Gaza is a tragedy, and it is a tragedy that Hamas wanted, and whoever their partners are, wanted.
The overreaction of Israel to what took place is inevitable, and that's what the barbarism was about.
And it is very hard To accept that bad people who are willing to do that to innocent folks on either side have such control over our future as a planet.
And this isn't just about the Middle East.
No, it's way bigger than that.
The world faces a huge setback.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Thank you for sharing that.
No, I totally see it like that.
And I think that Well, I always said that we're facing a few strategic points in the world right now that are detonators, like Taiwan and China, like Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia.
And I guess we got to that second step after Ukraine.
Powers for the US are not as effective anymore as Biden would have liked, I guess.
So it's as if they're pulling the next step in the plan.
And I was dreading this day and we're there.
Now, my only hope is that this will not spark the third world war.
But that is very much on the table.
It is on the table, it is, but yeah, we can talk about that later maybe.
So let me return us to an earlier point in the conversation.
I'd asked you to describe as best you can what Hamas is for people who, you know, know the name but little more.
So, it's hard to say this, but Israel has helped establish Hamas early on.
I think it was 1967 when it started, and Hamas was the beginning movement, and with time It received more and more power and more and more influence and incentives from different powers around the world.
Iran is one of them.
Israel was one of them for a while.
Qatar.
I mean, there were different messengers that were using Hamas as a It was a very convenient tool to spark conflicts with Israel.
It was very convenient that they are situated, convenient, right?
Situated in the Gaza Strip amongst civilian spots like, you know, churches and mosques and hospitals and schools.
In fact, it's a favorite tactic of theirs to do their dirty work where a response will inevitably kill innocence, which will bring sympathy.
Correct, and that's their tactic and it works for many, many years.
I remember that from when I was a soldier, that there would be no clean... It was very, very hard to create a clean work in the Gaza Strip because you had to have some casualties, you know, overheads for whatever operation that Israel has performed in the Gaza Strip.
In 2005, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and Hamas became stronger and stronger when Israel's military is not inside the Strip anymore.
The control, I would say, of the Israeli forces over Hamas is done through intelligence forces.
There are various organizations that are in charge of keeping in touch with Hamas, Spying on them, you know, knowing everything they do in order to control them.
They have grown in the past few years to really large dimensions that I think that even Israel knows today.
And definitely Abu Mazen, the Prime Minister of Palestine.
They both know that they cannot control Hamas anymore.
And it became, that's what I called the beast before, right?
It's very powerful, it controls the population.
Speaking of propaganda, it's great in recruiting young children to its forces very early on.
There is heavy mind control in the strip to just grow this organization's dimensions to really large scale.
Recent questions that are popping up, you may have seen this really from the past few days, is about the weapon systems of Hamas.
They are being sponsored by different countries in the Arab world.
But recently there have been voices saying, how come Hamas is holding weapons that are American weapons?
How did it get to them?
This was just recently.
From Afghanistan, for example.
From Afghanistan, from Ukraine, maybe.
Yeah.
Heavy black market of weaponry.
It's just...
I just recall this image of the stock exchange in the US with the military-industrial complex, stocks of Lockheed Martin going up now, all the other companies.
War is great for someone, right?
There are weapon systems, ample weapon systems, in the Gaza Strip, in Hamas, as well as in the West Bank, and obviously Hezbollah up north, but that's another organization.
Now, some people during this attack, you see online, many people refer to the Hamas as freedom fighters.
Again, that's another tactic for the divide and rule.
You cannot look at what they're doing and call that freedom.
It's a terror organization.
The truth has to be said.
Do you know, I realize that some of the people who support Hamas probably do so under duress or under false pretenses, but do you have any idea within the Palestinian population how popular Hamas actually is?
I think they are very, I don't know to say numbers or refer to like very accurate information, but they are very popular and they are stronger, their influence is stronger than the influence of Abu Mazen.
And I think that's one of the problems that Israel and Abu Mazen, when they try to negotiate peace deals, they have a problem called Hamas.
What are we doing with that organization that is in the way, in a way?
So there needs to be I would speculate that there needs to be a good justification to take down Hamas.
And surprise, surprise, I think we have one now.
Well, the justification for eliminating Hamas is crystal clear.
The question of how one does that with Hamas intermingled with innocent people is another question entirely.
But, all right, so I think you've painted a fairly clear picture.
Let's get to the central point that caused me to focus on your work and brought us into this conversation.
When I saw the attacks, my first thought, literally, was, how is this even possible?
On that border, that it could be breached by so many people simultaneously?
One would have expected, if an attack had been successful, That the number of people who got through initially would have been small.
You know, if five people had gotten through out of a, uh, a, uh, a military force of a hundred and had done some damage, that would certainly be noteworthy and would be considered an embarrassing failure for the IDF and the security services of Israel, but to have hundreds get through and operate Barely impeded for, was it a full day almost?
This seems like it is not, if somebody submitted it as a script, you would say that is implausible.
And so it did lead me to wonder what could possibly explain such a failure.
Incompetence seems inadequate to explain it.
Now you're in a position to say more about this because you have, you have manned that border.
Yeah.
It's very hard for me to talk about it because there are so many friends and family members of friends that are missing and have been taken hostage in this barbaric act that talking about what I know sometimes feels like, why is this important now?
And at the same time, I know that if we don't talk about this, then we will just let them off the hook once again.
Because to me, and I will explain why I think this is a great atrocity, because to me this is, I don't know how to say it.
It's just the people of Israel have been, I don't know if sacrifice is too rough of a word, but we have been sold out completely and no help for hours and hours.
And no military involvement, no police, no arms on the ground for hours and hours.
This is something that is non-typical and unusual for Israel Defense Forces.
Now, I've served in the military forces 25 years ago as I was in the intelligence forces based in the Gaza Strip, as I told you.
And I know the security drills.
