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Sept. 16, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:31
Matt Hoh: Can Israel Legally Own Gaza?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, September 17th, 2024.
Matt Ho will be with us in just a moment on Netanyahu's latest claims on Gaza and latest killings in Lebanon.
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Matt Ho, welcome to the show, my dear friend.
Your time, of course, is always very much appreciated.
I would like to spend a fair amount of time discussing the latest in Israel, including the exploding pagers that have apparently injured 2,800 people and killed 10, including two babies.
But before we get there, let's do a little bit on your thoughts on Ukraine.
It appears as though...
Joe Biden changed his mind and very angrily revealed that the United States will not be authorizing and Great Britain will not be authorizing.
Russia.
Gee, do you think this had anything to do with President Putin's statement?
I think it might have, although I'm not as encouraged by it as others, Judge, and of course, thank you for having me back on.
I think there's a danger here that maybe they're just getting their message synchronized, and so the delay in approving these long-range missiles right?
I mean, it's like, you know, anyway, that's certainly the way, if you listen to corporate media, mainstream media, that's the way they're implying.
The success of this, how this thing's going to go.
However, there is this aspect that you said, in the sense that Biden did say no to this, and it comes following very clear, very direct, and very serious warnings from the Russians.
Now, you have Americans and Brits and French and Germans and others in NATO who are saying you don't have to, and of course the Ukrainians, you don't have to respect Or pay attention to what the Russians are saying.
But I think you also have the realization in Washington, D.C. that this game of chicken has to end in some manner.
And the way in which the Russians have so clearly said that, you know, the United States for decades has felt in our planning and our policies has believed that Europe is the buffer zone for World War III with Russia.
That if war begins, it's going to take place there, including the beginning phases of nuclear war.
And if at any point it gets too serious, then we'll be able to negotiate an end.
This is essentially a lot of the escalate to de-escalate policy that informs so much of the American imperial policies abroad with the terms there.
Their aggression towards adversaries.
So the fact that the Russians said clearly, look, we're not going to limit this just to Europe.
If you think that our first nuclear strikes are only going to be in Europe, or perhaps even our conventional strikes against NATO are only going to be in Europe, you're mistaken.
So for Americans who for decades now have said, you know, if it's going to happen, that means we're going to lose Berlin or we're going to lose Warsaw or we're going to lose Bucharest.
But we're going to be okay.
The Russians clearly said that is not the case.
And Joe Biden is under an awful lot of pressure here.
He is being portrayed throughout American media.
And the pressure, particularly in Washington, D.C., of being the man who potentially will lose Ukraine.
That he's going to be the one who is tying the hands of the Ukrainians and won't let them win the war.
Where have we heard that before, right?
In the American narratives about war.
They tied our hands in Korea.
They tied our hands in Vietnam.
They tied our hands in Iraq.
All nonsense.
All completely untrue.
But it's a great myth.
It's a great warmongering.
A narrative to follow.
As well as Joe Biden, your legacy is going to be that you're the one who backed down from the dictator Putin.
You didn't stand up for democracy against authoritarianism.
That's what he's under attack from.
Here is the person that Joe Biden calls the dictator Putin with a warning about which you just spoke so eloquently.
It is not about allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not.
It is about making a decision about whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not.
If the decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine.
This is their direct participation, and this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict.
This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are fighting Russia.
And if this is so, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.
Pretty direct, calm, methodical.
Methodical, rational, and direct.
Right.
And obviously Joe Biden is being presented, or you would like to think he is being presented, with what would this look like?
You know, I hope to God that the conversations regarding the idea of allowing American missiles to strike into Russia, including the discussion of what happens next.
We provide these missiles.
How do the Russians respond?
How do we then respond?
How do the Russians then respond to our responses?
You know, Ritter, Scott has said, the missiles are so sophisticated, we wouldn't train others to use them.
Americans would have to use them, and Russian intel knows that.
That's correct.
The other thing, too, is hopefully, and if the assumption is that the Pentagon are the people who spoke to Joe Biden and said, you can't stop listening to Tony Blinken, Stop listening to these pundits in the media.
Stop listening to the people at the DNC.
I mean, this is the other problem, too, Judge, is that in polling, the war is still very popular among Democrats, particularly among the most ardent, the bluest.
Of the loyalists of the Biden-Harris White House.
You know, there's polling that came out, that was done by the Cato Institute a week or so ago, that found that the majority of Democrats were in favor of continuing to support Ukraine, even if that meant war with Russia.
Wow.
Right?
I mean, so you have to remember that this is – They pulled everyone.
This is an interesting poll done by Cato of...
So the three key swing states for this election.
One of the things it found is that Democrats, it polled everyone, but it broke it out, of course, by Republicans and Democrats.
