Trump, Vance & Musk Announce a Radically New Foreign Policy Framework; Prof. Norman Finkelstein on Gaza's Future, the Cease-Fire Deal & Fallout from the U.S./Israeli War
President Trump and Vice President Vance unveil a radically new foreign policy framework for the United States, shocking Europe and the DC establishment. PLUS: Prof. Norman Finkelstein discusses what is next for the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal, the future of Gaza, and more.
Please note: This episode was recorded on February 14, 2025.
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It's Friday, February 14th, which is Valentine's Day.
I was instructed by my colleagues here to say how much I deeply love our audience, which I think it goes about saying.
I think you already know that, but I was told to say that on Valentine's Day, so here I am saying it.
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...
We reported on Wednesday night on the extraordinary remarks by new Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath on the war in Ukraine in which he told the Europeans what they long needed to hear about the futility of this war and the limits on America's willingness to fund it and similar proxy wars in defense of Europe.
Over the last 24 hours...
Even more significant statements have emanated from the highest levels of the new administration.
President Trump himself last night announced his desire to reach an agreement with both China and Russia whereby all three countries would cut their military budget by 50%.
Vice President Vance in Munich today told the Europeans that their pompous view of themselves, that they stand for democracy promotion, is often the exact opposite of what they do.
Whether it be when they nullify elections, whatever the outcome is, one they dislike as they recently tried to do in Romania, or imposing censorship online.
And Elon Musk told a conference in the Middle East that the United States has been interfering relentlessly in other countries' politics for far too long and that the United States should, in his words, mind its own business.
Whether all of this will result in tangible and radical and enduring policy changes remains to be seen, of course, but the announcements themselves and the admissions and acknowledgments they entail and the direction that they signal are highly consequential simply by themselves, and so we're going to break that down.
We'll sit down and analyze it.
Then, Professor Norman Finkelstein has been long one of the most informed scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
He is, of course, an extremely outspoken critic of Israel and one of this program's most popular guests, given the breadth We sat down with him a little bit ago, just earlier today, for a wide-ranging discussion about the ceasefire deal in Gaza, the future of the Palestinians, the degradation of Israeli discourse and culture, the likely Trump policies in the region, and much more.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the things that has long most interested me about Donald Trump and the Trump movement has been the potential to usher in a brand new,
radically different foreign policy ideology radically different foreign policy ideology than the bipartisan foreign policy dogma that has governed Washington for decades now to so much destruction and bloodshed and waste and domination of the kind that benefits nobody in the United States.
The first Trump administration featured some of that, but there were all kinds of constraints imposed on Trump.
Many of which they take responsibility for themselves and including just a simple lack of understanding how Washington works and they seem very intent this time as I was repeatedly told they were on making sure that they can actually pursue the foreign policy ideology that they advocated during the campaign and that they feel Americans ratified and we are seeing all sorts of evidence of this very very quickly beginning with the fact that it was remember Donald Trump who facilitated A
ceasefire deal between Israel and Gaza after 15 months of relentless bombing and destruction in Gaza that the Biden administration funded and armed and diplomatically protected.
It never got close to a ceasefire deal that became possible only when Donald Trump was just days away from becoming inaugurated.
And we're seeing it in all kinds of policy statements as well.
We, on Wednesday night, extensively reported on the remarks of Pete Hegseth when he traveled to a meeting of defense ministers of NATO where he talked about Ukraine and the administration's new approach to that, their determination to end that war, and in general, their instructions to Europe to understand that in the future, the United States is not going to...
Provide for the defense of Europe in the ways that it had been, that it's the responsibility of Europeans to do so, but also the belief that part of the new administration that the United States has been pursuing far too many unnecessary and destructive wars, including the proxy war in Ukraine, which Trump is determined to end.
That was significant enough, but since then, since Wednesday night, just over the last 24 hours, there have been a series of truly remarkable and radical...
Policy announcements and speeches and new frameworks unveiled that, taken on the aggregate, are really extraordinary and worthy of all of our attention.
The first one was last night in the Oval Office.
Donald Trump himself said this about military spending in the United States.
One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say let's cut our military budget in half.
And we can do that.
And I think we'll be able to do it.
Now, there were a lot of liberal types and leftist types who ought to be very welcoming of that announcement.
Obviously, cutting military spending was supposedly a priority of the liberal left of the United States for decades, yet no Democratic president for a long, long time has even alluded to it, let alone advocated it in the way Trump just did.
And in order to justify Their confusion about this, they all said, oh, these are just words.
It is true, as of now, they're just words.
They haven't yet cut the military budget by 50%.
Trump has been in office for about three seconds.
But the mere announcement that this is something Trump wants to do, in and of itself is an acknowledgement that the United States' military budget, which is rapidly approaching a trillion dollars a year, it's about $870 billion a year, far, far more than any other country spends.
It's an acknowledgement that it's basically double what it needs to be in order for the United States to be safe.
If Trump believes, as he just said, that the United States can cut its military budget by 50% and still remain safe, that is an acknowledgement of the extraordinary waste that the Pentagon consumes.
