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Nov. 15, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:41:08
To “Combat Antisemitism,” NY Gov. Launches New Social Media Surveillance Program. Columbia Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on Israel/Gaza, Ukraine, China, & More. Plus: Michael Tracey Reports From Jerusalem | SYSTEM UPDATE #181

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Time Text
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Good evening.
It's Tuesday, November 14th.
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, New York's Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced a major new initiative today that she says is necessary to combat what she and many others call an exploding crisis of anti-Semitism in both New York State and in the country.
The governor has implemented a massive new program of spying on the social media activities of citizens in order to find out who is being hateful and to provide the state with sufficient resources to counteract anyone with views that the state regards as sufficiently hateful to merit their attention.
Governor Hochul has actually been advocating social media spying programs like this for many years now in the name of stopping hate speech.
Ever since she took over that position when former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace, but as so often happens with new wars and with claim crises of domestic hate speech, Governor Hochul has not been able to achieve this goal until now.
She has seized on this opportunity And on widespread claims that anti-Semitism is now a national crisis, endangering American Jews everywhere, to justify this monitoring of social media activities and to provide both state and local police significant new resources to engage in this online snooping.
As always, wars have a domestic component, and it almost always leads to an increase in the amount of state power in the name of keeping the population safe.
You can call it the 9-11 lesson, if you want, but the reality is that every American war, and wars generally, are seized on this way to erode civil liberties and massively increase the power of the state, even when, as here, it's not even an attack on the United States, but on a foreign country on the other side of the world.
But, by pushing this narrative that Americans are somehow unsafe in the United States, specifically American Jews, It gives politicians, as Kathy Hochul is doing, the opportunity to say, we need more power to keep you safe.
That is always the dynamic that leads to authoritarianism and new wars, and it's happening even now when our nation is not officially at war, another country is.
One of our favorite guests is Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who has a long career in government and academia, has seen many vital historical events over the last several decades up close and firsthand, and has become one of the most independent-minded scholars and former establishment insiders.
We'll talk to Professor Sachs about this new Israel-Gaza War, the very active U.S.
role in it, the war in Ukraine, remember that, whether there is any hope for the U.S. or Ukraine to achieve its stated goals and other vital developments in international affairs.
And then finally, Michael Tracy, the lovable independent journalist who is a frequent guest of ours, has spent the last several weeks traveling throughout the state of Israel where he still is located now.
He has attended all sorts of protests against the Netanyahu government by Israeli Jews, has interviewed dozens of Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and has done his best to get as complete a picture as he can of the domestic debate and domestic situation inside that country.
And we will speak to him live from Jerusalem about all of that as well.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Every time there's a new war, not just a war that the United States directly fights in, but a war that the United States decides to take on as one of its own proxy wars, there's obviously a lot of implications, geostrategically, geopolitically, and financially inside the United States.
We usually end up spending tens, or in the case of the war in Ukraine, hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel the war with no end in sight.
We sometimes end up occupying a country for 20 years, as we did with Afghanistan, only for the Taliban to march right back into power.
And you may recall that the stated purpose of the war in Afghanistan was to destroy and crush the Taliban to make sure it never existed anymore.
And, of course, after 20 years, the Taliban marched right back into power.
But there's also always a domestic component, domestic implications from having a new war, either involving ourselves in a new war with the deployment of combat troops or by using all our resources, our money, and our weapons to support another country in one of its new wars.
And generally, that means changes to our political structure, to our political culture, and particularly to the kinds of civil liberties we have.
The history of war, if you go back and look at almost every war that the United States has fought in, it has entailed erosions of civil liberties, and it's not hard to understand why.
The nature of getting the United States and its population to agree to involve itself in a new war is a claim that we are under threat, that we face some grave danger.
You have to put the population in fear of something in order to get them to agree to support a new war.
And once the population is in fear as a result of a new war, the population wants to be protected.
That's just a natural human instinct.
And once you convince the population that they have something to fear and are in need of protection, they will naturally not just be willing to give up a lot of rights and invest more power in the state, but be eager to do so.
They'll demand that the state seize more power in order to do things that previously it could never do.
And that's exactly what's happening now.
That happened with every crisis we've had over the past seven years, whether it be COVID or the war in Ukraine or January 6th.
All of that ushered in new forms of internet control and censorship, as we've been over many times before.
That is certainly happening now with this new war between Israel and Gaza that the United States has been involved in.
We've covered on our show many times before the fact that it has led to all new censorship all throughout the West, but here at home as well.
We've had all kinds of firings of people who are dissidents to the war.
And now what we have is the Democratic governor of New York Seizing on these new fears, specifically the fears of anti-Semitism that we're told that all American Jews must quiver in the face of.
American Jews can't leave their homes.
Their children in college can't leave their dorm rooms.
Just the country has become unsafe for American Jews at the narrative, and as a result, Kathy Hochul sees this fear mongering going on, and she's decided, oh, here's an opportunity for me to grab more power, specifically the power to surveil the internet, a power I've been wanting to get for myself for many years and haven't been able to, but now that the country is in fear, I'm able to get it.
So she announced today, and I don't know if we have the video ready or not or any of our videos.
Yes, we do.
So that's good.
So Kathy Hochul today gave a speech in which she explained why Americans need to be in fear and why it is that we need her to save us from these new dangers and what she intends to do And what power she needs, she intends to claim and is claiming in the name of keeping us all safe.
Let's listen to our new protector, Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, as she explains the new power she will have over the Internet.
Good morning.
We have determined that the rising level of hate and anti-Semitism in particular poses a clear and present danger to the safety and well-being of all New Yorkers.
And I, as governor, am doing everything in my power to fight back.
I just convened an emergency meeting with Jewish leaders and law enforcement to discuss strategies.
I had the New York State Police Office of Counterterrorism, the MTA Police, the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, federal law enforcement, including the ATF, as well as religious leaders from various organizations in different parts of the state, and clergy as well.
Here's what I shared with them.
The day that Hamas attacked Israel, October 7th, and the rise in hate crimes began instantaneously.
I immediately deployed the state police to be on high alert to protect vulnerable assets.
We've had regular disruptions now in our transit terminals, including a major incident at Grand Central over the weekend.
Let me just stop there.
So we've had a major incident, a major security incident at Grand Central.
What was that?
Was it like a terrorist attack?
Did Hamas come and blow up a train?
Did Hezbollah come and start shooting up a car and trying to kill Jews?
No, that's not what she means.
Devastating, threatening incident in Grand Central Station.
You know what it is that she's referring to?
She's referring to this.
A protest against the war in Israel that the United States and the Biden administration are supporting by a group of Jewish activists who are opposed to the war in Israel.
They're from CBS New York, October 28, 2023, over 200 arrested at Grand Central Terminal during rally for ceasefire in Gaza.
Quote, hundreds of demonstrators took over Grand Central Terminal on Friday calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
More than 200 were arrested.
Hundreds of demonstrators from a Jewish activist group made their way into Grand Central Terminal's main concourse and stayed to sit in during rush hour.
The group, Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a designated terrorist group, has no history of engaging in violence.
Demanded a ceasefire in Gaza on a day Israeli military forces increased incursions.
Quote, right now you are hearing thousands of Jewish New Yorkers who are raising our voices so clear that our safety can never come at the expense of another community's safety.
Jewish Voice for Peace spokesperson Jay Sapper said.
Now, isn't it amazing that when trying to convince Americans And New Yorkers that Jews are in such danger that we need Kathy Hochul to engage in all kinds of special new security measures including censoring and monitoring the internet.
That she pretended she was referencing some major security event at Grand Central Station when in fact it was nothing other than Jewish Residents of New York exercising their core constitutional right to protest their government's war policy.
It wasn't an attack by Hamas or by Hezbollah in Grand Central Station.
But she tried to make it seem that's what she's reaching for.
She needs, in order to convince you to be happy with this, to acquiesce to it, she needs to scare you.
She needs to say there's been major security incidents all over New York ever since October 7th.
And the only thing she can cite Of any significance is a protest that happened in Grand Central Station that was carried out by Jewish students, though she of course didn't tell you that, who are peaceful, who are not terrorists, who engage in no violence and attack nobody.
Let's listen to the rest of how she's going to save us from these marauding hordes of Jewish peace activists.
