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| Good evening. | |
| It's Monday, September 23rd. | |
| 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, many Democrats believe that it could not possibly get any better than last week when they got the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney for Kamala Harris, but they were wrong. | |
| Today was even more of an impressive accomplishment and more of a reflection of what Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party actually are, as dozens of former CIA officials, operatives of the NSA, and more than 100 Pentagon officials issued a joint letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president. | |
| Essentially, this is the U.S. | |
| security state uniting In support of her candidacy, maybe it's worth asking why things like this keep happening. | |
| And then, Ukraine's President for Life Vladimir Zelensky is campaigning today with Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro in the King's Swing State of Pennsylvania, which is the state of which Josh Shapiro is governor. | |
| Both Zelensky and Shapiro are touting the benefits of building new weapons factories to fuel the war in Ukraine. | |
| As if feeding the U.S. | |
| war machine somehow helps the American people is now a key part of the Democratic Party agenda. | |
| All of this comes as even Ukraine's most ardent supporters in the region, such as the President of the Czech Republic, Peter Pavel, who said today, are acknowledging that Ukraine's war cause is lost and that an agreement to cede territory for peace to Russia is the only realistic option. | |
| And now all of this is to say nothing about the fact of the supreme irony that Democrats have spent eight years incessantly whining about the evils of foreign interference in our sacred elections, even as they invite the Ukrainian leader to the United States in the middle of a campaign, not the first time the Ukrainian government has attempted to help Democrats. | |
| And finally, Professor Norman Finkelstein is one of the most studied and passionate and, I think, riveting scholars of the Israel-Palestine conflict. | |
| After October 7th, he became one of the most sought-after voices on countless media outlets around the world, including ours, to speak on this topic. | |
| He's withdrawn a bit over the last few months in order to write a book, which is very much in progress. | |
| We are excited to read it when it's done, but we are happy to say that we have him tonight, and we will talk to him about all of the new and quite dangerous developments in that region recently, including Israel's ongoing destruction of Gaza, its new war with Lebanon, the U.S. | |
| role in all of this, and much more. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. | |
| You can tell a lot by a political party or a political candidate by looking at the elites who are endorsing them and what it is that they're saying when they do. | |
| For more than four years now, all sorts of people who are part of the war machine in Washington, who embrace the neoconservative ideology of starting wars all over the country as a way of asserting American influence and enriching the weapons manufacturers of the United States, | |
| All the people who are most vested in preservation of the ruling class status quo have been radically and rapidly migrating from the Republican Party, where they once resided, especially after the War on Terror, during the War on Terror, after the 9-11 attack, and during the Bush-Cheney administration, gradually but also very inexorably toward the Democratic Party. | |
| And now it's a quite rapid migration ever since Trump arrived. | |
| And that's why it was anything but a surprise when two weeks ago, first Liz Cheney and then Dick Cheney, once considered to be the embodiment of Satan, a new Hitler, by the consensus of American liberals to say nothing of the allegation that he stole the 2000 election, came out and didn't just repudiate Donald Trump, but affirmatively endorsed Kamala Harris. | |
| And when doing so, Liz Cheney, on behalf of her dad, said the reason for it was that Kamala Harris's foreign policy better aligns with The foreign policy of the Cheney family, which has not changed at all, then a Trump-led Republican party would align with it. | |
| Now, even though that was unsurprising, it was extremely revealing. | |
| In case the migration of all these neocons and Bush-Cheney operatives was too subtle, having Dick Cheney come out and say he thinks Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, would make the better president should have made this vividly manifest to everyone who hadn't yet realized what this realignment has become. | |
| In case that wasn't clear enough, we have even a more vivid example that happened today from The Guardian. | |
| Just earlier today, you can see the headline, more than 700 national security officials endorse Kamala Harris for president. | |
| The public letter calls the Vice President a candidate who, quotes, defends America's democratic ideals and says Donald Trump is unfit for the job. | |
| Quote, the letter, signed by retired U.S. | |
| Navy Rear Admiral Michael Smith and hundreds of others, criticized the former president's remarks about, quote, terminating the U.S. | |
| Constitution over his lie that the 2000 election was stolen and his suggestion of becoming a, quote, dictator if reelected. | |
| Both of those quotes are completely fabricated. | |
| If you go and look at what Trump said when he said I'm going to be a dictator on day one, he was talking to Sean Hannity and he was clearly joking and he made it immediately clear that he was joking by saying what I mean is I'm going to just on day one sign executive orders to close the border and begin deporting people who are here illegally and who are violent. | |
| He didn't say, I'm going to be a dictator for the next four years starting on day one, but these are the kinds of fabricated quotes that start circulating by the media and they never stop no matter how often they're debunked. | |
| The Guardian article goes on, quote, among those signing the letter is the former secretary of state in 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. | |
| No, imagine she doesn't support Trump, but supports Kamala. | |
| Jeff Blake, who served as the U.S. | |
| ambassador to Australia under Barack Obama and the former CIA director, John Deutch. | |
| For decades it had been a staple, an anchor of left liberal politics in the United States, that the CIA and the U.S. | |
| security state in general was the embodiment of evil, the root of all evil in American politics. | |
| They were the part of the government that acted in secret. | |
| With no democratic accountability, with no ethical limits of any kind, and that intensified in the wake of the war on terror when they began becoming more and more involved, not just with foreign affairs and the foreign politics of foreign countries, but the politics of the United States and domestic thought and domestic speech as well. | |
| And yet it's very clear that the U.S. | |
| security state, the CIA, all of those institutions have been and continue to be Aligned with the Democratic Party, because what they fear most is Donald Trump, for reasons that we can evaluate another time, but clearly they do fear Donald Trump. | |
| Which is why, not just now, but even back in 2016, you saw the Democratic head of the CIA, Michael Morrell, who served under President Obama, as well as the Republican head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, who served both as the director of the CIA and the NSA, under George Bush and Dick Cheney. | |
| Come out in separate op-eds, one in the New York Times, one in the Washington Post in 2016, and try and warn the country that Donald Trump was some sort of agent of the Kremlin in order to ensure his defeat. | |
| This trend has been ongoing for a long time. | |
| The U.S. | |
| security state, just like Dick Cheney, feels far, far more comfortable within the Democratic Party than a Trump-led Republican Party now, here's some of the rationale from the letter itself explaining why there you see the title NSL for a endorses Kamala Harris for president of the United States That's the nurse national security leaders for America. | |
| That's the group that they're calling themselves. | |
| You can see the The little logo they created there with the name underneath and this is part of what the letter says quote to the American people We are former public servants We are former public servants who swore an oath of the Constitution. | |
| That's what the leaders of the CIA, the NSA, Pentagon officials are. | |
| They're just former public servants who believe in the Constitution. | |
| Many of us have risked our lives for it. | |
| We are retired generals, admirals, senior non-commissioned officers, ambassadors, and senior civilian national security leaders. | |
| We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. | |
| We are loyal to the ideals of our nation. | |
| Like freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, not to any one individual or party. | |
| We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles. | |
| First, we believe America's national security requires a serious and capable commander-in-chief. | |
| Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable. | |
| Each generation has a responsibility to defend it. | |
| That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next president of the United States. | |
| Vice President Harris has proven she is an effective leader, able to advance American national security interests. | |
| Now, American national security interests, as this bipartisan foreign policy establishment blob perceives it. | |