When I served there was no internet so I would sit next to the phone in my shift of the fence of the security of the Gaza Strip and whenever something would move alongside the fence I would get a phone call from the human observers that are looking at the gate telling us there is a chain of command that you have to notify when something like this happens and then straight away
So what do you mean when something moves by the fence?
It can be a pig, it can be a cat moving alongside the fence or touching the fence or trying to cross the fence, an animal.
They would identify it, they would see it.
A cat gets a trigger.
Yeah, it could trigger the fence.
Yeah.
And 25 years later, with with internet and with the most sophisticated high tech weaponary systems, like drones, like there is a special system, I don't know how to call it in English.
It's called seeing shooting.
That's a literal translation from Hebrew to English.
Seeing shooting.
It's a robot that sits on top of a tower looking at the fence and whenever something triggers the fence which has sensors on it, it's supposed to shoot.
It's like automatic, right?
And there are drones and there are helicopters and there are troopers on the ground and, you know, there are many things that are supposed to be activated.
There are various lines of defense and layers of defense that are supposed to be activated when something like that happens.
Okay, so I just want to make this clear.
I mean, it probably is, but you have a system that is sensitive to anything the size of a cat or bigger.
That system, since you were manning it, has had 25 years to mature and become more sensitive, to become more discerning.
And yet, how many places was that border breached? 15.
15 places.
It's not more, yeah.
15 and that is completely ridiculous because normally with one breach of the fence the whole army is triggered and things start moving immediately.
Things start moving immediately and here there was nothing for hours and so I want to talk about some of the explanations that have been given so far There are some unbacked, I have to say that these explanations are unbacked by any evidence or proof so far, but they have been thrown out to the air or to the mainstream media.
It started with Iranian cyber attack that took down the IDF tech infrastructure that was running around for a while, because they took down the The IDF technology infrastructure, there was no way for the technology to operate.
All right, let me just... I think it's highly unlikely.
Even if it was true, one would imagine that especially, was it within one day of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, there is a cyber attack that doesn't result in Every person being called up simultaneously and placed on whatever border is most likely to be breached under those conditions.
Yeah.
I mean, wouldn't it?
Of course, that's why it's completely unlikely.
And what about the backup systems?
And how come?
And then I'm asking myself, okay, if this is true, then how come all the civilian infrastructure was still working?
We had no problem with any other infrastructure, just the IDF one was hurt.
This just doesn't add up.
And then it moved on to the narrative of A takedown of the observer lookouts, including the human observer soldiers that were there.
They said that the terrorists came into the bunker and just, you know, murdered or killed everyone.
We still don't know if this is true or not.
That would seem like a simple, factual question.
Yeah, and we don't know.
There was no explanation or fact released to us about that.
It was just a rumor.
Again, were such a thing to have happened, I don't think you need to be a military strategist to imagine that the next thing you do is marshal an overwhelming force to the area that has just been blinded by the murder of the people manning the border.
Correct.
And yet that did not happen.
No, it did not happen and then you get some other soldiers talking on social media saying, tweeting on social media saying that leave the observers alone, they were heroes, they did notify, they were there and they notified the forces that they were supposed to notify but no one answered.
So again, who knows?
It's again another contradiction, we don't know.
And then the next thing that happened, it was this morning when I received this information that Air Force pilots shared stories on their Twitter account.
It's in Hebrew.
That they were up in the air fighting and protecting already 45 minutes after the breaches.
Now that is, I'm sorry to say it like that blatantly, that is a lie.
Because we have people on the ground in all the different villages in the Gaza envelope area around the Gaza Strip.
That they see every movement in the sky, whenever there's a helicopter or a jet or anything, they know there was nothing for hours in the sky.
So why would the Air Force pilots now tweet and say, we were there within 45 minutes fighting and taking down terrorists?
No, they weren't.
And so these narratives are being thrown out to the air.
There is no official statement about any of these that I told you about.
It's only in the public discussion and the administration is not even trying to give us any answers.
They're saying we're fighting now, we'll talk about it later kind of approach.
Yes, and unfortunately that has an eerie ring to other events.
And it's almost as if Whatever arranged this, and let us agree that at the very least this was not Hamas acting independently.
They were at least backed by Iran, and that suggests that there were at least regional forces in play, possibly global forces.
But whatever it is that arranged this, there is a component on the Israeli side that is mysterious, and there is no effort being put into An explanation that could possibly satisfy anybody with, let's say, your level of understanding of what took place there.
These are transparently inadequate explanations being offered, and the only defense of them is that to entertain any alternative possibility will be dismissed as conspiracy theorizing.
Correct, and what you're saying is so true that it's actually happening.
I will explain in a second.
I just want to say something about what you said about Iran.
I'm not sure that Iran is behind this, although the mainstream media, Wall Street Journal, is saying that they are.
Isn't Iran saying that it is?
Iran is not saying that it is.
The president of Iran is actually saying, we are not behind this, but we kiss the hands of Hamas for doing what they did.
We support them, but we are not behind this.
Now, that is complicated.
And the thing is, just because I'm a journalist now and I try to be factual, Israel does not have any evidence at the moment that Iran is behind this.
So we just have to hold that.
Okay?
I want to be careful because we don't know.
It may have been, by the way, a Hamas soldier that was captured by the Israeli Defense Forces now in the last couple of days.
In his investigation, he said that they were working on this drill for one year.
They were planning and preparing for this for one year.
That they were shocked that the IDF did not show up until five hours later.
And he said, he said another thing.
He said that, he said that they were the one, I mean, he said it was their initiative.
He didn't mention Iran at all.
He said that they were working on it.
With 1000 soldiers.
Now, as I said before, Hamas did grow to really big dimensions and they do have a lot of weaponry and a lot of sophistication and they should not be disrespected in terms of military power.
And so it is possible that they did it themselves.
The only thing I would speculate is that they were supposed to come in and do a smaller A smaller event, but since they bumped into this party, they did an ISIS trick that didn't end well.
That's what I speculate.
I don't know if it was planned to be that big as it was, and very gory, and I have really gory descriptions which we will not go into, but I don't know if they had planned all of what has happened in such detail.