Including a major incident at Grand Central over the weekend.
A major incident, major, major incident at Grand Central.
Approach some of the busiest travel days of the year heading into Thanksgiving.
I want to make sure, as I spoke to these leaders in law enforcement, that they have a plan to ensure that our commuters will be able to go about their lives freely without disruption.
Also, we're very focused on the data we're collecting from surveillance efforts.
We're very focused on the data that we're collecting from surveillance efforts.
Obviously, I became better known as a journalist as a result of the work I did in 2013 with my source, Edward Snowden, when he came forward and enabled us, myself and the documentarian Laura Poitras and the media outlets with whom we worked, to report that the NSA, in the name of that war, and the fear that it ushered in, the war on terror,
led to a massive new warrantless domestic indiscriminate spying program against led to a massive new warrantless domestic indiscriminate spying program against the American It's the same dynamic here.
I know from people in my life that there really are Jews, American Jews, who have been convinced that they can't leave their house safely.
The media is very powerful.
Activists or groups are very powerful.
If you keep telling a group of people you are in danger, there are mobs, violent hate mobs, roving around in the street ready to murder you because of who you are.
People are going to get scared and they have gotten scared.
But this is the result of that kind of fear mongering.
We had Bata Ungar-Sargon on our show last week.
She's a very stalwart Israel supporter, an American Jewish woman.
And one of the things I most appreciated about that interview, I pretty much loved the whole interview because it was a great exchange of ideas between she and I, even though we vehemently disagree on the broader Israel-Palestine conflict, the role of the U.S.
in this war and what it should be.
But the one thing she said was, look, I've been somebody who's been mocking Woke, fear-mongering, trying to convince American black people, LGBTs in the United States that they're endangered in the United States, that the United States is a hateful country.
There's hate mobs everywhere ready to kill them.
Spreading neurosis and fear and paranoia and hatred for the United States.
Trying to get people to think that they can't safely exist in the United States.
The NAACP issued a travel advisory for black people when they want to go to Florida.
So did LGBT groups.
And Obviously when you do that, you spread paranoia and fear.
And she said, this is enough.
American Jews are safe in America.
But the result of this fear mongering is that Kathy Hochul gets to say things like, we're increasing our surveillance power.
We're very focused on the domestic data that we're collecting.
Efforts.
What's being said on social media platforms and We have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms.
She's not the most articulate politician ever, but I want to just replay what she said about what exactly is this new censorship, this new surveillance program that she's launching in the name of this fear that has been deliberately disseminated and cultivated among American Jews.
Also, we're very focused on the data we're collecting from surveillance efforts.
What's being said on social media platforms.
We have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms.
Our media analysis, our social media analysis unit, has ramped up its monitoring of sites to catch incitement to violence, direct threats to others, and all this is Do you see what this has led to?
Do you see what this is leading to?
to ensure that not only do New Yorkers be safe, but they also feel safe.
Because personal security is about everything for them.
As I said, no one walking down the street or in a subway.
Do you see what this has led to?
Do you see what this is leading to?
This incessant drumbeat that because Hamas attacked Israel on the other side of the world, now American Jews are unsafe in the United States.
Of course, people are going to now want the government to engage in domestic surveillance of their fellow citizens.
They're going to want more monitoring of social media and she's stepping into that breach.
Now, as I said, this is something she's wanted for a long time here from March of 2022.
So, almost 18 months ago, The Intercept reports Kathy Hochul is ready to spend millions on new police surveillance.
New York State legislators have just days to question phone hacking, forensics, and fusion centers before the budget passes.
In January, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams released his highly publicized inaugural blueprint to combat gun violence, it set the stage for political commotion.
His plans for ramped up policing, including new gun detection technology, increased patrols, and the redeployment of a notorious plainclothes unit have drawn condemnation from advocates and activists and praise from mainstream pundits, fueling the ongoing debate over cops' roles in our communities.
Around the same time Adams released his plan, New York's Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled details of her own policing initiative to crack down on gun crime, but hardly anyone seemed to notice.
Embedded within the dozen bills and hundreds of line items that make up our plan for next year's state budget, Hochul's administration has proposed tens of millions of dollars in several new initiatives to expand state policing and investigative power, including agencies' ability to surveil New Yorkers and gather intelligence on people not yet suspected of breaking the law.
Among Hochul's proposals are a new statewide system of police intelligence gathering centers, which would engage in mass surveillance.
and whose model hinges on the use of unproven forensic science.
Other proposals, funds for new law enforcement, social media surveillance personnel, the expansion of existing police intelligence gathering and sharing efforts, and most likely technology that downloads the full contents of people's cell phones on tops of millions of dollars for more street policing.
Now, even if you're not with me on this warning that this is being exaggerated to scare the domestic population to believing that they can't safely go outside and therefore need the government's protection, do you see what it's leading to?
Do you trust the New York governor or the governor of any state to To have the power to surveil the domestic population, including people who aren't suspected of committing any crimes, in order to detect who is posting what they regard as hateful content online, and then having the power to counteract it using a police force called the Social Media Domestic Surveillance Unit?
Because that's what is being done in the name of this narrative.
Before we get to Professor Sachs, which we're about to do, I just want to show you an excerpt of the conversation I had with Tucker Carlson last week where he actually warned and brought this question up and asking me about the domestic component.
of this new war in Israel.
Listen to what he said.
It was one of the main people in the media selling the lie that Al Qaeda was responsible with Saddam Hussein for planning the 9-11 attack.
He's now the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.
They get promoted for these lies.
And so there won't be any accountability.
These very same people, Victoria Nuland, are all still in power and they're going to continue to use these tactics because they never pay a price.
To the contrary, they end up getting rewarded for it.
It's a very familiar template.
So their real aims are domestic.
They use foreign conflicts to make change in the United States to make the country, in fact, less democratic.
But they use those conflicts abroad to divide the United States.
So we're going to do this.
We're going to spend all this money.
We're going to imperil America's national security.
And if you don't like it, then you are a tool of fill in the blanks.
Saddam, Putin, Hamas.
It seems like a uniquely poisonous way of running a country, and not at all good for the country.
No, I think that's exactly right.
Days later, I promise you it won't be the last time, Kathy Hochul is stepping into that void, into that fear, that funnel of fear that has been spread to say, don't worry, I'm here to protect you.
We're going to monitor social media.
We're going to identify the hateful people in the society.
We're going to counteract them.
We're going to go after them.
You can't possibly be comfortable with that.
No matter what your views on the Israeli-Gaza war are.
But that will absolutely be a major implication of this work.
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist.
He is a policy analyst and has held many positions at Columbia University, where he is currently a university professor.
He has served as special advisor to the U.N.
Secretary General, is credited with guiding several countries out of major debt crises over the last several decades, and has become one of the nation's most influential scholars on international relations.
He has been on System Update several times before, and we are always delighted to get his expertise.
Professor Sachs, thanks so much for Taking the time to talk with us tonight.
It's great to see you.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Great to be with you again.
Fantastic.
Absolutely.
So obviously, the last time we had you on, there was not this new war, this war in the Middle East between Israel and Gaza.
The major parts of the world have obviously transformed and changed as a result of this brand new war.
We were talking a lot about the last war when you were on the last few times, which is the war in Ukraine.
I think people have forgotten that that's kind of still plodding along.
But as far as this new war is concerned in Israel-Gaza, obviously this latest outbreak began with this horrific attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7th.
It's now been about five weeks of relentless Israeli bombing and now a ground invasion that many, many sources say, including U.S.
intelligence, had killed in excess of 10,000 Palestinians, 4,500, almost 5,000 children, devastated the infrastructure of Gaza.
What do you make of this war in general before we get to some specific questions?
Well, it's a disaster, of course.
What Israel is doing is a danger to Israel.
It is absolutely one war crime after another in Gaza.
It is not going to lead to any kind of safety for Israel.
So we have yet another absolute disaster on our hands, which is worsening American security, world security, pushing the chances of more global war.
So I can't say I'm, well, no one can be happy about this.
The Hamas attack was horrific.
The response has been absolutely mind boggling in its inappropriateness and the damage that it's creating.
Today, as I'm sure you know, a lawsuit was filed in the federal court of District Court for Northern District of California by the What is the name of the group?
