At RNC Debate, Nikki Haley Shows She’s the Candidate of Neocons & Corporate Media, Glenn Addresses Viral Interviews & “Pushing Back,” and Interview w/ Jacob Siegel on Israel, US Aid, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #179
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald
Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/
Follow System Update:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the Republican Party held its third presidential debate last night, now reduced to five participants after Mike Pence dropped out and none of the other candidates qualified.
Donald Trump, yet again, did not show up, and who can blame him?
Each time he makes that choice, he seems to rise in the polls.
And the consensus of the corporate media is that the clear winner of last night's debate was Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who spent 18 months as the U.S.
ambassador to the U.N., which is a largely ceremonial post where she raised her hand very elegantly, in fairness, to vote in accordance with Trump administration policy.
The corporate media not exactly in step with the sentiments and priorities of Republican Party primary voters views Haley in such a positive light and that they do should tell you most of what you need to know about her candidacy.
She exists to serve establishment interests and to rescue the Republican Party from the anti-corporate, anti-militarist, and anti-establishment sentiments that have driven it since the emergence of Donald Trump.
The requirement for being seen as a serious national security expert in the eyes of the corporate press is clear and obvious.
It's simple.
You must cheer U.S.
wars every time one is proposed, and certainly every time one is being fought.
And by that metric, there is no greater foreign policy sage in the United States than Nikki Haley, with the possible exception of Lindsey Graham.
That's the reason the U.S.
media adored John McCain so much, because he too cheered every U.S.
war.
Last night Haley really let her warmongering and neocon colors fly more proudly than ever and that's why she got such universally high marks from the GOP establishment and the corporate media that ordinarily has nothing but scorn to heap on Republican candidates because what they want is Nikki Haley to be the nominee and therefore for Americans to have no choice
On foreign policy, when they go to the polls next year to vote, two candidates, two parties that represent the warmongering neocon ideology will show you the lowlights of Nikki Haley's performance and the attacks that she sustained on these issues from Vivek Ramaswamy in particular.
Then, over the past several weeks, we have welcomed to the show numerous guests to speak about the war between Israel and Gaza.
Most of them, for reasons we have explained on several occasions, have been pro-Palestinian, or critics of Israel.
Namely, we were having a hard time booking pro-Israel voices to come on, but it wasn't for lack of effort.
That changed last night when we devoted most of our show to our discussion with Batia Ungersagen, and then again tonight when we speak with Tablet Magazine's Jacob Siegel, both Israel supporters.
And over the last several weeks we have heard criticisms, both from our viewers and from other media outlets, about our alleged failure to, quote, push back sufficiently against our pro-politician guests.
And then we heard the same thing from some of you during last night's discussion with Batya.
Indeed the interview we conducted with Roger Waters last week was particularly controversial as it received ample media attention in the United States and then in Europe and even in Brazil where Jair Bolsonaro's wife Michelle attacked Roger Waters and the statements he made on our show as demented.
And given these critiques, I wanted to say a few words about how I see interviews with the guests we invite onto our show and specifically what our objectives are and what they're not when we have such interviews.
We understand the questions and critiques some in our audience have, and we should note that they're by no means unanimous.
They're coming from just a few people, but we do understand the root of them.
And so I want to take a little time to explain my philosophy and my approach to how we speak with the people we who we invite on our show and what the goals of such discussions are.
And then finally, as I mentioned, well, welcome to the show Jacob Siegel.
He was last on our show in March after he wrote in tablet what I regard as the definitive account of the emergence of the fraudulent disinformation industry and how it now has become the principal weapon to censor the Internet and control the flow of information online.
Jacob, I think it's fair to say, is a supporter of Israel and a basic supporter of their war effort in Gaza ever since the Hamas attack on October 7th.
And I have no doubt our conversation will be illuminating and worthwhile.
Before we get to the show, a few programming notes.
We are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app, which works both on your smart TV and your phone.
And if you do so, you can follow the programs you most like to watch on Rumble, which we presume includes system update.
And if you activate notifications, which we hope you will, it means that the minute we start broadcasting live on the platform or any of the other shows that you follow do, you'll be immediately notified of that fact so that you don't have to wait around in a few instances where a little bit late or you don't have to try and remember what time shows start.
You can just click right on the link, go right to the show, start watching.
It really helps our live audience size, which we are definitely trying to continue to increase as well as the Rumble platform itself.
As a reminder, system update is also available in podcast form where you can follow us on Spotify, Apple and all of the major podcasting platforms.
Every episode is posted in its podcast version to those platforms 12 hours after they first are broadcast live here on Rumble.
And if you rate and review and follow the program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, which means tonight, given that it's Thursday, we will move once we're done with our live show here on Rumble to our Locals platform, which is part of the Rumble platform, for our live interactive after show with our subscribers to the Locals community, where we take your questions, respond to your feedback and your critiques, hear your suggestions for things we should cover, people we should talk to, that is available only for our Locals subscribers.
And if you want to become a member, our Locals community, which also gives you access, in addition to those two shows, to the daily transcripts we post of every show, as well as original journalism that we will publish there.
And it really just helps support the independent journalism that we're doing here.
You can just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you to that Locals community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
So before we get to our segment on Nikki Haley and last night, and then speak to Jacob Siegel about the Israel-Gaza War, which is an interview I'm looking forward to, given that he definitely is a supporter of what Israel is doing, and I think it's clear by now that I am not.
The I wanted to say a few words about some of the interviews we've been conducting over the last month, particularly since the Hamas attack on October 7th, and then now month-long Israel bombardment campaign and ground invasion into Gaza.
Because these interviews have created controversy not only among some of our viewers and again I want to stress that it's only a small portion of our viewers expressing these critiques but these critiques are often being expressed in ways I consider to be smart and certainly in good faith and substantive and so I want to take them seriously as well as critiques that are coming from outside the show from other media outlets or from other journalists
And for several weeks, we were hearing that we weren't pushing back enough against some of our pro-Palestinian guests, particularly Roger Waters, but also the Harvard students we had on a couple of nights ago, that we were just allowing them to make statements that weren't entirely true or that were outrageous.
And I wasn't sufficiently denouncing those statements or fighting with them when they made them.
And then I heard some of the similar critiques last night when we actually had a pro-Israel voice on the show, which was Batya.
And I do understand that critique.
It is possible to conduct more contentious interviews if I wanted to.
So I just wanted to shed a little bit of light on what I am thinking about when I'm inviting people onto my shows, what the goal is that I'm trying to reach.
So early on in my career, I was definitely part of what has become a kind of popular online content, type of content, which is people going kind of head-to-head in these contentious, confrontational, combative ways.
I would go on cable shows a lot as part of panels, and I would fight with people about various issues in my audience like that.
It brought me a lot of attention, a lot of positive attention.
That kind of debating is something that I'm good at.
It's something I've trained a long time for.
I was on my debate team in high school and college.
I was the sort of kid that people always said, oh, you should go be a lawyer.
You fight with everybody.
You argue with everybody.
So it's just something that I'm naturally inclined to do, to have these kind of very fast exchanges that are combative in nature.
And over the years, as I did more of those, I came to kind of find them unsatisfying.
I I started to feel like they were a little bit degrading.
Like I was kind of a performing monkey just throwing poop at other people for the pleasure and entertainment of others and I wasn't really finding much nutritious in them or substantive or enlightening.
It just felt very performative, very theatrical, and it brought a lot of benefits to me.
You would have YouTube shows and people would write blogs and articles saying, Glenn Greenwald destroys so-and-so.
And so over the years I developed kind of a policy that I just will not participate in panels on television at all.
I never will go on television to be part of a panel where you fight with somebody for seven minutes in between two commercial breaks because the objective of those kinds of exchanges inevitably is not to inform, it's not to say anything smart, it's just to try and prove that you're the winner.
And it's, again, something I'm skilled at doing.
I typically end up having at least a lot of people say, "Oh, you won that debate." But it's just not something I find interesting.
It's not something I find illuminating or satisfying to do.
It's not engaging.
And earlier this week, I was on one of those platforms on the Pierce Morgan Show to talk about the Israel-Gaza War and specifically the censorship that surrounded it.
And the only reason why I ended up on that show is because when they invited me on that show, I was not aware they wanted me on to be part of a panel.
They didn't mention that.
I don't think they deceived me.
I just think they invite guests on and then put them where they want.
Most people don't have a prohibition.
On panels, people will go on TV no matter what they're supposed to do and it really wasn't literally until a minute before the segment aired that I knew I was going to be on a panel when I heard him say, oh next up we have an eminent panel to debate this and they heard other people doing sound checks and I almost disconnected because I just know what's going to happen and it's exactly what happened.
I was on with two crazy people who were screaming at each other, who were exchanging insults, who were fighting to be heard.
I'm just not going to fight to be heard.
I'm not going to insist on being heard.
I'm not going to perform like a circus clown for others.
And so I just waited my turn.
Whenever he gave me the floor and the others were willing to stop talking, I said what I had to say.
And it ended up being fine.
I was able to say things I thought should be heard and he's gotten a big audience lately on the war because of these sorts of things that he's doing.
That's the point.
They do attract a lot of attention and if we did them we would attract a lot of attention, a lot of traffic as well.
People like these.
But I left feeling just dirty.
Dirty by having to participate in this and just being part of these insane sort of circuses.
And so my idea when I invite people onto the show, no matter what their views are, and that's why we got the same critique when I had pro-Palestinian people on and now when I have pro-Israel people, is not to attack them or scream at them or kind of perform what I think is the function of the audience.
I think what I want to do is respect the audience to allow you to make your judgments about what you think of the views being presented.
I see my role and it is a little bit different when I'm inviting somebody onto my show.
I still don't consider myself as the interviewer and them as the interviewee where only they have the obligation to say what they think.
I view it more as a discussion where I'm there to also participate in the discussion and say what I believe.
But it is a little bit different than when you go onto somebody else's show and you're there to kind of fight in a boxing ring.
But still, I don't want it to just be someone comes on and speaks and gets to speak and I don't challenge them on anything.
What I try to do before the show is think about the hardest questions that their smartest critics would want them to be confronted with.
And then I view my role as ensuring that they actually address those criticisms, that they can't evade them, they can't substitute talking points in lieu of having to address those hard arguments.
But I don't see my role, once somebody says their view, once they respond to those critiques, to sit there and denounce them and say, you're a liar or that's insane.
These are judgments for you to make.
And so I do think there's this kind of expectation based on what people think are good interviews on cable news to be very confrontational, very aggressive.
And again, that is my natural instinct.
I have to actually work not to do that.
But I just don't think it's an effective way of illuminating discourse.
I think it's disrespectful to you to think that you want to see people fighting.
And so if we get to the point where I ask enough questions and Roger Waters says that he's not willing to condemn Hamas, even though I ask him over and over whether he will, he finally basically says, well, I guess I will, but very bigologically.
That's his answer.
And if I have a conversation, as I did with Batya last night, where she ends up saying she doesn't think Israel is bound by the Geneva Conventions or by the laws of war, nor should it be, that's her view.
And we had enough of an exchange that I think you had the tools in your hands to make decisions about what you think about those ideas.
I just think my idea is to make sure, my role is to make sure those ideas receive the critical scrutiny they require.
Now, I could do more in terms of, I could fact check every single time someone says something that's a little bit factually dubious.
I could say, but where's the evidence for that?
And we did do some of that last night, for example, when she was saying that you're allowed to attack hospitals if it's being used by Hamas to shoot rockets or to engage in other military engagement.