| The foreign policy interest, the national security interest and the ideology surrounding it that has destroyed so many places around the world as well as our own country. | |
| They're saying that's the agenda Kamala Harris will faithfully advance and I agree with them completely that she will. | |
| As I said, if I were a detainee, or if I were John Brennan, or if I were James Clapper, or any of these previous CIA directors, or NSA operatives, or members of the Pentagon who care most about the war machine being funded, I also would endorse Kamala Harris. | |
| She would definitely be my candidate, too. | |
| I understand exactly why they're doing this. | |
| And I hope everyone else does, too. | |
| The letter goes on, quote, her relentless diplomacy with allies around the globe preserved a united front in support of Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. | |
| So we're supposed to believe that it was Kamala Harris whose diplomacy aligned these countries behind the United States and NATO. | |
| This was something Joe Biden said that with his ample foreign policy experience, he was the one who engineered. | |
| But diplomacy is not about gathering alliances to fight wars. | |
| I mean, I guess it could be, but typically the benefit of diplomacy is averting war. | |
| or resolving a war once it begins. | |
| And there's been no diplomacy from Joe Biden or Kamala Harris precisely because they want that work to continue. | |
| And so does the U.S. | |
| security state, hence their endorsement of Kamala Harris. | |
| The letter goes on, quote, Conversely, Donald Trump has publicly and privately excoriated the leaders of our most steadfast allies, including the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, Canada and Germany. | |
| So apparently, one of the problems with the national security officials here is that the is the belief that Donald Trump has been too critical of the Israeli government and hence you see this statement that he has excoriated the leaders of other countries that are in our own including Israel. | |
| Apparently this is a view that they're trying to perpetrate that Donald Trump is somehow more hostile to Israel than Kamala Harris is. | |
| And then here you see some of the signatories, the distinguished signatories on this list. | |
| You have John Brennan, who is the former Director of the CIA. | |
| You have Janet Napolitano, who is the former Secretary of Homeland Security and the former Governor of Arizona. | |
| You have Jeremy Bash, the former Chief of Staff of the Department of Defense, Lieutenant General Jim Clapper, USAF, and the former Director of National Intelligence, Ambassador Susan Rice, former President, National Security Advisor to the President. | |
| And Ambassador Victoria Nuland, the former Acting Deputy Secretary of State, as well as Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and former U.S. | |
| Senator from New York. | |
| Now, these are the people who have destroyed the foreign policy of the United States. | |
| If you like the Iraq War, if you like the dirty wars in Syria and Libya, to try and engineer regime change there. | |
| If you like the endless funding of the war in Ukraine, the constant growth of the powers of the CIA and the NSA, including here at home, including to censor American discourse and speech, and to surveil American citizens and everyone else at the world, then I absolutely agree. | |
| Kamala Harris is your candidate. | |
| And it doesn't mean, just let me be clear, that Donald Trump will subvert those policies But what it does mean is that Kamala Harris is a much more reliable vehicle for advancing those foreign policies than Donald Trump is. | |
| Trump might advance them, depending on his mood, depending on who he was listening to last. | |
| He might actually try and subvert some of them. | |
| He's just too unpredictable for this foreign policy establishment that wants more than anything the disastrous foreign policy of the United States to continue because even though it prejudices the interests of most Americans, it benefits the interests of the people they care most about, which are the elites who benefit and profit from war and the leaders of the U.S. | |
| security state and the Pentagon who become far more powerful whenever endless war continues. | |
| Now, it's not only Dick Cheney and the CIA and the NSA and the Pentagon supporting Kamala Harris, so too are Reagan, Bush, McCain, and Romney alumni. | |
| On September 18th, just a little bit, just last week, about four days ago, here you see over 100 public and national security leaders endorse Vice President Harris. | |
| Quote, Donald Trump cannot be trusted to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and bear true faith and allegiance to the same. | |
| Quote, we are prepared to support her as president because she has Pledge to ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world, and to honor and respect those who wear the uniforms, supported a strong NATO to stand up to Russia and protect European and American security, and has been firm in her support of Ukraine. | |
| So if those are the things that you want, That we're going to keep paying for and being a part of this aggressive military alliance with Western Europe that the war in Ukraine will forever indefinitely be funded and continue to be fueled then again that's absolutely the sort of thing that would I think quite reasonably make somebody Support Kamala Harris. | |
| Now, I just want to give you a little bit of sense of what this faction really is after. | |
| Because I think sometimes it's perceived that all of these people only care about the military-industrial complex and the war machine, and that absolutely is their primary objective. | |
| But what they really have is an ideology, and the ideology is have the United States dominate the world through superior military force. | |
| Back in April of 2022, when I was still writing at Substack, I wrote an article about how every time there is legislation proposed or regulatory action taken to weaken the power of Big Tech so that all of our speech isn't concentrated in and controlled by a tiny group of Big Tech behemoths, it is these same people | |
| John Brennan and James Clapper and Michael Hayden from both political parties across the political spectrum who come out and demand that big tech not ever be weakened, that in fact its monopoly power continues to grow. | |
| And here you see the headline from the article that I wrote when it looked as though Congress was moving. | |
| Under the Biden administration, toward legislation that would protect consumers by weakening the monopoly power of saying Google or Facebook, it was former intelligence officials, the same ones who endorsed Kamala Harris today, the same exact ones who issued that letter right before the 2020 election, lying and saying that the Hunter Biden laptop and reporting based on it was Russian disinformation. | |
| These are trained liars. | |
| And it's the same circle of people over and over trying to control and manipulate and interfere in our politics. | |
| What they do is they come out and they say, no, Big Tech, as you can see by the headline, their monopoly power is vital to national security. | |
| Quote, when the U.S. | |
| security state announces that Big Tech centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves, meaning this regime of censorship that has been centralized in Big Tech. | |
| And it's the U.S. | |
| security state that wants to make sure that they can control the speech and discourse of Americans. | |
| This is all part of their agenda, and it's an agenda that Kamala Harris and the Democrats absolutely share. | |
| And it's one of the reasons why I still find and always found the attempt to ban TikTok so disturbing, because what that was was this group of people identifying one platform. | |
| Who they couldn't control in terms of what speech is allowed, what censorship has to be imposed, and so they wanted to either shut it down or force a sale of it to a company who they could better control. | |
| Now, at the same time that the war machine in the military industrial complex, people like Dick Cheney and neocons like Bill Kristol are united behind Kamala Harris, she's going around making sure that corporate America Is as well, meaning the large multinational corporations that ship jobs overseas that profit greatly at the expense of pretty much the whole country. | |
| And what she's doing is what Hillary Clinton was revealed to have been doing in 2016 when those WikiLeaks emails were released and she got caught doing it, which is running a campaign pretending that she wants to implement policies to help ordinary people in their economic situation, but then privately telling the big donors on whom the Democratic Party relies Bet she doesn't really mean it. | |
| Here's the Wall Street Journal yesterday. | |
| Kamala Harris makes undercover push to win over corporate America. | |
| The Vice President has campaigned on holding big business accountable, but has privately sought advice from CEOs and investors. | |
| Quote, she has hosted dinners of eight to 10 chief executives at the Vice President's Naval Observatory Residence, according to attendees, to discuss a range of topics with guests such as Visa's Ryan McCannery, who has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, Motorola's Greg Brown, a Republican, and CV Health's Karen Lynch, who isn't publicly affiliated with either party. | |
| Over the course of hours, attendees said she would typically listen to their thoughts on infrastructure funding, the Inflation Reduction Act, diversity, equity, inclusion efforts, China, and the labor market. | |
| Some of them came away impressed. | |
| Quote, she was given a bad rap in the echo chamber, said one. | |