The Center for Constitutional Rights, saying that America is complicit in genocide.
So, with a brief that is horrifying, actually, because it's dozens of pages of all of the horrific things that are being committed by Israel right now.
So, this has to stop.
Extraordinarily destructive and dangerous.
Yeah, there's no question this has become an American war, as almost every Israeli war has.
And the Biden administration made clear, we're going to give Israel everything it needs.
Everybody knows in that region and around the world that when they see a bomb dropping on a hospital, or an ambulance, or a church, or a school, or a mosque, even with the Israeli claim that Hamas is there, everybody knows those are actually American bombs.
America feeds Israel the bombs and pays for the bombs.
And any reverberations on Israel always spill over to the United States as well.
We have a sizable part of our audience, not a majority I don't think, but certainly a non-trivial portion of our audience, that definitely supports Israel.
Maybe not everything they're doing, but certainly their response.
And their argument is the following, and I want to get your response to it.
Israel was attacked in this, as you said, horrific way.
We don't know exactly how many civilians died.
Israel readjusted the number from 1,400 to 1,200 without a lot of explanation.
Many hundreds of those people were on military bases, were soldiers.
Other civilians were killed from the Israeli response, but obviously Hamas deliberately killed a lot of civilians.
And their argument is no country could tolerate security breaches of that kind.
You keep criticizing what Israel is doing, but what should Israel do in order to prevent an attack like this from happening again?
Well, the first thing is Israel let its guard down, which it should not have done.
This was a major security and intelligence failure.
Israel had been warned in the days leading up to October 7 that the Hamas militants were going to undertake some kind of operation.
The Egyptian government gave the warnings.
But Israel has the worst government in its history.
The government failed completely.
In fact, it is reported widely that soldiers that were guarding the border of Gaza and Israel were on holiday or had been shifted to the West it is reported widely that soldiers that were guarding the border And therefore, Israel let its guard down.
And the first thing it should do is keep its guard up.
So this is very basic.
Second thing that should have happened is that Netanyahu should have stepped down and taken responsibility for this massive failure.
The third is to think that.
What is going to deliver Israeli security?
Now launching a massive war in Gaza, leveling a large part of northern Gaza, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, Killing more than 11,000 people and more than 4,500 children.
And those are just the identified deaths because it is widely presumed that there are thousands of children and others under the rubble still whose deaths have not been accounted.
The idea that this is going to lead to security is mind-boggling.
What it has done is to isolate Israel almost entirely in the world.
Israel has one backer left.
That's the United States.
I would say within the United Nations of the 193 countries, You can't count, certainly you don't need two hands to count the number of countries that support what Israel's doing.
Probably it's on one hand maximum.
Israel has isolated itself.
It's committing war crimes.
Today it was said that more than 100 U.N. workers have been killed in this attack.
The brazenness of it is also matched by the rhetoric, the intentionality of this extreme right-wing cabinet to level Gaza, to treat the residents the intentionality of this extreme right-wing cabinet to level Gaza, to treat the residents That's their line.
To say that Gaza will never recover from this.
In other words, this brief that was filed about genocide documents the shocking statements, because one of the conditions for a claim of genocide under the genocide treaty is intent.
And there is such vulgarity in the language of this extremist right-wing government that it's there for all to see the ugliness of it.
Now, Israel needs security, but it is never going to achieve security unless there is a political settlement of a conflict that has been going on at least, one could say, for 57 years.
56 years since the Six-Day War in 1967.
And that political settlement requires the political rights of the Palestinian people.
And this government not only has launched a war that it cannot win, that could spread to regional war,
But it absolutely opposes vehemently, vulgarly, any kind of two-state solution, which almost all, in fact, I would say the rest of the world, because even on that score, the United States has reiterated almost every day,
In recent days that that's the only way forward but this is a government which utterly rejects this so they're launching a war that they cannot win that will kill tens of thousands of innocents and without any political vision at all other than continued domination by Israel of the Palestinian people which means no peace at all so
Nobody, no friend of Israel should be satisfied for one moment that what's happening is in Israel's interest.
There isn't anything that's happening that isn't self-destructive of Israel, or maybe that's not the right way to say it, that Netanyahu is creating destruction of Israel.
He's the worst prime minister Israel has ever had.
This cabinet is the most extremist that Israel has ever had, and this cabinet is doing grave damage to Israel, starting with letting Israel's basic guard down and then responding in a way which is absolutely destructive of Israel's security and its interests.
One of the, I think the event that comes to mind almost immediately, and this is something we've been emphasizing since the very first days after the October 7th attack when I think the space to kind of criticize Israel was very limited.
People were very traumatized by watching those images coming out of Israel.
No one wanted to hear any criticism of Israel.
So the thing we tried to say early on was Look, we have a historical lesson, a recent historical lesson that's highly comparable, which is we also suffered a terrible terrorist attack on 9-11 22 years ago, and 3,000 civilians were killed on that day.
Two gigantic skyscrapers in New York City came crashing down on top of our fellow citizens.
A plane was flown into the Pentagon.
It was very traumatic.
It was very outrageous.
And a lot of people have spent the last 20 years talking about the lessons of 9-11, the idea that we overreacted, we fell into Bin Laden's hands by doing exactly what he hoped we would do, which was turn the world against us by going around the world madly bombing in a quest for vengeance, but no real geostrategic plan.
We said we were going to go to Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and 20 years later we left Afghanistan.
The Taliban waltzed right back into power as though nothing had happened because 20 years of occupation and war radicalized the population even further against the West and in favor of the Taliban.
But one of the things that has happened, and what happened back then, after 9-11, was anybody who stood up and questioned these wars, and what Bush and Cheney were doing with torture, and Guantanamo, and rendition, and that whole panoply of things they wanted to do, everybody got accused, who objected, of being pro-terrorist, or unpatriotic, or on the side of Al Qaeda, and it was very effective.
It really repressed dissent for a long time in the United States.
The tactic that's being used now, not just in Israel, but also in the United States, is to say that anyone who isn't fully supportive of the Israeli war is obviously guilty of anti-semitism, must hate Jews.
As a Jew myself, I've heard that I don't know how many times every day for the last five weeks as I've expressed these criticisms of the Israeli response.
I'm wondering what you make of that as a tactic and how do you react to that when you hear that?
Well, let me say the analogy with 9-11 is even more direct.
It's said that the United States acted with rage and therefore made a lot of grave errors.
But I think it's actually deeper than that.
The United States government at the time, I would not say the nation, but I would say the government under George W. Bush Jr.
and Cheney, Didn't react with rage so much as react with a planned neocon agenda, which was actually already in place in the late 1990s, the project for a new American century.
And the idea of the PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, was in a unipolar world, so they thought in their delusions that the U.S.
stands alone in its power and can do whatever it wants and define reality the way that it wants, was literally described by one of the neocon protagonists, was that 9-11 would be used To take out every American foe.
And so we know that the first reaction to 9-11 wasn't even Al-Qaeda or Afghanistan.
The first reaction was Iraq.
Now we can go after Iraq.
Now we can go after Saddam Hussein.
And it was questioned.
What do you mean Iraq?
Don't you mean Afghanistan?
No, no, no.
We mean Iraq.
Now we can do what we have wanted to do.
And so this was an agenda of the United States.
It was absolutely...
Mind-boggling in its craziness, in its ineptitude, in the trillions of dollars that it cost in the destruction of America's reputation around the world, in the free fall of American prestige, which, believe me, happened and continues to happen and has changed
the world and diminished America's safety from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but the not-so-covert operations to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the mobilization of NATO to overthrow Gaddafi.
This was all a sequence of operations that was anticipated already in the late 1990s.
Now, the reason I make all of this analogy is this government of Netanyahu is not just acting with rage.
It's acting with an agenda.
And you look across the cabinet and listen to the words of Smotrich, the finance minister, of course to Netanyahu himself, who's just the most awful prime minister in Israel's history.
to the interior minister, to across the board, they have an agenda.
The agenda has been what is called the greater Israel or greater land of Israel, which is that Israel really should control in any way, not only Israel, which is that Israel really should control in any way, not only Israel, but the Palestinian territories, Gaza and
And for some, it goes even beyond that, because they look to the book of Joshua in the Bible and say, oh, the promised land is even beyond that.