I was making the argument that there was nowhere near enough evidence to suggest that every time Israel bombs a hospital, that's what they're being used for, that there are medical staff who insist That Hamas isn't in their hospitals.
They want UN investigators to come in and take a look to prove that they're not, that their hospitals are being bombed maliciously.
So there is a pushback.
There is a kind of exchange where I do think it's important to, especially on the core claims, to make sure that if there's no support for them that I search for that and either obtain that support or demonstrate there is none.
But I just don't want it to devolve into a screaming match or a circus.
I think smart people are unlikely to want to come on.
I know I don't want to come on to a show where I know that's what I'm there to do.
I'm happy to do debates as long as they're constructive and intelligent and you can actually exchange ideas where you're not screaming to talk over one another.
I do think one of the benefits of this show is we don't have the kind of time constraints that cable news has.
We aren't forced to go to commercial breaks at specific times so we can really take the time to have a conversation.
But I'm not gonna be the sort of host that is here to prove to you that I can win That's not what I'm looking to do when I enter into a discussion these days.
It might have been my mindset 10 years ago, but I've just come to see that as less valuable than giving people a space to express their views, making sure they respond to the hardest critiques Of their views, no matter whether I agree with them or not, I try and think what are the hardest arguments that they would have to answer and should have to answer, and I insist that they answer them, and then once they do, that's their answer.
So I understand that some of you want a more disputatious or aggressive form of interviewing, but I honestly think this is a preferable way of informing and allowing people to think and be engaged rather than just entertaining.
So that's just what I wanted to say about that.
We had a lot of smart emails over the last 24 hours.
I wasn't able to respond to all of them.
I said I would talk about it, though, on my show, and I'm doing that now, and that applies both to the pro-Palestinian interviews and the pro-Israel ones we've done and now will do in the future.
All right, so let's talk about the first segment, which is Nikki Haley's performance last night at the Republican National Convention, and in particular, the way in which the corporate media oozed Support for her and happiness with her and praise he prays on what it is that she said so much of the debate because of the word Israel focused on foreign policy questions, and so she was really there to
Present the pro-war view, the idea that the United States should keep sending endless amounts of money to Ukraine, the United States should keep sending endless amounts of money to Israel, should look at Israel's war as our war, should give Israel everything that it wants.
And it produced some contentious exchanges, particularly with Vivek Ramaswamy.
So let me show you one of those where he essentially attacked her in a way that I thought was quite accurate.
This is what he said.
The fact of the matter is, the Republican Party is not that much better.
You have the likes of Nikki Haley, who stepped down from her time at the UN.
Bankrupt or in debt was her family.
Then she becomes a military contractor, she joins the board of Boeing and otherwise, and is now a multi-millionaire.
So I think that that's wrong when Republicans do it or Democrats do it.
That's the choice we face.
Do you want a leader from a different generation who's going to put this country first?
Or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?
All right, Mr. Ron DeSantis.
In which case, we've got two of them on stage.
Mr. Ron DeSantis, thank you.
Senator Scott.
So he said we have Dick Cheney in three-inch heels, and then he said we have two of them.
I'm not sure the two people to whom he was referring.
I think it was Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley because of the heels that Ron DeSantis has been wearing.
So it was a pretty funny line.
But I thought the substantive critique was even more important, that she basically is exactly what the Bush-Cheney first term and second term was, the neoconservative dominated worldview that led us into so many disastrous military engagements and wars.
Jesus.
Now, Nikki Haley's response on Twitter today was bizarre.
I think it united everybody in bafflement.
She said, Vivek, I wear heels.
They're not for a fashion statement.
They're for ammunition.
What?
Are her heels, like, uh, have been modified to be some sort of firearm and she shoots bullets out of them as she stores ammunition in her heels?
I don't know what that meant.
I think the consultant who gave her that ought to be instantly fired.
That is not a clever response.
It's just a response that makes everybody cringe with embarrassment and nobody really knows what it means.
Now, here's one of the exchanges that the two of them had, and this is where Nikki Haley expressed some of her views.
This is actually one of their really contentious exchanges where you can see the true disdain they have for one another.
Well, I want to laugh at why Nikki Haley didn't answer your question, which is about looking at families in the eye.
In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time.
So you might want to take care of your family first.
Leave my daughter out of your voice!
The next generation of Americans are using it.
And that's actually the point.
You have her supporters propping her up.
That's fine.
Here's the truth.
The easy answer is actually to say that we're just going to ban one app.
We got to go further.
All right, you're just scum.
You only say that when you lose control of yourself.
And part of me understands.
I think people react to that and say it's kind of not fair game to bring up someone's daughter.
But Nikki Haley's daughter is not a child.
She's a grown woman.
She's somebody who's married.
She's a grown adult.
And Nikki Haley was saying, how can you Vivek Ramaswamy criticized TikTok when he used TikTok.
And his argument was, why use TikTok?
Because millions of young people are on it.
We don't reach young people, which I think was a credible argument.
And she was saying, well, you seem like a hypocrite if you use it.
And so he was saying, well, your own family uses it.
Your own daughter uses it.
So take that what you will.
I just think it shows the True contempt that most of these Republican candidates have for Vivek Ramaswamy to get to the point where you're saying you're just scum is something again that you say only when your hatred is genuine.
Now, here's Nikki Haley talking about a substantive issue and her views on the military.
Let's listen to this.
The last thing we need to do is to tell Israel what to do.
The only thing we should be doing is supporting them in eliminating Hamas.
It is not that Israel needs America.
America needs Israel.
They are the tip of the spear when it comes to this Islamic terrorism and we need to make sure that we have their backs in that process.
Okay, we need to make sure that we have Israel's back in this process.
We need to give them everything they asked for, no questions asked.
We shouldn't tell them anything about what we think that they should do, even though the world knows that our bombs are being used to be dropped, that it's our money that's fueling that.
So if they're doing things that might harm our interest or make people want to attack the United States, and we've had several warnings now from the State Department that Americans are in greater danger when traveling as a result of this war, which doesn't sound like our relationship with Israel to me makes us safer.
Given that there are people now all over the world that have a much greater desire to attack American citizens violently than they did before, that seems like a worsening of our national security to me.
But her view is, give Israel all the money they need, which is the same view that she has about Ukraine, give them all the weapons they need, and just don't ask them any questions.
Whatever they want, you give it to them, no questions asked.
So, she wants to give over As much money as these foreign countries want from us and fuel their war forever until they win.
This has been her view on Ukraine.
This has been her view on Israel.
This has been her view on every single war proposed or actual.
For years now, she also strongly suggested at the start of the war that the United States ought to consider entering a war with Iran over their alleged role in what happened to Israel, that we should look at what they, the role they played in attacking Israel, can treat that as our war, treat Israel, I guess, as one of our states, and if Israel is attacked, we now go attack whoever played a role in attacking Israel.
That is the neocon view.
Let's just involve ourselves in countless wars at the same time, spend as much money as we have to.
And then at the same time, she's saying this.
...tells you that they're not going to take on entitlements is not being serious.
Let's play that again.
Any candidate that tells you that they're not going to take on entitlements is not being serious.
Now, do you see what she's doing there?
Maybe you think that Social Security or Medicaid need reform because there's just not enough money to let Americans retire with dignity.
I personally think that the way in which a country treats people at the end of their life and the last stage of their life is incredibly important.
I think the ability to, especially for people who engage in manual labor, like hard back-breaking labor, The ability to have as many years off from that at the end of their life, to be with their families, to reflect on things, to explore the world in ways they can't when they're working is a very high priority.
But maybe we don't have the money to let people retire at 62 or 64 or 65 and give them Medicaid.
But if you're going to make that argument, to simultaneously say we should be pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into other countries' wars Seems like an extremely warped priority system to me.
And it is the priority system that has been governing the United States for many, many years now.
There's always enough money to fight foreign wars even when they have nothing to do with American national security.
It goes into the pocket of Raytheon and Boeing, on whose board Nikki Haley sat.
And then they say, they turn around and they say, well, for you people out there who can't afford retirement, unlike us, who got very rich because of our connections in Washington, sorry, there's no money for you.
We just sent it all to these foreign countries.
And let's remind ourselves that what Vivek Ramaswamy said about how she constructed her personal wealth is true.
We did our own reporting on that back in August.
of how Nikki Haley has been pushing every intervention and has been profiting off that.
She has been someone who was in debt her entire life.
And then the minute she quit the Trump administration, which she said she was doing to quote, go into the private sector, as though she was going to, I don't know, invent something or sell things.
or invest that's not what she did at all she went around collecting paychecks from neoconservative groups from pro-war groups she sat on the board of voing that's her interest that's where her interest is and now she advocates policies that serve the interest only of that tiny little war machine complex and neocon complex in washington let me show you the excerpt and excerpt of the report that we did back in august about exactly where nikki haley's massive personal wealth
newfound massive personal wealth has come from The reason Nikki Haley left after less than two years and apparently developed extraordinarily profound foreign policy experience in those one and a half years where she raised her hand elegantly at the UN is because she had all kinds of opportunities to enrich herself.
And that's what she told President Trump is the reason she was leaving.
She wanted to join what she called the private sector.
And boy, did she join the private sector.
I mean, she thrived within it.
Hear from Forbes in August of this year how Nikki Haley built an $8 million fortune and helped bail out her parents.
Quote, Haley stunned Washington by resigning her role in the Trump administration in 2018, less than two years after taking office.
A spokesperson for Haley claims that the family financial troubles had, quote, no bearing whatsoever on Ambassador Haley's decision to leave her position.
So the Forbes article prior to this paragraph detailed all of the debt in which Nikki Haley and her family had long wallowed, which is not at all a mark against her.
That is very common for Americans.
She was middle class.
She was in a lot of debt.
She had no real personal wealth.
And she recognized that once you're something like the UN ambassador, there's tons of people waiting to hand money to you.
And she wanted to go and collect those checks.
And that's what she did.
She points to a section of Haley's resignation letter in which she expressed support for, quote, rotation in office.
Okay, so that wasn't her motive, the fact that there were millions of dollars waiting for her from the military-industrial complex and from neoconservative think tanks, but...
Whether that was her motive or not, she certainly was eager and efficient about sweeping up those millions of dollars.
But the same letter also suggested that Haley may have had money-making ventures on her mind.
Oh, you don't say.
As a businessman, she wrote to Donald Trump, I expect you will appreciate my sense that returning from government to the private sector is not a step down, but a step up.
If you measure somebody's character by net worth, Nikki Haley definitely took a step up.
When she left the Trump administration for the, quote, private sector.
The article continues, quote, Indeed, since then, Haley's net worth has ballooned from less than a million dollars to an estimated eight million.
How did she make so much money in so little time?
By following a tried and true playbook for politicians looking to cash in on their fame.
Speeches to companies like Barclays and organizations such as the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs provided more money in a day than Haley had previously earned in a year.
It's not clear how many talks she gave from 2019 to 2021, but Haley hauled in $2.3 million from just 11 events in 2022.
She became a director of Boeing in 2019, then stepped down the next year, collecting over $300,000 in cash and stock.
So when Vivek said to her, congratulations on your future as a member of the board of directors of Boeing, he was not really predicting the future, but just describing the past.
Just like Lloyd Austin came right from the board of directors of Raytheon to run the Defense Department, Nikki Haley left the Trump administration to go sit on the board of Boeing and now is using her campaign to support policies of endless war and cutting back entitlement programs for Americans that many Americans subsist on in order to feed Boeing and the other companies that made her rich.
Isn't that so inspiring?