But just in the case, I know we're going to get to Israel and Palestine in a moment, but it shows that among Democrats, among independents, and even to a degree among Republicans, ending arms...
That Harris would gain more votes by ending arms transfers, or at least conditioning arms transfers to Israel, than she would lose.
So you can see, and you go through this poll, and you can see it's clear that the Democrats are more concerned about staying in the good graces of the Israel lobby and AIPAC than they are of actually winning.
The election in November.
But to get back to Ukraine, the poll shows that for many Democratic voters, this is still a very important issue to them.
It may not be their top issue.
It may be number five or six, but it informs their identity because we have to remember that this war is a culmination.
of the nearly decade-long Russiagate campaign narrative, campaign messaging that the Democrats have used for 10 years against Republicans and Donald Trump.
So to undo that now, to say in the elections, to say two months before the elections that it really doesn't matter anymore, we can make peace with Russia, that we can back off from the war in Ukraine, that upends your whole democracy versus authoritarianism, Putin equals Trump type of rhetoric that has dominated the party for almost a decade.
Before we get to Israel, I have to see the look on your face and hear your comments after you hear Boris Johnson's latest on Ukraine.
And take a note of who's sitting next to him, the former director of the CIA and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
We're not going to play Pompeo because there's enough...
Cut number seven.
As for the role the Ukrainians could themselves play...
Thanks to the heroism of the Ukrainian armed forces, they've been fighting for more than two years, almost three years.
They are the most accomplished armed forces in the whole continent.
And it's easy to see how they could play a very, very important role in peace and stability on the European continent.
One of the arguments I think we should make to our American friends is if they want to take back some U.S. troops from the European theater and save a few billion, a lot of billion, Mike, then I'm sure the Ukrainians have...
Anyway, those are some of the things, some of the ways in which I think Ukraine can be a force for stability.
That's about as irrational as you can get.
Right.
I only want to joke about it because this is an important figure.
I mean, this is the man who kept this war going.
This is the man who went to Kiev in April and told Zelensky and the Ukrainian government to stop Ukraine.
There are negotiations with Russia to back out of the peace deal that would have ended this war two and a half years ago now.
I mean, how many hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive, their lives not ruined?
How many millions of people would have been able to return home?
How we would not be in this game of chicken with Russia at this point if Boris Johnson had not done that?
I mean, but those comments are just completely irrational.
He's in a fantasy land.
This idea that Ukraine is going to backfill the Americans because Ukraine has won the war.
I mean, I don't even know where to begin to try and understand what he's talking about.
But one of the things that it does kind of bring me back to, you asked me a question before judge and I went off on a tangent.
Like I usually do, but you know, this idea that, I appreciate the vote of confidence there.
This idea, though, of the Pentagon were the ones that told Joe Biden, hey, look, back off.
Don't do this missile expansion thing.
Don't allow our missiles to go into Russia.
One of the arguments might have been, it's not going to matter.
These wonder weapons don't exist.
There is no magical fairy ending.
Some deus ex machina, technologically, that's going to win this thing for us.
All it's going to do is the Russians are just going to pull their forces back.
You know, anyone who's telling you that this is going to stop them from dropping glide bombs just simply doesn't know what they're talking about.
I'll just give you an example.
You know, the idea that we need these missiles to strike the Russian air bases to prevent them from dropping those large glide bombs, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000-pound bombs, which are basically unstoppable, and wrecking the Ukrainian military.
I mean, absolutely wrecking them.
Well, I mean, if anyone knows about our operations in Iraq, in Afghanistan, where did our planes come from?
Our planes came from hundreds of miles away.
When we were in Afghanistan, we had air cover.
We had planes coming from the Persian Gulf and from Diego Garcia.
Thousands of miles away.
When I was in Iraq, I remember in 2004 when the Fallujah campaign was going on, and I was in Tikrit.
I remember hearing the F-15s coming down the Tigris River, you know, to go bomb Fallujah, which was 120 miles away from me or however far it was.
Where were they coming from?
They were coming from Turkey.
You know, I don't know a lot about the Russian aircraft.
You'd have to ask Scott or somebody that knows the equipment better than I do.
But I do know they could just simply move their aircraft back.
They can just simply use aerial refueling.
I mean, this idea that somehow these weapons, like all the other things, the HIMARS, the ATACAMs, the M1s, you know, whatever they are.
And this is where it sets it up for really dangerous, though, because what comes next?
They use, they allow us to use the attackums or the, or we give them the jazz and missiles for the F-16s to strike a couple hundred miles into Russia.
And this is saying we're not even going to talk about Russia retaliating or escalating the war, right?
Just leave that aside.
Well, okay, now Russia pulls their air forces back.
Well, then what comes next, of course?