It actually goes to Mesopotamia, so it goes to the Euphrates, no less.
Jordan and multiple Middle Eastern countries, all part of greater Israel.
It actually goes to Mesopotamia.
Yeah, yeah.
It goes to the Euphrates, no less.
So it's a kind of mind boggling book, by the way, to read because it's a book of serial genocides, as a matter of fact.
But the point is that this cabinet wants to clear out Gaza.
That was the first impulse.
Actually, the United States was almost pulled along.
They tried to talk El-Sisi in Egypt into this.
He said, no way I'm going to be a party to the next Nakba, the next disaster of the Palestinian people by opening Rafa, the border with Gaza and Egypt to take in hundreds of thousands of the border with Gaza and Egypt to take in hundreds of thousands After Israel told them, you must flee for your life, giving them a few hours to flee for their life.
So this is an agenda.
And in that sense, the analogy to 9-11 is is even more precise.
It's not just blind rage.
It's a political agenda.
And we should understand, I think it's The smartest words about war that have been uttered since Sun Tzu, since the strategy of war in ancient China by von Clausewitz, the war theorist
In Germany, in the period just after the Napoleonic Wars and in von Clausewitz's famous book on war, he says very famously that war is the continuation of politics with other means.
And so when you see conflict Think politics.
Don't just think rage or attack and counterattack.
But what's the underlying politics?
In Ukraine, the underlying politics is NATO enlargement.
This is a war over NATO enlargement, which I think was a reckless thing for the United States to do.
And it put Ukraine into the battleground of a proxy war between the U.S.
and Russia, which is destroying Ukraine.
Now, what is the politics here?
The politics here Is that the people of Palestine do not have political rights.
They live in a condition dominated by Israel, effectively, as countless organizations have rightly pointed out, an apartheid system imposed by Israel and the whole world Including the United States has said this has to be remedied by a Palestinian state.
And even President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have repeated this several times in the last days.
But this is precisely what Netanyahu and his government oppose.
So this is not a war to and the Hamas threat in order to move to a state of Palestine, completely the opposite.
This is a war being waged by Israel ostensibly to crush Hamas, but to dominate the Palestinian lands.
And this has been made absolutely explicit in the last couple of days because Blinken kind of murmured, well, the Palestinian authorities should have control over Gaza after this.
And Netanyahu said, no way Israel is going to have full control over this.
But let me ask you about that now that you mentioned Blinken, because there is not, There's not just a war between Israel and Gaza.
This is a war that the United States is very heavily involved in.
We are feeding the Israelis an enormous amount of weaponry.
Biden asked for $14 billion additional just to start.
Yes, it dwarfs what we've given to Ukraine, but on top of what we're already giving to the Israelis every year, it's a pretty significant amount And one of the people who lived through 9-11 and learned all those lessons, presumably, or at least said he did, was Joe Biden.
Joe Biden was one of the key, I would argue, the most important Democratic senator as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, who advocated for the invasion of Iraq, pushed the Democrats to vote for the authorization to use military force that Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, so many other Democratic senators ended up endorsing.
Biden said it was a mistake.
He regrets that vote.
He lived through all those events that you're describing, and yet Biden has been one of the most stalwart supporters of the Israeli government and of U.S.
support for Israel for decades, and he continues to be.
You know, he's kind of uttered a few phrases like, oh, we wish they would be a little bit more careful.
We wish they would do a kind of humanitarian pause here and there, but nowhere near ever even thinking about rescinding what Biden pledged when he flew to Israel with Netanyahu early on, which was, we are going to stand by you.
There's no space between your government and ours.
We're going to give you all the arms, all the money you need until the end of this conflict to make sure you win.
There has now been, it's a little bit of a change, a pretty significant number of Democrats, voters on whom the Democrats rely for next year's election, young people, Muslims in Michigan and elsewhere in key swing states saying, We're not voting for you if you keep supporting these atrocities.
And there's been a little bit of walk back, but nothing substantial.
What is motivating Joe Biden?
Is he a true believer in the superiority of Israel?
The idea that Israel is a crucial American ally?
Is it a political constraint that he feels like he's under that he can't afford for Netanyahu to accuse him of not supporting Israel sufficiently?
What is the U.S.
motive in just how willing we are to throw our lot in to this war that, as you said, is resulting in full-scale isolation among pretty much everyone else on the planet?
Well, let me say, first of all, just as a point of policy, if the United States government said, we need a two state solution and we need it now, it needs to be the object of whatever actions are taken.
First of all, the United States would find itself in partnership with all of the rest of the world, with the single exception, I would say single exception, of the Netanyahu government.
And the Netanyahu government does not speak for the interests of the Israeli people, nor, I think, for the Israeli people at all right now.
But the point is, if the United States followed through on the logic of what Biden and Blinken have said in recent days, they would find that the United States is part of a complete global consensus.
That global consensus would effectively be exercised very directly and institutionally in the UN Security Council, where there would be immediately a unanimous vote
For a ceasefire based on moving to a two-state solution, and just so every listener understands correctly my own thought about this, that move to a two-state solution
Would include intrinsically the demilitarization, disarming, demobilization of all of the violent militias, including Hamas, and there are several others as well, which have backers throughout the Middle East.
So the first thing is that it would be possible for the U.S.
to find a unanimity other than Israel in The rest of the United Nations member states.
It would be possible to find a full agreement on this with the Arab and Islamic leaders.
And this is not a hunch on my part.
One needs merely to look at the statement that the Arab and Islamic leaders made from their emergency meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a couple of days ago.
They didn't call for the destruction of Israel.
They didn't wail about the evils.
They said this needs a political solution now to save the lives of the people of Palestine, but also for the security of Israel.
In other words, for everybody's security, this war needs to stop immediately and we need a two-state solution.
And in that statement by the Arab and Islamic leaders, they pointed out a document which is absolutely important and fascinating for people to refresh their memories or to learn about for the first time if they don't know about it.
And that is the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Also spearheaded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
And what in 2002 the Arab leaders said is, we will normalize relations with Israel.
We will have diplomatic relations.
We will end the state of war.
With the achievement of a state of Palestine in a two-state solution.
We will help to guarantee the security of Israel.
One of the great lies of our time is there's no one to talk to.
That's what Netanyahu and his cronies say.
The ones to talk to are Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
United Arab Emirates and indeed, by the way, Iran as well, which is actively engaged in constructive diplomacy that we have blown off repeatedly, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, which was the deal in 2015 with Iran to end sanctions as part of the
disbandment by Iran of any nuclear program.
And then Trump walked away from that, and Biden never walked back to it.
All of this is to say there's plenty of grounds, plenty of grounds for constructive diplomacy right now for Israel's security.
So why doesn't it happen?
Because the Netanyahu government doesn't want it to happen.
Because that constructive security is constructive towards a Palestinian state.
But what about the Biden government?
I don't see any signs that the Biden administration is using its massive leverage over Israel as the primary sponsor of Tel Aviv.
Why isn't it?
Why isn't it?
You know, we can't know for sure, but I would say my best guess is that senior politicians of Biden's generation, OK, this is the septuagenarian and octogenarian generation, are trained by instinct, never show a glimmer of space between yourself and Israel because you will feel a backlash.
And I think that it is just political instinct.
You know, that's basically what Biden rides on these days anyway, is whatever instinctual motives or urges come to him.
But I think it's basically that they believe Don't show any space with Israel.
That's the prudent measure for an American politician.
By the way, it's completely wrong.
It's so out of date.
But we're seeing that sense of being out of date everywhere.
We're seeing it on the campuses as well.
where the older generation is pro-Israel and can't understand anything but complete pro-Israel sentiment.
And the students are saying, oh, we're watching this mass slaughter taking place in Gaza.
This is not right.
And so there's a generational divide on the campuses.
There's a generational divide in the broader population.
There's a generational divide among the voters.
But my guess is that this is instinct and out of date spin doctors in the White House telling Biden, you've got to do it this way.
And this is not a strong president.
And it's in An extraordinarily weak foreign policy team.
They've gotten everything wrong.
Remember, it's Jake Sullivan who said two weeks before October 7 that the Middle East is the quietest that it's been in 20 years.
And actually in that article in Foreign Affairs specifically said that the tensions in Gaza have been wound down.