| And they have really lined up behind her just like in 2020 with Biden and Trump and just like in 2016 with Biden and Hillary. | |
| The Democrats and Kamala Harris' campaign are not just being supported by the U.S. | |
| security state, but by all of big corporate America that Donald Trump ran his campaign in 2016 on opposing, and that Democrats try and now commandeer that populist agenda, even while Kamala Harris assures these corporate leaders in private that she will serve their agenda, which is why they're supporting her. | |
| Now, I want to just make clear that while The military-industrial complex and the arms industry and the intelligence community and the U.S. | |
| security state and neocons are lined up behind Dick Cheney. | |
| It's not because Donald Trump is running on the same sort of non-interventionist policy that he ran on in 2016. | |
| One of the things that happened to Trump is that his campaign depends to a very alarming amount On the funding of Miriam Adelson, who married Sheldon Nilsen, one of the world's richest person, who was very open about the fact that the only issue that he really cared about was having the United States support Israel, fund Israel, arm Israel. | |
| And he used his billions and billions of dollars to spread throughout the Republican Party to ensure that they adhere to his agenda, just like plenty of pro-Israel billionaires do for the Democratic Party as well. | |
| But Trump is particularly reliant on Miriam Adelson in this campaign. | |
| She's giving him $100 million for his campaign to try and ensure his election. | |
| And so Trump has built his campaign In a to a very notable extent a very non-trivial extent quite substantive extent on promising over and over and over and over and over again that he will do everything he possibly can for Israel that he will give Israel everything that it wants | |
| He's campaigning on this preposterous claim that the Democratic Party, which is steadfastly pro-Israel and long has been, Joe Biden armed Israel and gave them everything they needed and wanted and more over the past year, just like he's been doing his whole career, that somehow Israel will be in danger in terms of its existence if Kamala Harris wins because the Democrats are so anti-Israel. | |
| But Trump, he's been boasting, is so pro-Israel that every time the Adelsons come to visit him and he says nobody visited the White House in his first term more than Sheldon and Miriam Adelson who again only care about Israel. | |
| He said every time they came he gave them something for Israel and they keep coming back and always want more and he says he's going to give it to them. | |
| Here he is speaking to the Israeli American Council and just listen to Trump in his own words. | |
| Just as I promised, I recognized Israel's eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem. | |
| Jerusalem became the capital. | |
| I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. | |
| You know, Miriam and Sheldon. | |
| By the way, for those of you who are listening to this, As an audio, you may not be able to notice, but in this crowd that's listening to him and cheering for him, you see all sorts of Israeli flags. | |
| You see very, very few American flags, if you see any. | |
| It reminds me a lot of that time when Republicans and Fox News tried to turn into heroes those students at the University of North Carolina for having put back up the American flag against pro-Palestinian protesters who had taken it down and tried to turn them into some sort of uber-patriots that we should all revere. | |
| I think they even did a GoFundMe campaign where they got something like $60,000 or something. | |
| And then once the students started getting interviewed, they actually admitted, no, we didn't do that for the United States. | |
| Our cause is Israel. | |
| We were there to defend Israel. | |
| And all over the place, outside of that one scene that was shown, were Israeli flags waving, just like Israeli flags are waving here. | |
| And this is the crowd Trump is speaking to. | |
| And he's promising that he will give them everything and more. | |
| Let's listen to the rest. | |
| Would come into the White House, probably almost more than anybody, outside of people that work there, probably almost more than anybody. | |
| Would come into the White House, probably almost more than anybody, outside of people that work there. | |
| And they were always after, and as soon as I'd give them something, always for Israel, as soon as I'd give them something, they'd want something else. | |
| I'd say, give me a couple of weeks, will you please? | |
| But I gave them the Golan Heights and they never even asked for it. | |
| You know, for 72 years, they've been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? | |
| And even Sheldon didn't have the nerve. | |
| But I said, you know what? | |
| I said to David Friedman, give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less on the Golan Heights. | |
| And he did. | |
| And I said, let's do it. | |
| We got it done in about 15 minutes. | |
| Isn't that a weird way of advancing the America First agenda? | |
| Make America great again, to go around the country campaigning on the basis of how much you're going to give to Israel, bragging about the fact that every time Sheldon and Miriam Edelson come to the White House, you give them something else for Israel, even if they don't ask for it. | |
| And then he said, he had David Friedman, who was his ambassador, US ambassador to Israel, one of the most fanatical pro-Israel extremists that exist on the planet. | |
| And he said, yeah, I don't know anything about the Golan Heights. | |
| I don't even know what it is. | |
| Can you give me a five minute summary of what it is? | |
| And then after he got a five minute summary from David Friedman, he said, yeah, let's give the Golan Heights to Israel. | |
| So. | |
| It's, as I said, it's not like Trump is campaigning so explicitly on undermining core American foreign policy. | |
| He's surrounded by people who believe in American foreign policy more than anybody. | |
| In fact, many of his closest advisors are people who criticize the Biden and Harris administration, not on Ukraine, not for supporting the war in Ukraine too much, but for supporting it insufficiently. | |
| That we should lift all the limits, give them all the long-range missiles to shoot into Moscow. | |
| Now the problem is that Trump did select J.D. | |
| Vance as his vice president, who has a much more anti-interventionist and sustained agenda of populism when it comes to foreign policy. | |
| And there are people surrounding Trump who feel the same, and he has frequently defended a form of anti-interventionism and populism in his foreign policy. | |
| It's just that this campaign has become a much more traditional Republican campaign on foreign policy. | |
| And so, as always, the campaign, in large part, is about the two candidates fighting over who's better for Israel. | |
| As I said, this letter issued by the U.S. | |
| security state Actually accuses Trump of excoriating the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu as though that's a bad thing and saying Kamala Harris is a better, more reliable defender of our allies such as Israel. | |
| And then you have a Trump over here saying, no, no, I'm much better for Israel. | |
| But at the end of the day, the people who live in Washington, who are defending their interests, and the people who understand Washington best, and what they're making extremely clear, is that there's one candidate, and one candidate only, who will best advance their rotted foreign policy agenda and foreign policy ideology, and that's Kamala Harris, and I think they have very good reason for believing that. | |
| All right, so earlier today in Pennsylvania, which is one of the most important swing states that will determine the 2024 election, the Democratic governor of that state, Josh Shapiro, was visited by Ukrainian President, I guess you could say, for life at the moment, Vladimir Zelensky. | |
| Remember, all elections in Ukraine are canceled. | |
| Indefinitely, at least until the war is over, which doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon. | |
| So Zelensky's there, doesn't matter how unpopular he is, there's no elections, you can't put him out of office. | |
| And here is Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, welcoming Zelensky to that state. | |
| And here's what he tweeted, quote, we all must do our part in this fight for freedom. | |
| From the workers in Scranton who make Pennsylvania the arsenal of democracy to the brave Ukrainian soldiers protecting their country, we stand with Ukraine in their just defense of their homeland in the face of Russian aggression. | |
| Now, again, imagine yourself as a neocon, somebody whose top foreign policy agenda is supporting Israel, which Josh Shapiro very aggressively does. | |
| And who wants to keep wars going endlessly, the posture of endless war. | |
| When you have Josh Shapiro using the neocon rhetoric, the classic neocon rhetoric, we have to spread democracy, protect democracy by building weapons, sending weapons anywhere. | |
| This is the identity of the United States. | |
| Is it any wonder why Those kinds of people feel so comfortable in the Democratic Party. | |
| Here was Josh Shapiro at a factory, a weapons factory, with President Zelensky in Pennsylvania, in which Josh Shapiro signed one of the weapons that they intend to give to Ukraine to bomb the Russian army with. | |
| There you see President Zelensky standing behind him smiling as the Democratic Party continues to do the bidding of Ukraine. | |
| And who knows what message he wrote, I'm sure we'll find out. | |
| I think the whole practice of signing weapons that are designed to kill people is pretty psychotic, although it's very common. | |
