Rashid Khalidi, Leading Palestine Expert, on Israel-Gaza, College Campuses, & More. Plus: Elon Musk’s Defiant Message to Disney
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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, Elon Musk has spent the last two weeks being widely accused of anti-Semitism by media outlets, liberal activist groups like Media Matters, from really every institution of power, including in Congress and the White House.
And as we covered on our show last night, He went and traveled to Israel where he paid homage to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and all of the Israeli bromides about its current war in Gaza, nodding and laughing and agreeing with everything Netanyahu said.
And that act of penance worked with some.
He proudly accepted reprieves, mostly from the American right, people who were thrilled that he did what he did in Israel.
But many liberals continue to insist that he was anti-Semite and even attacked Israel and Netanyahu for agreeing to meet with him at all.
But earlier today, Elon Musk changed tone on this, quite radically and even violently.
He appeared at a forum hosted by the New York Times and when questioned by its Wall Street reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, about all the corporate advertisers such as Disney, who stopped advertising on Twitter on X in response to claims that Musk was permitting anti-Semitic content to proliferate and was even who stopped advertising on Twitter on X in response to claims that Musk was permitting anti-Semitic content to proliferate and was even affirming anti-Semitic content, he didn't try and assuage those concerns at all, but instead offered an extremely defiant message, one that but instead offered an extremely defiant message, one that caused all sorts of employees of media corporations and journalists to express shock and horror at what he said, and yet it's a message that far more media corporations and social
One that caused all sorts of employees of media corporations and journalists to express shock and horror at what he said.
And yet it's a message that far more media corporations and social media platforms should express in the face of corporate advertisers trying to dictate political speech.
But they simply lack the courage to do so, which is why they were so horrified about what Elon Musk said.
And we'll show you that video.
Then Rashid Khalidi is a historian at Columbia University who, among other things, is a specialist and scholar in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the history of the Middle East more broadly.
Columbia has been the epicenter for many decades in the United States when it comes to campus conflicts about Israel and Palestine or Israeli-Arab conflicts, and it still is.
Right before the show that airs live right now, we sat down with Professor Khalidi just a few minutes before he went on live on air to talk about the Israel-Gaza war, about Joe Biden's request for $14 billion more in American funds to send to Israel to fund that war, changing public opinion about Israel and the United States' support for it, attacks on free speech on college campuses, including Columbia, where two pro-Palestinian groups were banned.
The rise of anti-semitism and anti-Palestinian animus in the wake of this war and much more.
Because Professor Kleedy is a clear advocate for Palestinian rights and a critic of Israel, he makes no bones about that, we have secured for tomorrow night's program a guest who is a very vocal and steadfast supporter of Israel and a defender of its war effort in Gaza, Max Abrams, who has been on our show before.
We're very much looking forward to engaging his pro-Israel arguments on tomorrow night's show and seeing how they withstand critical scrutiny.
A few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
System Update.
On last night's show, we reported on a trip that Elon Musk made to Israel and a subsequent interview that he did with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the X platform.
We are very critical of both that trip and that discussion, in part because it seemed very clear, although we don't know his motives for sure, so I don't want to pretend that I know them with certainty.
But it seemed very clear that it was a response to Elon Musk being in the middle of a two-week tsunami of accusations against him that he is anti-Semitic.
An accusation that is pretty much made against anybody automatically who doesn't immediately stand up and affirm every last precept involving Israel and U.S. support for it.
In Elon Musk's case, he was accused of personally endorsing an anti-Semitic tweet when, according to him, he merely intended to agree with the idea that there are some Jewish groups like the ADL that fund anti-white content, meaning diversity programs that teach anti-white content or open meaning diversity programs that teach anti-white content or open borders immigration, which some people perceive as being anti-white, That was his explanation.
But also that there is proliferating on the platform anti-Semitic content, particularly pro-Hamas or anti-Israel propaganda.
As a result of those accusations that were leveled against him, and Media Matters amplified it with a fraudulent study that they also published against Rumble, Many corporate advertisers stopped advertising on X. According to the New York Times, X stands to lose up to $75 million in losses from corporate advertisers.
Disney and many others who fled the platform stopped advertising in light of this anti-Semitism scandal aimed at Elon Musk.
And CNN has been pressuring other corporations who have continued to advertise to also leave the platform by publishing articles trying to shame them.
By saying these are the corporations that continue to advertise on X, even though Elon Musk is an anti-Semite.
So there is this widespread, pervasive attempt on the part of corporate advertisers to dictate to X what kind of content they can and can't permit on their platforms in terms of political speech, but also dictating to Elon Musk personally what he is and isn't allowed to say upon threat of no longer advertising on the social media platform that he owns.
Now, anyone who works in journalism, anyone who works in media, and who has worked within the standard model of how journalism has operated in the United States for decades, which is the model of corporate advertising, knows that that model imposes extremely severe restraints on what media outlets can and can't do.
They are certain journalists that they can't hire because the journalists will say things that will offend corporate advertisers on whom they depend, In order to survive as a media outlet, of course, relying on corporate advertisers severely restricts the kinds of opinions you can air, the types of perspectives you can permit, the kind of reporting you can do.
What has happened over the last decade is that the media has increasingly moved to a subscription model.
The New York Times, I believe, their revenue from subscriptions is now greater than their revenue from corporate advertising.
But on cable, on the network news, still almost every media outlet, including the New York Times, depends to a very large extent on corporate advertiser.
And that's very much true of social media platforms like Facebook and Google and Twitter, X.
And so when corporate advertisers threaten to leave the platform in protest of political speech that's being permitted, what they're trying to do is use their corporate power to censor, saying, we're not going to support you unless you agree to censor this material with which we don't want to be associated.
It's a very serious form of corporate censorship.
It places meaningful and severe limits on the kinds of things journalists can do.
Now, journalists themselves will insist that they never think about this.
They don't ever get told, oh you can't say this because our corporate advertisers won't like it, but it doesn't even matter if that's true because the kind of person that gets hired and that works their way up in corporate media are the kind of people who are inoffensive generally to corporate advertisers.
They just set the limits on not just the kind of things people can say once you work there, but the kind of people who they can even hire, willing to hire and give a platform to.
And that's a serious threat to X, which has struggled in all sorts of ways since Elon Musk purchased it and well before that as well, financially, figuring out how to monetize and make profitable the large number of users they have on their platform.
That's been something that Twitter was struggling for a long time to figure out, which is one of the reasons why it became vulnerable to a sale.