So this is a group that's out of touch, not competent.
And I think just relying on what were the instincts of American politicians for decades, which is back Israel to the hilt no matter what.
But now it is literally isolated, the United States.
So it's 191 against two.
And it's not in America's interest.
But by the way, I think people listening should understand this is not in Israel's interest.
I'm not saying a word against Israel's interest.
Israel is being damaged so severely by this miserable person, Netanyahu, who should be in prison, by the way, because he's also corrupt on top of being miserable in so many other ways.
But Israel is being incredibly endangered by the wrongheaded approach that Israel's taking.
Yeah, we're about to talk to Michael Tracy, who's spent the last several weeks traveling throughout Israel.
And there's a lot of critics of Netanyahu.
And there's a lot of critics of the Israeli war effort.
Even more so, I think, in Israel than people, at least in the elite class of the United States, feel comfortable expressing.
I want to ask you about Ukraine, but before I do, you mentioned college campuses.
There has been a huge amount of focus over the last several years by the American pundit class, political class on college campuses.
I think a lot of people couldn't figure out why.
I think you put your finger on one of the reasons, which is that there are some doctrines developing there that the American elite on a bipartisan level have never accepted in fear and dislike, one of which is this questioning of why we're so blindly supportive of Israel.
And there's been this massive focus on college students since the outbreak of this war, trying to have billionaires compile a list of students who should be put on no-hire blacklists because they signed petitions that were insufficiently supportive of Israel or overly critical of Israel.
We've had efforts to pressure faculty to stop allowing pro-Palestinian protests from mega donors who are telling these schools, we're gonna withhold funding in the event that you don't change your policy or that you don't institutionally defend Israel.
One of the centerpieces of that controversy is Harvard.
I just had a Professor Walt of my show, Stephen Walt, who talked about the situation at Harvard, but the other institution that often gets focused on with this issue is Columbia, which is where you're at.
Talk to me a little bit about the concerns you have about the climates being the focus on American academic campuses, on the potential chilling effect.
We interviewed some Harvard students who were put on those no-hire lists for having signed this They're having trucks riding around the Harvard campus with their face on it, a megaphone blaring that they hate Jews and are anti-Semitic.
Imagine the kind of harassment that brings.
What has been your sense of what's happening on the Columbia campus?
Look, I think there's one thing that universities should be doing right now, and that is having discussions, sessions, lectures, teachings about history, about this conflict, about what is really happening.
Not only the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I would say Ukraine as well.
The students are Absolutely unnerved and upset by a world of war.
And one of the responsibilities of a university is to discuss these issues, not to clamp down, for God's sake, not to say this is impermissible, but actually to teach, to learn, to discuss, to analyze together.
There's not enough of that going on.
By a long shot.
And this is quite disturbing, because universities are, should be, thinking institutions.
They are institutions of diverse views, they should be places of vigorous open debate, but especially honest and open inquiry.
Colombia has the greatest historian of modern Palestine, Rashid Khalidi.
He's brilliant.
His books are magnificent books about the history and the plight of Palestine during the last century.
Students need to read those, to understand, to listen to Professor Kalidi and others, to have an open discussion of all of this.
Instead, of course, we've had not that kind of educational experience.
We've had confrontation, donors yelling, threatening to withhold their funds if you don't crack down on this and that, the doxing.
It's horrible.
I mean, this is so bad for American society to have that approach rather than saying, my God, this is very serious.
Let's understand this.
And of course, we're not really in an understanding mood on so many things in this country.
When we talked about Ukraine, There was a lot to understand.
That was one of the things I've seen close up for 30 years because I was involved as an advisor to Gorbachev, to Yeltsin, to Kuchma in Ukraine more than 30 years ago.
And I wanted people to understand the background.
What's the history?
Read about this.
Understand it.
Debate it.
But of course, everything got nailed down.
If you say one word that isn't completely in line with the beating Russia, you're a Putin lover.
You know, everything was to shut down debate and understanding rather than to Discuss, understand, and analyze.
And we're not serving our national interest, our social interest, our university's interest or capacity if we approach it that way.
So it's not good.
Absolutely.
So let me ask you just my final question about Ukraine.
Those of us who are Kremlin agents, who are official Russian apologists on various lists and stuff.
There we go!
Yeah, we're having a little confederation of Putin apologists on this show.
We have another one coming up.
Got put there because for months we were saying, look, it seems like the U.S.
Fueling of this war is actually making things a lot worse.
It doesn't seem like Ukraine will be able to win.
Russia is a much larger country.
The front line hasn't moved in a year.
There have been tens of thousands of young Ukrainian conscripts and Russian soldiers as well who are losing their lives over the kind of inch-by-inch trench warfare that came to dominate World War I. And at the end of the day, there's no way Ukraine can expel Russia from that territory for all sorts of reasons.
This should have been handled at the domestic At the diplomatic table way early on, the Americans obviously didn't want that.
And now here we are, 18 months later, with a new war, having spent over $100 billion.
I think even Washington and intelligence agencies throughout the West that were so gung-ho about Ukrainian victory are now finally coming to face the music that the Russians and that the Ukrainians are going to have to sit down.
And part of that negotiation, whether you hate it or not, is going to be a seating of some portion of Ukrainian territory to the Russians beyond the Crimean Peninsula that they already had control of since 2014.
Looking back now on everything that has happened and where we are, what do you make of the last year of enormous amounts of loss of life and just the burning of huge amounts of resources on a war that really hasn't moved in over a year?
Well, I think, of course, this is another massive, massive U.S.
foreign policy disaster.
Right at the beginning I wrote a piece called The Latest Neocon Debacle because the way that this has played out was completely foreseeable.
Yeah, I would say this one was not very hard to see.
Like you said, how could you beat Russia?
But protected by people like you and Professor Mearsheimer and plenty of people who came through my program predicting with their foreign policy expertise that exactly what has happened would happen.
Yeah, I would say this one was not very hard to see.
Like you said, how could you beat Russia?
It was pretty obvious.
And, you know, these people just are not very clever.
Biden, Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken, they've been at this back since 2014.
This whole debacle goes back at least to 2008.
So we're in the 15th year of this debacle.
Arguably, it goes back 30 years.
But let's just stay at 2008 for one moment.
You know, the point is, The US has played a losing hand badly for 15 straight years.
And this is really important to understand if one wants to learn a little bit about geopolitical poker, which is we keep raising the stakes On a losing hand.
Because Russia wasn't demanding Ukrainian territory in 2007 and 2008.
It was demanding one thing.
Don't move NATO in.
That's all.
Perfectly sensible.
Our top diplomats like Bill Burns, who was ambassador to Russia, said as much then.
Wrote the famous NYET means yet memo that was known to the public through WikiLeaks so that we really knew what they were saying.
But nobody heeded that, of course, in the political class.
Then came Nuland as the point person for the U.S.
in conspiring in the overthrow of the Yanukovych presidency in Ukraine in February 2014.
And his offense was he wanted neutrality.
That's all.
Russia wasn't demanding territory under Yanukovych.
All they wanted and they got was a long-term lease of the Sevastopol Naval Base, the Russian naval base since 1783.
They got a lease till 2042.
But for the United States, this was not good enough.
We needed NATO there.
So, Nuland helped, and friends, and I know a lot of what happened behind the scenes, took out, helped to take out Yanukovych, and then Putin grabbed Crimea.
Referendum, took Crimea, but still was not demanding anything more than that.
Not demanding territory.
All that Russia was demanding was don't shell the Russian ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
Give a measure of autonomy.
And that got negotiated in the so-called Minsk 1 and then Minsk 2 agreements.
The Minsk 2 agreement was adopted 15 to nothing in the Security Council.
Russia wasn't saying, we want to own Eastern Donbas.
Russia was saying, enforce an agreement that unanimously was adopted by the UN Security Council.
Well, that wasn't good enough for the United States.
The U.S.
told Ukraine Don't worry about it.
You don't have to implement that.
We know that.
We know that in some detail.
So up until December 2021, Russia was not demanding more territory.
But in December 17th, 2021, President Putin put on the table the draft U.S.-Russia security arrangements based on two things.
One, no NATO enlargement.
And second, a negotiation over the placement of U.S.
missile systems, especially Aegis missile systems, in Eastern Europe, which Russia regarded understandably as a threat to Russia.