And the fact that he wants to do this in conjunction with China and Russia after years of Extremely bellicose rhetoric about the U.S.-Chinese relationship is also very promising, given that it is a sign that Trump wants to improve relations and work diplomatically where possible, not only with the largest nuclear armed state, which is Russia, but a major nuclear power in China as well.
Something that no Democrat would ever have even hinted at or alluded to, the rhetoric about China has been extremely hawkish for a long time.
It signals, obviously, to Beijing and to Moscow that Trump wants to open up diplomatic relations.
Doesn't mean he's going to give them everything they want.
It doesn't mean that an agreement will be possible.
And, in fact, there's reason for the Chinese and the Russians to be skeptical of this proposal, including the fact that if China cut its military spending by 50%, even if the United States did so as well, that would still put the Chinese and the Russians, especially way behind where the United States is.
The Chinese have already indicated.
Skepticism about this deal, but the fact that Trump, out of the blue, announced it so definitively, I want to meet with Chinese and the Russians to cut defense spending by 50% is a strong signal to Americans about the priorities of this administration.
He has no reason to say any of that if he didn't mean it.
There's no political gain from it.
There's no election that he has to face re-election.
This is obviously something that he believes the United States can Sustain and can afford to do, and in fact has to do, cut military spending.
There's no way to cut government spending or waste in any meaningful way without, as Steve Bannon put it, crossing the Potomac and heading toward the Pentagon.
And Trump's announcement just three weeks into his presidency of something so radical is a very promising sign of how they're thinking.
Equally significant, if not more so, is what the Vice President J.D. Vance said today at the Munich Security Conference, where he went to speak to essentially European elites, European officials, and he spoke to them in highly critical ways, in ways that you do not often hear American officials talking to or about Europe, even though so much of what he said is so plainly accurate.
It was a really...
Remarkable speech, extremely well constructed and well delivered, but the substance of it was by far the most important.
Here's part of it.
I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.
Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder.
And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I'm quoting, a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.
A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.
Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
Now the officers were not moved.
Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.
But no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime.
In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
Now, a couple parts about this passage.
You could make the argument that this is an example of the United States government trying to interfere in the affairs of other countries.
The Europeans have a much more constrained and constricted view about free speech.
The United States does.
And on some level, you can say that's their right.
And why is J.D. Vance over there telling them how they should think about free speech?
But the broader context here for the speech, as we're about to show you, was that the foundation of EU policy and EU foreign policy in the world is that the whole point of the U.S.-EU relationship is that we promote our shared democratic values, our promotion of democracy.
When, in fact, the Europeans are constantly acting in undemocratic, Anti-democratic ways by doing things like censoring the internet in ways that J.D. Vance just outlined and by trying to simply overturn the outcome of elections in Georgia and Romania and elsewhere whenever they dislike their outcome.
The very antithesis of promoting democratic values.
Now the other thing I want to say about J.D. Vance's remarks here, as much as I support them, obviously for obvious reasons, is that Some of the most extreme forms of censorship in European countries are those imposed against Israel critics, and Germany in particular.
Not only did they ban pro-Palestinian marches while allowing pro-Israel marches, they have arrested enormous numbers of people, including German Jews, for giving speeches critical of Israel, for critiquing the war, for engaging in activism.
They have not only Germany but the UK as well and France has interrogated people continuously through the police who appear at events designed to criticize Israel simply using free expression of the kind.
That are the same as the examples that he gave.
And of course, politically, it's very difficult for J.D. Vance to include those kind of examples in his denunciation of European censorship.
But make no mistake, that is a major part of how free speech is being eroded, not just in the EU, but also in the United States in ways that we've repeatedly reported.
So it would be good to have denunciations of censorship, not just of the ideas that J.D. Vance feels aligned with.
Anti-abortion protesters or other forms of conservatives whose speech has definitely been constrained in the EU in terms of denunciation, but as a principle across the board.
Nonetheless, online censorship has in many ways been driven by the EU and by the UK, and so having the United States go and give such a rousing defense of free speech is something that ought to be applauded.
Now, like I said, if it were just that...
You could raise the same objection that a lot of countries have raised to the United States.
Why are you coming and telling us how to conduct our own affairs?
If we, the Germans or the British or whoever, want to constrict free speech in ways that you don't consider acceptable to the United States, who are you to tell us we can't do that?
But the broader point, as J.D. Vance said, is that the whole relationship is supposed to be about promoting democratic values.
And it doesn't work if Europe is In fact, engaging in exactly the opposite.
Here's how he described this.
...and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election.
He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too.
Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears.
For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.
Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy.
But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, We ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.
No, this critique obviously applies just as much to the United States.
In fact, the freezing of funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, though not getting as much attention as the freezing of funding from USAID, may be one of the most significant attempts to actually preserve democracy, given that the National Endowment for Democracy is a known CIA front, an arm in the CIA. It was created for that reason.
And the whole point of this endowment for democracy is for us to spend money inside other countries to fund dissident groups against governments we dislike, to create turmoil and instability and try and foster coups as we did when Hillary Clinton funded anti-Putin opposition groups in Russia or when we used the National Endowment for Democracy through Victoria Nuland to engineer a coup in Ukraine and in so many other countries around the world.