Well, if I put together the pieces that I've seen, and again, I am no expert in what takes place in the Middle East, but A, there are two contradictions here, or two implausible claims.
One, that the failure at the Israeli border was organic.
There is at least not a sufficient explanation that is on the table yet that would explain both the failure of the detection and the failure in the absence of the detection of an overwhelming force showing up immediately.
One of those two things.
If the detection failed, the IDF should have shown up in force immediately.
And the fact that it didn't suggests two failures.
But the other thing I want to point out is that Israel is now It is claiming to be bombing the sites in which Hamas conducts its operations.
To say that this operation, which was being planned for a year and was massive, went undetected And now to be claiming that, in fact, they are being, that it may look to us like they're blowing up apartment buildings, but that's because there's a weapons factory in the basement.
That suggests a high level of knowledge of where these actions are actually conducted.
And a high level of knowledge and a long period of planning in which the attack was not anticipated, that is simply incompatible.
And that's the other thing about my military experience.
I was in the intelligence forces.
The shift I told you about, about picking the phone and knowing what happens.
Around the fence, that was only one time a week.
All the rest of my time was in intelligence work.
So I know how the system works in terms of knowing about every little step that Hamas is taking in the Gaza Strip.
We have human informers and, you know, many other tactics to know what is happening in the Gaza Strip.
You know I don't need to go into the details people who see spy movies know but it all exists and so for one year this has been planned and the Shabak or the 8-200 or whatever the intelligence forces did not know the Mossad did not know of anything highly highly highly unlikely Okay.
And then you asked, you said something, you mentioned something about they are supposed to bring in the forces, even if there were so many breaches, where were the forces?
So I want to answer to that.
The Gaza Division was actually moved to the Judea and Samaria area near Jerusalem, almost in its entirety, 60 to 80% of this battalion was moved to that area.
Some of the most professional battalions in the IDF were moved there to secure illegal outposts in the Samaria and secure a member of parliament.
In a village called Hawara, a Palestinian village, because it's one of those member of parliaments that likes to provoke.
And, you know, he's a settler.
He wants to be there in the middle of a Palestinian village.
And so he needs protection from the army.
And so a lot of, you know, that's one of the things about the current Israeli administration that has a lot of ministers or members of the parliament that are extreme It's right-wing, like, they're settlers.
Hardliners.
Yeah, oh, completely.
And so they're very provocative, and they demand a lot of protection from the army, from Benjamin Netanyahu, and he succumbs to their demands.
And so a lot of the forces that were supposed to be around Gaza were not there.
And this, I would point out, again, I don't think you have to be a military strategist to figure out why you wouldn't want to move that entire force.
Even if you had to borrow half of it, you would certainly leave the other half there and you would leave them in an activated state because there's a diminished capacity.
That does not seem to me like that requires a tremendous amount of understanding.
The other thing is, to move that force on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Seems preposterous.
Correct.
Yes.
And I want to add one last thing about all this.
I watched Mike Pence explaining really well in his recent video how he follows internet censorship as
detecting leads lead indicators to finding answers about things and if you want to know if you get you want to get some clues about what's happening here right now there is a clear attempt in the israeli mainstream media to silence any voices which are asking how come something like this has happened they're calling any question like the ones i'm
So, let us also point out the interesting, possibly just coincidental fact, that Mike Benz has just faced a character assassination.
So that's a, for me, this is a clue.
They don't want us to ask the questions.
So let us also point out the interesting, possibly just coincidental fact that Mike Benz has just faced a character assassination that has made a few days of... possibly just coincidental fact that Mike Benz has just faced Just now?
A few days before the attack.
And so it is possible that that is happenstance.
Mike has done a great job of revealing the censorship industrial complex.
And they would, of course, have an incentive to take him down at any moment.
But the coincidence of him being hobbled Just before this attack, in which the censorship was going to kick into high gear, is at least worth noticing.
Mm-hmm.
Wow, I didn't know that.
Right, so there's that.
I did want to ask you, the view in the West, which I suspect is overly simplistic, is that the failure that allowed this to happen is so glaring that Benjamin Netanyahu will not politically survive this chapter.
And the reason that I don't think that that's accurate is that the Bush administration had a similar failure.
And one could have made the same argument, that it was so embarrassing that this could have happened, the 9-11 attacks could have happened on their watch, that Bush could not survive.
But of course, it empowered him.
So I'm not sure.
One interpretation is that whatever arranged this, and I'm fascinated to hear you say, it's very interesting for Iran to bless the attack without taking credit.
They're paying much of the price just simply to embrace it.
And then to say, actually, this wasn't us.
I don't, I certainly don't take them at their word.
On the other hand, it's an interesting way to divide the responsibility.
So the question is, what did arrange this?
Hamas clearly arranged it.
Did they have help?
Did they have someone Who understood what was taking place and decided it was better to allow it to happen?
Were they supplied by larger forces?
Was there a desire to upend the Saudi accord, which was successful?
You know, so what we have is the usual, what has become the usual implausible pattern of anomalies.
There will always be anomalies in historical events.
Those who are guilty of what a statistician might call overfitting will see patterns where they're not there.
But at this point in history, we have a great many historical events that just simply have too many anomalies to be organic.
There is some way in which we know at least we are not getting the full story.
And in this case, you have the obvious story.
Oh, there you are.
We have the obvious story of Hamas attacking southern Israel.
That one is unignorable because we see it rendered in video.
We have a larger regional story Potentially involving Iran and Saudi Arabia.
And then we have also a global story in which you say war is always good for someone.
And those someone's aren't inherently in the Middle East.
In fact, many of them simply won't be.
So let us at least take on the sophistication of recognizing That given how much is at stake in the battle that has now erupted, that it would be naive to imagine that the players don't know on which side their bread is buttered, and that they are not acting accordingly, and may have acted accordingly prior to the outbreak of any obvious violence.