The United States gave its formal reply in January 2022.
We don't have to discuss any of that with you.
That was the reply.
We don't have to discuss NATO with you.
It's none of your business.
So even then, till that moment, Russia wasn't demanding any territory.
Then came the special military operation.
The Russian Duma recognized the independence of Lugansk and Donetsk, didn't annex them, recognized the independence because we had lost the chance of just implementing the Minsk agreements.
And then within three days of the start of the special military operations, Zelensky said, you know, no, no, maybe we should negotiate maybe neutrality.
And in March of 2022, Russia and Ukraine negotiated An agreement based around Ukrainian neutrality.
So here comes the US with its lousy hand upping the ante again by running over to Kiev and telling them, no, no, you're not going to negotiate that.
We're not going to give you any protection on that.
So we blew it again.
Then over the summer, Russia mobilizes.
In the fall, it annexes the four oblasts, not only Lugansk and Donetsk, but Zaporizhia and the Kherson district, getting worse and worse for the United States.
And then we tell them, don't worry, we've got your back.
You just launch a major counteroffensive.
Now, anyone watching at the time knew there was nothing there militarily.
But there's our generals strutting out, oh, we're so optimistic, said General Petraeus and others.
What was clearly an impossibility.
It seems nobody knows for sure in this delusional approach of the government that maybe they thought this coup by Purgosian was the secret weapon.
Who knows?
But anyway, this was a complete debacle.
Of course.
Ukraine lost tens of thousands of people in a very short period of time.
It lost, again, the armies that had been built up, the military hardware, the tanks, all the artillery systems and so forth.
And here we are.
They've raised the stakes for 15 years on a losing hand and they can't get it.
And this is, this is our team.
They're just, they failed.
Biden needs, I mean, Biden.
Okay.
We need a new foreign policy team and we need a new foreign policy approach and we need to negotiate before Ukraine is completely destroyed.
Yeah, I mean it's just, it's so tragic that we're now in the position of having to beg the Russians to be happy with 20% of Ukraine, all that loss of life, all that loss of money and resources, all of it for naught.
And the amazing thing is, you've talked about these multiple disasters after 9-11, the Ukraine conflict, what we're doing in Israel, and the frustrating part of it all is that it's always the same people who never face accountability, they remain in power, they move up the, kind of, ladder of power and they get rewarded for their failures.
And of course those failures are going to continue because there's no incentive for them not to continue that same path.
Professor Sachs, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you.
I hope people will go back and look at what you've been saying on our show and elsewhere to see that you're not doing this kind of Monday morning quarterbacking.
This is something that you've been urging and predicting from the start of the conflict.
Unfortunately, I think you're going to be just as prescient when it comes to the disasters that we're going to have from this new Middle East conflict as well, which is brought to you by the same set of people.
So it stands to reason that it will.
We hope to have you back on in just a little bit as bad news as it often brings.
Maybe, maybe they can learn something so we don't have to go through another debacle like this.
Let's hope.
I would like to hope, but I'm afraid I'm pessimistic.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
It's always a pleasure.
Absolutely great to be with you.
Have a great evening.
Bye-bye.
All right, so Michael Tracy, as you know, is a good friend of our show.
He is an independent journalist who goes around on little different field trips whenever there are foreign affairs.
He has spent the last several weeks in Israel and Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere reporting on a lot of the domestic politics in Israel, the protests, All sorts of things that he's been seeing with regard to this war from the Israeli perspective.
We are, as always, delighted to have him on our program.
It's always a very tranquil and happy moment when we get to welcome Michael to the show.
We really appreciate, Michael, that you are so generous with your time.
I know it's like 2 or 3 in the morning there.
You're looking very sprite, though, as usual.
Thanks so much for being patient and talking to us tonight.
It's always such an honor, Glenn.
Yeah, you got to listen to Professor Sachs with a couple of history lessons that I'm sure you found illuminating.
So let's start off, before I get into specific questions, with your general impressions.
You've been there, I think, two weeks, maybe two and a half weeks, almost three.
Talk a little bit about where you've been, what you've been doing in Israel, and kind of the main takeaways of things that you've learned from having been there.
Yes, it's been about two weeks, a little over two weeks thus far.
The first thing that I noticed, I have to say, was that even in Tel Aviv, which is the liberal hub, such as there is one in Israel, The amount of nationalistic imagery that just suffuses the entire plays reminded me instantly of the post 9-11 period in the U.S.
It was the only parallel that I could recall, and I was basically an adolescent around 13 or 14 at the time, and even I can recall having been, you know, in northern New Jersey when that was going on, so pretty in pretty close proximity to, you know, ground zero.
People had American flags waving on their porches and hanging out their windows, and all the cable news chyrons had an American flag graphic.
Everywhere you looked, there was an American flag, right?
The United States is already a fairly nationalistic or patriotic country anyway, but it really went into overdrive post 9-11.
In Israel, it's that but times 10 or 100 or I don't know how many multiples, but somewhere in that vicinity.
So everywhere you go, it's just flag, Israeli flag after Israeli flag.
The images of the hostages are just beams on buildings all over and the posters, which have also been put up in Europe and the U.S., as I understand it.
But it just it's you couldn't help but notice, at least I couldn't help but instantly notice how just suffuse this imagery is in the populace.
And it was.
So it was that way in Tel Aviv, but also more pronounced in Jerusalem, which is where I am now, which is more of the, probably more of a heavily religious enclave, more probably right-wing in its political orientation, so even more kind of vociferous in that respect in a lot of ways.
So that's just one observation.
So to the extent that there's an app parallel with 9-11, because remember when the October 7th attack first happened, we kept being inundated with figures about how this was just like 9-11, but like times 20 because they tried to do a proportional extrapolation of the amount of casualties versus the overall Right, I saw a statistic today that there's been 55 9-11s in Gaza, if you want to kind of do that math in terms of the number of people killed in Gaza relative to their population.
So Gaza has had 55 9-11s in Gaza.
- Right, I saw a statistic today that there's been 55 9/11s in Gaza.
If you wanna kind of do that math in terms of the number of people killed in Gaza versus relative to their population.
So Gaza has had 55 9/11s in Gaza. - My question was if there are six people, if there are six people killed in the micro state of Monaco, then that's the equivalent of a 9/11 for them. - Yeah, it's kind of a creepy way of somehow valuing certain lives over others.
Let me ask you this question.
I remember, there's this obvious tension, and it's the reason Hamas took hostages, which is, look, We have 250 of your citizens, we have children, we have, you know, innocent people here in Gaza.
If you want to flatten Gaza, it means killing all these hostages that you're now valorizing.
And there were articles, I remember, in the Israeli press about this kind of conflict between How much do you decide to just write off these hostages and bomb Gaza without regard to their lives?
And yesterday or the day before, there was a relative of a family, one of whom was killed in the Hamas attack, but a couple of others who were taken hostage.
And he was an Israeli Jew and he was enraged at these members of Likud in the Knesset who were saying these casual slogans that are genocidal in nature like erase Gaza, eliminate it from the map, wipe it off the face of the planet.
And he was saying, who is it that you're erasing?
You know, you're talking about Jewish babies and Jewish children and Jewish hostages.
What is the sense of how to reconcile, on the one hand, this valorizing of these hostages, the imagery of them all over the place, the pictures of them as martyrs, with the obvious fact that you're directly endangering their lives by refusing ceasefires or trading for hostages and just bombing everywhere in Gaza where obviously the hostages have a high risk of being killed?
Well, this is why there's such rage against Netanyahu within huge swaths of the Israeli population.
So a dissimilarity with 9-11 is that, as you I'm sure recall, Glenn, George W. Bush's popularity in the wake of 9-11 skyrocketed to almost unprecedented heights.
It's almost unfathomable now, but Bush's approval rating post 9-11 was like 92%, something just almost beyond belief, whereas Netanyahu hasn't enjoyed a surge of that kind yet, which is a bit counterintuitive because you'd expect a bit of a rallying around flag effect and a bolstering of the support for the wartime leader who's leading the country into battle.
And Netanyahu probably has been able to consolidate political support to some extent because he does have this unity government that he instated with bringing in the opposition leader, Benny Gantz, or not the opposition leader, but other party leaders into his war cabinet. but other party leaders into his war cabinet.