Alright, so that's the Nikki Haley campaign.
You would think, maybe, that journalists would look askance at that sort of arrangement.
That you have a candidate who is advocating policies that serve a tiny sliver of special interest in Washington who made her very rich and who will continue to make her rich if she doesn't win the election.
But you'd be very wrong.
The corporate media loves Nikki Haley.
Here is Politico in the headline, DeSantis and Haley Race for Second Place, and they say this, quote, Nikki Haley was the apparent winner of the foreign policy dominated conversation in Miami, not just for the former UN ambassador's command of world affairs in a time of crisis.
They're treating her like she's some sort of Henry Kissinger figure who has like shuttled back and forth negotiating all sorts of historic peace treaties.
When all she did was just like raise her hand on command at the UN, but also for the clapbacks that have become a hallmark of her debate performance.
And then the New York Times gathered together all of their columnists who are, needless to say, extremely aligned with the Republican primary voter, have all the same views and same interests as the people who make up the Republican base.
And for the third straight debate, they made Nikki Haley the Winner, there you see on the screen, there's her face.
Look at that.
There's the first debate, Nikki Haley wins.
Second debate, Nikki Haley wins.
Third debate, Nikki Haley comes in first place.
Congratulations to Nikki Haley.
They hate Vivek, the only candidate on the stage who's sort of expressing the kind of America first or anti-interventionist policy that Donald Trump popularized.
He's constantly in last place.
He was ahead of Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson, but only them.
So that is the sort of media reaction to Nikki Haley.
And she got all sorts of praise for having been a foreign policy expert from the New York Times as well.
So what the New York Times is looking for, what the corporate media is looking for, is a restoration of normalcy, of establishment ideology.
They don't want there to be a stark choice.
In foreign policy or anything else, when you go to the polls in 2024, they want to ensure that the Republican Party returns to the grip of the GOP establishment and the neoconservative ideology that they subscribe to, along with the Democratic Party ideology and Democratic Party establishment wing, so that whoever wins in November of next year Militarism and imperialism and war, the war machine and neoconservative ideology continues to prevail.
That's what Nikki Haley's candidacy is for.
That's why she has so much establishment money behind her.
I think they've given up in some way on Ron DeSantis.
He's also sort of trying to play a more middle game where she is the embodiment of The ideology that the corporate media loves most, that the Republican big donors love most, and that is the ploy to make sure that there's really no choice next year when you have a choice between Joe Biden or Nikki Haley.
And the fact that the corporate, if the corporate media were smart, they would try to help Nikki Haley by pretending they hated her, not by constantly heaping praise on her and declaring her the queen of the debates.
Because the only thing that Republican Party voters hate More than the Democratic Party is the corporate media.
and to watch the corporate media pick a candidate for them will, I think, have nothing other than backlash.
So Jacob Siegel is our guest for this evening.
He is a senior editor with Tablet Magazine, which is an online outlet focused on Jewish news and culture.
He's also the host of the podcast Manifesto.
As I said, he was on our show in March.
When he wrote a guide to understanding the hoax of the century, which I described at the time as the definitive accounting of the emergence of this fraudulent disinformation industry and the way it's now weaponized to control the flow of information online, I think it's fair to call him a supporter of Israel, both in general and in terms of the Hi Glenn, thank you.
I'm glad to be back.
been undertaking in Gaza, and we are very happy to have him back on System Update to discuss this war, the censorship and cancellation issues that have emerged around it, and the role that the U.S. and the Biden administration are playing.
Jacob, good evening.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show and taking the time to talk to us.
We're glad to have you.
Hi, Glenn.
Thank you.
I'm glad to be back.
So let's start with just kind of a general question.
On October 7th, like most people I was watching these videos, many of which were produced by Hamas, that were obviously designed to terrorize people, to show the kind of cruelty and sadism that they had targeted at Israeli civilians.
And I have to say, you know, almost every single person in my life who's Jewish, many of whom have been apolitical or critical of Israel or just sort of uninterested in the Israel question, were not just traumatized but radicalized and remained so to this very day.
I've never heard most of these people who are friends of mine or relatives be so pro-Israel, be so supportive of Israel in my life as they've been since October 7th.
And then at the same time, you have a month now worth of the Israeli response, this relentless bombing campaign in Gaza that has killed thousands and thousands of people.
The White House today said it's probably more than the official count of 10,000.
It's going to be much higher as the Israelis continue to bomb and now do this ground invasion.
What is your overall view of this war, the war being what happened on October 7th and now the month of bombardment and invasion that has followed?
Well, to start on October 7th, I mean, the war began with a massacre, and the response of the people you know, Jewish people you know, I think is understandable, given that the massacre was broadcast to the world with the intent of terrorizing not only the Israeli population, but I think Jews in general.
The war, consequently, that followed from that massacre has less to do, frankly, with Hamas and Israel than it does with a larger kind of strategic architecture in the Middle East that was put in place by the U.S.
Israel is now the main combatants in this war, obviously, but the conditions for the war were really set in very significant, determinative ways by U.S.
policy in the region.
And we're seeing, you know, a cascading effect taking place now, and we're seeing, you know, the U.S.
sort of try and I could control in the one situation, which is a kind of full on operation in Gaza, where size, the degree of micromanagement that it's accustomed to.
But the fundaments here really were put in place by US policy.
The official count of the number of people who died on October 7th in Israel is something like 1,400.
There has been a publication, a list recently published by the Israeli government of the names of all the people who died on that day, many of which appear to be people who were in the Israeli military or the police.
They have ranks before their name.
Do you know what the breakdown is of the number of people who were in the military or the police who died on October 7th versus the number of civilians who were killed?
You know, what I've seen roughly is two-thirds were civilians.
This is a country where everybody serves in the military.
I'm not sure that having a rank person's name indicates that they were serving in an active military capacity at the time.
Obviously, attendees at the music festival in the South, some of whom may well have been either reservists or even potentially active duty military members, On leave, they were not serving in that capacity.
At the time, they were civilians at that music festival.
The people who were slaughtered in their homes, in the kibbutzes, were civilians.
Whether they might have had some potential military affiliation or not, as reservists, since, you know, everybody served when they get off active duty in Israel.
Roughly, what I've seen is two-thirds.
Yeah, there's no question lots of civilians were killed, and many of them killed deliberately, even with the knowledge that they were civilians.
I just haven't seen any kind of breakdown of that division.
To the extent that there were members of the active military who were killed on that day, and I don't just mean people who happened to be in the military and were on that day at a music festival or at their homes or who were, say, at the grocery store or in their cars or whatever, but I mean people who actually engaged on military bases or who were in part of the response to this attack.
Do you regard Israeli soldiers, either ones who are deployed in the West Bank as an occupying force or ones that are part of the military occupying the West Bank and blockading Gaza as legitimate targets for Palestinians when they decide to resort to violence against Israel?
Yeah, of course, what warfare is.
And to be clear, the initial attacks in the south, the breach of the border, the attacks at the observation posts, the attacks of security positions around the border fence bases on the southern border.
Clearly, there were many.
IDF soldiers who were killed in the fighting in the South, and there were additional Israeli soldiers who were killed when they came and reinforced or, you know, responded to the initial breach of the borders.
No question that there were Israeli soldiers, Israeli military installations that were deliberately targeted, that there was fighting that occurred at military installations, and that Some of the people killed on October 7th on the Israeli side, not simply, you know, in the military, but we're serving that capacity at the time.
There's a question about the, you know, specific proportions.
I don't know about I'm giving you the rough estimate that I've seen in the Israeli press.
To the question of, are they legitimate targets?
They're legitimate targets in warfare.
So, you know, I see sometimes generic euphemistic references to resist West, but what resistance refers to is warfare when it's used in this way.
So yes, they are legitimate targets in war, but then you can't toggle back and forth between warfare, which has its own specific set of rules which are extremely difficult to control in police, and matters of political and civil resistance.
So legitimate targets, but then you've entered into the arena of warfare, and you can't then try to hop back over the line back to civil political resistance.
Well, what about, though, with regard to the fact that the Israeli military, according to how the world sees the situation in this area, is an occupying force in the West Bank The international law regards Israeli settlements that the Israeli military protects as illegal.
they regard the West Bank as not belonging to Israel, that Israel is a foreign occupying power there.
And then you have the situation in Gaza where Israel no longer physically occupies Gaza.
They haven't since 2005, but continue to control the border and the airspace and the sea lanes.
They control kind of all the area right around Gaza, what gets into Gaza, what gets out of Gaza is controlled by the Israelis.
Do the Palestinians have a general right, in your view, to target Israeli soldiers that are occupying the West Bank or that are in some way helping to sustain that blockade?
Well, first of all, I'm not sure what you just said is accurate.
So, in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has security control of much of the West Bank.
In Gaza, there are two borders.
There's a northern border and a southern border.
Israel controls the northern border.
Egypt controls the southern border, which is also militarized.
And, you know, the sort of larger, I think, context here that needs to be understood is that control is not simply unilateral Israeli force.
All the Israeli relationship to both the West Bank, to Gaza in the south, and indeed to Lebanon in the north, Also occurs within a larger strategic framework that is very much conditioned by US, you know, very much being set in Washington, D.C.
And that's not to say that the Israelis have no influence, that they don't have any sovereignty.
But the idea that all of this is just being done in a sort of unilateral way by Israelis who are bulldozing over risks and considerations is not accurate.
And you can look at in one example, you know, the Northern border, the relationship between Israel and Lebanon, but effectively Hezbollah to the north in Lebanon, now includes a series of arrangements, including a maritime agreement.
We're supposed to integrate Israel with Lebanon.
At really meaning integrate all to in the words of your officials like Sullivan and Blinken into depressurized region much according to a strategic logic and a set of interests that were determined in Washington DC.
So that's the first part.
The second part, are soldiers legitimate targets?
They're legitimate targets.
Warfare.
Soldiers are legitimate to warfare.
I don't think that I mean, it's a sort of legalistic question.
I just don't think it ultimately matters that much.
Or a moral one, I mean.
Or a moral one, I mean.
Do people have the right, legally, morally, whatever, to fight back against an occupation where their lives are being governed, essentially, by a foreign military?
Well, there's not an occupation in Gaza.
There wasn't one in the West Bank.
Right, in the West Bank.
Right.
No, I know.
There's the West Bank.
There's the occupation of the West Bank.
But then there's also the blockade of Gaza, which I understand Egypt also plays a role in that one part of the border.
But there's also a big Israeli influence in terms of Life in Gaza.
So what I'm essentially asking is a moral legal right of whatever you want to call it.
Is there a generalized right on the part of Palestinians to use violence against either soldiers in the West Bank that are occupying the West Bank or the part of the military that is responsible for that blockade of Gaza?
I mean, I suppose it's their right, but where it ends up is with warfare.
So you can exercise a right to engage in warfare and then the response will be warfare.
Right, which I guess is what we have now.
So I want to ask you about this May article that you wrote calling for this end to U.S.
aid to Israel because it's a much more subtle and nuanced argument than that headline that I just read suggested.
I want to delve into that in a second, but before I do, I just want to ask you about something that you just said, which is this idea that Much of what's happening in the region is a byproduct of the US policy.
Going back to the 1980s under the Reagan administration and then the Bush administration and every administration since, the position of the American government has been one of the key impediments to peace in the region.
And also one of the therefore problems for American national security is the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, which is every time they expand, making it less and less likely or less and less possible for there to be a peace agreement that results in a contiguous Palestinian state.
That has been the American view under every president.