Yes, and you know, another point that I want to add to that, which is interesting, speaking of The narratives or the clues that we get from the mainstream media is that we've seen in the past few days many narratives coming from global media about what's happening now in Gaza and Israel is the Israeli 9-11 or the Israeli Pearl Harbor.
And it's mainstream media that is making those parallels.
And I'm asking myself why?
What is behind this?
Because we know what has happened.
before Pearl Harbor and what happened after 9-11.
We know what kind of triggering of bigger events have happened after that.
Are they trying to prepare the audience for something bigger to come?
Well, it's funny.
Those comparisons have exactly the opposite ring to me.
They're almost like an admission.
Because although I don't think we have a good understanding of either event, there's the implication in both events that there may have been awareness, at least, and that that awareness suggests larger forces in play.
And I think this is...
Believe me, I am anything but comfortable saying this, and I know that you're not comfortable in this territory, but the idea that we little people are being played and pushed into a battle in which we will lose a tremendous amount for reasons that we can't understand because we're not at the table and we don't hear the discussions and we don't know what the objectives are.
is almost inescapable.
And it is the reason that we have to have these conversations, is we have to stop being manipulable into conflicts that are serving someone else at our expense, whoever it may be.
And you mentioned there the Saudi deal, right?
And trying to normalize the efforts between Trying to normalize a peace deal between Israel and Palestine.
And I wonder to myself whether a prisoner exchange deal is something that could only be seriously considered by Israel if a shocking event like that happened.
Did they need such an atrocity in order to justify us releasing really dangerous prisoners from Israel, security prisoners?
Or is there a bigger play here to try and wipe out Hamas, which Abu Mazen cannot control, as I said before, or even Benjamin Netanyahu cannot control, and try and get a peace deal with pulling out, like maybe it's an exchange deal of Israel pulling out its settlements from Judea and Samaria area, which is a big problem on the table when you come to talk about the peace process.
So is it, okay, we'll pull out from there in exchange to those hostages and, I mean, but you have to justify to the Israeli people.
So did you need such a big thing in order to, you know, build your path towards this?
And again, this is, this is just my speculations because You even heard yesterday the Deputy Hamas leader, Saleh al-Aruri, suggesting using Israeli prisoners for leverage in negotiations.
And that happened very, I think it was even two days ago, it happened almost immediately after they captured them.
It's as if they were doing it in order to have it, in order to say it, you know, it's so Well, let me say, I think we're damned if we do and damned if we don't with respect to having these conversations.
Obviously, we are at a tremendous disadvantage in terms of knowing what's really going on inside of any of these things, because I think it is fair to say you and I are both outsiders to all of it.
But not discussing it leaves us as pawns in a game we do not understand, and that is a terrible position to find ourselves in.
The one thing that does not fit about the narrative you have just proposed, I think, is the barbaric atrocities that were committed.
Had this been a strategically careful operation, had they grabbed prisoners and not harmed them, their leverage would be greater, I think.
I agree, but since Hamas is Hamas, and it's a terrorist organization, it's not a It's not a well-regulated force.
It's not a well-regulated force, but it's also, it's made of really evil people.
It may have gone out of control.
All I'm saying is that it was, maybe it was supposed to be something like that and then went out of control and became... Especially given how, if we take the captured Hamas member at his word, which there's no reason we should, but there's also no obvious reason that he would lie about it.
The fact that Hamas was surprised at their success means that likely they were not planning for the level of access that they would gain.
And therefore, it is possible that what unfolded on the ground was, you know, their nature coming out in light of Yeah.
Surprising failure.
Yeah, we're succeeding big time here, so we should pile up.
Yeah.
And one last point about that, there is a retired general, his name is Itzhak Brick, he said that Gadi Eisenkot, which was the former IDF Chief of General Staff, fought to hide his report on the IDF's unpreparedness for war.
And Briggs said this in April this year, and also a few weeks ago in an interview, and many, many times before, that Israel is not ready for an all-out war And laid out the reasons for it.
And he's been knocking on the doors of the Prime Minister and the higher generals and the army and the Minister of Defense, but no one would listen to him.
And he was also banned from mainstream media.
They would not give him a stage.
And this is a retired general of the IDF, right?
It's not someone that came from the street analyzing what they're doing.
It's coming from within the system.
And he's saying we are not prepared if something like this is about to happen.
So he's like pointing on all the different flaws of the army that maybe, you know, and I know that I'm now complicating this even more because I'm saying maybe really the IDF was not ready and something really bad is going on in the IDF since I was there 25 years ago.
I don't know.
Well, let me... It's just fair to put that on the table as well, I think.
Yes.
And I think we are Not only well within our rights as citizens whose interests are tied up in events over which we have no control, but I think we are also obligated to have this discussion.
And because we are left only with the evidence we can see and the ability to extrapolate, I think we have to, and we are bound to get some stuff wrong.
And what we have to do is just commit as we discover that we have got something wrong to fix it.
Um, but I want to go back to something you said at the beginning, which struck me as important and potentially relevant.
You said that Hamas was in some way a creation.
Do you want to describe what the early relationship that you were alluding to is?
Because it may be that we are looking at an evolved version of that same relationship.
Yes, I would love that but I am no expert in that so I don't want to say things that are wrong and I want to be responsible here because there is a history about it.
I need to go back and look at my notes and read more about it before I answer this.
I know that Israel was the one that sponsored and created the organization and with With the different administrations that have changed during the years, there were different relationships with this organization.
But again, I don't want to bring the details because I don't have them on me.
And as I said, I'm not an expert, so I don't want to go into it too much.
So that does, I appreciate your caution.
It does remind me, I think there are a number of different examples, in history, but Afghanistan for the United States is clearly one where we appear to have created a force in the era where it was fighting the Russians that became a monster which haunted our Our later incarnation.
So creating a monster that you can't control is an old story.
Yeah.
But there is also the possibility, you know, what I increasingly think is that we outsiders, we citizens of the world who are trying to live better lives, are unfortunately mesmerized by anachronisms of the map.