So much of what the United States does that it says is about advancing democracy is in fact about Eroding it and attacking it, but the same is true of Europe.
And so to have J.D. Vance going there and saying, look at what you do, everything you do from censorship to interfering in other countries to proxy wars is done in the name of promoting democracy, and yet the minute there's an election where the people vote in a way you dislike, you want to nullify the elections?
The whole foundation of this U.S. The EU relationship and the EU posture and self-branding of itself in the world is fraudulent for reasons that are so blatant and yet almost never expressed.
It's incredibly encouraging to hear a senior US official go to Europe and tell them that to their faces.
And they didn't take it well.
The German defense minister and others gave speeches that were indignant about what J.D. Vance told them.
Because essentially he was exposing the core Propagandistic conceit of the West and the hypocrisy that has long defined it.
Elon Musk spoke to the World Governments Conference, which I believe was based in Dubai, somewhere in the Middle East, yesterday.
And he had some pretty extraordinary comments to make about the U.S. government and bipartisan foreign policy for decades.
Here's what he told this audience.
I think some of the things we're doing also will be hopefully helpful to other countries because with the new administration, there's less interest in interfering with the affairs of other countries.
The times the United States has been kind of pushy in international affairs, which may resonate with a number of members of the audience.
And I think we should, in general, leave other countries to their own business.
And basically, America should mind its own business, you know, rather than push for regime change all over the place.
And now, again, these are things that had been foundational to left liberal discourse for decades.
The United States uses the pretense of advancing democracy to actually undermine it.
We should cut defense spending by significant amounts.
We should do so and pursue into agreements with China and other major powers.
The United States has been interfering in other countries in engineering coups and controlling them for far too long.
We should mind our own business.
But now this is coming not from Noam Chomsky or Bernie Sanders, but from Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump as part of a radical reorientation of American foreign policy that is long overdue, in part just because of the moral dimension of having us go around the world trying to bully the world, control the world.
It's what's driving other countries into China.
But also, if there's any serious attempt to transform the U.S. government, to have it reprioritize the interest and welfare of American citizens, dismantling This entire forward policy framework is absolutely vital.
I don't want to be rosy-eyed about it.
I'm sure there's going to be lots of deviations from it.
If there's a new war and Trump gets carried away in that war fever, all of this could easily fall by the wayside.
But in terms of what's happening in the first three weeks, and it's backed up by actions targeting USA, targeting National Endowment for Democracy, heading toward the Pentagon.
There's a Wall Street Journal report today about how the Pentagon is already canceling unnecessary Arms contracts in anticipation of the arrival of Elon Musk and Doge and the controversy that's going to bring and shine on Pentagon's overspending.
All of this is directionally very important and it's critical that the world hears that and I honestly never thought I would witness an administration where the top officials in that administration deliver messages of this kind, but to call it refreshing is a very significant understatement.
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Professor Norman Finkelstein is a good friend of the show.
He's appeared here many times.
He is, without doubt, one of the most informed scholars on the history of Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
He is, among other things, the author of the 2000 book, The Holocaust Industry, which described how Israelis and Zionists exploit the Holocaust as a massive industry in order to exploit the world to get huge amounts of money that end up supporting the Israeli government.
He's been a vocal critic of the Israeli government long before the destruction of Gaza, but during the destruction of Gaza has really emerged as a strong and morally clear and highly informed scholar and analyst of this situation.
We are always delighted to have him here.
He's a guest who...
Uniformly, our audience reacts to very positively as somebody who helps them navigate and understand very complex issues.
We sat down with him today a little bit ago for about an hour and a half, maybe an hour and 20 minutes, in which we explored a wide range of issues beginning with the ceasefire in Gaza and the Trump administration's policy toward that region and a whole variety of other related issues as well.
We're going to show you the first good chunk of this interview here on our Rumble live show, but to hear the rest of it, you can...
Head over to our Locals community to hear the rest, the last 20-25 minutes or so.
And you can just simply click the Join button to become a member of our Locals community, which is absolutely critical to supporting the independent journalism that we do here.
Here is our discussion with Professor Finkelstein that we recorded earlier today.
Norman, it's great to see you.
Thank you for joining us.
We haven't spoken since the The imposition of or the agreement to the ceasefire that was agreed to just days before Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20th.
There have been violations of that ceasefire.
There's a lot of imperfections with that ceasefire.
But do you think the ceasefire itself is a positive step forward when compared to what came before it?
That's a difficult question to answer because there's an immediate effect, which of course is positive.
The people of Gaza were celebrating the fact that after 16 months of relentless and historically unprecedented bombing, the genocide in that form had come to an end.
And it would be verging on satanic.
On my part, to anyway be critical of that development.
There was huge human relief at the end of the cessation of the bombing.
As to where it will lead, I'm a little bit skeptical about the terms of the agreement based on two facts.
Number one, if you look at the historical precedents, all of the terms attached to agreements after Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, after the Mavi Marmara incident on May 31,
2010, after Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Terms, apart from the actual ceasefire,
all of the terms to lift the medieval criminal blockade of Gaza, to ease at least the criminal medieval blockade of Gaza, those terms were never honored.