I'm not sure it was the view under President Trump that might have been unclear, but every other president since Reagan, if not before, has told the Israelis, we wish you would stop expanding The settlements in the West Bank and yet these settlements have continued to expand to the point where the current government now basically has a view that the West Bank doesn't really belong to the Palestinians but belongs to Israel, certainly the parts where those settlements have been constructed.
So in what regard is that part of the problem, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, a byproduct of American policy rather than Israeli action?
So the settlements have expanded over the time period that you're talking about, but within that time, you know, there have been expansion and freezes.
There have been various land for peace frameworks, the Oslo Accords, Camp David, et cetera.
The idea that the settlement itself is the, you know, the single or largest obstacle to peace, I don't think is accurate.
And you can look at the way in which the settlement project has or has not corresponded to other developments, or for that matter, Palestinian political initiatives.
And I think what you would see is that there's not a A 1 to 1 correlation here has the expansion of settlements.
You'll under international law post the settlement project, which you're what you're describing here, right?
The Israeli building on the other side of the Green Line.
occurs after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in 1967.
And the legality of that is not cut as it's sometimes made out to be even by administrations in Washington that are pursuing their own interests and may well see the expansion of settlements as an obstacle to US independence.
interests in the region and U.S.
interests in the region can sometimes gesture towards or even meaningfully include some kind of peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, but that doesn't mean that they're actually illegal in a meaningful sense.
Moreover, the U.S.
attempt to oversee this process and the U.S.
attempt to drive towards some kind of negotiated land for peace, two-state solution, has been an utter failure.
been a failure over subsequent administrations.
It's been a failure under both Republicans and under Democrats.
And that simply can't be the feat of the expansion of Israeli settlements when there have been a whole series of proposals made through those settlements to end, you know, the vast majority of those settlements and resettle people in Israel proper as part of various deals, not a single deal, but various deals that were offered during different peace processes.
And they've all failed.
There's no Israeli culpability in any of this.
The current government obviously takes a kind of maximalist approach to this and has Pretty clearly abandoned the land for peace framework, you know.
Not without any justification, which is not to say that I support the policies of the current Netanyahu government in regards to what they're doing here.
The general sense inside Israeli society that Oslo is a failure, that the framework is a failure, is not something that's not, you know, only on the right that people feel that way.
It's a pretty broad consensus around that.
So on that question, though, then, I mean, for a long time, the world kind of told itself the way in which we're going to get to peace here is through this magical two-state solution.
And especially over the last decade, let's call it, I think there's been an increasing awareness in the region that that two-state solution is further away than ever, in part because of these settlements, in part because of the change in Political ideology in Israel and in Gaza and in the West Bank, just people in the region seem to believe now that that is not really a viable solution.
Do you agree it's not a viable solution?
And if it's not, what is the solution in terms of how Israel and Palestinians can live side by side in peace?
Yeah, well, you mentioned the, you know, the international community believing in it, and now it doesn't anymore.
But, you know, there was also the Palestinian leadership, the Fatah leadership, Palestinian Authority leadership seemed to not believe in it enough to really make a deal and turn down not one offer, but several offers.
And, you know, this history of this is now being Relitigated in the context of the war that's now taking place, but I think it's pretty clear to honest brokers who look at the offers that were made and you can challenge whether enough was being offered.
But certainly at Taba, for instance, there was You know, this is subsequent U.S.
and Israeli administrations, offers made from Iraq and then from Olmert.
You know, there was a willingness to include those offers from the side, not simply an unwillingness to accept these terms.
I should add an unwillingness to continue in the negotiations.
You know, do I see a two-state solution as the answer to this?
I used to believe in it.
I lost hope because I think that there doesn't seem to be a great desire for that on the Palestinian side, and there doesn't seem to be that on the Israeli side anymore.
I also, more fundamentally, don't believe in Sort of top-down technocratic solutions to this problem delivered from Brussels, Washington, D.C.
There has to be a political settlement that honors the political aspirations of Palestinians, honors Israelis' political aspirations and needs.
There has to be some kind of political settlement, but the idea that politics ...this to be cleared out in various think tanks.
You are in America seems wrong to me.
What needs to happen is some kind of arrangement that actually comes from the parties involved here.
So the article that you wrote in May is End USA to Israel, America's Manipulation of the Jewish State that is Endangering Israel and American Jews.
Can you just summarize, I know you've in part explained why you think a lot of these problems come from American policy, but Specifically with regard to the $4 billion a year that was negotiated between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2016 that the Israeli government very much wanted and sought and negotiated for.
That aid package, along with the kind of extras that Israel ends up getting, including when they end up in wars.
Why do you advocate an end to that aid?
Because it's been extraordinarily damaging to Israel and to Israeli sovereignty as this war has shown.
And to be clear, anybody who reads that article will see that I'm explicitly critical of the Netanyahu administration in that article.
I'm not only, you know, nobody forced Netanyahu to execute the package, as I state clearly in the article.
The problem here is that the framework of aid, let me actually, Glenn, let me step back and describe how we got to this point.
You know, I think sometimes there's a sense among people who are sort of General or casual observers of the conflict that the US-Israeli relationship is a kind of eternal verity that it's existed Maybe since before the creation of Israel, but certainly since since 1948 when Israel was created.
Let me just interject that's why I didn't want to summarize your article I said, it's a very complex and nuanced article.
I encourage people to read it There is a long history there.
You absolutely criticize the Israelis for seeking and wanting this this aid So that's why I basically wanted you To explain your perspective about why you think this aid is harmful to the Israelis and why it should end.
Yeah, of course.
I appreciate the opportunity to do that.
I just, before we get to the aid, very quickly, there's a period before it is From the birth of the Israeli state in 1948, 1967, with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, where the U.S.
extends diplomatic recognition to Israel, the Soviet Union, but then proceeds to, at times, Actually have a policy of a kind of soft arms embargo, blocking other states from sending weapons to Israel.
In part, in large part, I should say, because this is all playing out in the larger geopolitical context of the Cold War and the US is trying to court the Arab states and doesn't want to alienate them by seeming to side with Israel, which it sees as the weaker party and likely to lose.
So there's a long period.
You know, decades where there is no US-Israeli military relationship to speak of.
It's only after the Six Day War, and it doesn't start with weapons sales.
The modern aid relationship really dates to America's sort of political involvement in the Middle East, starting with, you know, the Egypt-Israeli peace.
And out of that comes both the modern aid to Israel and modern aid to Egypt, which is, you know, has long been the second biggest recipient of aid.
And then you, if you fast forward a bit from that, understanding that AIDS starts as an interweaving political lens, not a gift to Israel because there's some religious or deep political affinity between the U.S.
and Israel.
There are religious and political affinities between the U.S.
and Israel, and there's obviously of long history among the American founders, you know, not only of Christian Zionism, but of seeing the United States as a kind of, you know, a new Israel in a way.
So all of that exists, but it doesn't create the modern U.S.-Israeli relationship.
It's there as a sort of substrate.
The modern U.S.
relationship as the aid relationship starts as a way of, you know, as a political instrument, and it can produce some good things.
I mean, I would argue that the Israeli-Egyptian peace accords were good, and they've been lasting.
And so it's not that it ever achieved anything of value.
Over time, it became an instrument of the primary policy of the U.S. which evolved into a kind of imperial clientelism, I think it would describe it became an instrument of the primary policy of the U.S.
Now, there are administrations that have pursued that more directly, like the Obama and Biden administrations.
And then there's the Trump administration, which took a step back from that kind of clientelism and returned to a pursuit of core US interests.
Under the management of client states framework of foreign policy, which is the one that we're under right now, where the US tries to control all of its different clients in the Middle East, through financial incentives, and, you know, various, various sort of incentives that it offers, and those clients include Iran,
You know, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Egypt still, the Palestinians and Israel, they're all functioning as clients of the real superpower in the region, which is the United States.
Under that, aid evolved into an instrument, especially under the Obama administration, to sort of buy the acquiescence of the Israelis to greater political control in Washington, D.C., and very significantly to purchase from the Israelis a sort of client position.
Well, not all of it, right?
Are you saying all of it?
There are billions of dollars going to Israel, yes.
$4 billion going to Israel, yes.
But let's understand what that money actually represents.
It represents money that has to be spent-- it's credit, for one thing.
It's not cash.
So it's credit that has to be spent on US weapons.
So it's a subsidy to the US weapons industry.
Well, not all of it, right?
I mean, are you saying all of it, all $4 billion has to go back to US?
70, 75%.
OK.
Seventy five percent right now.
And there is a 20 excuse me.
Seventy four percent.
There's 26 percent.
Something called the APD, the Offshore Procurement, which allowed real to continue, you know, spending on its industry that will sunset by either six or twenty twenty eight.
But that OSP clause, the offshore That's the actual underlying structure.
That structure also includes significant U.S.
from US weapons manufacturers.
So that's the actual underlying structure.
That structure also includes significant US controls over Israeli arms and technology exports, which are very valuable in both financial and strategic terms.
So the idea that this is a blank check being written, not just that it's untrue, it's applying a framework that is decades out of date at this point.
It's not how it works anymore.
And on the Israeli side, they ought to have understood that.
They ought to have understood that for an advanced state like Israel to be receiving This much money from the U.S.
that money was going to, you know, even if that money is in effect getting spent back in Washington, D.C., it's a very grand gesture.
And the purpose of that grand gesture is to buy the compliance of the Israeli political class extent and to also create an impression in the U.S.
of, you know, a strong in which Israel is the dependency.
And I think that that's worked to some extent.
But what it misses is that Israel is one client among the least.
I mean, one of the things people seem to not understand about the current war, the US is funding all sides of this war.
is not only funding Israel through the aid agreement.
The U.S.
is effectively funding Iran.
The U.S.
is effectively funding Hamas.
Wait, let me ask you about that.
The idea that the U.S.
is funding Iran.
Are you talking about the $6 billion that the U.S.
originally seized in Iranian oil proceeds and now is releasing?
Or are you talking about cash that's going from the U.S.
government to Iran?
Well, they're both recurring.
That's Iranian money.
They sold their oil, the money came in, the U.S.
seized it.
If the U.S.
lets it go, which they haven't yet, they were going to and now they haven't, in what way is that the U.S.
funding Iran?
I think if you're making billions of dollars available to Iran that would otherwise have been available, which then goes, by the way, directly, some of that money goes directly to the Iraq government, which goes to the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq to attack U.S.
installations in Iraq and Syria.
But it's Iran's money, right?
It's Iran's money.
Well, you know, if you want to talk about international law and the sanctions regime, and we want to apply the standards of international law, if it's money acquired through sales that would have otherwise been sanctioned, you know, it makes sense to talk about that as Iran's money, as if it wasn't acquired with the acquiescence of the of the American government.
Look, frankly speaking, practically speaking, I don't want to say it's Iran's money.
I mean, that's fine.
Practically speaking, money available to Iran had not previously been available to Iran in U.S.
policy, which is actually, like, that's the important thing here.
That's what matters.
What's having an impact?
How can we measure those impacts?
Well, the Trump administration When that money was cut off, what did we see in the Middle East?
What were the effects of policies in the Middle East?
Generally, it was a much higher degree of peace and stability.
You know, people associate that kind of statement with partisan support for Trump, but I'm not saying this as a partisan Trump supporter.
I'm saying this as a dispassionate observer of how different policies produce different outcomes.
The effect of the Trump policy, which was effectively to, you know, not provide this kind of money to Iran—and by the way, under the Obama administration, there were also cash payments being delivered to Iran.