Right?
We look at Israel and we see a flag with a Jewish star and we look at the border fence and we see a population that is not free to come and go and we imagine that these must be the objects in play on the chessboard and we just fail to grasp that actually
Nation-states are not what they once were, and there are forces that are as big as nation-states, or bigger, that operate without names that we know, or if we know their names, we misunderstand the magnitude of their power and the nature of it.
And so what it means is we are we are easily pushed into things based on a narrative that isn't actually even highly relevant to the events.
It's the narrative that is delivered for, I don't want to say our benefit, but it is delivered in order to control our mindset surrounding these things.
It inflames predictable tensions in order to accomplish ends that may have nothing to do And everything is so shallow in most of the public's perception of what's happening in reality.
And most people look at what the government is doing, what the, in this case, defense forces are doing, and they refuse to take on the point of view that there may be higher powers that are manipulating this.
They simply refuse under the cognitive dissonance that they're in, under the influence of the indoctrination of the army, of the different systems that are running at play, not just in Israel, but all around the world.
And whenever you suggest something that is outside, I call it the sandbox of allowed rules, which you can play this game in, this matrix, then you're being, you know, you're being tagged and shamed and called names.
And because of that, I don't know if it's hubris or the cognitive dissonance that is controlling here, but because of that phenomena, we are not able as a species Not just as Israelis or Jewish or, you know, Palestinians or whatever, but just as human species.
We're unable to expand our perception and consciousness to there is something more here.
than the five senses that we have or the rules of the game that we are being allowed to play.
And that is, this is my only hope from all this crazy shenanigan that is going around in Israel and around the world that people will start asking questions because that's the only way to start waking up the mind that is so heavily controlled.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, and in particular I think it is the terror that people experience over the stigmas that will be directed at them if they contemplate these things that keeps them... they purge their own minds of the awareness that they would otherwise have so as not to be caught in possession of illegal thoughts.
Yes.
And we saw that over COVID, where because of what I now know about our meeting, I know you and I are of like mind on this front, that a story unfolded surrounding COVID that we do not know.
And we are left with a tremendous amount of evidence, but it tells an incomplete story about who was driving and for what reason.
But the The only people who know anything about what happened during COVID are people who stared down those stigmas and decided to endure them in order to see what was on the other side.
And I think we are in the same place here, that we have a puzzle with many parties that have interests, named and unnamed, some of which may just be lucky or unlucky bystanders, some of which may have been motivating, some of which may be painted as having motivated or participated, even though they did not.
And I have always liked the part of Harry Potter, where Harry Potter is the one guy who doesn't worry about saying Voldemort.
I think it's a deep insight.
So I'm going to speak the name of Voldemort here.
I'm going to say that there is something, there is a thought that will not let me go in looking at the aftermath of October 7th's attack, which is that years ago, The neocons wanted to remake the map of the Middle East with American military might.
That was their plan.
And it involved battles which they had reason to want.
And they partially got their way, and it was of course a disaster.
This does.
The fact that we have all, who have paid any attention, I mean, I have avoided the mainstream press on this issue as much as possible, and thank goodness that Twitter, as broken as it is, provides a semi-free space in which we can at least exchange evidence and debate it.
But there is a way in which the portrayal of Iran's role would function as a continuation of that neocon plan, a revival of it, in the aftermath of the debacle in Iraq.
So, I don't know if that's a driving force here or not, but I certainly think it is incumbent on the citizens of the world Not to be pushed into actions over a simplistic narrative that cannot possibly account for the events that we have seen.
I'm with you, and I think that the fact that there are higher powers geopolitically at play, especially with Russia and China, that are behind the scenes.
Putin has today, by the way, said that he's supporting Hamas.
But we know that Iran is one of the largest players in the world for oil and gas.
We know its importance.
We know that the U.S.
position as the Anglo-American, forget the word, That would be something we'll have to edit.
Hegemony.
Hegemony.
Yes.
No, we don't have to edit that.
That's perfect.
English is not your first language.
The fact that you even know the word hegemony is wonderful.
I think the fact that we're going into in a way that it looks like an unstable hegemony for the US and towards the end of this Monetary control for the US with the dollar and the BRICS coming in to destabilize the power of the dollar.
Iran is playing a very important role here.
And I think that Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the BRICS countries, as I said before, have an interest of keeping the Middle East relatively quiet.
Whereas the US may have an interest to keep the Middle East burning, or at least sparking some kind of... trying to lure in maybe Iran into a war.
Well, I'm going to quibble with you in one way.
It's very minor, though it's very major as well.
It's not the U.S.
that might have that interest.
It is the thing that has captured our system.
Rather like the Palestinians who are now going to suffer the wrath that will naturally respond to Hamas, the American public most certainly does not have an interest in a chaotic Middle East.
But that doesn't mean, and this was, I thought, the strength of what Mike Benz put out.
It alerted me to a whole dimension of this puzzle.
I don't know why I wasn't thinking about it.
Obviously, one should think about fossil fuels when one thinks about the Middle East because it is a major force.
But what he called my attention to was, forgive me if I get the numbers wrong, but he said Iran is sitting on the third largest oil deposit and the second largest natural gas deposits on earth and that this actually
Interrelates the story in the Middle East with the story in Ukraine, especially with respect to Europe's need for liquefied natural gas, the Nord Stream pipeline, etc.
Iran can be the new supplier of energy for Europe, right?
Right, and I don't know, you probably will not be aware of this, but I've deployed a A principle on Dark Horse that I call the Time Traveling Money Printer.
And the idea is we all understand how to make money if you have a time machine.
There are no time machines, but you can create something that works just like one by slowing down everyone else's awareness of what's taking place, because it allows you to predict events in the world.
And if you can predict events in the world, you can bet on them in the market.
And when you bet on them in the market, you can effectively print money.
You steal that money from the rest of us and we don't even notice, right?
We face inflation.
We don't know why.