And it was striking that after Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, When Israel had to decide whether to agree to a ceasefire, which also included easing the blockade or lifting the blockade,
Ehud Barak, who was the defense minister at the time, he said once the ceasefire is agreed to, all the other terms are forgotten.
And it was on that assumption.
That Israel agreed to the ceasefire.
My guess this time around—and I don't pretend to have any insider knowledge on the subject, nor have I followed it closely—my guess this time is Donald Trump wants to take credit for having gotten all the hostages released.
And he can claim that as a Huge, quote-unquote, diplomatic victory.
And so he is waiting for the hostages, every last one of them, to be released.
He'll become a hero in Israel.
And he will, as I said, be able to claim a major diplomatic victory.
But all the rest, it seems to me, completely far-fetched.
To believe that will be followed through on.
And that brings me to my second reservation.
It strikes me as totally far-fetched that after spending 15, 16 months trying to render Gaza unlivable,
which was the main goal after October 7th, To render it unlivable so that those who weren't killed would be faced with only two options.
As the senior government advisor, Giora Aylan, put it, they'll be left with only two options to stay and to starve or to leave.
I find it completely Tenable that suddenly the Israeli government is going to do an about-face and say, all we are saying is give peace a chance.
That doesn't seem to me very plausible.
And with Donald Trump's announced plan of Deporting the entire population, in his view, it will be a willing deportation because of new opportunities he promises to open up to them.
But whether it's a willing deportation or an unwilling deportation, the fact remains deportation is incompatible with humanitarian aid.
To make life sustainable.
And it's certainly incompatible with reconstruction.
A reconstruction, not the turning of Gaza into a Riviera, but a reconstruction that enables the population to stay in place.
It's humanitarian aid reconstruction.
Are simply incompatible, fundamentally, not just incompatible, in contradiction with Israel's announced goal, objective, after October 7th to render Gaza unlivable.
And it's incompatible with Donald Trump's announced objective into the Riviera, minus its indigenous population.
So I believe that once there is, once all of the Israeli hostages are returned, Israel will be given a free hand and the prospects of sufficient humanitarian aid and reconstruction,
which were The humanitarian aid was integrated into stage one and stage two, and reconstruction in this nebulous stage three, even stage two is nebulous.
I can't see that happening.
Yeah, I take your skepticism and not just take it, but share it completely.
At the same time, I'm wondering whether it's certainly true that the Israeli goal From the start was to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza in order to claim it for themselves.
And in order to do that, as you also correctly observed, there was a need to make Gaza uninhabitable.
If you listen to Trump and everyone around Trump, the premise of everything they're saying is that Gaza is already uninhabitable.
Went to Gaza on a short little excursion into it, protected by the IDF, and basically came back and said there's nothing there but rubble.
Trump's whole argument for this pipe dream of cleansing Gaza is that there's nothing left of Gaza.
There's no civilian infrastructure.
There's basically no buildings left, all of which is true.
So just focused for a moment on the narrow question of whether Israel I totally agree with that.
I would just like to add a couple of relevant observations.
Number one, those who are outraged at what Trump has been saying, it ought to be borne in mind, the perfectly obvious ought to be borne in mind, that Trump is ostensibly simply that Trump is ostensibly simply reacting to a situation enabled, created by the Biden administration.
If I understood from day one, and I said it from day one, that Israel's goal was to render Gaza uninhabitable, Certainly, the Biden administration, Mr. Blinken, they were aware of that goal.
They green-lighted that goal.
And they enabled that goal.
So the situation to which President Trump is speaking was created under Biden's watch.
If there were any doubt about what Israel's goal was, all you have to do is read the statements that were coming out of Israel at the highest most levels to the base of Israeli society, from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum, and in both official institutions and civil society institutions.
There was a consensus, and here I would want to note, that by now we have so many compendia of collecting all the statements, the genocidal statements that were uttered during the past 15 months. the genocidal statements that were uttered during the past 15
We have, in May 29, 2024, South Africa submitted a letter to the Security Council, and it was accompanied by 121 pages, single and it was accompanied by 121 pages, single space of documentation in its entirety comprising the genocidal statements by the Israeli society.
And I want to emphasize that because sometimes you can say a genocidal policy is a state policy.
But I do not believe that's an accurate description of what unfolded in Gaza the past 16 months.
It was a national project encompassing the whole of Israeli society.
And so there was simply a kind of explosion.
Of the id, the unconscious, the subconscious, whatever departments of the psyche you believe in, there was this explosion of the most horrendous genocidal statements every day,
every hour, on every Social media option.
There was this explosion.
So you can't really say, A, that the Israelis didn't know, as the Germans pretended after Hitler's defeat.
You can't say they didn't know.
And you certainly can't say...
The Biden administration didn't know.
If I knew, they knew.
All you had to do was converse with Israeli officials or read your daily updates provided to senior officials by the CIA and other institutions.
All you had to do was read them.
As I said, there was the There's a South African submission on May 29th to the Security Council.
There's this submission, communication it's called, by Omer Schatz, who's a professor at Science Po in France.