Talked about this openly and came up with convoluted explanations for why they were forced to these cash payments.
But nevertheless, they were cash payments to Iran.
That emboldened Iran in the region, allowed it to fund various proxy and militia groups like Hezbollah, like Qatab, Hezbollah in Iraq, Asab al-Haq, that went on to attack Americans in the region.
Of course, Iraqis in the region as well.
went to funding attacks on Israel also.
That security framework.
Then the Trump security framework.
Jacob, I'm sorry.
Can I just interject here?
I want to make sure we get to the war and I understand the argument about the American framework.
So given that argument, and again, I do want to encourage people to go read this article because it is thought-provoking and I think it's obviously not a left-wing argument that we should end aid to Israel because Israel is immoral.
It's a much more subtle geopolitical argument.
But given that framework that you just laid out, the argument that Israel is not a right-wing, That Israel kind of is constrained by this aid, that it becomes a client state, that it means that the Americans can kind of dictate the things in the region.
Right now, the Israelis are asking for, and the Biden administration wants to provide, at least $14 billion to the Israelis to help them fund this new war that they're engaged in.
Would you be opposed to that $14 billion being authorized to be sent to Israel?
On the U.S.
side, I mean, I certainly wouldn't have asked for it.
I don't think that's through the same aid, exactly the same.
Look, in general, I think that if Israel needs to acquire American weapons systems, if it needs to Ask for American, uh, aid, or I should say American credit.
It should do so on the basis of, uh, core interests that reflect, um, you know, the, the current interests of the government.
What I'm objecting to is the larger framework of perpetual aid being delivered to it.
It doesn't need that in order to foster ownership of dependencies.
No, I get that, but I'm asking you specifically about the current request.
I'm not sure what you're asking me about it from, from the U.S.
side of the issue.
Well, I mean, we're American citizens.
I'm saying like from an American perspective, or from an Israeli perspective, given that your argument is this relationship harms Israel.
Is it in Israel's interest?
Is it in the American interest?
My argument is that the relationship harms both parties, because I don't think it's in America's interest to be managing client states abroad in an overextended imperial framework.
But I think that if Israel has The correct role for the U.S.
to play in foreign policy, again, coming back to the kind of Trump framework, is to support its allies.
Israel is a key ally of the United States.
If it has funding requests that it needs to get filled in war, I have no problem with that.
The U.S.
should fund funding requests for Israel.
Within the framework of congressional scrutiny, I'm not suggesting write a blank check to Israel, but the general policy of support allies in a time of war, key allies when they're fighting a war on their own border is a good policy.
The Israeli request into that policy, my objection, I just give me a second and let me just clarify it because I'm not sure I clearly the modern aid arrangement is not about supporting an ally so it can pursue its own interests, which align with American interests.
And therefore support support the larger American goal of strengthening allies in the region.
The modern aid arrangement is a continual out.
It's a kind of year to year guarantee on the political relationship between Israel and the US, one that fosters a kind of protectorate status for Israel while at the time tying the US down.
And what I'm saying is a, I think, a bad, faulty, effectively, you know, in the long-term unworkable policy of clientele-ism.
So, that's what I'm objecting to.
Not supporting Israel through, you know, arms sales or other kinds of payments, but aid relations is clearly one intended to foster that kind of dependency.
Washington with political control.
With regard to the current war that the Israelis are now fighting in Gaza, the argument is that, and you referred to it earlier, that look, if the Palestinians want to use violence to attack Israel, whether military target, or in this case as well, civilian targets, as they did on October 7th, what it means is we're going to be in war, and when we're in war, it means Israel's going to respond as a country at war, as it's now doing, by bombing Gaza, by invading Gaza.
With regard to the Israeli war aims, whatever they are, and I want to get to that, but the ostensible war aim is we're there to destroy, Israel's there to destroy Hamas.
Do you, are there any limits at all, moral or legal, that you think are cognizable or valid in terms of how many Palestinians Israel can kill through its bombs, through its invasion, in order to achieve this goal?
Or is the sky the limit?
I mean, I find that to be the wrong question to ask.
It's a sort of like a kind of accountants to war.
It's just not how war works.
Of course, there are moral limits.
Of course, there are and should be legal limits.
And it's pretty clear when Israel opened the humanitarian corridors.
When Israel goes to very significant lengths to try and evacuate civilian areas, that this is not indiscriminate carpet bombing.
I mean, we've seen examples of indiscriminate carpet bombing in the very recent incident in Syria, for instance, and they didn't involve extensive efforts from the United States to actually, you know, deliberate efforts to prevent the evacuation of civilians.
What's going on here?
The idea that the proper framework to look at this is a sort of, you know, human life being counting where we look at the number of casualties on both sides, I'm sorry, is a kind of technocratic fallacy.
Applied to an arena that simply doesn't work, in which it actually doesn't accord with the laws of war.
That's the law of, you know, proportionality.
It does not refer to, if you kill one of us, this is how many of you we can kill.
That's what proportionality actually means.
It really refers to, you know, it combines Ethical considerations about civilian casualties with strategic considerations, operational considerations.
What is the value of the target?
What is the strategic operation, operational value of the target?
And so it makes more sense to look at it that way rather than to just look at it As a body count on this side and a body count on that side, which is why it's so important to not allow it to get to this point, to not set the conditions what US policy in the Middle East has been doing for years now.
Look, it's not an accident that shortly after the Biden administration took over in Washington, The first little mini, you know, or a recurrence of fighting between Israel and Hamas took place.
It's not an accident that the restart of the grand project of U.S.
approach with Iran, which is what's really underwriting the current war, it's not an accident that once the Biden administration decided that it was going to abandon the successful Trump approach, which had maintained peace and stability in the region, and return to the failed which had maintained peace and stability in the region, and return to the failed Obama approach of trying to elevate Iran's status as a general counterweight
And in return to the failed Obama approach of trying to elevate Iran's status as a general counterweight and diminish the status of Israel and Saudi Arabia in the region and bring everybody into a concert of powers,
including integrating, which is the word used by Blinken recently, integrating the Israelis and the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese armed forces to the north, it's not an accident that once that framework it's not an accident that once that framework was restarted,
There have been a series of wars and escalating instability leading to catastrophe and tragedy in the region that was actually fairly predictable.
I was one of the people who was predicting that which is why I wrote an article in part And now that we're at this point, now that all the meaningful conditions have been put in place that led us to this point, now you've opened up an abyss.
That's what urban warfare is.
Urban warfare is hellish.
Urban warfare was hell in Mosul.
When the bombing campaign, which included both aerial bombing and, you know, significant artillery and indirect fire that leveled the city of Mosul, backed up by Iraqi forces, was sent into Mosul to depose the Islamic State and liberate Mosul from the Islamic State.
That was hell.
That was absolute hell.
And what's going on in Gaza now is also hell.
And the thing that is incumbent on responsible political actors is to prevent that hell from opening up.
Once that hell does open up, it's not to say that there are no ethical or legal constraints that can be applied, but I think the framework of looking only at body counts and thinking that that's the correct moral or operational framework, it was wrong when it was applied in Vietnam.
It was wrong when it was applied in Afghanistan in the other direction.
In other words, just holding up body counts and saying we've killed this many people, therefore our military campaign is successful, is a kind of corrupt and bankrupt enterprise.
But conversely, just holding up body counts and saying this is a war crime is also a corrupt enterprise.
It doesn't reflect the The reality of war, and there's one more thing to add to that, you know, Hamas responsibility to the Palestinian people, as Hamas leaders keep saying in public over and over again, right?
There was a piece in the New York Times yesterday where a senior leader of Hamas said, we have no responsibility for water, electricity, you know, our responsibility is Perpetual warfare against Israel until we erase the state.
This is what a senior Hamas in the New York Times.
Now, the sort of defenders of Hamas abroad have been like to translate its own maximalist disregard for Palestinian citizens and belligerence towards Israel.
They translate that into like a rationalist Technocratic framework and, you know, Robert Malley, the former top level negotiator with both the Obama and Biden administrations, who mysteriously was relieved from his post only a few months before this war started, apparently related to what was subsequently uncovered as a
a very high level Iranian influence operation at the highest levels of the United States government.
Mali famously referred to Hamas as a rational act or a kind of social movement in the Middle East.
And there are people at this very moment who are making the same arguments about Hamas being essentially just a kind of misunderstood conflict resolution.
Just to be clear, I'm not making that argument, but I do want to just— No, no, no.
I know you weren't saying that.
I get it.
I understand.
But I do want to just go back to that question because I actually don't think... Can I just finish the one point?
Go ahead.
Yeah, go ahead.
Quickly, and let me clarify now, I absolutely was not saying... No, I know, I didn't mean to suggest you were.
I know, I didn't think you were.
But there is an important thing to understand, Dieter, which is that because Hamas is not accountable to Palestinians, as Hamas leaders say publicly, And the Israeli government is accountable to Israeli citizens.
Israel has an obligation to pursue victory in warfare.
You know, this is something I've thought a lot about as an American combat veteran, as an American who participated in catastrophic, futile wars where American leaders refused to pursue victory, where American leaders stranded
I was including myself in pointless wars in Afghanistan for two decades, and not only didn't achieve victory, but explicitly scoffed at the victory, which is something that, you know, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration did.
They treated victory like an outlet.
The reason why this is so important is victory is how you secure peace.
This has been true for thousands of years, and it's true now.
And can you sometimes avoid war and secure peace through political negotiations?
Yes, you can.
And every conceivable step should be taken to prevent war.
But once you're in war, the obligation of the sovereign is to achieve a victory that restores peace.
Okay, so that's what I want to zero in on.
I don't think it's a technocratic question to say how many Palestinians can end up dead at the end of this war for someone to look at this war and say this was a just war.
I actually think it's the opposite.
I think it's an incredibly technocratic Response to say, well, look, there are these doctrines of proportionality and how you secure victory.
We're talking about how many human lives, many, many innocent human lives, children, babies are going to end up dead.
And what I'm asking you is not as a technocratic question, not according to international law or whatever kind of concepts one can invoke when arguing at the Hague.
But as a human being, as somebody who can look at this as a moral actor, is there any number of dead Palestinians that we can reach?
100,000?
500,000?
A million?
Half the population of Gaza?
Where you would say that simply by virtue of how many Palestinians ended up losing their lives in this war, that this war ended up being unjust?
Or, as I said at the start, is it just we don't care about that number, that's not a relevant number, how many died?
I think the evidence shows that the Israelis do care about that number, and the Americans obviously care about that number also.
Also, yeah, there is a -- I wouldn't say there's a number only -- I'm not prepared to put a number on this because I think that the important question is, is there deliberate targeting of civilians?
Is there an effort to avoid civilian casualties?
Who ultimately is placing the civilians on fire?
All of these things are important.
Are there moral trespasses that Israel could commit?
Yes, there are unjustifiable moral trespasses that Israel could potentially commit.
You know, I have not seen that so far.
I have not seen evidence that the Israeli approach to warfare is the singularly brutal approach that is sometimes ascribed by Israel, you know, the kind of approach that we saw in Syria, for instance.
I haven't seen that.
That's not to suggest that there are no restraints on how Israel can act.
There are absolutely restraints, and there are restraints coming both from inside Israel and obviously from Washington, D.C.
as well.
I'm not going to try and parse the numbers with you.
Which numbers to trust?
Even from critics of Israel, I see mild discrepancies in the numbers.