We face, you know, the downturn in the market where we're invested in an upturn in the stocks that you're invested in because you knew what was going to happen and we didn't.
It basically turns the population of the world into greater fools.
And in any case, my point would be... You're manifesting reality.
Manufacturing reality, I would point out, what does manufacturing reality look like?
It looks like absolute barbarism conducted against real innocent citizens and then broadcast to the internet.
So the callousness that is required to operate the time-traveling money printer is ghastly.
Right, it manifests as the torment and destruction of innocent people.
But for anyone willing to do that, and I think COVID reveals that there are at least some very powerful people who are unbothered by the destruction of innocent lives.
That for anyone willing to do that, it is a game at which they can become highly expert and escape any control that we might wish to exert through the normal structures that society depends on.
Because if you can print money by predicting events, or even more powerfully, creating events that you can then predict with precision, Then you are freed from the mechanism that we usually use to control things like espionage organizations, right?
The budget.
So it is smart for us to recognize the degree to which our lives, life and death, exists downstream of this potential mechanism, which a very powerful few are likely operating regularly.
And it likely explains events that we then try to explain with much more mundane tools, which don't work.
Yeah.
Because, of course, the nature of the event... Yeah, you and I can sit here and try to speculate for ever about what has happened and we may never know of what has happened here or what has happened at 9-11 or what has happened in many other incidents in the past.
But those people who are behind pushing, you called it, you know, having the grip on the US and on the people of the US and Pushing that boat in the direction that it's going are hidden from sight.
We don't know who they are.
We don't know what their motives are.
We can guess and speculate and it's an unfair game.
And the whole design of the system that they have created is definitely not in our favor.
It's never in the favor of the small person.
And I think the money story.
Tells a lot, not just who's making more money, but the actual design and architecture of the monetary system and how it came to be and why they have created it the way it has been created and the fact that the sheer design of that system is dictating Enslavement in a way.
It's modern enslavement.
It's hidden from our eyes.
We don't go, we don't wake up in the morning, go to work feeling like a slave.
We are being taught that that's the normal way to live.
But when you actually analyze and learn about how money works and how the fiat currency system works, you understand that this is a perfect design for those power that be.
To manipulate the whole world and the small person.
Yeah, it's a it's a kind of surgical slavery where parts of you are free, right?
Go get a tattoo.
You can curse, you know, you are free in many ways, but you're not free in the ways that matter.
Yeah, that's why I call it the sandbox, because you have a border that they've drawn for you.
You can play as much as you want within that sandbox, but once you try and step out of that sandbox, see what happens.
Very difficult.
Very difficult.
So I think it's wise, just for anybody who's trying to figure out what to do with the
obvious dearth of useful information and the need to speculate where you just simply don't have the right access to information is to consider, you know, is the barbarism of Hamas in southern Israel on October 7th actually the result of a story involving liquid natural gas that exists in Iran that might be sold to Europe and that certain powerful players might be aware of
A way that they might get cut in on the massive amount of wealth that will be at least transferred, if not generated by such an event.
Right?
Again, it looks like barbarism on your screen, but it might be about money and natural gas that isn't even on the map you were looking at.
So, you know, and you know, what we haven't mentioned is that I'm also watching The events in Israel had a profound effect on alliances that were forming that were going to have an effect on the American election in 2024.
Now that could be pure happenstance.
Or not.
And it could also be, in fact it strikes me as rather likely, that whatever it is that is steering events, and of course it doesn't steer them all, there are bound to be organic events, but whatever it is that is steering events is large.
There may be multiple things doing it and they may be competing, but There doesn't have to be a single objective.
It can be that a certain number of objectives would be served by a certain kind of event, and that, you know, once you get a sufficient number of checkboxes checked, then the point is, okay, this one's worth making happen.
And that means that those of us who are trying to figure out what's going on from the outside are liable to Settle on a single explanation which will be wrong because it's incomplete.
So we have to be aware that we're dealing with a complex system that we have no ability to observe and learn about.
It's all very indirect by design.
I love the analysis of Catherine Austin Fitz when she describes the silos that the money people as she calls them
have when they design, or the most powerful people in the world, and some of them are bankers, she says they try to keep the silos intact so that you will not connect the silo of media to the silo of defense to the silo of
elections or politics to the silo of money etc etc so that you will not make these connections and see the bigger picture.
You would think the Israeli Gaza attack is related only to the conflict in the Middle East and you would think that the elections in the U.S.
is related only to the elections in the U.S.
and Ukraine and Russia is separate and it really blocks you from seeing the bigger picture and
I think, and that also takes me to, sorry, it's like intuitive taking me to remembering Edward Dowd saying that when he saw early on in 2020 the head of the Bank of International Settlements, the BIS, when he saw him making a speech saying that they are about to create
green passes or vaccine passports, before the vaccines even came out.
And this is a banker, a mega banker.
The BIS, for those who don't know, is the big brother of central banks.
He's sitting there talking about moving into a new system of digital passports for vaccinations and health.
And Edward Dowd, being a former BlackRock analyst and a Wall Street Guy is looking at it saying, that moment I knew that this COVID thing is way larger than just health.
Because if a banker is sitting there talking to me about a digital passport, a vaccine passport, then they, like he gave him the clue that here's a connection between those two silos that you normally cannot see.
Right.
So, and you have to be really sophisticated, I think, in order to spot Those small connections between those silos, because the system will try to make it almost impossible for you to detect them.
And so you have to, in a way, that's why, you know, I like the term conspiracy theorists, because you are open to so many ideas and to so many different points of information.
And you have the ability to try and connect them.
And you also need to have the humility to say, no, with that connection, I was wrong.
And that's not.
A proper theory and I'm going to throw it away, but then you stay open and you know, you, you take on more and you know, I got carried away, but that just sparked this for me.
No, I get it.
I will say, in my professional life, I am a theorist.
I'm an evolutionary theorist.
And so I think very carefully about how theory functions, right?
It functions.
You don't come up with a theory.
You come up with a hypothesis.