And the valuation of Twitter has at least reduced by 50% if not more since Elon Musk purchased it for $44 billion, and so having an exodus of corporate advertisers is a very serious threat to X. And that's one of the reasons, I think, why Elon Musk ran to Israel, to try and stem that tide.
Earlier today, he appeared at a New York Times summit called the DealBook Summit.
DealBook is the name of the part of the New York Times that covers Wall Street, that is led by their reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's well known as being the ultimate establishment servant.
And Elon Musk went there, and we'll put the video on the screen, the title of it was, Musk's anti-Semitism was not my intention, so we deny the accusations of anti-Semitism, but when he was asked about the specific problem of having corporate advertisers such as Disney fleeing his platform, this is what he said.
Listen to this.
Apology tour, if you will.
This had been said online, there was all of the criticism, there was advertisers leaving.
We talked to Bob Iger today.
I hope they stop.
You hope?
Don't advertise.
You don't want them to advertise?
No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising?
Blackmail me with money?
Go fuck yourself.
But... Listen to that silence.
Just the utter silence after he said that.
From Andrew Ross Sorkin, from the people in the crowd.
When he just stopped and said it.
Listen to this.
Fuck yourself.
But, go fuck yourself.
Is that clear?
I hope it is.
Hey Bob, if you're in the audience.
Well, let me ask you then.
He was referring there to Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who was one of the main corporate executives who Made the decision to stop advertising on X. That was his message, not only in general to corporations that wanted to dictate to X what kind of content it can host, but specifically to the CEO of Disney, Bob Iger.
That's what he meant when he said, Hello, Bob.
Well, let me ask you then... That's how I feel.
Don't advertise.
How do you think then about... Alright, so... When that happened, All sorts of journalists who were in the audience, who were watching live, went onto Twitter to express their horror and shock.
And I think they think that in some way Elon Musk dug his own grave.
I didn't see any positive comment at all from a single journalist who works at a major media corporation.
Maybe there were some and I didn't see it, but I saw a lot and they were overwhelmingly
Shocked, horrified, and in a way happy that Elon Musk was digging his own grave because they hate him because he, in many ways at least, again not perfectly, we covered a lot of the criticism we had for him on last night's show, but he certainly has refused to take a lot of the censorship orders that almost every other social media platform has been complying with in part because they don't want to lose corporate advertisers for failing to comply or be shamed by media outlets and the like.
What's so amazing about this Is that if you're a journalist, the thing that you should hate more than anything is any force or any influence that tries to limit your freedom to speak.
Your reaction, if you're actually just a journalist in terms of your composition, your comportment, your personality, your mentality, When even thinking there might be someone or something trying to limit your freedom to speak should be exactly what Elon Musk said there.
Go fuck yourself.
There was only one time in my entire journalism career when I perceived that somebody was trying to limit what I wanted to say.
That was when The Intercept refused to publish my article right before the 2020 election.
That reported on and analyzed the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop and what it revealed about Joe Biden.
And when I saw The Intercept wasn't going to publish my article unless I made radical changes to it that gutted the entire thing so that it was no longer critical of Joe Biden, I quit.
And I didn't contemplate or deliberate much at all.
I started writing about journalism, writing about politics and doing journalism in 2005 when I created a blog, a free blog.
And one of the reasons I developed an audience quickly was because I was saying things other people weren't saying.
And I had no structure in which I was working.
I wasn't paid to do this.
I didn't have an editorial structure or a corporate structure around me or on top of me.
I would write, I would fact check, I would edit, and then I would press publish.
And I had complete and total freedom to say what I wanted.
That was the thing I valued most.
And when I got my first offer from a media outlet to go work there, to bring my blog there, which they wanted because I had built up a large audience and the main currency of internet era journalism became who has an audience and who doesn't.
That's portable.
It was from salon.com.
And I said to them, I'm willing to come and work there, but only if I have complete and total editorial freedom in writing.
Where I just publish right to the internet.
You don't even get to read it first or look at it first.
It just goes right up.
I press publish just like I do now.
And if I think I need editorial assistance or scrutiny, either because it presents a legal issue that might fall on you, or some complicated journalistic ethical conundrum, I'll request it.
I have an interest in having you look at it so that we're protected legally.
And I did ask for that a few times and they gave it to me and we worked, but I never felt like I was being constrained in any way.
And then when I got an offer to go do the same thing for The Guardian, one of the oldest newspapers in the West, I told them I would be happy to go, but only under the same condition and they were shocked They said, we don't have journalists who just post directly to our website under our name.
And I said, well, that's the only way I'll come.
And they said, OK.
And they gave me that same arrangement.
I used to click Post, and it used to go right up on The Guardian with no pre-publication review of any kind.
Let alone attempts to silence me.
And then obviously when I left The Guardian and went to The Intercept and created The Intercept with Jeremy Scale and Laura Poitras and the height of the Snowden reporting in 2013, obviously when my contract was written, that exact clause that unless I ask for it, there's no right by anybody to limit what I can say.
And they honored that for seven years until they didn't.
And the minute they didn't, I quit.
Because just instinctively as a journalist, I'm never going to allow anyone to limit what I can say.
Obviously, it's one thing to say there's no factual basis for what you want to say, but not because of a fear that they'll be accused of helping Donald Trump win or defeating Joe Biden, not for political or ideological reasons, which is what The Intercept was driven by, by the time I quit.
I quit with no plan.
I quit in 12 hours after I got their email saying they would only publish my article in the event that it contained these changes.
And that's because it was an instinct.
It was just a reaction.
Like, go fuck yourself.
You're gonna tell me what I can't say?
On my own site that I created that was built on my name and my work?
But I would have to have that anywhere.
That's what Elon Musk did there.
You think that's in his interest to do that?
Of course not.
Seems like a visceral reaction.
And maybe he's ashamed that he had to go to Israel and did what he did and he heard people criticizing him for doing it.
And he kind of rediscovered this sense of, I'm the richest man in the world.
Why would I tell people?
Why would I let people tell me what I can and can't say?
That he used the word blackmail.
That's what it is.
And what went wrong here is not what Elon Musk said.
It's so revealing that so many journalists and people who call themselves journalists and work for media corporations are aghast that anyone would dare tell Disney and major corporations to go fuck yourself.
When they're trying to limit and censor and control the flow of political content.
If you aren't willing to say that to corporations who are trying to limit what you can say, don't bother calling yourself a journalist.