And I know from, you know, past wars between Israel and Hamas that the deliberate policy of Hamas, you know, there's one argument that's made about the inflation of overall casualties, but there's another very clear policy Hamas has to identify everyone killed as a As a civilian, I mean, this is written Hamas policy.
You can look up the instructions they had from 2014 about how casualties should be related to the international media.
And it makes clear everybody should be identified as a civilian.
Gaza is an urban environment.
Of course, there are civilians being killed.
That is absolutely horrific.
And that horror is To some extent, inescapable in all war.
That's the reality of what war is.
The point then is to try to do war in a way that restores peace without, you know, inflicting brutality for the sake of brutality, which is obviously wrong.
Just on the question, though, of the moral guidelines that Israel is using with these humanitarian corridors that you mentioned, in the second week of the war, the Israeli defense minister said, we're going to blockade Gaza and not allow food, water, medication, or fuel to enter Gaza at all.
There was just an American nurse, I don't know if you saw the interview, who came back.
She works with Doctors Without Borders, who said the reason she was forced to leave Gaza, aside from the fact that her safety could have been endangered, is because there's basically a food supply that even if you use the minimal amount of subsistence that the human body needs just to survive, which is 700 calories per day, there was only enough food in all of that area to last for
for two days and the UN says the amount of water and food that are being permitted to enter is about one-tenth of what is necessary just for pure assistance.
There's been reports of doctors amputating limbs that get infected because of dirty drinking water which is then have to be performed without anesthesia.
So there's a lot of reports that there's nowhere near enough even just the basic water and food for the civilian population being permitted in after the Israeli defense minister said we're going to blockade exactly that from entering into Gaza.
Do you think all of that comports with whatever constraints legal or moral that you think apply to the conflict? - Correct.
Well, I know there have been statements from a number of Israeli officials that were stupid and blustering.
And, you know, it doesn't mean that that's been policy in every case.
Humanitarian airdrops.
You know, I think Jordan was doing humanitarian airdrops with You know, through cooperation with Israel, there have been other supplies coming in through the Rafah border.
So it's not that no supplies at all have come in.
And as I'm sure you saw, there's now an agreement that's been reached to test to do these for humanitarian.
So, I should point out that, what was it, two and a half weeks ago, we saw, I'm sure your audience saw this as well, all of the reports that the hospitals in Gaza were 24 hours away from running out of fuel.
Somehow, two and a half weeks later, it seems they still haven't run out of fuel.
It seems that there are supply that doesn't mean that everyone in every place is getting the adequate level of supplies that they need, though the effort to move people to the South and now to have these regular routine tactical pauses, as the Israelis are calling them, humanitarian pauses, the US is calling them, may facilitate that more.
You know, look, Glenn, if you or somebody else has an operational concept for how Israel can destroy Hamas infrastructure, which includes hundreds of miles of underground networks built beneath a densely populated which includes hundreds of miles of underground networks built beneath a densely populated urban area, tunnel networks built largely with international aid money, including U.S. money, tunnel
networks that were built including U.S. money, tunnel networks that were built over the course of a decade under the supervision of the international community, actually a real concept for a way to do that that spares civilian life a real concept for a way to do that that spares civilian life and actually destroys that infrastructure and delivers a meaningful measure of peace to the Israelis, that's something I would certainly consider.
For right now, it looks to me like we are seeing a fairly standard by modern...
Modern standards, that is, urban warfare approach.
There's been devastating air strikes, but less artillery, it looks like, than was used in U.S.
wars.
Accompanied by a ground assault is placing, obviously, Israeli soldiers at great risk as they fight in close quarters with Hamas fighters.
I don't know how you can go beyond what's been done at this point in terms of bringing supplies in, evacuating people to the south, while also maintaining the need for actual operational victory, which is the only while also maintaining the need for actual operational victory, which is the only thing that can justify going to war in maintaining the need for actual operational victory, which is the only thing that can justify going to war in the first place.
In other words, Israel should not go to war in Gaza if it's not caping fleet committed to securing that victory that will bring a measure of peace to its own citizens.
You don't go to war to provide humanitarian assistance.
It doesn't mean that there's no obligation to civilians once the war has started, but that obligation comes under the overall mission of the war, which is that kind of operational victory.
Right.
And I mean, but you can't win wars by starving a population or having them died of a lack of water.
And I understand the argument that there's a humanitarian... No, you can't win wars that way.
And I wouldn't argue that Israel should, nor is that what's going on now.
Look, there are laws of siege warfare that are spelled out.
People who are interested in the laws of siege warfare can look them up.
Siege warfare, which is considered, you know, you can You can go look at the appropriate sources in international law and also from places like the Modern Warfare Institute or other sort of, you know, defense think tanks that actually do some of this stuff for a living.
You can look at what siege warfare is.
It tends to be the sort of conventional.
Now, my strategic The sense of what Israel should have done is not actually what they're doing right now.
But, you know, I would not have necessarily launched this kind of operation in Gaza.
But if we're going to talk about what's actually happening in the context of international law and specifically the laws on siege warfare, then there are relevant and applicable statutes here.
All right, I want to be respectful of your time.
We've gone about an hour.
If you have a few minutes to spare, I do want to ask you just a couple of questions about the Israeli war objective, if you have that time.
But if you don't, just let me know, and I'm happy to let you go.
You've given an hour, and that's obviously enough.
But if you do have the time, on the question of this... I'm happy to stay.
All right, thanks.
So on this question of the attempt to try and destroy Hamas.
The US, when it went to Afghanistan, had a proclaimed goal of trying to destroy the Taliban.
You obviously know better than anyone because you were actually there.
20 years after the US left, the Taliban marched right back into power as though nothing had really happened.
I'm wondering, What does that mean to destroy Hamas?
Does it mean to kill every person who is in some way associated with Hamas?
Or does it mean to kill or neutralize every person who in some way has a desire to bring violence to Israel?
And then if it is the latter, if it's this kind of broader goal, Don't you think on some level that having huge numbers of Muslims and Arabs watch what is being done in Gaza and the perception that they have of it, whether accurate or not, that it's this incredibly cruel war, that enormous amounts of bombs are being dropped by airplanes on a trapped population of 2.2 million people, half of whom are children, the images we're seeing of babies and the like.
Isn't that on some level, even if there's no such thing anymore called Hamas, they're going to have an increase in the number of people, both Palestinians and in the region, who want to do violence to Israel, bring violence to Israel more than ever before.
So what is that goal of destroying Hamas?
What does that really mean?
I'm glad you asked that question.
So the relevant here in military terms is between defeat and destroy.
I was trying to look up the, you know, the precise verbiage, I couldn't get it in time.
But basically, what this distinction comes down to refers to depriving the enemy of the will to fight.
So defeat would mean not simply the destruction of It wouldn't mean, for instance, only killing all of Hamas leadership, because if there remained a will to reconstitute Hamas, that wouldn't be defeat.
Destroy, on the other hand, refers to physically destroying infrastructure, senior Hamas leadership, You know, the tunnel network, obviously, and I think that that's the relevant and the meaningful distinction here.
I don't think it makes sense or is wise strategically to try and defeat Hamas.
I don't think a long war to defeat Hamas is a good thing.
I don't think it would be successful necessarily, and I don't think it's in the interests of Israel or the U.S.
Or in the interest of some kind of rebuilding process for the Palestinians in Gaza.
So I don't think that that makes sense.
And the Israelis have sort of signaled both ways on this.
But it appears now that that's not their intention.
The latest talk from Netanyahu and senior Israeli leadership is that they're really actually looking more towards destroy.
And what this means is you kill senior Hamas leadership and you destroy the Tom Rooker in particular, but also, you know, these trailers are going through in Gaza City and discovering rocket catches and discovering, you know, drone factories, that the neighborhoods in northern Gaza are honeycombed
With a military infrastructure both above ground and beneath ground, I think destroying that infrastructure which exists not only for the sole purpose of conducting warfare, but also for the sole purpose of kind of holding the civilian population hostage.
Within that honeycombed military infrastructure, I think that makes more sense.
That's not at all like the U.S.
approach in Afghanistan, which was a war very far away from American borders, in which we pursued simultaneously counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda, you know, nation-building missions that ran the gamut from women's education and sort of
Women's business empowerment to poppy eradication programs, all of which were abject failures, and then finally to more sort of conventional warfare to defeat the Taliban.
And the U.S.
was never really committed to any one of those goals, at the exclusion of all other goals, critically, because the U.S.
wasn't interested in achieving victory And ending that war.
The reason why it's important to be able to achieve operational victory is not to satisfy, you know, patriotic fervor among Israelis or revenge or like that.
The reason why it's so important is because victory is what ends wars in a way that restores peace.
What the US did in Afghanistan was to keep the war going in a continual sort of reinvention, expansion, contraction, where it operated effectively at various times as a massive boon to the domestic defense industry, a money laundering operation for the U.S. ruling class, a gift to certain allies.
And so there was no intention of really meaningfully concluding it until Trump came up with a plan to try and get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, which is exactly the point when the fake story about Russian bounties was planted.
So, you know, I see people in America calling for more U.S. intervention, more U.S. stewardship over what Israel is doing.
And The problem with that is that the people who are determining U.S.
policy now are the same ones who led us into the quagmire defeat in Afghanistan that restored the Taliban to power.
This is very much a continuation.
The U.S.
framework in the Middle East that led to this war is very much a continuation.
of the approach in Afghanistan.
And there's absolutely no indication that these people who are, you know, essentially it's like taking the Anthony Fauci COVID approach and applying it to foreign policy and expecting it to work this time.
It hasn't ever worked in the past and it's not going to work now.
I guess what I'm asking in terms of this goal, though, and just to be like blunt about it is, you know, I said earlier that because of October 7th, the people in my life who were Jewish, kind of got radicalized.
And then there's the other side of it as well, which are the people I know who are critics of Israel, who are kind of not particularly focused on that issue.
It's kind of been off the table, on the back burner for a long time in American politics.
But I also see a lot of young people who seem to be paying attention to this for the first time kind of have a rage toward Israel, a hatred of Israel, because of what they're seeing it do in Gaza.
I can only imagine, I have to believe, that that at least is true, if not much more true in that part of the world, in the part of the world that is Muslim, that is Arab, that looks at this in a way that Jewish people identified with the Jewish victims on October 7th, who are identifying much more viscerally with the victims in Gaza for what's now a month and certainly to be a lot longer.
If you end up with this kind of operational victory where you destroy Hamas and whatever that means, How does Israel ever live in peace after having just taken all this action that has escalated and intensified the hatred for Israel, the desire to do harm to Israel, unless, and this is what Naftali Bennett says, we're going to destroy so much.
We're going to engage in such a display of raw power.
We're going to show them we're willing to destroy an entire area and kill a huge number of people that we're going to put our enemies in fear so even though they hate us, They'll basically be terrorized into submission and not be willing to attack us no matter how much they want to.
I mean, isn't that, at the end of the day, the only real way that Israel can end up being more secure at the end of all of this?
Well, you know, Bennett's not setting policy right now.
And I don't think, you know, there's been a lot of bombastic statements from Israeli leaders that, you know, I think range from ill-advised to despicable.
But Bennett's not setting policy right now.
That being said, But what he said makes sense to me, I guess, is what I'm saying.
That seems to me to be the only solution to the question I pose, which is you're going to leave people hating Israel a lot more than they started.
No, it doesn't make sense to me.
Go ahead.
Explain that.
It doesn't make sense to me.
I think that we could go through the history of wars that were fought, fought brutal wars that were fought between belligerents that led to peace in their aftermath and nations that have gone to war against each other quite brutally that were able to achieve a measure of peace.