He produced a very substantial compendium.
There's the compendium by Lee Mordechai.
Who is a Princeton-trained historian in Byzantium studies, but he knows how to do research.
He produced a compendium.
There are the ones put out by Amnesty International, a 250-page compendium.
But that one didn't just include statements.
It also included what was being done on the ground.
So it was perfect.
And there was the Human Rights Watch.
A more recent report on Israel's systematic denial of water to the people of Gaza, which Human Rights Watch classified as a crime against humanity, an act of extermination, as well as the crime against humanity of extermination, and also described as acts of genocide.
All this was known.
And it was also the idea of deporting the people from Gaza that originated with Secretary of State Blinken, who tried to exhort Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population from Gaza, knowing full well it was going to be a one-way ticket.
So, at some level, one has to say, not in any way to diminish the evil of Donald Trump's proposal.
Its evilness is actually not in the idea, but it's the cavalier nature in which he speaks about entire populations, as if it were in the United States, you might recall.
I don't quite know where your memory stretches back, but it was like for him it's a massive urban renewal project where you simply take the populations and thrust them from one side of the chessboard to the other.
So it's the cruelty with which he carries on because they're little people.
They are the unimportant.
Lesser peoples of the world for whom massive population transfers simply aren't morally significant.
Still, I have to say, and you'll forgive me for repeating myself, the situation to which Donald Trump speaks, that was created, or you could say the pretext for his Yeah,
you know, I don't want to read too much into Trump's thinking or his mind.
My belief is that clearly he— He looks at the Israelis as people he values more than the Palestinians.
There's no doubt about that.
Pretty much all of the West does that.
My guess is that on some level he doesn't understand or doesn't assign value to the Palestinian connection to that land, the cultural and religious and historic attachment that Palestinians feel toward that land.
And puts himself in that position and says, well, if the choice for me were sitting in rubble for the next seven years or having some development or the border of Egypt or Jordan or whatever, it's clearly better for the people to go where they're not living in death and destruction and disease.
But let me ask you, because I think the point that you're making is such a critical one.
It's so frustrating sometimes how lost it's gotten.
What we just witnessed in Gaza over 16 months was done not just with the green lighting of the Biden administration, but they paid for it, they armed it, they isolated the United States from the world to diplomatically shield it at the UN, at the ICC, elsewhere.
Even, as you say, the worst parts of what Trump has suggested, which is this population transfer, was in their own...
More subtle and diplomatically polite way, what Blinken was attempting to do in persuading the Egyptians to take Palestinians as well.
There was this calculation that was made by a lot of Palestinian and Arab voters in the middle of the country, a lot of leftist voters, that basically reasoned as follows.
We don't think that Donald Trump is going to be anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian by any means.
But given everything that we just watched, the Democrats do.
And at the end of the day, that is their destruction.
That is their genocide.
It happened on their watch and at their hands.
It's almost impossible to see how Trump could be worse and the kind of unpredictability of Trump, whatever his motives are, could create a possibility for things to be marginally better.
Given that, as you say, the horrific bombing has subsided and I think Everybody attributes that to Trump.
Is there on some level some vindication, not for that belief, but for that hope, that if we continue with Democrats, you know, I'm very convinced that Kamala won that election, that bombing would still be going on, there would be no ceasefire.
Given what we just saw with the Democrats and what we know we're getting from them, why not roll the dice with Trump who, whatever else you might want to say about him, is an unpredictable figure?
I do believe there is one inhibiting factor on Trump.
And that inhibiting factor is the following.
He doesn't want the albatross of Gaza on his watch because he saw What it did during the Biden administration, it became a real public and political burden for the Biden-Blinken administration.
Now, I don't believe that Mr. Blinken has a shot of heart.
Except maybe in his personal life.
But people can have very different personas in their personal and public life.
Mr. Hitler loved his dogs.
Mr. Himmler was a vegetarian.
But that didn't inhibit them in their political, their professional life.
And I suppose Mr. Blinken might be a good father, for all I know.
But he didn't give, you know, in his professional capacity, he didn't give a darn about the people of Gaza, probably about any lesser peoples.
But it became...
But you remember when, for example, Blinken was confronted, as he occasionally was during his news conferences about the crimes in Gaza, the cameras honed in on him, and you could see the quivers in his face and the unease that it was causing him.
I don't think that was an act.
I think it became a real burden for them.
And Donald Trump is determined that that's not going to occur again under his watch.
And so even though he talks about hell to pay if his orders aren't obeyed by Hamas, I do not believe he is eager.
To unleash a new round of genocidal bombing in Gaza because he doesn't want to repeat the mishaps of the Biden-Blinken years or 16 months.
So that will be an inhibiting factor on him.
Otherwise, No, I think you have to bear in mind the range of options are very, very limited.
What exactly can he or can't he do?
So when you talk about the throw of the dice, and I think a lot of people vote for Trump both times on the throw of the dice consideration.
But I don't think there's all that much they can do.
I'm not even clear.
Look, I read the reports.
I'm not a civil engineer.
I don't claim to underground knowledge.
But there have been a series of reports, the last of which said, the UN report, that there are 50 million tons of rubble in Gaza.