| Nikki Haley went to Israel and Signed all sorts of things on the missiles that are used to destroy Gaza and kill all sorts of Gazan civilians. | |
| Now this whole rhetoric about Ukraine and as fanatical as the Democratic Party has been about fueling it and much of the Republican Party, Europe is even worse. | |
| The British in particular, who are always just the most sociopathic when it comes to war. | |
| They have a national identity crisis, a sort of inferiority complex from having crumbled in their empire and being this little tiny irrelevant country. | |
| But they're also desperate to be the new Churchill, so they just constantly give these pompous speeches about the glories of war. | |
| They actually want to provide Ukrainians with long-range missiles and then have NATO use them to guide those missiles to hit targets deep into Russia. | |
| And the French seem to want that too. | |
| So far, Biden hasn't given them that. | |
| But the pattern has always been that every time there's a limit of things we won't do, send tanks or send air fighter jets, Every time there's been a limit, the United States has announced that they're now going beyond it, and this is following that pattern where they issue these trial balloons of what the United States is going to do, wait a while, see what happens, and then the momentum grows, and then Biden says the U.S. | |
| is now going to do it. | |
| And all that's happening, this kind of escalated rhetoric about winning the war in Ukraine, giving more to the Ukrainians, exactly at the same time that people in the region The people who should care most about the war in Ukraine and about Russia, including some of the most fervent and vocal supporters of Ukraine all this time, are now admitting publicly that there's no way Ukraine can win this war, that it's time to start being realistic about what needs to be done to end this war. | |
| And that means, a lot of their most vocal supporters say, conceding certain Ukrainian territory to Russia, otherwise all of Ukraine is going to be destroyed. | |
| Here from the New York Times earlier today, reporting on one of the most surprising statements of this kind, Ukraine needs to be realistic about its goals, the Czech president says. | |
| President Peter Pavel, a former NATO general who has been vocal in his support for Ukraine, said Kiev needed to accept that some territory could remain under Russian control, at least temporarily. | |
| With Russia-friendly populist leaders such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary disrupting European unity over the war, and with the fatigue of 19 months of conflict growing everywhere, Ukraine, quote, will have to be realistic about its prospects of recovering territory occupied by Russia. | |
| Mr. Powell said in an interview, quote, the most probable outcome of the war, he said, will be a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation temporarily. | |
| But he added that, quote, temporary thing could last years. | |
| It has been so clear for so long. | |
| But Ukraine has no chance to win this war. | |
| Just the gap in soldiers alone. | |
| Makes that inevitable. | |
| And there's all sorts of military advances that have been happening in Ukraine that all favor Russia. | |
| You can just look at a map, and it may be slow, but it's very clear that the Russian army has continued to expand westward. | |
| From the eastern part of Ukraine where there's been a war of separatism or a civil war by pro-Russian forces in the Donbass and they're starting to expand westward inexorably and continuously as the Ukrainian front line crumbles to the point where they're soon going to have Ukrainian soldiers encircled. | |
| And the reason this is so dangerous is because the West made absolute guarantees that there was no way they would ever allow Russia to win the war. | |
| And the problem is the way they defined victory, which is expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, is one that will never, ever happen. | |
| And so as the U.S. | |
| and NATO gets closer, get closer to clear humiliation, if Russia ends up with even a single inch of Ukrainian territory, that will mean the U.S. | |
| and NATO will have lost the war and Russia will have won They seemingly get even more desperate in talking about being willing to green light certain kinds of escalation that could be a genuine risk of real escalation between both sides. | |
| It is so ironic, I have to say, that probably the number one grievance of the Democratic Party since 2016 has been the evils of having Russia interfere in our sacred democracy. | |
| That our democracy is imperiled if foreigners, dirty foreigners, get to have some sort of say in our elections, get to influence its outcomes. | |
| And yet here is President Zelensky on American soil six weeks before an election. | |
| Making extremely clear that he believes the Democrats and Kamala Harris are better for the Ukrainian cause than Donald Trump is. | |
| Campaigning for the Democratic Party. | |
| Invited to American soil in a swing state to campaign for the Democratic Party. | |
| The Ukrainian leader is in the United States doing that at the behest of the Democrats who have spent eight years endlessly aggrieved about the evils of foreign influence. | |
| And it's not the first time the Ukrainian government Has tried to interfere in the election in order to help the Democrats. | |
| People have forgotten, given what turned out to be the false narrative that the Russians were working with the Trump campaign to ensure Donald Trump won. | |
| It was the Ukrainians. | |
| Who engaged in efforts at least as extensive, if not more so than the Russians, to control and manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election, although they wanted Hillary Clinton to win because they knew Hillary Clinton was a steadfast anti-Russian hawk who would help the Ukrainians in every way they wanted. | |
| Remember, it was Hillary Clinton for whom Victoria Nuland worked. | |
| when Hillary Clinton left the Obama administration and wrote a book, the only places where she criticized Obama were the places where she said that Obama had failed sufficiently to confront Russia, including in Syria and Ukraine. | |
| She wanted far more aggressive pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian efforts, just like Victoria Nuland wanted. | |
| And so, of course, the Ukrainians wanted Hillary Clinton to win, And Ukraine is just as much of a foreign country as Russia is. | |
| And they didn't just want Hillary Clinton to win from kind of the sideline. | |
| They took active steps to help Hillary Clinton defeat Trump, in part because they were so sure, like so many people, that Hillary Clinton would win. | |
| And then when Trump won, as Politico reported in January of 2017, so just a few days before Trump was inaugurated, there you see the headline, Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire. | |
| This has been completely memory hold. | |
| I think if you ask Americans if they remember or know that Ukraine interfered in our election in 2016 to try and help defeat Trump and help Hillary Clinton win, the number of people who know this or remember it is exceptionally low. | |
| But it was well documented. | |
| Quote, Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country. | |
| Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. | |
| They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested that they were investigating the matter only to back away after the election. | |
| And they helped Clinton's allies researching damaging information on Trump and his advisors, a Politico investigation found. | |
| It's really amazing that it wasn't just Russia that the Clinton campaign accused of interfering this way. | |
| It was also Wikileaks to this day. | |
| That's the argument about Wikileaks. | |
| Oh, Wikileaks interfered corruptly in our election by publishing documents that were derogatory to the Hillary Clinton campaign. | |
| And here is the Ukrainian government At the behest of the Democratic Party, publishing all sorts of documents to try and dirty Trump and his advisors with the explicit goal of helping Hillary Clinton win the election. | |
| Now, just eight years later, here we have President Zelensky on American soil at a clear campaign event in Pennsylvania with Josh Shapiro, who almost got chosen as Kamala Harris' vice president, campaigning on the ground that the Democrats are much better for the war in Ukraine than Donald Trump is. | |
| It's, again, the sort of thing that is a very illustrative, Reflection of what Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are going to do and are going to be in the event that she wins in the election held in just about six weeks. | |
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| From the beginning of October 7th, followed by the Israeli bombardment campaign in Gaza, which continues to progress in absolutely horrific form, the question that which continues to progress in absolutely horrific form, the question that has always been a question posed on this show and others has been, what is the risk that that conflict can escalate through the | |
| And obviously any sort of escalation of its kind, whether in Ukraine and Russia or with Israel and its neighbors, including Iran, is a very dangerous one. | |
| But in this case, it's even more dangerous given the fact that the United States has already said under the Biden-Harris administration, and continues to say under who knows who, That the United States will deploy all the military assets needed to protect Israel and to involve ourselves in any such escalated regional war in order to, as usual, help Israel and its interests even at the expense of our own. | |