And so he's not subject to the same kind of political pressures as he would have been before October 7th.
And by the way, he's using that situation to basically, as one person affiliated with the Knesset explained to me, to basically rush through and enact lots of pre-existing measures that he probably would have wanted to get in in any way, but now because of this wartime emergency law situation that's been imposed, he can kind of expedite the passage of a lot of different measures.
But on the question of the hostages, yeah, it is a paradox, and that's why you have lots of extremely angry protests against Netanyahu.
And now, there are different factions of these anti-Netanyahu protests.
Some of them are just infuriated about Netanyahu himself, because they feel he's corrupt.
I've heard he's sociopathic from people.
I was at the Knesset a few days ago in Jerusalem, where there's bereaved families of people who were killed on October 7th.
who are protesting, soldiers and other, you know, the mothers of killed soldiers and so forth.
And their point is essentially that Netanyahu is running a fake government.
He has no, he's not even really in charge of the war effort.
It's being mostly run by UL.
Gallant, who is basically the defense minister.
And so they're trying to distinguish the war effort itself from Netanyahu.
So a lot of people who hate Netanyahu are not necessarily against the war itself.
But there's other factions who are more of thoroughgoing critics against the war itself and the logic underpinning it.
So I've had left-wing Israelis who do exist and, by the way, would be denounced as anti-Semitic in the United States by dopey, low-IQ right-wing pundits.
But these left-wing Israelis and also not even really ardently ideological people but people who just have a certain critique of the situation, they'll point out that Netanyahu and the government that he currently has in power around him, which is the most hardline and religious that they'll point out that Netanyahu and the government that he currently has in power around him, which is the most hardline and religious that has basically ever existed in Israeli history because, remember, from the
They were Zionists, but they were not hardline religious theocrats in the way that a lot of the people who are in power now are.
And the idea that's being floated is that the Certain people in positions of power in Israeli society want to reintroduce the Jewish settlements that had been evacuated in 2005 within Gaza and reinstate them because they were always wrongfully withdrawn in the first place.
That's the critique.
And there's this messianic objective essentially to retain full Israeli control of the Gaza Strip and also ultimately the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And what these people who are critical of Netanyahu are suspecting, I think with some grounds, is that Netanyahu and the people who are running this war effort don't even prioritize the retrieval of the hostages.
What they really prioritize is this conquest goal to basically reoccupy or to re-solidify the occupation of Gaza.
Of course, it's always been occupied in the sense of having its airspace and water and ways and population movements controlled by Israel since 2007, but now they want a full-fledged reoccupation where it's basically under full Israeli control.
Netanyahu has made comments to that effect by saying that he's going to insist on full, quote, security control of Gaza and that there will be no civil administration that Israel objects to in Gaza, which effectively seems like an occupation, although he's not being especially forthright about what that would entail.
But the point is that the objection among this segment of the Israelis against Netanyahu is that because of these overriding ideological or even religious objectives about the rightful place of Gaza within the Jewish homeland.
He's basically foregoing what should be his solemn primary obligation, which is retrieval of the hostages.
And so that's a paradox that really has yet to resolve itself.
You know, it's interesting that there are some obvious parallels between Bush in 9-11 and Netanyahu in October 7.
For one thing, remember, Bush was an extremely polarizing president.
Almost all Democrats and liberals believe that Bush had stolen the 2000 election as a result of that Supreme Court decision that stopped the count in Florida.
Whereas Netanyahu was obviously involved in embroiled in all kinds of civic strife and 9-11 was also an intelligence failure.
We had spent Tens of billions of dollars a year on the NSA and on the CIA and all kinds of surveillance programs designed to detect.
Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S.
Remember that was the memo that was given to the Bush White House in August of 2001?
Exactly and all of that got papered over in the name of a kind of immediate unity, a shocking unity.
No one wanted to hear that Bush was responsible.
I think the big difference is he was only in office for about eight months whereas Netanyahu has been you know, overstayed his welcome.
He's governed Israel for 15 out of the last 20 years or whatever it is.
He's the longest serving Israeli prime minister by far now.
Yeah.
And there was, you know, really, the Israelis were on the verge of a civil war over his corruption trial, over the attempt to eliminate judicial independence.
One of the things I want to ask you, though, is I keep getting kind of conflicting views about the extent to which they have given space to Israeli critics of Netanyahu and Israeli protesters, especially on the Israeli left, We had a member of the Knesset on who's a member of the left-wing party in the Knesset who's a vehement supporter of Netanyahu.
He said he thinks that Israeli Arabs in the Knesset and left-wing Israelis are endangered by these kind of robing fascist militia bands that are well-armed and answer to certain members, the more extremist religious ones in the Netanyahu government.
And yet, since you've been there, you've described some protests that you've seen.
What is your sense of, and I want to separate for a moment the Israeli Arabs who are getting arrested for things like looking at social media postings that are deemed too sympathetic to the Gazans They've introduced a new social media law that's incredibly repressive.
But what about the Israeli left, the Israeli Jewish left?
What is their ability to freely protest without being menaced by the state or roving militias?
Well, in Tel Aviv, where I spent my first week here, I didn't see the police giving any trouble at all to the left-wing protesters who were congregating basically every night.
Like I tried to spell out before us, they have different views as to the war effort itself versus a grievance against Netanyahu, but whatever they were expressing, they were allowed to protest essentially unhindered.
It was a radically different experience in Jerusalem as I observed it when I got here because on Friday, a small group of left-wing primarily demonstrators, and by the way, an interesting demographic phenomenon in Israel is that the left-wing contingent of societies is now overwhelmingly concentrated among the old So it's the remnants of the Israeli kind of labor left or the socialists who were dominant in Israel in its early days, but now they're aging out of society essentially.
And the younger people, and this is reflected also in the polling data that I saw even well before the current war broke out as to Israel.
The younger demographics are much more rabid and right-wing and religious because they're second or third generation and they don't really have much cognizance or at least as much cognizance of the kind of in part socialistic origins of the Israeli state.
But beyond that, on Friday, There was a small protest in the morning, so like not one of these night-time, kind of very rambunctious, rabble-rousing protests populated by young men looking for a fight or something.
These were older people, overwhelmingly, I think almost exclusively, people aged maybe 45 or 50 and up, at a morning protest on Friday of last week at a courthouse right near where I am now in Jerusalem.
Where a history teacher was being held, an Israeli Jew, left-wing Jew, maybe 50 or 60 years old, who had been arrested and detained by the local police, which I should note is controlled by this guy Ben Gavir, who's one of the most extreme members of the Netanyahu coalition.
Yeah, it's like his own private militia.
It's an armed militia.
Within the normal governmental accountability of the Israeli government, it's really like a militia that answers directly to him.
No, but it's a government unit, though.
Yeah, but in theory, I know it officially is a government unit, but it's a government unit really controlled by him.
They are loyal to him more so than Israeli law, the Knesset, or the Israeli government.
Right, so anyway, there was this pretty placid protest going on at the courthouse because this history teacher, his name is Meir Baruchin, was arrested for essentially just posting stuff on Facebook that was critical of the war effort.
Now, even people who don't like Netanyahu would probably be offended by what this guy was posting.
more on the, you know, toward the outer fringe of Israeli popular opinion.
But whatever the case may be, it was still just Facebook posts.
Essentially, he was arrested and basically detained without charge for several days.
The judge who presided over it ended up invoking or citing a provision of Israeli law around a quote incitement to treason as to why this person was being detained.
So this small group of protesters showed up in the morning, around 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning, and just did a fairly unremarkable protest.
And all of a sudden, the next thing I know, and I was there just talking to some older women, including one woman who must have been 80 years old.
Not even exaggerating.
I look up and then this band of riot cops essentially, who are under the command of this Ben Gavir, or at least mixed in with those people, 'cause it's hard to distinguish necessarily what law enforcement officer reports to whom, similar to the US where there's like always multiple layers of law enforcement 'cause it's hard to distinguish necessarily what law enforcement officer reports to whom, similar
But by and large, it was under, it was this unit called Yassom, who are, you know, basically, for the most part, respond to riot control type situations in East Jerusalem to do with Palestinians and Arabs, right?