I mean...
The United States is a war where, you know, brother fought brother in the Civil War and unbelievably brutal warfare, and yet the nations stayed together.
You know, the Union, the nation not only stayed together, but there was a reconciliation that occurred between North and South.
There's a very That's only the example nearest to home.
There's a very long list of such cases.
Now, I have been explicit, I hope in this conversation, I can't keep track of everything I've said, but also in writing and in pieces that I've written that I don't think that, you know, brutality is a worthy or acceptable goal in warfare.
And it's not acceptable.
You know, I make the case explicitly in strategic terms, which is, you know, I think the the first principle of ethical warfare is the sound statesmanship and strategy.
And it's it's not it's not sound according to that logic, which is, you know, the one that I am principally interested in in this context.
So I don't think that's what's going on.
And I don't think that that would be A worthy goal, however, if it was going on.
That being said, the images going out are clearly radicalizing people, but you cannot fight a war with the TikTok audience in mind.
You can't fight a war with the international press in mind, and you especially can't fight a war with sort of, you know, ideological maniacs on U.S.
college campuses who were protesting transgenocides Sure, but the people in the region are going to be interested in who wins this war.
I mean, that's not an insignificant part of this.
in the Arab world, like the people in that region. - Sure, but the people in the region are going to be interested in who wins this war.
I mean, that's not an insignificant part of this.
If we're talking about this, the way you're framing this is like, if we take those terms, if we frame it in those terms, what should Israel do in order to win over the people in the region?
What Israel would do to win over the people in the region is destroy Hamas in a way that it is definitive, but not wantonly, which is That would make the most strategic sense.
The countries in the region, look, part of the reason why the southern border on Gaza is as restrictive as it is, part of the reason why the Egyptian government doesn't want to take any refugees, and you know, you can make the argument that they don't want to see Israel displace more Palestinians, but the Egyptian government reviles Hamas.
They hate Hamas.
They're obviously no fans of the Muslim Brotherhood in general.
Hamas is a Jordan, for that matter, is not a fan of Hamas.
You know, two countries that Israel shares borders with.
These are dictatorial states.
getting folded into the Iranian permanent revolution.
And so the government is not a fan of Hamas.
Jordan, for that matter, is not a fan of Hamas.
You know, two countries that Israel shares borders with.
Right, but these are dictatorial states.
Like the government of Egypt, as you call it, was a government that came in with a military coup after Egypt had a democratic election and elected someone associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
So the government of Egypt is a government.
Just like how Hamas was.
Well, they were elected.
Yeah, but the government of Egypt doesn't represent the views of the Egyptian people.
When they had a chance, they elected Mohammed Morsi.
He got overthrown, and this is a government that gets a lot of money from the US.
I mean, what I mean to say is these are not representative of the sentiments of the people over whom they rule.
These are dictatorships that are there to keep the people in line and keep their sentiments from finding expression.
Yeah, but in non-democratic societies, what the dictatorial regime thinks matters.
I mean, look, there's a separate conversation to be had about what's the ideal form of government for Egypt, but you were asking a question specifically about what should Israel do if it wants to achieve peace one day with its neighbors.
And in achieving peace with its neighbors, very much including, you know, the citizens of the countries on its borders, it also has to understand strategic calculus and understand the interests of the leaders of those countries.
And you know, Israel being a democracy, The Israeli government has to be far more accountable to its population.
I mean, that's, that's clear.
However, if you're talking, which I think was the original question you were asking me, Glenn, about, you know, what should Israel do, keeping in mind how the images coming out of the war sort of play in the region and potentially radicalize people in the region?
You know, it's, It is a question that can't be answered simply by thinking about what images broadcast over, you know, news outlets with propagandistic intentions funded by hostile foreign government, Al Jazeera, for instance.
What images can we present or not present to Al Jazeera for broadcast to the It can't be the full consideration for Israel if the question is how to achieve peace.
I have to go back to the Trump framework.
It's really important to think about this.
People have to look at this objectively and with clear minds.
Leave aside the partisanship for a second.
If you're interested in peace, If you disk war, if you think that the costs of war are horrific and unacceptable, and you want to restore peace, you have to look at what worked, what truly achieved that.
And what actually achieved that was the strategic framework and the U.S.
leadership framework put in place by the Trump administration.
And that framework included, you know, the Abraham Accords, sort of leading toward the Arab, excuse me, Israeli-Saudi agreement, would have been the logical next step of that.
Not the Biden-brokered one, which was actually a step back from the Abraham Accords, but a real folding Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords would have been the logical next step.
And then the Saudis, I think, would have taken more of a leadership role in negotiating a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, which, by the way, is still what I hope happens.
I think the Saudis are far better situated to lead that sort of peace settlement at this point than Washington is, in part because nobody trusts Washington anymore, because this sort Strategic partnership with Iran has made the u.s.
An untrustworthy Partner to its other clients and this is one of the problems with clientelism is the more clients you acquire the difficult more difficult it is to sort of keep them all happier or balance all the equities and the sort of
So, it is obviously not helpful towards, you know, improving Israel's image in the minds of Egyptian citizens to have any kind of war, much less a brutal war, which is, let's be clear, this is a brutal war.
Horrific things are happening.
yes, that will inflame people.
But I think that most of the people who are inflamed by that are not necessarily predisposed towards looking at the situation objectively or trying to analyze the sort of acceptable degree of military assault that Israel might conceivably carry out that would satisfy their moral requirements.
I don't think it makes sense for Israel.
Therefore, if its interest is in achieving peace, which I think is what we're all talking about, I don't think it makes sense for Israel to look at it in those terms either.
If the interest is in achieving peace, we have a very recent precedent showing us a general framework of how we might get to something like that, and we ought to return to that.
Yeah, I mean, just to add on to that, I mean, we point out a lot of times that Trump was the first American president in decades not to involve the U.S.
in a new war.
That is just a fact.
And you also have Vivek Ramaswamy, who has kind of echoed your view that the Israelis would be better served by getting to a point where they're no longer reliant on American aid either and actually at the very beginning of Trump's candidacy back in 2015 he made a statement that was one of the things that turned neocons against him and made them distrust him where he actually said
the reason we've been ineffective in being able to forge a peace deal between the Palestinians and the Israelis is because we're seen as being too pro-Israeli and not even handed enough and And the Palestinians rightly don't trust us because they perceive that we look at Israel as a client state, just putting that out there.
And then eventually, both the backhand Trump kind of got pressured into walking that back.
But that was Trump's instinct was that we've lost the ability to be an effective negotiator in that region.
Let me just you've been very generous with your time.
Before I let you go, I do just want to ask you one question about the ramifications of all of this in the United States.
We've covered a lot the kind of spate of censorship and cancellations that have come from the American political class, from a lot of conservatives.
I don't need to really ask you what your view on that is because I already know that you're going to tell me.
You are someone who believes in free speech and doesn't want to see censorship, certainly in the name of the war in Israel.
But what I am interested in is this sort of victimhood narrative that a lot of people have been pushing, really a lot of non-Jews as well.
That kind of disturbs me, this idea that very much similar to the way right after George Floyd, there were a lot of white progressives that started to kind of fetishize black people and insist that they had to be protected, that they were unsafe in the United States.
They were about a minute away all of them were from getting murdered.
They couldn't go out on the street without fearing because America is just such a fundamentally racist country.
And kind of tried to disseminate this paranoia and victimhood complex in the minds of black people that they needed the protection of kind of white people in order to stay safe, which they weren't.
We're seeing a very similar narrative when it comes to Jewish students on campus being in danger.
There was that social media campaign telling people we're about a day away from a new holocaust and we need to ask our Christian neighbors whether or not they would hide us the way that Anne Frank's protectors hid her.
What do you think of this kind of narrative that's trying to suggest that Jews are a uniquely vulnerable or endangered minority group in the United States and need all these protections like censorship and administration speech codes in order to protect them the way they've tried to protect other minority groups with similar narratives and measures?
Yeah, I think that, you know, the sort of victimhood narrative that you're describing is enfeebling, corrupting, corrupt at its core, only empowering the administrations that are normalizing anti-Semitism, which actually is happening.
Right.
And so this is not difficult to understand.
And you can look at it in terms of hate crimes.
And there's some definitely some funny math.
Going on with some of the hate crimes calculations, but one thing that's very clear and hold all of the calculations is, you know, Jews have been disproportionate victims of hate crimes in the United States for over a decade.
Um, and, and that's, you know, even if you adjust for taking out, um, simply hate speech, um, and, and that's also not even getting into whether the, you know, the category of hate crime makes sense as a, as a, but the, the normalization of antisemitism in America through framework of a, you know, sort of, you can, you could call it woke, it's only an
Another more generalized racialist bureaucracy that explicitly sorts people into a racial caste system that is openly prejudicial against disfavored identity groups.
It's white men, whether it's men, whether it's Asians because they're Asian or Asians because they're white adjacent, you know, whatever kind of terminology gets attached to it, the
The system of therapeutic racial caste bureaucracy that dominates on college campuses and also now increasingly, unfortunately, in municipal governments and school boards in Los Angeles, et cetera, that very much is dedicated to demonizing certain disfavored groups, Jews among them.
In some ways at the top of the list, that system is itself evil, corrupt, connected to the sort of administrative protections through bureaucracies that are supposed to protect victims.
The answer is not to appeal to that system to protect Jews.
The answer is to wholesale dismantle that system, to stop sorting Americans according to identity categories, racial, gender, or otherwise, and then doling out, you know, a preferential treatment or a sort of A system of moral hierarchy that has done nothing good for anybody.
It didn't didn't do anything good for black Americans in the wake of the death of George Floyd, and it's not going to do anything good for Jewish Americans now.
I would point out, though, with the analogy that, you know, one thing that doesn't hold up, would you, the sort of victimhood analogy is that, you know, the comparable situation for black Americans after the death of George Floyd would have been to say you're victims everywhere. the comparable situation for black Americans after the death of
There's a system of totalizing white supremacy that afflicts you and holds you back and victimizes you in every single segment of American life.
And at the same time, you are brutal occupiers or, you know, complicit in genocide, which is sort of the double game that's going on at now, where on the one hand, you're, You have a push among maybe certain segments of the sort of liberal progressive elite to have Jews appeal to the protections of the therapeutic administrative bureaucracies.
And then at the same time, you have the therapeutic administrative bureaucracies themselves in the form of DEI offices and the academics and activists who provide the ideological content to that bureaucracy.
You know, some of them openly, I shouldn't say some of them, a significant number of them openly exulting in the October 7th massacre, celebrating Hamas's resistance, and on a more wholesale level, you know, inculcating and promoting this racial caste system that is absolutely destructive to all Americans.
And, you know, there's a piece that my colleague at Tablet, David Samuels, wrote where he makes the point, which is absolutely the correct point, that Jewish Americans who are concerned about their status need to worry about saving America.
They need to, you know, don't worry about asking the authorities to protect you.
If you need protection, you should, you know, find ways to meaningfully protect yourself and worry about restoring the America that does not Can I just ask you about that and I said that was gonna be my last question so I'll just consider this a follow-up and I promise this will be my last one but I do think there's a tendency
For people to take more seriously threats to the groups to which they belong than they do groups to which they don't belong.
We just saw the Congress do something it very rarely does, which is censor a politician, a member of Congress, for a view that they expressed.
It wasn't a Jewish member of Congress who was defending Israel.
It was the only Palestinian member of Congress who was criticizing Israel and defending Palestinians based on The view that she endorsed a chant that was genocidal toward Israel.