| And the concern specifically was that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a very personalized goal, a personal interest of continuing this war. | |
| In part, that's because it helps him avoid corruption charges, which very well might send him to prison, but also because he's now getting to the end of his career and his life, and he envisions this kind of apocalyptic legacy that he's going to obliterate all of Israel's enemies and be remembered in Jewish history for a long time to come as some sort of crusading hero | |
| It really has taken on this kind of, I'm going to ask Professor Finkelstein when he's here in just a little bit about this as well, this kind of end of the world, limitless willingness to just pursue war without the slightest regard for the consequences for anybody else. | |
| They're just bloodthirsty at the moment and have been for quite some time. | |
| and the attacks over the weekend that we reported on on Thursday and Friday actually late last week of what they call targeted killings but were in fact indiscriminate ended up killing dozens if not hundreds or severely injuring dozens if not hundreds of Israeli Lebanese civilians including Lebanese children | |
| With their explosion on pagers and mobile devices, walkie-talkies, where they interrupted the supply chain or were able to fabricate a store that sold these goods, not just to Hezbollah, but to the broader public, and then just exploded them remotely, regardless of where they were or who was nearby. | |
| Followed by what now clearly seems to be an attempt to escalate this war into a full-on regional war is very much underway. | |
| It's not at all anymore a remote possibility or a fear. | |
| We seem to be right on the brink of it. | |
| From the New York Times earlier today, Israel launches intense airstrikes on Hezbollah, killing at least 350 in Lebanon. | |
| Quote, it was the deadliest day of Israeli attacks in Lebanon since at least 2006. | |
| The armed group Hezbollah sent rockets into northern Israel and vowed to keep attacking. | |
| Now, I know a lot of people think the New York Times is some sort of left-wing, anti-Israel paper. | |
| The reality is that the editorial board of the New York Times has often, and pretty much in an unbroken way, supported Israel, supported its wars. | |
| And so every time they report on a war, it's never Israel attacks Gaza, Israel bombs the Palestinians, Israel attacks Lebanon or Beirut, it's Israel attacks Gaza or Hamas or Israel attacks Hezbollah to try and give the false appearance that these are very targeted attacks when they're not. | |
| They're just indiscriminate bombing of entire neighborhoods, like we've seen in Gaza for the last year. | |
| From NPR earlier today, Hezbollah vows a war of reckoning as an exchange of fire with Israel escalates. | |
| Quote, the group said Sunday that the escalation on northern Israel as a response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon this past week, booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies and an airstrike on a densely populated neighborhood in Beirut resulted in the deaths of two of the group's senior commanders and killed dozens of Hezbollah operatives and civilians. | |
| And wounded thousands more. | |
| The Israeli military said Sunday that 150 rockets, cruise missiles, and drones were launched toward Israeli territory. | |
| Most were fired from Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Iranian-backed militias in Iraq also claim responsibility for some of the drone attacks. | |
| The onslaught sent Israeli civilians scrambling to bomb shelters. | |
| I don't think there's been a single report of an Israeli casualty. | |
| And in a sign of just how significant this escalation in the north is, Israel's closed schools and restrictive gatherings in the north, it's ordered hospitals there to move patients and staff to protected areas. | |
| The Associated Press added, in this headline, U.S. | |
| is sending more troops to the Middle East as violence rises between Israel and Hezbollah, emphasizing that this is not just a war between Israel and Lebanon. | |
| It's a very much a war that the United States government under whose ever leadership it is now. | |
| We have no idea. | |
| It's clearly not Joe Biden making the decisions. | |
| Maybe it's his wife who recently last week led a cabinet meeting while he just sat there. | |
| But clearly there's decision-making going on in the United States government. | |
| It's just unclear who's making them, but the decision is very clear, which is to make sure that the United States deploys more and more military assets and soldiers to that region, so that if there is a further war that breaks out, the United States will fight in it on Israel's side, like we've been doing for a year since October 7th, bombing the Houthis, bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, having our own troops killed. | |
| Remember in the debate Kamala Harris said, We don't have any active-duty U.S. | |
| soldiers in a war zone the first time in decades that happened and there was video of active-duty soldiers in Iraq and in Syria saying, what do you mean? | |
| What are we doing here then? | |
| They very much think it's a war zone because they've been shot out and are shooting at people as well. | |
| So as always, again, like with Ukraine, the question is why is this the United States' war? | |
| And here's a text, quote, the U.S. | |
| is sending a small number of additional troops to the Middle East in response to a sharp spike in violence between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon that has raised the risk of a greater regional war, the Pentagon said Monday. | |
| Pentagon Press Secretary Major General Pat Ryder would provide no details on how many additional forces or what they would be tasked to do. | |
| The U.S. | |
| currently has about 40,000 troops in the region, quote, in light of increased tension in the Middle East. | |
| And out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. | |
| military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region, Reiter said, but for operational security reasons, I'm not going to comment on or to provide specifics. | |
| So we clearly are gearing up for this war to be an American war, as much as it is an Israeli war, and a Hezbollah war, and a Hamas war, and a Palestinian war, and a Lebanese war. | |
| And we have a lot of questions about exactly why that's happening, about who that will benefit, about what the Israelis are doing. | |
| And there's basically no better person I can think of to speak about all of those things than Professor Norman Finkelstein, who is a friend of our show. | |
| We haven't seen him for a while. | |
| He's been off writing a book that I think is going to be coming out sometime soon. | |
| We'll ask him about that. | |
| Obviously, as soon as it does, I will be one of the first people to buy it and consume it. | |
| I think he's one of the most informed scholars on this war. | |
| He speaks with great moral clarity and historical knowledge about this region, and we are very delighted to be joined by Norman Ficklestein. | |
| Good evening, Norman. | |
| It's great to see you. | |
| How are you? | |
| I'm fine, thank you. | |
| So I want to start with that about what you've been up to because you were so prevalent, so ubiquitous in the aftermath of October 7th. | |
| I haven't seen a lot of you since then. | |
| I understand that you're working on a couple of projects. | |
| Is there a book that you're working on that you want to talk about? | |
| I am working on a book and it's a rather narrow topic. | |
| Basically looking at certain characters in the international | |
| legal and political system at the United Nations, at the International Court of Justice, which is the legal arm of the UN, at the International Criminal Court, and trying to demonstrate that these are basically, there are individuals in these venues who are basically agents of Israel, but I'm not trying to do it in a | |
| Colombo fashion that is to find a smoking gun or to demonstrate using that kind of evidence but rather going through the court records and trying to demonstrate that the arguments that certain individuals have made be it the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Fatou Bensouda | |
| The former president of the International Court of Justice, Joan Donahue, the current vice president of the International Court of Justice, Julie Sabatindi, and also one of the Secretary General Gutierrez, his envoy, Pramila Patan. | |
| That the sorts of arguments that they have made in these venues are certainly not tenable, they're not plausible, unless these individuals are either being blackmailed or bribed by Israel. | |
| So I'm trying to demonstrate it in a legal forensic way rather than a police forensic way. | |
| I think one of the reasons why the war in Gaza got so much attention for the time that it did was in part because of just the sheer brutality of what the Israelis were doing, but also because I think a lot of people who have sort of paid attention to politics only recently, young people, people who only started to get involved with Trump, Really had no idea the extent to which the United States enabled it, paid for it, and sort of fueled and never placed limits on what the Israelis are permitted to do to the Palestinians. | |
| And I remember asking you on my show, sort of, where do you put this war in Gaza in the kind of pantheon of horrific war crimes and other types of destruction? | |
| And I remember you saying it's basically at the top. | |
| And yet that was months ago. | |
| And this war really hasn't slowed down. | |
| I mean, every day, every week, we hear of some new school being killed, of some family being wiped out, of dozens of Palestinians in Gaza just being utterly destroyed. | |