And so I think it's very telling and interesting that Musk got to the point where he said it, but I think even more telling is the fact that so many journalists were horrified.
We need way more journalists willing to say, go fuck yourself to people who try and limit what they say.
The problem is, is that the people who are hired by these major media corporations and who thrive in them and succeed in them are people who have the opposite instinct.
Their instinct is to assuage and serve and placate establishment power, not to defy it.
Even though the purpose of journalism is to be adversarial to establishment power, once journalism started getting corporatized, no longer owned by families dedicated to journalism or local communities but major corporations that have all kinds of other interests besides their media division, And what kind of attributes are awarded in major corporations?
People who avoid controversy, who avoid conflict, who avoid displeasing and angering powerful people.
That's the corporate ethos.
And the corporatization of media meant that that kind of attribute was imported into journalism.
And that's why no one, almost, who works for large media corporations or the media corporations themselves has the courage to say this.
They're shocked.
They think it's a sign that he's unhinged, when in reality it's just a sign of how cowardly and craven they are.
Professor Rashid Khalidi is, I think, one of the nation's leading scholars when it comes to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of the State of Israel, the history of the Palestinian people, the broader context the history of the Palestinian people, the broader context of the Israel, the Israeli-Arab wars that have taken place over the decades.
He is the author of several books on this topic.
Including his 2020 book, The Hundred Years War in Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917 to 2017.
We were able to sit down with Professor Khalidi just before we went on air where we had a 45 minute discussion, I think of a very high quality about the current war in Gaza, the prospects that this pause in the fighting might endure.
The posture of Joe Biden and the political pressure on him and whether that might undermine his ability to fund and finance the war in Israel, even though he obviously wants to, whether Israel can be deterred at all by the United States.
And we talked a lot as well about the fact that he is at Columbia, which often is ground zero for these kind of speech wars over Israel and Palestine in particular.
Barry Weiss, the Well now, the renowned free speech champion got her start at Columbia.
I wrote once about this, where she had the view that the faculty at Columbia, including Professor Khalidi and the professor after whom his professorship is named, Edward Said, were anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, and she wanted changes in the faculty based on that.
And just a few weeks ago, Columbia banned two pro-Palestinian groups, one of which was a Jewish group.
that advocates for Palestinian rights, another of which is just a general pro-Palestinian group, on the grounds that they violated the rules, not that they're pro-Palestinian.
We talked to him about that, about the narrative that there's an anti-Semitism problem in the United States, and he seemed to think there was, and he had interesting things to say about that.
He clearly is a defender of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause.
So he's very upfront about that perspective, shaping his views on these issues.
Tomorrow night we're going to follow this interview with a vigorous pro-Israel scholar and professor, Max Abrams, who has been on our show before.
He's one of the most interesting voices to listen to.
but he's now and always has been a very fanatical supporter of Israel, the Israeli war in Gaza, the U.S. support for that war and financing of it.
So he'll be on our show tomorrow night.
We're really looking forward to engaging and subjecting to critical scrutiny, his views on this conflict.
But for now, we're really excited to prevent our discussion with Professor Khalidi.
I think he's one of the most interesting voices to listen to.
So here's that interview.
Professor Khalidi, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We're thrilled to have you on System Update.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
So we are seven weeks into this completely horrific war.
There's obviously a lot of angles to discuss with you, especially given your expertise in the historical context of this conflict.
But you want to start with where we are right at the moment, which is we're now on day five of what has been deemed not a ceasefire, but a pause.
But effectively, it has resulted more or less in the cessation of conflict between Israel and Gaza.
At least there's been no massive bombing of Gaza.
The invasion is frozen.
The troops have moved back.
What do you think are the prospects of having this turn into something longer or even more permanent?
I think that it's impossible to say.
Very clearly, the Biden administration has given Israel complete support up to this point.
And the Israeli military and the Israeli government seem to be intent on continuing the war as soon as the release of hostages and prisoners is completed.
And And it's not clear how long that might take.
There are pressures on the Biden administration to restrain Israel after it starts again, or perhaps conceivably to restrain it from starting the war again.
But the dynamic on the Israeli side seems to be towards a continuation as soon as this exchange of prisoners is completed.
And that might be prolonged a little longer if new categories besides women and children and civilians are introduced, because there are apparently a number of Israeli soldiers and there are a large number of high-level Palestinian security prisoners whom Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians on the other would like to see released.
So it's actually impossible to say how long this might last and when and if it'll break down.
My instinct is it may well break down soon after a number of further exchanges take place, but one can't really say.
I think it's generally been assumed that Israel is constrained by certain pressures on it, one being world opinion, another being how much its patrons, particularly in the United States, but also in Europe, how far they will permit Israel how far they will permit Israel to go.
I think though over the years we've seen Israel care I think less and less about world opinion, about public opinion and they clearly have had changes to their government in terms of the type of people who are now in the governing coalition with Prime Minister Netanyahu and they have said even before the October 7th
And I've heard American supporters of theirs say this as well, that they have to stop caring about what the United States thinks it should or shouldn't do in terms of its security, that they need to be unleashed and essentially be able to do whatever they think they should do in the name of their national security, whether the United States or world opinion is happy about it or not.
How far down that path do you think they are?
Or in other words, I guess what I'm really asking is, is there anybody, including President Biden, Who has, in your view, the clear ability to stop Israel from doing what it wants to do in Gaza?
He certainly has that ability.
He certainly has the ability to put forward a UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire.
He certainly has the ability to condition the delivery of the munitions upon which Israel's offensive would depend.
He certainly has the ability to speak out and say that nothing justifies the extraordinarily high number of civilian casualties that are entailed in the way in which Israel has chosen to make war with the aim, supposed aim, of destroying Hamas.
The question is, does he have the will to do that?
And does he have the inclination to do that?
And as of this moment in time, I don't see either that will or that inclination.
He is, for the first time, under pressure.
And it's not so much from international public opinion or from Arab public opinion, which are very largely opposed to the continuation of this war.
It comes from within American public opinion, among young people in particular, among the base of the Democratic Party, large sections of which, in fact, majorities of which, are very critical of Israel.
We're talking about Democratic voters generally, and we're talking about young people generally.
And there is a lot of pressure there, because these people may not vote for Joe Biden in November 2024.
And he must have political advisors telling him that, that if this war continues with the kind of horrific civilian casualty tolls that we witnessed for the first six and a half weeks, that will cost him electorally.