The rubble is mixed in with unexploded ordnance and toxic substances.
It will take, if 100 trucks are admitted a day, and I can't believe Israel will allow 100 trucks to be admitted a day, but if they do, even with 100 trucks working full-time, 24-7, it would take 15 years just to clear out the rubble.
Without any reconstruction, just clearing out the rubble.
So I'm not really sure what are any plausible scenarios for the people to remain there.
I'll have to wait, as I usually do, to hear what the experts have to say, what the UN agencies will...
Propose as an alternative to the Gaza Riviera plan.
I have to wait and see.
But the options are really, at this point, judging from what's been written, the options really are very limited.
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, we did shows on Trump's population transfer proposal and expressed all the Revulsion and moral repugnance that it deserves.
But on the other hand, you know, I have to acknowledge that one of the most horrific things about watching everything that's happened to Gaza is not just the death and destruction, but this is a society that had a very serious Value on education.
It had serious universities, some of the best healthcare professionals in the world, the highest literacy rates of, you know, countries pretty much anywhere.
And you're talking about a people who have built for themselves, albeit with extreme deprivations for everything that they've encountered, a kind of society in which Some degree of human thriving has become possible and encouraged and valued and it is very difficult to envision how anything like that could be remotely reconstructed in this place for all the reasons that you just said and
to think about two million people who have just endured some of the most, the ones who survived, some of the most psychologically traumatizing and horrific experiences imaginable to then have that Misery and suffering and deprivation prolonged for another decade or two decades, it does start to make you open to, almost out of desperation, to some way to alleviate that suffering.
And there's ways you could think of to do it, but they're not really realistic.
Let me just move a little bit to the West Bank.
Throughout 2024, my assumption had always been that the Trump administration was going to formally acknowledge the West Bank as part of Israel, as Israel as the sovereign over the West Bank.
That was, I think, clearly what Miriam Adelson wanted most in giving Trump more than $100 million.
$100 million for his campaign.
Mike Huckabee, the now ambassador to Israel, explicitly advocates that.
So does Elise Stefanik, the UN ambassador.
What we're now seeing in the West Bank is obviously a very significant escalation of bombing and killing and not ready to say that they're doing to the West Bank what they did to Gaza, but if it continued to escalate, you would start entering a territory of that kind.
What do you think is the current Israeli intention and the American intention with respect to the West Bank?
Okay.
I want to back up a minute.
I'm going to get right to your question, but just back up.
And I'll say something that's heretical.
And people, of course, can disagree with me.
In itself, There's nothing intrinsically or morally in itself morally wrong with what Trump is proposing, although the language is very crude and heartless.
It was recognized for a very long time that the resolution of the Palestinian refugee question and 70% of the people in Gaza It was recognized that there were going to be three possibilities for resolving what's called the Palestinian refugee question.
One would be exercise of the right of return.
And if you look at the negotiations closely, as I have, The consensus seemed to be that that particular option would be minimal.
The numbers put forth by the Palestinian negotiators at the various diplomatic attempts to resolve the conflict, be it Camp David in 2000, be it the Annapolis negotiations in 2007. If you look at the numbers that the Palestinians were throwing around,
they put the numbers somewhere around 500,000 Palestinians would be repatriated to Israel over a 10-year period.
The number of actual refugees and descendants The figure is usually put at roughly—these are all rough numbers, so don't hold me to it.
I'm not out of the ballpark, but I have the numbers.
You know, I know the numbers, so I'm giving you rough numbers because the ranges are wide.
But we're talking about six million refugees who have the refugee status, of whom The Palestinians were throwing around numbers, sometimes 200,000, sometimes 800,000.
But next to the bulk of the problem, we're not really talking about a significant number.
The second possibility was that the Palestinians would be resettled in the place where they currently live.
So most of the Palestinian refugees are living in Lebanon, some in Syria, Jordan.
A large number.
So they would be resettled there with some sort of financial compensation.
And the third possibility was called resettlement in a third country.
So countries like Canada were mentioned, countries like Australia were mentioned.
Those were the three possibilities.
So when Trump says the Palestinians will want to leave because of the Presumably, he means the financial incentives, in addition, of course, to the brute force or crude force or brute force.
It's not totally an out-to-lunch statement to make.
Now, how people choose between those three options, that's up to them.
Though, as I said, the Palestinian negotiators seem to suggest there would be a cap on those returning to Israel itself.
Some Palestinians suggested if you give us a system of graduated incentives, if you return to Israel, you'll get X amount of money compensation.
If you stay in the country where you're currently residing, you'll get Y amount of compensation, more than X. Or X +, and then if you go to a third country, it'll be X++, that you can have a voluntary resolution of the refugee question.
And that strikes me as perfectly plausible.
The problem, as I see it, is this, that Israel is, as Bet Selim, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in Occupied Territories, Israel is a Jewish supremacist state.
And it wants a purely Jewish state.
It doesn't want non-Jews.
It doesn't even want Goyim.
They think they're better, that they should rule the world.
But only Jews.
Only Jews.
It's a Jewish supremacist state.
And so, let us say that Trump The so-called Trump plan, though there's no plan.