| How do you think, from a historical perspective, this Israeli destruction of civilian life and civilian infrastructure in Gaza will be understood? | |
| Well, there is, as the historians like to say, There's continuity and there's change with what preceded it. | |
| I think if one uses the metaphors that Israel has invoked, if you use their metaphors, what you can say is, up until October 7th, Israel periodically launched these high-tech killing sprees, what they call operations. | |
| And the main purpose of these killing sprees, as they said it, not me, their metaphor was to mow the lawn in Gaza. | |
| And that basically meant, well, it had several different features to it, but it didn't mean the total annihilation. | |
| Come October 7th, there was a new goal set by Israel, namely this time we're not going to mow the lawn in Gaza, we're going to extirpate, pull out by the roots, every blade of grass in Gaza. | |
| And that took basically three forms. | |
| Originally, and I should point out, these are overlapping forms, they're not discrete, entirely discrete. | |
| The first form was an attempted mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Namely, forcing all the people to the south and then hopefully the gates of Rafah would be opened and they would flood into the Sinai desert. | |
| That didn't happen because the president of Egypt said no and it seems that the US deferred to President Sisi's decision and the ethnic cleansing didn't in total occur. | |
| But I think it's not widely known. | |
| It has, in large regards, has succeeded. | |
| The estimates are somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 Gazans are no longer in Gaza. | |
| They, by hook or by crook, were in Egypt. | |
| It seems Egypt doesn't allow more than 60,000 Gazans to stay at any one given time. | |
| So you could say 300, we'll take the low estimate, 300,000 have been expelled, they will certainly never return, and they are finding a way to get past Egypt, that is, Egypt is a transit point to some other corner of the world. | |
| So if you take the low estimate, That would mean one seventh of Gaza's population has been successfully, and one might add, surreptitiously expelled. | |
| If you take the higher estimate of 500,000, that would be about one quarter of the population. | |
| So even though the kind of ethnic cleansing that was conceived in the early days has not succeeded, it must be said that in part, It has succeeded. | |
| The second possibility, leaving aside the ethnic cleansing, the second possibility was to make Gaza unlivable. | |
| And that goal has succeeded. | |
| There's a lot of nonsense, in my opinion, and I have to emphasize in my opinion because I don't make any claims to infallibility. | |
| There's a lot of nonsense being said about what has happened and continues to happen in Gaza. | |
| Number one, as you know, every headline has to have as its subhead, the Israel-Hamas war. | |
| There has not been any meaningful, substantive Israel-Hamas war. | |
| There has been an Israel-Gaza war. | |
| And The aim of the Israel-Gaza war is to make Gaza unlivable, uninhabitable. | |
| I'm using the language of the Israelis. | |
| This is not my embroidery or embellishment. | |
| That's what they say. | |
| As the former head of the National Security Council, Ghira Eiland, and he's not the only one. | |
| He's one of the Defense Ministry's advisors, Defense Minister Golan's advisors. | |
| He has said we're going to leave the people of Gaza with two choices. | |
| One, to stay and starve, or two, to leave. | |
| And that goal, which in my opinion was the main goal, that goal has been achieved. | |
| I don't like to be a bearer of bad news. | |
| On the other hand, if we're speaking to adults, we should treat them respectfully as adults. | |
| Gaza is no more. | |
| Gaza is gone. | |
| About the estimates are, if you take the whole of Gaza, one half of the infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed. | |
| That means for somebody who doesn't quite grasp that, if you're, say, on a major thoroughfare, let's say in New York City, where I happen to reside, and you're walking down 6th Avenue, just imagine every second building is gone. | |
| Or just imagine you're walking down 6th Avenue. | |
| One side of the street is there. | |
| The other side of the street is no longer there. | |
| That's Gaza. | |
| There are no universities left in Gaza. | |
| There are no schools or colleges, universities, hospitals. | |
| There are barely any hospitals left in Gaza at this point. | |
| And so you might say, well, what about rebuilding? | |
| There can't be any rebuilding of Gaza. | |
| That's just not true. | |
| First of all, the estimates are by now there are about 45 million tons of rubble in Gaza. | |
| It's estimated it'll take 10 to 15 years to just remove the rubble. | |
| The rubble is mixed with a lot of unexploded ordnance, toxic substances, and also a lot of dead bodies. | |
| And even if you manage to remove the rubble, there's no question in my mind what's going to happen. | |
| Israel's going to say, we're not letting cement into Gaza. | |
| It already did that after Cast Lead. | |
| It said the Hamas will use the cement to build tunnels. | |
| We're not going to let cement in. | |
| And nobody in the international community is going to quarrel with that. | |
| Hamas, they say, built 450 miles of tunnels, which I consider complete nonsense. | |
| All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the State of Israel. | |
| If they had built 450 miles of tunnels, that would be more. | |
| Since, Glenn, I know you lived for a while in New York City, that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York subway system. | |
| New York subway system has 430 miles of tunnels. | |
| Are you going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza, 26 miles long and five miles wide? | |
| No. | |
| But that's the excuse that Israel is going to use, and everybody will accept it. | |
| So, between the 45 million tons of rubble and the fact that Israel won't let cement in, there is no Gaza anymore. | |
| Let me interject there for just a second because... | |
| I've spent a long time over the last couple of years with concerns about the possibility of escalation with the Ukraine and Russia. | |
| And I think you've seen, even though we keep hearing that Putin is this new Hitler and the Russians are this new Nazi state, that there's been a lot of constraint. | |
| Every time Putin sets a red line and the NATO crosses it, there hasn't been the use of nuclear weapons or tactical use of nuclear weapons or even close because people are rational leaders. | |
| And we've always heard the same things about Iran, that it's an apocalyptic cult that wants the end of the world, and yet you see how restrained they've been, maybe arguably excessively so, as Israel blew up its embassy in Damascus and assassinated someone that they invited onto their soil, things that no country that's sovereign would actually expect. | |
| And my big concern has been wondering about the mindset of the Israeli government and how apocalyptic and extremist they might be. | |
| And I was planning on asking you a lot about that, and then you emailed me an article that you had written back in April. | |
| I think I saw it at the time, but I re-read it today. | |
| And one of the passages, it's entitled Samson and Cassandra. | |
| We're going to put the link to it, I believe it's on your sub stack. | |
| But one of the passages you wrote about the Israeli government was this, quote, I have hesitated thus far to sound the alarm, but at the risk of being thought mad, It must, as an act of political responsibility, be said out loud. | |
| Israel is hurling toward the precipice and dragging the rest of the world with it. | |
| A rational analysis of the current predicament must begin with this bedrock fact. | |
| Israel is a crazy state. | |
| Not a bad actor, not a rogue regime, a crazy state. | |
| The full range of Israeli elite opinion, its self-reflective Israeli society at large, which overwhelmingly supports the genocidal war in Gaza, spans a mere fleas hop. | |
| Now, that's a pretty, I think, alarming statement, given that we now have not just one Israeli war, but a second that they've opened up in Lebanon that has all kinds of chances to spiral out of control. | |
| And I want to ask you about that in a second. | |
| When did you start believing that Israel is a crazy state? | |
| And what is it that you mean by that? | |
| I can't give a date or even an approximate date for when I started to believe that. | |
| Well, I don't think it's far-fetched. | |
| In fact, I would think most people, not most, but a considerable number of people will agree that Israel is now carrying on in a fashion that has, that's out of control. | |
| It's a kind of, I can use the expression, it's become a kind of a lunatic juggernaut. | |
| Now, I have to say that at that point when I wrote that, It was a slightly different time where I thought that Israel couldn't get away with it and that it would lead to catastrophic consequences on all sides. | |
| But now I'm not so sure because let's just look at the recent sequence of events. | |
| Number one, and I know many people will quarrel with me because they prefer to see a happier picture than the one I'm going to present. | |
| Number one, Israel won in Gaza. | |
| People keep asking this kind of ridiculous question. | |
| I was watching their commentary today. | |
| Why now? | |
| Why is Israel going to war with Hezbollah now? | |
| Well, the answer is simple. | |
| Because they've won in Gaza. | |
| Israel, it was clear, I know you couldn't possibly follow the details as I do, but when the South Africans went before the International Court of Justice for the fourth time in May of this year, that was the assault on Gaza began on May 5th or May 7th of this past year. | |