That seems to me one of the few restraints on him, because ideologically he seems completely committed to doing whatever has up to this point been completely committed to doing whatever it was that Israel said it wanted to do.
And that includes destroying Hamas, which, you know, you may be able to defeat Hamas's military forces, but destroying Hamas, which is a political and religious and cultural organization, that's actually impossible.
But that's the stated aim, and that is an aim that he has attached American power to up to this point.
So we'll see whether the limited international, the limited impact of international condemnation and the impact of his own domestic considerations persuade the president to change.
As of this moment in time, I don't see that happening.
I want to delve into what the actual Israeli war aims are as opposed to the stated ones, I want to get to that in a second.
But I just want to spend a little bit more time on this question about the Israeli mindset.
Because clearly, no question, there are many things Joe Biden could be doing.
That would put more pressure on the Israelis to rein in the type of military force they're using, the indiscriminate nature of these bombings, the utter disregard for civilian life.
There are things he could be doing rhetorically, politically, diplomatically, financially, none of which he has been willing to do up until this point, which is very consistent with his life in politics when it comes to the question of Israel.
What I guess I'm really asking is, I think there has been an assumption, maybe probably one that I've shared in the past, that given how important the United States is to Israel's security, we provide those bombs that they use to drop on Gaza, we pay for the weapons they use to enforce their occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank, That there was a real ability on the part of the United States to fully constrain the Israelis if it really wanted to.
Of course, the U.S.
government has shown no signs of trying.
I guess what I'm asking is, when a government becomes kind of more fanatical, more extremist, more almost apocalyptic and messianic, as I think many Israeli officials have become, these newer kind of right-wing politicians that are now far more powerful than they ever have been, at least in several decades in Israel.
I don't mean to romanticize the Israeli past, but as bad as those others were, these are more extreme.
Do you think there's some truth?
Because there are Israeli officials who have said, we don't care this time what the Americans tell us we can and can't do.
We're going to do what we think we have to do for our security and the Americans be damned.
Do you think the Israeli mindset is genuinely that?
I think that after the shock of October 7th, when you had actually the largest number of Israeli civilians killed since the beginning of the wars in 1948, and in fact since the beginning of the conflict in over 100 years, you have had a determination on the part of many Israelis to do absolutely anything necessary to ensure that something like this never happens again.
But you have something else, because this was an extraordinary humiliation of the Israeli military.
And so it's not just a desire on the part of the Israeli public to make up for the terrible traumatic shock of so many civilians being killed.
It's the collapse of an entire security doctrine and the defeat of an entire division of the Israeli army by not an Regular Arab military, which happened in 1973.
Briefly, the Assyrian and the Egyptian armies overwhelmed Israeli lines at the beginning of the 1973 war.
But by Hamas, by an organization that the Israelis basically had contempt for, and the Israeli security establishment considered that it had completely contained.
This was a shock to the military and a humiliation for the military, which I think they are bent on avenging by expunging Hamas militarily and politically.
And they have support, I think, among a large part of the Israeli public, both that extreme right wing faction of the government, which wants to take advantage of this to carry out as much ethnic cleansing as possible in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, but of the general public, which wants to avenge this huge toll of almost perhaps more than 800 Israeli civilians who were killed and many more who were then taken which wants to avenge this huge toll of almost perhaps more than 800 Israeli civilians who were killed and many more
So I think both of these things are operating I think you do have on the right wing of the Israeli government a messianic extreme faction that really sees this as an opportunity in particular in the West Bank to realize its fantasies of as much as possible a Palestinian free what they call Judea and Samaria, of an expansion of the settlement project to as much as possible of the West Bank.
And some of them are even talking about resettling, reestablishing colonies in the Gaza Strip. - Right, so let's dive into that a little bit because the state of goal, of course, is to destroy Hamas.
And I think there's no doubt that part of what's happening is a reaction to the atrocities on October 7th.
We saw some of that after the 9-11 attack.
Obviously, Americans just wanted to see things being blown up and people being killed and the assertion of American power and might because of the humiliation that we suffered on 9-11.
Those two gigantic buildings collapsing, the Pentagon being attacked.
I think it's a normal human reaction, but we've seen some concrete pieces of evidence that the Israelis have other goals.
There was an essay by Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister and The Economist the first or second week after October 7th where he said the purpose of this war is to put fear into the hearts of all of our enemies in the region that's so deep and so traumatizing that they will be the former Israeli Prime Minister and The Economist the first or second week That they will be forced into submission.
Even though they hate us for generations, they will be petrified that we are so unhinged that they can't attack us.
We've seen leaks of Israeli military documents suggesting that the real aim is to move the population of Gaza into the Sinai or out of Gaza, which is part of the explicit aim of many of the officials in the Netanyahu government.
Probably it's kind of like trying to figure out what the motive of the Iraq War was.
It's almost impossible because different actors had different motives.
But how varied, how real are those more maximalist objectives, do you think, in terms of what's governing the Israeli actions in Gazanel?
I mean, there clearly was an intention at the beginning of the war to expel from Gaza into Sinai as much as possible of the Palestinian population.
We know that because the United States Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, serving in my view as an errand boy for the Israelis, tried to persuade the Egyptians to accept something like that and apparently tried to persuade the Jordanians to accept something like that.
There is in the White House letter to Congress asking for funding For Israel, $14.3 billion in military funding, a section under migration, which talks about program requirements outside of Gaza, which talks about displacement across borders, which talks about Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.
In other words, the United States was asking Congress to fund something that the Israelis had presumably asked them to run by the Egyptians and the Jordanians.
So we know that that was the intention of this government, the United States government, and of the Israeli government at the very outset of the war.
And that's in the budget request that is still before Congress, that the Office of Management and Budget put before the Speaker of the House on the 20th of October.
You can look at that letter on the government website.
That's a 60-page document with a cover letter.
And so that was the original intention.
The Egyptians and the Jordanians made that impossible.
the Jordanians moved tanks to the border and armored vehicles to the border.
The Egyptian president publicly, repeatedly insisted that under no circumstances would Egypt accept any such thing.
And President Biden has since then backed off.
He made phone calls to both King Abdullah and to President Sisi, in which he assured them, according to the White House readout, that no such thing would be contemplated.
So that was the original intention.
Kick as many of these people out of Gaza.
At another stage it appeared that the intention was to push as many people out of the northern part of Gaza into the southern part.
And that has been largely achieved.