The hypothesis is predictions.
If those predictions turn out to be true, then you tend to think your hypothesis is probably overlapping reality.
So there's a rigorous way To do theory, it doesn't mean a guess.
So what I would say is, for decades, in fact, partially downstream from the CIA, which set about poisoning the idea of conspiracy theory, the CIA actually advanced the concept that the term conspiracy theory should be used to dismiss alternative explanations for the Kennedy assassination.
But in any case, The point is, they have now overplayed their hand.
For years, people were spooked by the idea of conspiracy theory.
Now the question is really not, are you a conspiracy theorist, but are you good at it?
Are you good at being rigorous and throwing out bad hypotheses of conspiracy and following evidence to where it actually leads, even when it upends an idea that you Yeah, and I think with the size of the beast right now, we are going to see more and more narratives collide.
People are getting used to the idea that it would be absurd, given how much collusion we've seen, it would be absurd to dismiss the idea of conspiracy out of hand.
That's just naive.
Yeah, and I think with the size of the beast right now, we are going to see more and more narratives collide.
We're going to see more and more things that don't add up, that maybe even internal battles between different powers of that beast.
And I think this is to our advantage in a way.
It's going to be very messy.
It's dirty.
It's gory.
This is exactly what's happening in Israel right now.
But it's revealing at the same time.
Well, I like your point about When we glimpse a connection between silos that tells us something, like Edward Dowd was awakened to what COVID was by a banker talking about vaccine passports, right?
It's a classic moment.
But it speaks also to the importance of, just as we are jerked around by events and simplistic narratives that cause us to To see familiar lines on a map and think we know what's going on.
We are also triggered.
into betrayals of people who are on our team by these takedowns, right?
The Mike Benz takedown is particularly important in a world where the glimpses of the connections between silos are actually the map of what's really taking place.
Yes.
Not many people can do what Mike Benz does and whatever, you know, The takedown of him I did not find very compelling.
They did find something that does have a kind of moral complexity to it that requires you to think very carefully about to even know whether you're comfortable with it.
But at the end of the day, Mike is playing such an important role in revealing a world that is controlling how we interact with each other that we ought to look at The fact that something suddenly emerges about him that causes us to feel one way or another and say, well, why would that be happening?
Right?
Why are we suddenly questioning Mike Benz?
Why are we suddenly questioning Russell Brand?
Why are we suddenly questioning Joe Rogan or Robert Malone or any of the dissidents who have proven that they can actually withstand the stigmas and reveal things that others cannot?
Yeah, this is a very important clue in deciphering the game that is being played against us.
And I'm just hopeful that more and more people will understand that when this becomes so common and so, you know, with all the misinformation laws now, it's becoming like they're trying to normalize it.
And it is weird, even to the most normal normie out there, that they're trying to silence so many people on so many topics.
And I think that's where they're going to get a, how do you call it?
Like a foul?
Like a, like a, like in soccer that you... Yeah, a foul.
A foul, right?
Yeah.
Because they, they, they're, They're digging their own grave, in a way.
They're showing the normal people out there that, yeah, we told you in the past that you should behave a certain way, and you should comply with certain rules, and you should be in a certain way in society, but now we're enforcing all these things in laws, and we're hurting people who are not doing that, and they are escalating this.
Exaggerating, and I think this is their mistake, because it will wake more and more people up.
There's no question that they are waking more and more people up, but I also think it is very important that we understand that that was not... They did make an error, but I don't think it's exactly the one you've described.
I think so.
Another principle that I took a long time to realize but I find very important is that what we are facing in this complex environment, I call it Goliath.
Goliath is the force that opposes meaningful change.
And why doesn't it want meaningful change?
Because it's a winner and it can only end up as a loser through change.
It could stay a winner but in general change is not good for the winners.
So they prevent it.
But Goliath, that force that prevents change, has two parts.
It has a part that colludes, that knows what it's doing.
That part is intelligent.
It also has a part that's emergent, right?
People who realize that they're going to be stigmatized if they think one thing, so they think another, and then they reinforce each other.
Or journalists who accidentally discover that when they write stories that look like this, they don't do well.
And when they write stories like that, suddenly, you know, their quality of life goes up so that they don't know why they're writing those stories, but something is paying them indirectly, something that they will never meet.
So that emergent part is dumb as hell, just like the real Goliath probably was.
The real Goliath was probably a giant, meaning that he had a pituitary tumor.
And he was a dimwit, and he was vulnerable.
And it wasn't David who took him out, but the story is recorded as if it was David.
But in any case, Goliath is partially an emergent force, and an emergent force, that's a synonym for an evolved force.
The thing about evolved forces is they can be ferociously powerful when they are facing the thing to which they evolved.
They are clumsy when they are facing something novel that they have never seen before.
Right?
Goliath had never seen Elhanan, who we record in the story as if it was David.
Right?
A little guy who understood that this battle was not just about force, but was about, you know, agility and slingshots or whatever.
That is something Goliath does not anticipate.
And our Goliath did not anticipate The ability of people with a camera and a microphone and an internet connection to outfox massive institutions and people with superior access to information.
So what I think happened during COVID was Goliath literally didn't know what a podcast was, and he certainly couldn't figure out why whatever happens in Joe Rogan's man cave should matter to anyone.
Right?
Wyeth knew that he owned all of the major media properties.
Yes.
And that that was sufficient to control the public mind.
And what Joe Rogan says, and what Joe Rogan's guests say, doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference.
Goliath was sure of that, and he was wrong.
So, the reason that they have revealed themselves is that we are figuring out how to talk in spite of the controls that they wish to apply.
They try to get us in a sandbox, and we've figured out a way to speak that isn't, you know, we've figured out how to tunnel out of the sandbox.
So, that's a battle.
I'm not saying we won.
We didn't.
But we were on the right path, yeah.
And that's the thing that I love the most about human species, that we're in times of trouble, and when we're being pushed to the corner, our creativity comes out.
We find another way, just like water.