| And what South Africa in its Pleadings before the court, what it kept saying was, if Rafa is destroyed, Gaza is gone. | |
| Rafa was the last outpost of a actual society. | |
| And as you know, the ICJ, International Court of Justice, ordered, that's the terminology they use, Ordered Israel not to launch its offensive on Rafa. | |
| Israel, as we know, proceeded to ignore the ICJ order. | |
| The estimates based on... Sorry, just to interject there, Joe Biden said, don't go into Rafa and declared it a red line, meaning if you cross it, we'll strongly consider not supporting you. | |
| And Netanyahu said, I don't care about your dumb red lines. | |
| I'm going to do exactly what we want. | |
| And they did. | |
| That's correct. | |
| And yes, based on the satellite imagery, about 50% of Rafah has been destroyed, putting it in line with all the other sectors of Gaza. | |
| So at that point, Israel succeeded. | |
| It had made Gaza unlivable. | |
| And so they then said, they were very open about it. | |
| That the operation in Gaza has practically succeeded. | |
| We have to bear in mind what was the operation. | |
| It wasn't about destroying Hamas, which was, yeah, they wanted to destroy Hamas, but it was basically a secondary consideration. | |
| The primary consideration was to finally rid Israel of that pinprick called Gaza. | |
| And then they proceeded to the north, to Hezbollah. | |
| You might recall back then I did many interviews and there was always this discussion that was asked. | |
| The constant question was, so what's going to happen the day after? | |
| And I kept replying, I'm very sorry to have to say, I think we might be closer to the beginning than to the end. | |
| Because I said, I do not believe Israel will let Hezbollah get away with having launched attacks on the north of Israel. | |
| And so now Israel realizes that, I know this is going to sound a little bit cynical, but that's alas how the world works. | |
| Israel's October 7th was our 9-11. | |
| If you recall, right after 9-11, yes, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush, and the others, they shed a few salty tears. | |
| And then they started to look at the map, literally, they were literally looking at the map, scanning the map, trying to figure out, okay, who are we going to attack? | |
| What country are we going to attack? | |
| And as you know, they originally alighted on Afghanistan. | |
| Their second goal was Iraq, But Iraq was a transitional goal. | |
| If you recall the talk back then, it was Iraq was a way station to Iran. | |
| And Israel's mentality was the same. | |
| Yes, it shed some salty tears, because they're outraged that these untermenschen in Gaza, these subhumans, could dare have touched the hair of a Jewish ubermenschen. | |
| So they were upset about that, for sure. | |
| I'm not going to dispute that. | |
| Just like the Nazis were very upset when Untermenschen killed their soldiers or killed Heydrich. | |
| But that aside, they immediately saw this as a godsend. | |
| And I will repeat that because people will be irate at what I'm saying. | |
| For the Israeli leadership, October 7th was a godsend because it not only enabled them to solve the Gaza question for once and for all, but it also opened up the grand vista of solving the Hezbollah question and then, of course, the big Megillah, the Iran question. | |
| And so now you have a convergence of factors Number one, not only October 7, but the first year anniversary of October 7. | |
| So there's going to be, you know, the Israeli usual extravaganza, which will be, of course, displayed on the front pages of the New York Times, the first anniversary of this horror that occurred on October 7. | |
| Then you have The presidential election and the fact that no presidential candidate will dare criticize Israel, not only for strategic interests, which I agree are there, but also because of the Jewish supremacist, the billionaire Jewish supremacist money. | |
| That's a real factor in an election campaign, especially at this point. | |
| And you don't want to ruffle the feathers of people like William Ackman and his coterie who threatened that if you don't follow the script, as it's been written by Israel, then we are going to just switch our money to Mr. Trump. | |
| So you have the presidential election, you have October 7th, and then you have the fact that I can't measure it because I'm not inside Hezbollah, I'm not privy to any internal information, but certainly a certain amount of disruption and despair set in after the Pager and walkie-talkie attack. | |
| So there are all sorts of factors that have now converged that for Israel, this is it. | |
| Everybody who followed the conflict knew that there would be a moment of truth. | |
| As you know, the Israelis have been eager to go after Iran and Hezbollah, have been exhorting the U.S. | |
| to join them. | |
| Benny Morris, every few years, the main Israeli historian, Benny Morris, | |
| As every few years, roughly every two years, he authors an article in some esteemed venue, the New York Times, the London Times, in which he says, if the United States doesn't join in the attack on Iran, we, meaning Israel, have no choice but to attack on our own, and we'll have to use nuclear weapons. | |
| And that's been since, you could say, roughly around 2010. | |
| It's been a very steady drumbeat. | |
| But you never knew, you never could know when it would happen. | |
| There was a period when I was in Lebanon, I can't now remember when, but I was very nervous at the time I was there that we had approached that moment. | |
| And I remember a member of Hezbollah, now don't Ask me who, because I honestly don't remember. | |
| If I remember, that would tell you. | |
| A member of Hezbollah replied to me, we recognize a conflict is inevitable, but we don't know. | |
| We don't think it's now, but we don't think it's now. | |
| And they were right. | |
| I was wrong. | |
| But I think now is now. | |
| I think the thing that we dreaded and dreaded and dreaded, but knew as we dreaded it, Our minds told us it's inevitable. | |
| And that inevitable has now happened. | |
| Netanyahu, and not just Prime Minister Netanyahu, it's the whole elite, they now realize this is the now or never moment. | |
| We will never again have that confluence of October 7th, the presidential election, the partial disarray of Hezbollah, it won't come again. | |
| So either we pull all the stoppers and go for it, or it won't happen again. | |
| We won't have another opportunity. | |
| So if you read the article to the end, and it's not a long article, I say that anybody who thinks that you can appease Israel once Israel has you in its crosshairs, it's not going to happen. | |
| You can't appease them. | |
| Once they've made up their minds that this is the moment, you can't stop them. | |
| It's now a lunatic juggernaut. | |
| But I have to say, I think it's possible. | |
| I left out the other factor that Lebanon's economy is in complete disarray, which is going to alienate a large part of the Lebanese population from Hezbollah and blame Hezbollah for having caused this by bombing, by attacking northern Israel. | |
| I said in the article, I don't see how you could stop them, and I don't see it now. | |
| Let me ask you about that. | |
| By the way, just a quick ancillary point. | |
| Bill Ackman is actually supporting Trump, but there's obviously many, many Bill Ackmans in the Democratic Party as well doing exactly what you described. | |
| What I guess surprised me was that about six weeks ago it was being said, as though it was a fait accompli, that Iran was going to retaliate against Israel, and this time for real, not with its full force, but in a way that would actually make an impact, unlike the fake retaliation they did after the Damascus bombing. | |
| And yet that retaliation never came. | |
| And even now with a lot of missiles, these vaunted Hezbollah missiles being shot into Israel, it's doing a little damage to some buildings, but I think there hasn't even been a single Israeli casualty yet. | |
| Is the force capability and the power, the military power of Iran and Hezbollah really as formidable as we've been hearing, or do they have real fear about retaliating in a way that they might want to do? | |
| I have to always enter the caveat that I am not a military historian. | |
| Frankly, military matters don't very much interest me. | |
| But having said that, I have to make some comment on the subject since it's so obviously germane to the situation now. | |
| In the case of Iran, Iran is a very conservative country. | |
| And at the risk of making generalizations which sound a little bit too abstract, There's a very different way in which countries like Iran, which have a rich civilization spanning thousands of years, or China and countries in the West, the Iranians and the Chinese having this civilization of heritage, they tend to be much more long term in their thinking. | |
| And long term also means a lot more patient. | |
| And so they don't feel the kinds of needs for, we can use the expression, the same kinds of needs for instant gratification that Westerners tend to have. | |
| So Iran is confident that they will prevail because of their civilization, because of the sheer demographic weight, the geographic weight of their country, that they will prevail in the long term. | |
| And that basically means they slowly move their chess pieces on the board. | |
| I forgot the expression that's used. | |
| It's called something like a ring of fire. | |
| I could be using the wrong expression. | |
| That they will surround Israel with the various, the expression is you can call it proxies, collaborators, allies, whichever term you want, and slowly but surely build up A force sufficient to, I'll use the term not in the literal sense, but in the metaphorical sense, to extinguish Israel. | |