Now whether it is intended to keep them there permanently, what kind of future for Gaza Israel intends, I don't think the Israelis know.
I think that's one of the things that Blinken is in Israel right now, tonight.
trying to winkle out of the Israelis.
What are you planning?
What do you intend?
Which I presume will then become the ceiling for whatever the United States says, because that has been the pattern in the past.
Whatever Israel says it's willing to do is the absolute maximum the United States is willing to push for, at least on the Palestine issue.
That has been the pattern at least for 30 or 40 or 50 years.
I mean, thinking about that, the Israeli midterm or long-term plan, meaning what happened when this bombing campaign finally comes to an end, when the ground invasion either turns into some sort of partial occupation, reoccupation of Gaza or some international force or whatever,
If you look at the scope of the destruction in northern Gaza, there have been reports that 60% of all buildings, if not destroyed, are architecturally compromised, not safe to inhabit.
The sewage system, the electrical system, the hospital system are completely destroyed.
I mean, to some extent, northern Gaza has been rendered, in a large degree, uninhabitable in terms of just any kind of modern society, how would these internally displaced Gazans who are now in southern Gaza and dispersed throughout the country really in any reasonable or meaningful way get back to any kind of meaningful or normal life in northern Gaza even if the Israelis were to permit that? how would these internally displaced Gazans who are now in
Well, I think rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable was actually a declared war aim.
The Minister of Defense, Galant, various Israeli generals said that.
And when you cut off electricity and you cut off water, you are in effect making the place uninhabitable.
When you destroy or render unusable most of the hospitals in northern Gaza, when you destroy schools, when you destroy a variety of other infrastructure, you are rendering northern Gaza uninhabitable.
Now, the claim is that this was intended to destroy Hamas infrastructure.
But my guess is that there was, as they said, a desire to render that part, at least of Gaza, uninhabitable.
Now, you can see that there's a doctrine here.
It's a doctrine that was first adopted in 2006, or at least first enunciated after the 2006 war on Lebanon.
And it was the so-called Dahiyya Doctrine, Dahiyya being the southern suburbs of Beirut, which were flattened.
by Israeli bombing in 2006.
And the man who is now a member of the War Cabinet, a former chief of staff by the name of Gadi Eisenkatt, actually enunciated this.
He said, "We will not accept proportionality.
We will act unproportionally, and we will flatten villages.
We will do what we did to the Dahyeh." In other words, we will destroy in order to destroy in a punitive fashion.
in order to destroy in a punitive fashion.
And I think that is what Israel is doing.
And I think that is what Israel is doing.
Now, what that means for the day after?
Now, what that means for the day after?
Well, I think it's connected in the first instance to what they were hoping, which is to get people out of Gaza, decrease the Palestinian population within the borders of mandatory Palestine.
Well I think it's connected in the first instance to what they were hoping, which is to get people out of Gaza.
Decrease the Palestinian population within the borders of mandatory Palestine.
In other words, launch another stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
If that proves impossible, the next best thing is to squeeze them into a smaller area.
Maybe push them into southern Gaza.
But I don't think that any of these things are necessarily, beyond rendering Gaza uninhabitable, which the Minister of Defense said, I don't think any of these things are entirely clear.
And I think, as you suggested, there are multiple factions in this government.
The military has its own views.
The prime minister who basically wants to continue the war and not lose this government, which keeps him in power, failing which he would go to trial, presumably.
And then other factions within the government, the Likud party, the extreme right-wing parties which want to see ethnic cleansing as soon as possible and as much of Palestine as possible, and so forth.
So it's, to me, frankly, and I'm reading the Israeli press carefully, it's not clear that they have a clear idea or a unified idea of what they want to do with the Gazans once this military campaign is over, whenever it's over.
On this stated goal of destroying Hamas, I don't think we ever got clarity about exactly what that means, although the Israelis made clear from the beginning, Netanyahu from Netanyahu on down, they said, we don't mean we're going to erode the power of Hamas, we don't mean we're going to undermine it, we don't mean we're going to weaken Hamas, we mean we're going to destroy it, eradicate it, remove it from existing in Gaza.
Obviously with a war like this, The facts are hard to come by, so let's just take the Israeli numbers, the numbers given by the Israeli military.
According to the Israeli military, they have thus far killed 1,500 to 2,000 Hamas militants.
So let's take the maximum number, 2,000.
And according to the Israelis as well, there are 30,000 Hamas fighters.
So they've killed 1 15th of all the Hamas fighters that existed at the start of the war.
Presumably there's going to be more anti-Israel radicals and people who hate Israel after this destruction that they've witnessed, after the amount of death.
But let's just keep that number in place.
30,000 Hamas militants.
That would mean in order to kill all Hamas militants, just the minimum necessary I would assume to achieve this goal of destroying Hamas, they would have to kill 15 times more Hamas militants than they have thus far.
And at the current rate of civilian death, that would mean that they would basically end up killing 200,000, 250,000 Gazans in total.
Do you think there is any world in which the world just stands by and watches something like that take place?
No, absolutely not.
The United States wouldn't tolerate it because the Biden administration couldn't tolerate it because public opinion is already against this war.
The majority of Americans are in favor of a ceasefire.
They want it to stop.
They do not accept the Biden administration and the Israeli government's insistence on continuing the war until, quote unquote, Hamas is destroyed, whatever that means.
I mean, whether it means killing 20,000 odd more Hamas militants and God knows how many thousand more civilians, tens of thousands more civilians, and destroying even more of the infrastructure of Gaza.
If 60 percent has already been rendered uninhabitable and unusable, God knows how much more there is to destroy.
But I do not think that the world public opinion, Arab public opinion, but for that matter, American public opinion, will put up with that.
I think there'll be a rebellion within the Democratic Party.
I think the president would be guaranteed of losing the 2024 election.
And I think that he would be obliged to stop this long before we got to those apocalyptic numbers.
So I don't think that there is any possibility of our reaching anything like those numbers, even if those numbers are realistic.
I mean, let's assume that they're highly exaggerated, which I think is the case.
I don't think there's any chance of killing 10,000 or 20,000 Hamas militants, no matter how many civilians Israel kills, and no matter how many tunnels.
You read the Israeli military correspondence, and they're saying they've done very limited damage to the tunnel system.
Well, they've dropped how many thousand tons of bombs a day, a week, on Gaza, and they still have only minimally damaged the tunnel system?
They've killed 2,000 of, by their estimate, 30,000 militants.
It just does not seem to me, within the world of possibility, that this could go on to that extent.