Every time there's a vote in Congress that involves Israel, it passes with a bigger margin than almost any other she commands, 411 to 8.
During these conversations I've been having with Jewish friends of mine about October 7th, ones who weren't political, ones who have become more politicized as a result of it, every one of them has said to me, you know, I've been living in the United States for 40, 50 years now, and I've never once in my life been menaced or had an anti-Semitic incident.
I think American Jews feel extremely safe In the United States, at least they did until this past month, where they begin to be told that, oh, anti-Semitism is being normalized, that they're actually endangered.
I look at the United States, my own experience, the experience of my family, my friends, what I see on the political level, the country of Israel that I see being treated in ways that are much better than a lot of other countries, and I have a hard time Reaching the conclusion that anti-semitism is somehow the most approved of bigotry.
In fact, it seems to me like over the last month the people who have lost their jobs have been people who have engaged in pro-Palestinian speech.
Nobody has lost their jobs for saying things about Palestinians, even though members of Congress have said things like there's no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.
People have called for Palestine to be turned in or Gaza to be turned into a parking lot for it to be obliterated.
No one's lost their job over that.
All the job loss and cancellation and censorship has come from people who have been insufficiently supportive of Israel.
So when you look at America and you want to say you think antisemitism is the kind of pinnacle or the most approved of bigotry, are there things in your experience in your life that you have experienced that lead you to believe that to be true?
I don't think I said that it's the pinnacle or most approved of bigotry.
I said that the disproportionate number of hate crimes are directed at Jews, which is just what the statistics reflect.
In the larger system of American bigotry, as it were, anti-Semitism slots in as a You know, an essential piece, but one piece among many in a system of discrimination, racialism, oppression of hierarchy that's corrupt from the top to bottom.
I don't think that, you know, I think that, you know, frankly, there's been a lot more of that kind of institutional bureaucratic discrimination.
overtly directed against other groups, Asians in particular, though, that's been that bureaucratic discrimination has been covertly directed against Jews as well, who have been sort of getting pushed off elite institutions, which have rejected meritocracy and this kind of, you know, Soviet system of apportionment.
But, you know, I, In America, I think that the people who are viewing the events of the last month as dispositive and like, ah, this reveals what America is, they're looking at this through the wrong lens.
You know, the sort of eruptions of pro-Hamas sentiment that have happened, Particularly in elite institutions in America over the past month are simply extensions of the sort of ruling class ideology that has been taking hold out in the open for the last decade.
Now, Congress is the one institution where it is an institution that's sort of more responsive to the popular sentiments.
So the I think the pro-Israel sentiment in Congress needs to be disaggregated from the pro-Israel expressions of pro-Israel sentiment coming from the White House, because I don't think they're the same thing.
Some of the pro-Israel sentiment in Congress is obviously just, especially like the sort of over-the-top, you know, stuff is obviously about domestic politics and electioneering and all of that.
But it's not the same as the— But by what you mean that there's a political benefit to showing that you support Israel, but there's no political benefit to showing that you oppose Israel, except maybe in a few districts, which is what accounts for the 411 to 7 votes.
No, there is a tremendous political benefit to showing that you oppose Israel in elite institutions, which overwhelmingly form the indoctrination apparatus which overwhelmingly form the indoctrination apparatus and the sort of finishing schools of the American ruling class.
You mean academia there?
You mean academia?
No, I also mean, well, certainly academia is a large part of it.
And I think that we've seen over the last decade that arguments about, hey, it's just college kids are wildly mistaken.
But no, not only academia, I think you know, you're talking about a A DEI bureaucracy that is not simply an academia, it's an extension of federal policy set by the federal government.
That's what the DEI bureaucracy effectively is now, and it's in the corporate sector, it's in municipal governments, it's in all sorts of bureaucratic and administrative offices, and
I think that the polling shows that most Americans are overwhelmingly still supportive of Israel, but young Americans, the people who are most taken with these new ideological dogmas, are the ones who are turning against Israel.
It's no surprise.
This makes perfect sense in the sort of oppressor-oppressed scheme.
Favored a disfavored identity group scheme of this this new ideal matrix as it were, but.
But yeah, I think that Congress, obviously, there's more pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel sentiment than there once was, still very far from being the majority position.
Very, very far from being the majority.
Because it's not the majority position among most Americans.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, but I'm not doing that at all, but I don't look good.
What I would say is if you take a step back from this.
It's been very, very clear over the last five years that the American ruling class exists precisely to stifle and intervene the majority position of most Americans on any number of absolutely critical issues.
Did most Americans support, you know, the sort of maximalist fervor of vaccinations?
Did most Americans support a campaign of subterfuge and a soft coup against the president of the United States, Donald Trump carried out by, you know, the actual American deed, of course.
Wait, - Are you saying the ruling class is suppressing a widespread anti-Semitism by continuing on the congressional level to be overwhelmingly pro-Israel or by having billionaires compile a list of people who can't be hired that isn't a list of people who are too pro-Israel but have criticized Israel?
I mean, it seems like the ruling class is pretty-- - No, that's not what I'm saying.
... opposed to anti-Semitism to me.
So I don't, I don't, what breach are you talking about there between the ruling class and what...
We're going back and forth between domestic anti-Semitism stuff and policy towards Israel.
So when you brought up Talib, that's what I was responding to.
So what I would say is that if you look at the structural position Of the U.S.
ruling class, right?
The idea that it's foreign policy is dominated by neocons and AIPAC has not been true for, you know, it was never true in some sense, but it certainly, you know, it's a mental model that sort of dates to like 2002, maybe, or 2000.
The actual structural position of the U.S.
ruling class, which began with President Obama, Who inaugurated this new era of foreign policy for the United States, in which the U.S.
in what was at the time a, I think, understandable sort of backlash against the disastrous Bush-era neoconservative approach to the war on terror.
The policy put in place by the Obama administration was In order to get us out of these Middle East wars, what we're going to do is we're going to elevate the status of Iran, and we're going to bring down the status of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and we're going to bring them into this concert of power, which will have equalized them, integrated them into this new concert of power.
They can exercise sort of countervailing powers.
against one other.
That was the explicit aim of the foreign policy.
And, you know, it produced any number of disasters that you could say equal the disasters of the war on terror, though not for Americans in that way.
And that is the policy of the Biden administration as well.
And that policy, which sort of presented itself from the outside as we're going to pull us out of the Middle East, we can focus on the domestic agenda by creating this new powers has actually had the effect of, you know, emboldening Iran, putting tons of money in Iran's pocket to fund groups that attack both Israel and Americans in the Middle East, not to mention destabilize the region in countless other ways,
while helping to sort of set the conditions for the while helping to sort of set the conditions for the Arab-Israeli rapprochement, which was carried out under Donald Trump, which created, you know, those four years of the Trump administration, created this sort of oasis of relative peace and stability created this sort of
If you look at the bookends of the Obama and now Biden administration, just endless convulsions for volatility.
You know, Trump didn't get us into any new wars.
That's right, including, you know, proxy wars like the U.S. involvement in Ukraine, which Biden did.
But, you know, Trump also actually restored a measure of stability and peace to the Middle East through his approach.
Now, when I lay all that out, what I'm saying is that the top of the U.S. government on the national security side, which include people like Trump,
Jalen Anthony Blinken, you know, Brett McGurk at NSC, these sort of Obama people, which included until quite recently Rob Malley, you know, a sort of somebody who was raised on anti-Zionist ideology since he was in diapers and who
went on to, you know, after making the now sort of infamous statement about Hamas being a rational social movement, went on to lead the negotiations with Iran, lead U.S.-Iran policy under both the Obama and the Biden administrations lead U.S.-Iran policy under both the Obama and the Biden administrations
I have to put it again because it seems to be getting totally ignored in the U.S. press, but it seems sort of relevant that the guy leading that policy was relieved under very mysterious circumstances just a few months ago.
And then subsequently, right before the latest war broke out, there was this revelation of, you know, an actual Iranian influence operation, members of which are now serving in very high levels with security clearances in the U.S.
In the national security establishment.
So one, this sort of claim that it's only neocon warmongers who are like sort of trumpeting the threat about Iran totally ignores the fact that the highest levels of the US national security establishment at this point include people who are part of the explicitly, you know, sort of what you might call pro-Iran rapprochement
wing of the Democratic Party, which is the top levels of the Democratic Party leadership at this point.
And those people have a very least inambient relationship to Israel.
And the outsized gestures of support that they give to Israel, including the building USAID, which come with many strings attached.
And I can't think of another war in recent memory where the U.S. was sort of micromanaging an ally's war plans in this way.
It's it's basically unprecedented, but maybe it does make sense in the context of this aid arrangement.
But at the same time, you know that these people are also They're critical of Israeli policy, they're interfering in Israel's domestic politics, pushing for the removal of Benjamin Netanyahu.
You can think whatever you want of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Personally, I think that he should be out of government, and I think that he bears primary responsibility for what happened on October 7th, and has yet to really fully own up to that.
But whatever you think about him, Israel is supposed to be, in theory, a sovereign state.
U.S.
probably should not be interfering in its domestic politics in that way.
But of course, that's how the U.S.
carries out this sort of clientelism, foreign policy in countries across the world.
It's not just Israel.
But my point is that the highest levels, the sort of ruling class position, which is reflected in The White House and in the national security establishment is much more in concert with some of the campus sentiments.
I don't mean overt anti Semitism, but I do mean, let's say, a sort of, you know.
Hostility to Israel that can either get coded as anti-colonialism in the academic context, or can get coded in the sort of national security context as, you know, constraining Israeli belligerence or something like that, that those two segments of the U.S.
ruling class, of the ruling party's elite, Which is pro-Israel.
Yeah, which is pro-Israel.
All right, well, listen, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
As I said, one of the things I like about doing a show like this is we don't have the kind of constraints where we're forced to speak in seven-minute spurts between commercials.
We can delve in.
Very deeply to doctrine and insight, which, whatever else I have to say about the things that you think, you definitely develop with a lot of thought.
I've listened to a lot of what you've had to say.
I do think it's difficult to depict the United States as a country where American Jews face anti-Semitism in a significant way.
I think American Jews are very safe.
I also think it's hard to say the Democratic Party isn't very solidly pro-Israel, maybe not in the same way they once were.
But I listened to all of your arguments.
I would love to have you back on.
We can delve this further, especially as this war progresses.
I'm sure there'll be a lot more to talk about.
We can kind of compare where the war has gone to what we spent tonight exploring.
And I always think you're very worth reading, very worth listening to you.
There are times I don't agree.
I'm sure that's true of you is of the things I believe as well, but I'm happy to have you on the show and it's always great to talk to you.
So thanks for coming on.
Glenn, I always appreciate hearing what you have to say as well.
And it's, you know, it is always a pleasure to come on and talk to you and I appreciate the opportunity.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening, Jacob.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form, where you can listen to our episodes in podcast version on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms, where they air 12 hours after they first are broadcast live here on Rumble.
If you want to rate and review and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
As a reminder, because today is Thursday night, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform where we have our live interactive after show with our local subscribers, where we take your comments and engage with your feedback and your critiques and hear your suggestions for things we should cover.
If you want to become a member of our Locals Community, which gives you access not only to those shows, but to the daily transcripts of each program that we publish there, as well as the original journalism that we intend to use that platform for, and it simply helps support the independent journalism that we're doing here, you can click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and that will take you to the Locals Community.
For those who have been watching, we are, as always, very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night, and every night at 7 p.m.