| And so they're always been very slow to react for those reasons, and also just prudence. | |
| It's just not, there's no necessity to act right now. | |
| On the other hand, Israel is perfectly aware of that strategy. | |
| They talk about it. | |
| And so they feel they have to act now in order to disable that ring that's being built up around them. | |
| And so now Iran, just like after the Gulf War, Iran knows if Hezbollah falls, they fall. | |
| There's no question about that. | |
| The only thing that stopped the attack in Iran was that Iraq turned into a disaster. | |
| Otherwise, Iran would have been attacked by Cheney and Rumsfeld. | |
| That was very clear at the time. | |
| So Iran recognizes now it's a moment of reckoning for it. | |
| There's a real problem for them, because they're the third in line. | |
| Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran. | |
| If you were to ask me about the issue of military capabilities, My guess is as follows. | |
| Number one, very unusual for Hezbollah and for its leader, Assad Nasrallah, whose speeches I always follow closely because they are in many ways quite educational. | |
| They're quite instructive. | |
| In his last few speeches, unusual for him, very unusual. | |
| He is very frank in his speeches. | |
| In the last speech he said, number one, he said, Israel has the technological edge. | |
| It's very unusual for an Arab leader, especially a proud Arab leader like Nasrallah, to frankly say they're ahead of us. | |
| Israel has the technological edge. | |
| And number two, he said, that we did suffer a major blow with the with the penetration of our intelligence. | |
| He was very frank about that. | |
| So that, to me, is not unusual for him. | |
| He is instructive, and instructive because he is a frank—he's probably by far the frankest and most impressive political leader on the world stage. | |
| But what was surprising was almost to the point of a plea, almost to the point of a plea, he He kept saying, we will stop the retaliation if you agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. | |
| We will stop the retaliation if you agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. | |
| And it was almost as I said, it almost, I don't want to offend him, but it almost came out as a plea. | |
| We don't want this war. | |
| So, on the one hand, when you talk about the limited damage, it may be that they're desperately looking for, what's the expression, an exit ramp? | |
| They're looking for an exit ramp. | |
| I don't believe it's possible, for the reasons I've already explained. | |
| But there's a second aspect to it. | |
| It's very easy to understand what their strategy is, because Israel wins hands down in the air assault. | |
| No question about that. | |
| There's no state in the Middle East that can compete with the Israeli Air Force. | |
| However, Israel loses hands down in a ground invasion. | |
| And Israel dreads a ground invasion. | |
| For the very simple reason that, believe it or not, Israelis don't want to die. | |
| They like to kill. | |
| It's fun to kill Arabs. | |
| It's more fun than shooting fish in a barrel. | |
| They are positively exhilarated and euphoric at the prospect of killing Arabs, including Children. | |
| They like to shoot children in the skull, as was fairly common according to physicians who served in the hospitals in Gaza the past year. | |
| They said children came in without any shrapnel on their body, just bullets to their head. | |
| And during the Great March of Return in 2018, As the UN report, an exhaustive 250-page, single-spaced report said, Israel targeted children. | |
| And in particular, when it didn't kill them, because killing too many unarmed children doesn't fly too well in the press to the extent that it's covered. | |
| They targeted their kneecaps and below their kneecaps to inflict what are called life-changing injuries. | |
| In any event, Israelis like to kill Arabs, humiliate Arabs, degrade Arabs, torture Arabs, but it doesn't like to fight them. | |
| In particular, they don't want to fight the party of God. | |
| Nasrallah said in his speech a couple of months ago that there are over a hundred thousand militants now in Hezbollah. | |
| I can't say with any certainty whether that figure is accurate, but obviously were it true, it's a very large number. | |
| So what Israel does is it goes in and it annihilates, it decimates, it pulverizes. | |
| But it doesn't launch the ground invasion. | |
| If you recall, on October 7th, they started massing troops on the border the day after, beginning October 8th. | |
| But if you recall, they didn't actually launch the ground invasion until October 27th, because they needed two weeks Well, closer to three weeks, to totally decimate everything in front of them, to turn it all, to reduce it all to dust, so there would be no resistance. | |
| If you look at the actual numbers, and in case you haven't noticed, Israel never gives out its casualty figures the past year. | |
| How many soldiers were killed? | |
| You couldn't find that anywhere. | |
| They did say a couple of weeks ago, That we have now had more soldiers killed in the past 11 months, 10 months, as were killed on October 7th. | |
| Now, on October 7th, 313 Israeli soldiers were killed. | |
| The estimates are 313 soldiers and the rest civilians, about 800 civilians. | |
| Well, that would mean, if you do very simple math, That would mean less than one Israeli. | |
| Well, about one Israeli was killed every day. | |
| One. | |
| One Israeli was killed every day. | |
| There was no ground war in Gaza. | |
| There was an aerial annihilation in Gaza. | |
| So Israel's hoping it can knock out Lebanon by air. | |
| The Hezbollah strategy, it's perfectly obvious. | |
| They will keep shooting rockets at Israel. | |
| However, they're not going to let out a huge blitz. | |
| Every time Israel declares victory over Hezbollah, they will fire more rockets. | |
| Israel will then inflict more aerial destruction, declare victory, and then Hezbollah will fire more rockets. | |
| in order to make the situation politically untenable for Israel, and they'll have to launch the ground invasion. | |
| Now, if you listen to Nasrallah's last speech, he said, literally, he said, please invade. | |
| Please invade. | |
| We welcome the invasion, which is true. | |
| If it's 100,000 or it's 75,000, the party of God longs for, yearns for that invasion so they can finally settle the score with that satanic state, man to man, in hand combat. | |
| So, The Israelis dread the aerial assault, excuse me, dread the land war. | |
| Hezbollah longs for it. | |
| And the only way it can force the land war is to keep its rockets and missiles in reserve and deny Netanyahu the chance to declare victory. | |
| That's what happened in 2006. | |
| Israel amassed the troops on its border with Lebanon, and it wasn't until 72 hours before, it was 33 days, that war, it wasn't until 72 hours before the war was over that the troops entered Lebanon, the Israeli troops. | |
| And already, Condoleezza Rice had gotten a UN resolution through ending the war, because Israel begged the US, get that resolution, get that resolution, because we don't want the land invasion. | |
| It will be a disaster. | |
| And of that, speaking as a complete political, excuse me, military know-nothing. | |
| Speaking as a complete military ignoramus, I would say with 100% certainty it will be, if it comes to pass, it will be a catastrophe for the State of Israel, because those people have no fear, no dread, | |
| of giving their lives to finally settling the score with that monstrous state that has inflicted so much death and destruction, agony and anguish with all the haughtiness and arrogance of the Uber mention. | |
| Just as the Soviet Red Army inflicted those final wounds on those Nazi Übermenschen that had invaded their country. | |
| It was very ugly for Germany at the end of the war. | |
| As you know, there was the mass rapes of German women. | |
| The Red Army was going to settle the score with those monsters who had murdered 30 million of their people. | |
| And it's the same thing with the party of God. | |
| So the question is, will Israel, how much death and destruction it will inflict from the air? | |
| And secondly, whether They will be forced, because they will deny Prime Minister Netanyahu the ability to declare victory. | |
| I should note, in the 2006 war, Hezbollah on the very last day, on the 33rd day, fired more missiles and rockets than on any other day in that fired more missiles and rockets than on any other day in that I think, you can correct me, I think it was 10,000. | |
| It wanted to transmit the message, you lost. | |
| And I think they're going to do the same thing this time. | |
| They will hold back. | |
| That's my guess. | |
| All right, Norman. | |
| Well, it's always great. | |
| It's always informative to speak with you. | |
| I can't say that it spreads a lot of optimism or joy. | |
| But unfortunately, as you said, that's the reality of the region. | |
| It seems, after talking to you, like things are even more dangerous than they might appear. | |
| And of course, there's the whole question of what role the U.S. | |
| might play in it. | |
| I'm so glad you were able to take the time. | |
| Do you want to tell people where they can find your work as you're kind of doing this book? | |
| Or if you want to invite people to go read what you're writing, tell them where to go. | |
| I don't, you know, I tend to write I tend to write long-winded books, and they're not going to interest most people. | |
| And when it's published, if you like... You're welcome. |