How it stops, however, I don't know.
You're somebody who's followed this conflict for most of your career as a scholar, as an academic, as a historian.
You've referred to on a couple of occasions this public opinion that has turned against the Democratic Party, against Joe Biden for his support of what's taking place in Israel.
I do think there's an interesting dynamic.
That it is the case that for a lot of years now, maybe going back to 2014, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has pretty much been on the back burner of American politics.
You have all these young people who have started to pay attention to politics for the first time, a lot of people who pay attention to politics for the first time only because of Trump.
This is the first real look they're getting at Israel and the Democratic Party's relationship to it.
And you have these mass protests all over the world, hundreds of thousands of people in major Western cities, like you have to go back to the Iraq War to find protests on this level.
As somebody who has followed this conflict, has been in the middle of it in so many ways for so long now, is this a kind of radical or fundamental change in terms of public opinion and the amount of opposition to what the Israelis are doing and the way in which the U.S.
is supporting them?
I mean, there has been a trend in this direction, but I think you put your finger on it.
I think that this is a moment when a newly awakened generation with new access to information is, for the first time, really looking very carefully at things that are happening in Israel and Palestine.
And they clearly do not like what they see.
There's an NBC poll that came out the other day of voters from 18 to 34.
70% of voters in that age group disapprove of the Biden administration's handling of this war.
That's an astonishing percentage.
I mean, a majority of Americans want a ceasefire, but that 70% of young voters, that includes Republicans and independents, I mean, that's a remarkable number.
And it's part of a trend that I think has really been accentuated by this war.
But that's been going on for actually a very long time.
The polling over many years shows a drift away from sympathy for Israel and towards greater sympathy for the Palestinians.
And this war has crystallized that, I think.
Yeah, so for those of us who have followed this debate, this conflict for a long time, there's all the arguments that everybody can rehearse in their sleep.
You show people the death tolls in Gaza, and people say, oh, Hamas uses them as human shields.
Hamas operates from hospitals.
They operate from us.
All the arguments that everybody knows and knows the responses to.
I do, though, want to ask you about a couple of perspectives that are, I think, Most potent ones that Israelis and pro-Israel supporters in the United States and the West offer.
And I want to begin by asking you this.
In almost every war, there's two questions, broadly speaking, I think, that need to be asked.
One is, is there a moral or legal justification for the war, for the force being used?
And then, is it a wise use of force, even if it's morally justifiable?
Will it produce benefits on the whole as opposed to detriment?
After the October 7th massacre that did kill hundreds of civilians, whatever that number is, 500, 800, 900, whatever that amount is, do you think Israel had a legal and moral right to use force in Gaza against the group and the people who perpetrated that attack?
You know, the problem with that question is its framing.
Gaza had been under siege for 16 years.
Israel had assumed that it could live a peaceful, quiet life while putting its boot heel on the Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
And sooner or later, that had to explode.
Now, it exploded in a particularly ugly fashion with these massacres.
It resulted in the highest Death toll among Israeli civilians in the entire history of Israel's wars since 1948.
So there was going to be a reaction necessarily and inevitably.
But if you step back one minute, I think it's very clear that if you occupy and if you imprison and blockade and besiege a population, sooner or later that population is going to react.
Violently and negatively.
Israelis talk about this as if it's irrational.
It's not irrational at all.
The nature of the violence is, of course, horrific that was carried out on that day.
But when you do this to people, and you pretend that out of sight is out of mind, and you can live a normal life in suburban communities with other people in a cage within a couple of miles of you, you are storing up problems that sooner or later are going to erupt.
So, did Israel have a right to occupy in the first instance?
Did Israel have a right to kick those people out in 1948 in the second instance?
I mean, you can go on and on and on.
The people in Gaza are 80% refugees from the areas that Hamas invaded on the 7th of October.
So, it really depends on where you start and where your perspective is on this.
If you assume that everything was peaceful, and this is France and Germany, Or this is country A and country B, where country A simply decides to launch a murderous assault on the civilians of country B, then of course country B has the right to counterattack.
But this is not country A and country B. This is an occupier and an occupied population.
And this is a settler colonial project where the people living in settlements around the Gaza Strip are living on lands that used to belong to people who have now been living, or their ancestors, their parents and grandparents, have been living as refugees in the Gaza Strip since 1948.
And you have to factor that in.
Does an occupying power have the right to attack an occupied population?
You should be asking, I think, those kinds of questions as well as the question, what should Israel have done?
Well, Israel shouldn't have been an occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the first place.
There should have been a Palestinian state.
There should have been, any number of things should have been, the absence of which have led to this horrific situation that we're in, where at least 800 Israeli civilians have been killed, at least 450 or more Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed.
Apparently, over 15,000 Palestinians, both civilians and militants, have been killed.
And we're not at the end of it.
I mean, assuming that this ceasefire breaks down over the next several days, we're going to see many, many, much higher casualty tolls.
And I think at the end of this, you'd have to ask that question.
What was achieved?
What was the point of this?
Have they stored up more enmity for Israel?
Have they improved Israel's position?
Are Israelis more secure as a result of killing 15,000 Palestinians, including a huge number of children and women and other non-combatants?
I don't think the answer is yes.
I don't think you achieve security in that fashion.
And I'm not just saying that from an Israeli perspective.
I would say that from a Palestinian perspective as well.
Sooner or later, there has to be a political resolution of this.
I don't think we're nearer to a political resolution as a result of this, not only, I think, because of whatever happened on the 7th of October, but because of the 15 times greater toll that has so far been inflicted by Israel since the 7th of October, and that toll will only, unfortunately, probably increase.
I'm always amazed at the ability for Western media outlets and governments to just define history however they want.
They did the same thing with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
They just pretended that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the West began on February of 2022, as opposed to having extended many years back, without which you can't possibly understand what happened in February of 2022.
And of course, the attempt to pretend that there was no conflict until October 7th, and it all started when Hamas invaded Israel.
But your answer essentially says that the way for Israel to, the best thing for Israel to do from its own perspective, from the perspective of morality and legality, is to resolve the underlying conflict so that there's no more motive for Palestinians to attack Israel.
The standard argument, which I am interested in hearing your view on, is that Hamas has made very clear they Don't want a two-state solution.
The reason Netanyahu propped up Hamas was precisely because he thought they would work symbiotically to prevent a two-state solution so that wouldn't resolve the hostility of Hamas, say Israel defenders.