It's just the pronouncement.
Let's say the Trump pronouncement metamorphoses into a plan.
Then what's going to happen?
You quote-unquote solve the Gaza question.
But then what does that want to mean?
Then you're going to have the West Bank question.
And what's the solution to the West Bank question?
Well, from the point of view of Israel, there's only one solution.
To leave, like the people in Gaza.
And then you have the question of the Arabs in Israel.
And how do you solve that question?
And so, to my mind, the main problem with this notion of deportation of the Arabs in Gaza, the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza, the main problem is it's going to open up a Pandora's box.
Because then they're going to look for the same solution in the West Bank.
As the cliche has it, the hunger increases with each bite.
They won't be satisfied with anything less than an Arab Rein, R-E-I-N, as in Judenrein, an Arab Rein, West Bank, and then an Arab Rein, Israel.
They will not accept anything less.
You know, you have this pressure.
I'm not sure how much the Israelis or the Americans care.
I don't think very much.
But this idea that very shortly or essentially now, you have an apartheid situation because between the river and the sea, the number of Arabs outnumber the number of Jews.
If you were to transfer out the two million people in Gaza, at the very least, that alleviates the problem for the moment because now you've taken two million Arabs out.
And I don't know, maybe the Israelis, the Israeli Jews believe they can tolerate a minority Arab population as long as they get to rule over them.
The problem becomes when they become the majority and then either they have democratic rights or you have an apartheid situation.
So perhaps just depopulating Gaza of Arabs solves that problem for the moment.
I never quarrel with facts.
I think there is an argument to be made there.
But I also believe that there is this very pronounced tendency in Israeli society to make the whole place pure.
You have to remember, in Nazi Germany, Jews were only 1% of the German population.
There were 60 million, my memory is, I think 60 million Germans.
Now I can't remember.
But it was only 1%.
That was 1% too many for the Nazi ideology.
And I think any percentage, short of a trivial number, any percentage for the Israelis.
It's one Arab too many, ten Arabs too many.
If you read, as I have done in the past few months, if you read the explosion of sheer racial derangement in Israeli society,
the glee, the joy, The euphoria they have carried on with in the extermination of the people of Gaza, just the postings on their social media, it's a genuine sight to behold.
And I am not sure whether it hasn't reached or plumbed a depth.
Well beyond Nazi Germany, even in the years of war, the peak when the Germans started to lose the war, and they blamed the whole loss on the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.
So you're constantly bombarded every day in Nazi Germany that our soldiers are dying.
They're freezing on the Russian front.
They're freezing to death on the Russian front.
And all of this is because of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.
And that was the only thing they heard.
Remember, Germany was a totalitarian state.
I suppose some people heard the BBC with what was called back then a...
Short-wave radio.
Maybe some did, but probably only a handful.
But I don't believe, judging from what I've seen, and the evidence is very thin because it was a totalitarian state, it was very difficult to measure what's called public opinion in those circumstances.
But you have to remember, as I'm sure you know, formally, formally, at any rate, The Nazi genocide was kept out of public view.
Now, of course, most people who wanted to know knew enough horrors were happening, because 50 percent of the Jews killed during World War II were not killed in the death camps.
They were just lined up and shot down.
So enough soldiers witnessed enough, and they heard the story.
So they knew enough to know something was Horrible.
Something horrible was happening.
How much they knew about the gas chambers.
I stopped studying it 20 years ago, and there's probably been a vast proliferation of scholarship in the subject.
But I knew the literature quite well as of 20 years ago.
There wasn't much knowledge in how much the Germans knew.
But this is a totally different thing in Israel.
This is every night.
The evening talk shows.
The social media is saturated, saturated with soldiers boasting in glee about the crimes they're committing in Gaza.
So this country is so completely unhinged that I'm not certain they'll tolerate any Arab presence, or if they tolerate it, it will be the same way as we tolerate in our country a black presence in the American South, namely the conditions being unlivable.
And here I would want to make a distinction.
You call it an apartheid regime, and it's been called by many people an apartheid regime.
But there is a slight, not trivial difference.
The South Africans wanted the Black population.
That was their working population.
They wanted to confine them technically to Bantu stands.
But most of the Blacks, they may have a...
Passport that says you belong to Traskai, Siskii, Bofutatswana, and all the other Bantustans.
But they didn't live in the Bantustans.
They lived in encampments because they were working in South Africa.
And they were wanted.
They were wanted.
Israel doesn't want them.
It doesn't want them to work there.
It wants them gone.
So even if you reduced the Gaza population, I still think there will be And so the demographic problem is solved to some extent.
I still think you're going to have this kind of juggernaut, this ideological juggernaut, to drive all the subhumans, the untermenschen, the subhumans out of all of Israel.
And then you're going to have the pressures on the land.
They want the land.
So even if the demographic problem is solved, the land problem remains.
They want the land.
Dunham by dunham, they want to take over all the land, especially, not especially, but at a greater even degree in places like East Jerusalem, which still puts you on a collision course.
So I consider the The so-called Trump plan.
The real horror of the plan is it will legitimize the complete ethnic cleansing of that area.