When there's supposed an arrest like in Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, which precipitated that conflict in Gaza.
But they all of a sudden they started – they just stormed.
I mean the police stormed this docile group of left-wing older protesters.
No young – I was the youngest person there probably.
And we're throwing old women to the ground, chasing them around, cursing at them in Hebrew.
I had to personally run away.
I got shoved and just really in the back out of nowhere as I was just trying to get out of there.
There were women – older women thrown to the ground.
And these are women – I talked to three women who – have sons or daughters currently deployed to fight in the war, either in Gaza or on the outskirts.
They're in the war operation right now.
They're against what's going on from the standpoint of they feel as though these hyper-religious objectives are what is being served by the war effort.
And they, I think, understandably resent that the hyper-religious elements of Israeli society get carve-outs and exceptions for military service.
Oh, yeah, that's a huge source of resentment that these religious fanatics are often pushing these warriors, even though they remain exempt from the fighting interests.
And you have these secularists in Tel Aviv who have to go and do all the fighting because they don't have this religious exemption.
Michael, just for the last question I have for you, let me just ask you this.
I'm really curious about this.
So they ambushed this older group of Israelis, threw them to the ground, women were injured, they were shouting at them, go to Gaza, they were calling them Hamas.
And what was shocking to the Israeli Jews who were the victims of this ambush, this police ambush, was that these are the type of tactics they would have ordinarily associated with the police conduct toward Arabs and Palestinians.
Now it was being brought to bear on the small remnants in Jerusalem of Israeli Jews who are critical of the government.
So that's the kind of watershed shift.
Yeah, so let's stay with that because there obviously is this radical change.
According to a report I just saw actually just recently from today, he was apparently rearrested and is back in custody.
Yeah, so let's stay with that because there obviously is this radical change.
Everyone I know who goes to Israel a lot, who cares about Israel a lot, has obviously said the face of Israel has changed pretty dramatically in the last 10 years for all sorts of reasons.
Historically, the United States has had the ability to restrain Israel.
There was that report about how Ronald Reagan, during the 1980s, basically put a stop to some of the more extreme Israeli aggression in Lebanon and elsewhere by simply telling them, you knock it off now or we're going to cut off your aid.
Bush 41 had a lot of success in forcing the Israelis to make concessions about settlement expansions.
They threatened, James Baker did, under Bush 41 to withhold loan guarantees if they didn't.
And obviously Obama and other presidents throughout the years, often quietly and privately, have tried to put restraints on what the Israelis can do, knowing that it can reflect and will reflect negatively on the United States, not just reputationally, but in terms of our national security.
One of the things I was noticing even before the war started, but certainly since, were people like Naftali Bennett writing an essay in The Economist and other statements where they were basically saying, look, we're appreciative of USAID, but we are no longer allowing USAID to restrict us from what we believe we need to do in our national interest to survive.
We're going to do it anyway.
And Professor Sachs is talking about the different pressures that can be brought to bear on the Israelis to end this siege of Gaza, to end this bombardment of Gaza, UN councils, Biden administration that doesn't appear near willing to do it.
But hypothetically, the things that could happen And I really question whether this new Israeli government, as religiously fanatical as it is, as devoted to seizing and annexing the West Bank and Gaza as part of greater Israel, to drive out the people of Gaza, either to internal displacement or even into the Sinai, how willing they really are, how much they care about international pressure, or even pressure from the United States, their prime sponsor and benefactor,
They basically have the attitude, we are going to finish this no matter what.
We don't care what the UN says.
We don't care what the international community says.
We don't even care what the US says.
I'm curious about your view of that question.
Yeah, because there's internal pressure within elements of the Netanyahu coalition on him to not capitulate to any international pressure, and that would include the US.
So Israel, in a way, has the leverage in this situation, not in terms of the power dynamic or the power because that's clearly wielded by the US.
But in terms of like the political contours of how that power is managed, in a way, Israel calls the shots.
Because as dependent as they are on US military, diplomatic and financial backing and political blessing, You tell me.
their war effort.
In terms of the strategic imperatives, in terms of in terms of how those resources are marshaled, Israel is calling the shots clearly or seems to be.
I don't know.
You tell me.
I see Biden administration officials like Tony Blinken, who's supposed to be the chief diplomat, it seems to always be opposing all diplomacy.
They will what the strategy has been is to raise these kind of procedural or technical complaints about various aspects of how Israel might be conducting the offensive.
So they're saying, so, you know, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, was on the Sunday TV shows this weekend saying, we don't want hospitals to be caught in the line of fire.
And so to the untrained eye, that might come across as, oh, wow, the Biden administration is actually criticizing some aspects of Israeli government behavior.
But what they're doing in practice is giving a political buffer to Israel by helping them kind of manage the political fallout for their actions, raising these pretensions to concern around humanitarian aid They introduced this ridiculous euphemism, humanitarian pauses, which means you unpause and the bombardment starts.
So it's not even to do anything to do with a, quote, ceasefire.
Would they move beyond that?
So all the technical or procedural apprehensions that might be expressed by the Biden administration really redounds to the advantage of Israel in the sense that it allows them to have more of a political breathing room to conduct the offensive in the same way that they'd be doing anyway.
Um, so no, I don't see the, I don't see Israel really buckling to much pressure from the U.S.
in this regard, in part because they know that there's such a vocal contingency in the U.S.
that will utterly revolt, including gas donors.
I know that's supposed to be anti-Semitic to note that there are Lots of wealthy Jewish donors who exert influence on the American government in a pro-Israel direction.
That's their explicitly stated aim.
But you're, I guess, anti-Semitic to note that, but it happens to be true, so sorry.
But those are the types of people, including in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, fairly evenly distributed, who are not going to stand for any divergence there between the U.S.
and Israel.
Congress is united.
There was just a big pro-Israel march or rally in Washington DC today with Chuck Schumer and Speaker Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries and Joni Ernst standing side-by-side in this bicameral, bipartisan resolve to, they say, unequivocally support Israel.
So there can't even be any equivocation or questioning in terms of how they're presenting it.
So, yeah, even if there are, I'm sure, some quiet murmurings of discontent with aspects of how Netanyahu, in particular, is handling this.
Because remember, Netanyahu was at loggerheads with the Obama administration, the Obama-Biden administration, in certain respects.
He delivered a speech to Congress at the invitation of the House Republicans that basically rebuked Obama's signature diplomatic initiative, the Iran nuclear deal.
So Biden can't be perfectly glad to have Netanyahu in power.
I'm sure they'd rather have one of their old friends in, like, the Israeli Labor Party or its subsequent offshoots running the war effort.
But nonetheless, there doesn't seem to be much will or desire or even, in a way, ability to exert leverage, even though it technically exists.
I mean, they could withdraw aid.
But then what's Biden going to do?
Veto one of these bills?
Yeah, I think that's the big paradox.
The reality is there's an election in the United States in less than a year where a very weak president, President Biden, is running for re-election.
He already has major problems in the polls.
And I think the Israelis know and Biden knows that it would be almost fatal or very injurious to those re-election efforts.
Imagine if Netanyahu came out and said, Joe Biden is impeding our ability to defeat Hamas.
I think Netanyahu knows he has that leverage.
Biden lives in fear of that.
And the reality is, is that the tail wags the dog and that Israel seems like the kind of client state that receives the money and is dependent on the United States.
But in reality, politically, the Biden administration is completely hamstrung, even if they wanted to pressure the Israelis.
And I think given Joe Biden's long history of steadfast, unflinching support for the Israelis, There's really no desire to do so.
Michael, I know it's super late there.
I want to be nice to you and say that you look so spright for the middle of the night.
I genuinely appreciate your being up and staying up for our show.
I've been napping for you, Glenn, in anticipation of our dramatic meeting here.
Yeah, it's been great.
I've been sucking down.
I mean, they have glorious iced coffee.
I mean, my favorite part of Israel so far is that they have all iced coffee.
It's presumptively in a slushy style.
And so I've been getting those slushy iced coffees to rejuvenate myself so I can have a delightful experience.
Well, you're looking super energized.
Like, it's 11 in the morning, so congratulations on that.
Michael, thank you so much.
It was super illuminating.
I'm glad you're over there, and we'll have you back on soon.
Have a good night.
All right, bye-bye.
Bye.
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