And then more interestingly, I think I want to ask you, is a two-state solution possible given the extent of the settlement project in the West Bank?
I mean, my short answer to the second part of your question is no.
Unless you deal with occupation and colonization, you should not even utter the words two-state solution.
A two-state solution in which Israel continues to settle or in which 750,000 Israeli citizens maintain their residence and their colonization of Palestinian lands is not a two-state solution.
It's a one-state solution with a one-state, one-Bantustan solution.
A situation in which Israel continues its occupation is not a two-state solution.
And every Israeli offer, generous offer, has included Israeli control of the Jordan River Valley, which means it's not a state.
I mean, imagine if a foreign country controlled the border with Mexico and the border with Canada.
Would we be a sovereign state?
The United States?
Of course not.
The first part of your question, I think that you have to Look at this in terms of how you end this conflict.
Do you end it in a fashion which maintains a structural inequality where one group has rights and security at the expense of the rights and security of the other?
Where one group proclaims, as the Israeli nation-state law proclaims, that only the Jewish people have the right of sovereignty in the land of Israel.
Or do you have a solution, whether it's a one-state or a two-state solution, in which both peoples and every individual have equal rights?
How you do that, I don't know.
I don't think that a two-state solution is possible in present circumstances because nobody's talking about the elephants in the room.
Nobody's talking about ending Israeli security control.
Nobody's talking about ending settlement.
And if you don't do that, even if the Palestinians accept the measly 22% of historic Palestine, which comprised the West Bank, occupied Arab East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Even if they accept that unjust partition of Palestine, you have to get 750,000 Israelis out of there or figure out how you, how they continue to live.
Heavily armed Israelis.
Heavily armed Israeli settlers backed by major components of the IDF, if not most.
Precisely.
Let me, let me... Oh, go ahead, go ahead.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
I think those are all obstacles in the way of two-state solution myself.
There are obstacles in the way of one-state solution as well, Frank.
I want to ask you about what's going on in the West Bank in a second.
I don't want to end our discussion before I do.
But before I get to that, you are at Columbia, where you've been for quite some time.
That has been a hotspot for this Israel-Palestine debate in the United States for many decades now.
Your professorship is named after the great scholar Edward Said, who was a highly controversial pro-Palestinian scholar.
And you have people, prominent pro-Israel Advocates in the United States like Barry Weiss, who got her start at Columbia, where she argued that the faculty was overwhelmingly anti-Israel and anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic.
Tried to get changes to the faculty, ironically achieved based on that goal before becoming a great free speech champion.
One of the controversies that has happened at Columbia over the last seven weeks is that the administration banned two Palestinian groups from existing or suspended their right to exist.
One of which was a largely Jewish organization that advocates for pro-Palestinian rights and then the other is a group of all sorts of people who are pro-Palestinian.
What are your thoughts on that?
Was there any valid basis at all for suspending those two groups on the grounds that they've been violating university rules?
So the university rules were made up in the immediate lead up to the suspension of these two groups and were implemented by an ad hoc body which does not comport with the statutes of the university.
So this was an illegal procedure by a committee of public safety type operation.
I think it's a committee on campus safety.
concocted for the occasion by the administration in order to shut down these two groups, presumably in response to overwhelming external pressure from politicians, from donors, from the board of trustees.
I don't know.
But it was clear that they jumped whenever the whip was cracked over their head.
And what you're talking about is the expression of political views on the part of students.
And in my view, it is completely illegitimate to shut that down.
There's all kinds of hate speech being uttered on Columbia's campus.
Let me put it differently.
There's all kinds of speech being uttered on Columbia's campus or was.
Things have calmed down now, But in the first few weeks after the start of this war on and in Gaza, there were all kinds of things that different groups might have perceived as hateful.
I thought it was hateful for pro-Israel demonstrators to say, you're all Hamas, you're all terrorists.
Others felt that it was hateful for Palestinians to say, for pro-Palestinian demonstrators, I should say, to say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
And there are all kinds of ways of interpreting that slogan or interpreting the claim that supporters of Palestine are terrorists.
That can be described as hate speech, but it certainly should be under doctrines of free speech, permissible political speech.
I may not like what some people say and they may not like what other people say, but the fact that the Columbia administration decided That certain words expressed only by one group were hate speech, and should be shut down, and those groups should be banned, and other things being said by others were not, to my way of thinking is completely unacceptable.
And it comports with statements made by the administration, which spoke only to the concerns of students who were deeply affected by the attack on Israel on the 7th of October, and said absolutely nothing about what Israel then proceeded to do in the many days and weeks that followed in bombing Gaza and in killing all of these thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of civilians.
And there were many Palestinians.
I have students who lost families.
I have family.
My niece's in-laws live in Gaza.
These people were much more personally affected, those who lost family.
They had concerns.
They were worried.
The administration showed absolutely no concern for them.
Its statements privileged the sense of vulnerability of Israeli and Jewish students, which In and of itself is unexceptionable.
It's, you know, it's what a university should do.
But it didn't show the same solicitude for the many, many, many students who either have family there or have feelings, as do many students who don't have family in Israel.
They had feelings for Israel.
And the one-sidedness of this, the bias of it, is to my way of thinking completely unacceptable.
And you've seen the same thing happening at other Ivy League schools, at Harvard and at Penn.
All of this, I think this should be said, in an environment which is not neutral.
The government of the United States is not neutral.
The governor of New York State is not neutral.
The mayor of New York City is not neutral.
They are extremely pro-Israel.
They show no concern, no solicitude for Palestinians.
The president, in fact, himself said, I don't believe them when they talk about capitalists and this is the result of war.
This is what happens in war.
The president said more or less that.
That's the President of the United States.
That's the environment we live in.
We do not live in an environment where there's solicitude for thousands and thousands of Palestinian children being killed under the ruins of their homes.
We live in an environment where the mainstream media is entirely hostile.
You had three Muslim anchors booted out of their jobs for a week at least at MSNBC.
If you had booted three pro-Israel, three Jewish pro-Israel anchors, there would have been a howl about it.
It could not have happened.
It's inconceivable that such a thing could happen because they're presumably pro-Israel.
But that's what happened at MSNBC.
And that is basically the tone of the mainstream media.
I mean, I occasionally publish something, I'm occasionally interviewed.
But the framing by the editors, by the publishers, by the producers of the newspapers and of the television networks Is decidedly pro-Israel.
That's the environment we all live in.