And if Israel gets its way, it will be ethnic cleansing of parts of Syria, ethnic cleansing of parts of Lebanon.
These people are completely mad.
It's an unhinged society.
It's a freakish society, in my opinion, when you actually read these statements coming out of that place.
Yeah, I think one of the moments that opened a lot of people's eyes was when those Israeli Soldiers were caught on video gang raping helpless Palestinian detainees, many of whom had never even been charged with a crime.
And you had a discourse that immediately emerged that rape of Palestinians, gang rape of Palestinians is justifiable.
You had marches in defense of those soldiers outside of where they had been detained, including by members of the Knesset, demanding they had been released on the ground.
They did nothing wrong.
You go and have any kind of person on the street interview in Israel, and you ask about the number of children who have been killed in Gaza, and they'll simply say, who cares?
It's almost like a universal answer.
It's a culture and a society that has become obviously not universally, but overwhelmingly completely inured and in denial of the humanity of everybody other than of Jews.
Norman, let me go ahead.
Another aspect which has to be borne in mind.
If you take the United States during the war in Vietnam, atrocities of a very high magnitude were occurring there.
In the end, about two million Vietnamese were killed by the U.S., about a million Laotians, and about 750,000 Cambodians were killed by the U.S. So there were atrocities occurring at a very high level.
For people like myself, you know, you're going to college.
You had a very, very remote connection with the actual killers.
So the most famous case, it was actually trivial by the standards of what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, but the most famous case was, of course, Lieutenant Kali and the My Lai Massacre.
Now, when we, speaking for myself, when we I saw Lieutenant Calley.
He was a person that was completely alien to our ambience, our mindset.
He was this southern redneck.
In our minds, he's a cracker, an idiot, uneducated.
So we were able to distance ourselves, at least morally.
We were able to distance ourselves from the actual killers.
If you were in college, you got the, I guess it was the 4F deferment, it was called, for your duration of your college education.
That's not true of Israeli society.
Israel has a citizen army.
Now, in principle, a citizen army is the correct thing.
Every individual should have to bear the burden up to and including death to defend the sovereignty and independence of his or her country.
So a citizen army is the right thing.
It shouldn't be a certain portion, always poor, the portion that does the work that requires Sacrifice, mortal sacrifice, it should be everybody.
However, there is a flip side.
If your country, if your state is engaged in a genocidal assault, then as a citizen army, that army is representative of everybody.
It's not Lieutenant Callie or the Lieutenant Callies.
Everyone.
So when you see those what you call horrific videos, those horrific marches, they're really representative of the cross-section of Israeli society.
I was reading, it was Lee Mordechai, he's the Princeton-trained historian, and he mentioned That even that venerable bastion of liberalism, Haaretz newspaper, for the first five months it refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Even though it was perfectly obvious, as he says, the humanitarian costs of what Israel was doing.
Even Haaretz went along with the genocide.
It's a much, in my opinion, it's a much more sinister insight into what happened and has happened in Gaza, that it's embraced by the, because it's a citizen army, it's embraced by the cross-section of Israeli society.
And then there's the other side.
If you ever talk to Israelis, and I've had occasion to speak to many of them, the seminal experience in every Israeli's life is service in the army.
And service in the army becomes a kind of family relationship.
So you have the normal sense of solidarity from being citizens of the same state.
And that normal sense of solidarity is then doubled by the sense of solidarity of this being a Jewish state, our Jewish state.
And then you have that sense of solidarity is then compounded by the solidarity that every soldier, because everybody served in the army, Brother, sister, mother, father, sibling, they're all now serving in the army.
So there's a third kind of familial relationship, the citizen relationship, the Jewish people relationship, and now that army relationship of family.
They all are very defensive about criticizing the IDF, because criticizing the IDF is not like our generation criticizing the Marines or criticizing the armed forces or even, by the way, even the CIA. The Mossad is our family.
The Shin Bet is our family.
They all serve, have served, and family members are serving.
And so that sense of social solidarity, in particular, when it comes to the army and the conduct and the behavior of the army, it's so robust.
That's why Israelis Without a blink of an eye or a miss of their heartbeat, who say, we have the most moral army in the world, because they're talking about themselves.
No American I know of would make the claim that the U.S. Army is the most moral army in the world.
That I've not heard.
I've heard many things in my day, but I've not heard that.
But every Israeli will say that.
You know why?
Because they're talking about themselves.
We, me, I'm the most moral person in the world.
So you have these multiple levels of solidarity climaxing in that army experience.
You know, when once you're in the paratroopers, I had friends who were in the paratroopers.
20, 30 years later, they still speak with reverence of their fellow paratroopers.
It's the seminal experience for an Israeli.
And it leads, as you can imagine, when your country is carrying on in a genocidal manner.
Not that before.
It was particularly beautiful what they did, but when you're carrying on in a genocidal manner and you are so defensive of the armed forces, it leads to very ugly consequences.
I hope you enjoyed that part of the discussion we had with Professor Finkelstein to hear the rest, which covers a lot of important issues including Lebanon and Hezbollah and the role of Middle East states in resolving a lot of these conflicts.
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