And this is what has happened here.
We've been pushed to the corner.
We found another way.
And again, like you said, we didn't win yet.
But, you know, there are different paths that are opening up thanks to that limitation that has been forced on us.
And it will continue to happen as this escalates.
And I'm looking forward to see what humanity unravels.
We can be unpredictable and we can be very creative.
And those are two traits of the human species that we sometimes underestimate.
And so I love your story, your analogy.
And what killed Goliath in the end?
Say what?
What killed Goliath?
A guy named Elhanan.
As best we understand it, a guy named Elhanan killed him.
And I think Slingshot was approximately right.
A rock.
Why do we know that David did that?
Um, you know, this is narrative license, that basically, because David goes on to play the role that he does in the Bible, it was sort of necessary.
To attribute.
Right, that his origin story.
So, you know, it's like when they take a really good book and they composite two characters in order to make it into a movie, right?
They streamline the story.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
I will put one more piece on this puzzle.
There's something I've noticed, and I think this discussion with you is the perfect place to deploy it.
There are a great many people who I now, I didn't have a tremendous number of heroes before, before COVID, but so many people I thought stood up so bravely that they really do have that status in my mind.
And it doesn't, it's not, it's not a superhuman thing.
It's just somebody who's shown terrific strength of character and they now have this status of hero to me.
Heroes are overwhelmingly At least in this era, there are overwhelmingly people who have a healthy dose of what I would call lone wolfism.
There's a part of them, there's a characteristic that human beings have, which is a vulnerability, which is that we are terribly afraid of being isolated.
Right?
And the reason for that is because 5000 years ago, if you were isolated by your tribe because you believed in compatible things, that was the first step to starvation.
So we fear isolation as if it was death, because frequently, for our ancestors, it was.
So that means people are manipulable, and they will sign up for things that they should know are nonsense, because fear drives them to do it.
And the heroes have enough independence of mind that it doesn't matter that everybody else thinks something different.
They can see the evidence in front of them and they will talk about it come hell or high water.
The problem is that the people who have that wonderful characteristic, that necessary characteristic, are often terrible at confederating.
They don't know how to team up because they're lone wolves.
And so one thing that I Absolutely fear in the aftermath of what happened on October 7th in Israel is that it caused a lot of people who were learning the skill of teaming up, a skill that was made fundamentally important by the shenanigans over COVID
Those people are suddenly eyeing each other with suspicion, because they find themselves in different places on this issue, which they have almost universally oversimplified.
So I worry that that was an innovation, that Goliath is learning things about how to deal with us, and one of the ways to feed us something that will cause us to not understand each other anymore.
And it's time for us to level up and learn how, for example, not to suddenly become suspicious of Mike Benz just because somebody decides to write a story about him at a particularly important moment.
Wow, this is so true.
It's the sophistication of divide and conquer.
I see it inside of Israel and I see it definitely in the larger global community that was formed after COVID and how people are taking sides so quickly and getting upset with each other.
And yes, the fact that we are okay being on our own and we don't need anyone.
We've already done it once or twice or a few times in our lives.
Now we can Go and live the rest of our lives like that.
We forget the power of the group.
And we must have each other.
We must have each other in order to win this.
And then it's going to be as you can see what's happening in Israel and it's going to happen in other places in the world.
And I think it's going to escalate in Israel, not necessarily with other Countries around us, but inside of Israel, I think we're going to have a proper crisis of divide inside the Israeli society of, are we for or against pulling out of the settlements?
This is going to be a future question that we have to handle and it's going to tear, it could tear the country apart.
And we, we must find the way.
To transcend those issues and see the bigger picture and the bigger Goliath, as you're saying.
If we don't see that and, you know, look long term and far away into the future, then we're definitely going to lose that game.
It's super important what you're saying.
Well, I think, you know, maybe this is the place to leave it.
I will just say that.
Once upon a time, Goliath was a person.
Right?
He was a brutal, terrible person.
And he was taken down by another person, Elhanan, who we composite into David.
In the present, Goliath has scaled way up.
It's not a person.
It's something much bigger.
David has to scale up, too.
We are effectively David, and in order to play our proper role, we have to learn how to function coherently and not leap to suspicions about each other that will make it impossible to take Goliath out, because we have to take Goliath out.
We do because, frankly, I think we have two choices.
For history, we can either return to lineage against lineage competition, or we can all step into the cosmopolitan future and we can retain our traditions, but we can stop suspecting each other and prioritizing each other based on our genes, which is something, if you understand how ridiculous it is to let your genes decide who you should like, then
You know it would be preposterous to allow lineage to dominate our world.
We simply Israel has to take the one foot that it's got in the West and it needs to put the other foot in the West.
The Middle East needs to come along and really the whole world because as long as there are large pockets of people who see our genetic lineages as the dominant, most important factor, they are in a position to cancel the well-being that the rest of us would seek because it is simply better.
Amen to that, Brett.
Amen.
All right.
Well, Ifrat, this has been a... I don't even know what the word is.
It's been a very important conversation from my perspective.
I hope so.
I was actually pretty nervous before, and it was fascinating for me where we took this.
Being grounded back to the reality in Israel, you know, going back to what's happening here.
But at the same time, I feel encouraged and hopeful that it's still possible to make my voice heard and to have a stage like this with you and with other people.
I think it's... If this is not inspirational to someone out there, then I don't know what this conversation was.
Yeah, agreed.
Well, it's been a pleasure, and I look forward to hearing your observations as events progress.
People, where can they find you?
On Twitter, Efrat Fennington, or Telegram, and Substack.
And yeah.
So let us spell out your Twitter handle.
That's the place people are going to have the easiest time finding the rest of your links.
Oh, it's going to be on the screen.
Oh, OK.
Yeah, we're going to put it on the screen.
OK, good.
All right.
Wonderful.
Well, Efrat, thank you so much for doing this and good luck.
Yeah, we need it.
Actually, as we were saying goodbye, I'm hearing booms outside.