Finally, we live in an environment where corporations are rescinding offers to students who have signed a petition they don't like.
Are they rescinding offers to students who signed pro-Israel petitions?
I don't think so.
So, on a corporate level, on a media level, on a political level, and on the level of the university, we are seeing extreme bias within which all of us are operating.
One group feels itself hurt by what happened to Israelis, another group feels itself hurt by what happened to Palestinians, but the former are getting all the solicitude in the world, and the latter are getting the back of the university's hand.
All of this, as I've said, in a broader environment of hostility to Palestine and to Palestinians, not on campus from students, nor necessarily from faculty or from other young people, but from the powers that be, politically, in the media, in the corporate world, and in non-profits, foundations, the art world, universities.
You have the same kinds of pressures being exerted from one direction from above.
The narrative that has been widely ratified by almost every major center of power in the United States, in Washington, in both political parties, every major media corporation that I know of, has been that the United States is a new crisis.
Which is a crisis of anti-Semitism particularly on college campuses and that we need all sorts of solutions including controls on speech, on the internet, on college campuses, in order to protect American Jewish students because they feel unsafe.
I have no doubt, and you even said earlier, that especially in the first few weeks following the outbreak of this war, emotions were very high.
I'm sure that in every group there were ugly things said on both sides and probably very Islamophobic sentiments, very anti-Semitic sentiments here and there.
There's no countervailing narrative that there is a crisis of anti-Muslim or anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic sentiments in the United States.
It's purely that there's a crisis of anti-Semitism on college campuses and we need all sorts of measures to protect students from that and make them feel safe.
As somebody who's been in academia for so long, who again is in kind of the ground zero centerpiece of this conflict in the academic world at Columbia, do you think there's validity not to the idea that there have of course been isolated anti-semitic incidents here and there, but that there is a new crisis of anti-semitism meriting censorship and changes to speech codes on college campuses?
I think that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism in the United States generally.
I don't think that.
There's no question that there has been such a rise in the incidence of not just verbal harassment, but actual attacks.
You had attacks on synagogues, you had attacks on cemeteries, you had all kinds of horrific, hateful attacks on Jewish institutions and on individuals.
There's no question about that.
What I would question is the conflation of criticism of Israel or criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism.
If the people who colonized Palestine were Danes, the Palestinians would have resisted them in just the same way.
If they had been Martians, they would have resisted them in just the same way.
It just happened that they came from a persecuted group.
It just happened that they had a historic tie to the Holy Land.
It just happened that they were Jewish.
And as colonists, as settlers, as people who were trying to take over the land of an indigenous population, they naturally, inevitably, provoked the resistance of that population.
That resistance had nothing to do, at its core, with anti-Semitism.
When people say we demand rights for the Palestinians, or the Palestinians have had this and that happen to them, it's not because the people who did this were Jews, or that they represented a Jewish national movement.
It's that they were settlers trying to take over.
The land of an indigenous population.
And to conflate hostility to Zionism and demand for rights for Palestinians with anti-Semitism is to make a category mistake.
It's fundamentally wrong.
Now, are there some anti-Semites among supporters of Palestinian rights?
There definitely must be.
I'm sure there are.
I've heard anti-Semitic things said.
by young people, misled, foolish young people.
But is that where most anti-Semitism in the United States comes from?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
It comes from the right.
As we know, historically, that's where anti-Semitism has its home, in Europe and in the United States.
And the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan.
I don't even need to go to European examples.
That's the home, historically, of anti-Semitism.
And that's where many of these hateful incidents are coming from.
Conflating opposition to Israeli policies or demands for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism is essentially, it's a refuge of scoundrels.
It's a refuge of scoundrels.
It's people who can't argue in support of Israel.
And so they say, we don't want to have this argument because you are all anti-Semites and therefore you're beyond the pale.
You're not allowed to talk.
And that's basically what's happening now at the same time.
is there is an incidence of anti-Semitism, not an incidence, an uptick, a serious, serious rise in anti-Semitic incidents, many of which have nothing to do with Palestine or the Arab-Israeli conflict, and some of which do.
There is also a rise not only in Islamophobia, but in anti-Palestinian hate crimes.
A few people have been killed in the last couple of years or last couple of weeks or shot.
The only persons to be killed are one protester supporting Israel in Los Angeles who was hit by a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, fell to the ground and died, and a young child in Illinois who was killed apparently because he was Palestinian, and three boys who were shot, college students who were shot in Vermont.
We're not fully sure what the motive of that attack is yet.
There's indications it was because of who they were, but we don't actually know that for sure.
But yeah, there just happened to be wearing cafes.
Yeah, like I said, there's indications, but I think- And we're talking Arabic.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I- What I'm trying to point to is that there is an incident, a rise in incidents of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hate, including crimes, including attacks on people, which, We will see what the result of the shooting outside of a mosque in Providence was.
We will see what the investigation into the shooter in Vermont proves.
But all of this has created a climate of fear.
Justified or unjustified, as have the very large number of attacks on Jewish institutions and Jewish individuals.
The point is that this is a larger problem of hate.
It's not just a problem of anti-Semitism.
And you have a congressional committee about to hold a hearing in which presidents of Harvard and Penn and another university are going to be hauled before a Republican committee, a Republican-dominated committee in the House, to talk only about anti-Semitism, not to talk about anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic hate crimes or harassment.
And that's typical of the environment that we're operating in.
First lady, before October 7th, when we first launched our show, we made a list of people that we wanted to invite on and you have been on it from the very beginning.
So I'm thrilled that we got the opportunity to spend some time together.
I'd love to have you back on.
We barely touched on the situation in the West Bank.
There's other issues in the region in terms of still the potential for escalation and other issues with domestic politics as well that I would love to dive in further with you, but I really enjoyed our conversation and I very much appreciate your taking the time that you gave to us to talk to us.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity.
Absolutely, have a great evening.
I hope to be on again.
Definitely will.
You too.
All right, bye-bye.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast version, where you can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
And if you rate, review, and follow the program, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to our community on Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we have our live interactive After Show, where we take your questions, respond to your feedback and criticism, hear your suggestions for future show.
That After Show is available exclusively for our subscribers to the local community.
If you want to become a subscriber, which gives you access to those twice a week, After shows as well as the transcripts of every program here on Rumble that we produce and publish there as well as original journalism that we will publish there in the future and it just helps support the independent journalism that we're doing here.
Just click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you to that locals community.
For those of you watching the show we are as always very appreciative.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