You have to give us tomahawks.
We need tomahawks.
You know, you're stabbing the Ukrainians in the back if you don't give them tomahawks.
This war would have been over if we just given them tomahawks, right?
I mean, so it never ends.
And so I'm hoping that maybe that was the mindset, the cognitive honesty.
That was occurring in Washington, D.C. this past week when it was said that, no, we're not going to allow these missile strikes with American missiles into Russia.
And hopefully it's not, as I was kind of saying cynically before, just an effort to get the message synchronized that we can announce this when Lincoln comes.
Because Biden didn't make that troubling point, or the White House didn't make the troubling point, and it was Kirby, that we'll talk about this further at the U.N. So that's my fear, is that this is just getting it all on.
Get the message tied together and that this is when Volodymyr Zelensky shows up and gives his big victory plan, this is going to be a component of it.
Switching over to Israel, at the same time the president or the prime minister Netanyahu is threatening to fire his defense minister and replace him with yet another right winger.
At the same time that Netanyahu has appointed a retired IDF colonel as the governor of Gaza, at the same time that a retired IDF general has said Netanyahu has lost the war, we cannot defeat Hamas, the following happens.
Cut number 16. The communication device that is being used by the Lebanese armed group has been penetrated, hacked, and a number, hundreds of Hezbollah, members of Hezbollah have been wounded after those devices, which are known as pagers.
That's the way that they are calling them exploded.
So if these are pagers, you know, like we used in the U.S. in the 90s before we had our cell phones, and that's the way they communicate with each other, and the Israelis found a way to penetrate them.
They've wounded about 2,300, and they've killed eight, two of whom were babies.
Now, the IDF hasn't claimed credit for it, but who else could it be?
Exactly.
I mean, Mossad, you know, I mean, this is the Israelis.
I can't imagine it's anyone else or it could be anyone else.
You know, the pagers are used, Judge.
My understanding they use pagers because they can't be hacked in the sense of people getting into it and reading information that they might want to get.
This is a simple, what's supposed to be secure, safe way of...
maybe thousands of devices, both in Lebanon and in Syria.
As you said, close to 3,000 wounded, 10 dead, including children.
You know, the scale of this.
And the terror of it, you know, is what's so pressing right now.
I will say that Netanyahu did make a big speech last night saying that we are going to finish this issue with Lebanon.
We need to get our people back to their homes in northern Israel because they still have 100,000 internally displaced refugees.
From the cross-border attacks that have been coming there.
It's a huge drain on their economy as well as a big political issue.
So we're going to get our people back home and we're going to finish this in Lebanon.
This, of course, happens today.
Whether this was it, this was the attack, it was punitive, it was meant as a warning, or was this an attempt to decapitate leadership within Hezbollah?
For a follow-on attack, a follow-on military operation, right?
You take out their mid-level, their junior, mid-level, senior level guys, cause disruption within their command and control.
That makes an Israeli attack much more likely to be successful, at least in the opening moments of it.
But, I mean, the idea comes to this, and we don't know if this was done by the Israelis implanting explosives into the devices.
Or somehow being able to cause the batteries to explode, we'll know within a day or so.
I mean, it won't be very hard to tell whether or not there's explosive residue.
But the idea of the terror behind it, the idea that the way it was done, and I mean, the videos I've seen of this, you know, it's been of people who are in stores, people buying groceries, and it goes off.
I mean, so the terror and the fact that thousands have been wounded, children killed.
It just shows that this is the Israeli way of war.
This is the Israeli way of life.
The Israelis exist in what our ancestors would call, you know, you had a house of peace and a house of war, and the Israelis have perpetually lived in the house of war.
And this is what this does to them.
They think that doing such things, having pagers explode while parents are driving cars with their children in them, pagers explode while people are shopping for groceries and don't care who's around them.
That's the point.
Israel is a country that was founded upon terrorism.
You go back to what the Israelis were doing before Israel became a state with the Ergun movement.
Most famous, of course, was the King David.
Hotel bombing in 1946.
Israel was founded with terrorism.
And then, of course, we've talked about this, Judge.
Not just the genocide in Gaza, but the way it's being carried out, particularly through the artificial intelligence programs, which are meant not to limit civilian casualties, but to increase civilian casualties.
The best example being, we know of three Israeli artificial intelligence programs.
Lavender, Gospel, and Where's Daddy?
Where's Daddy, of course, being the artificial intelligence program that tells the Israelis when to strike Hamas members when they are located with their families.
Right.
We see that this this willingness, this desire of the Israelis to.
It is who they are.
It's how they were founded.
It's how they existed.
It's what they believe in.
Then do we care if Netanyahu fires Gallant?
Does it make a difference?
Will his replacement have the same brutal genocidal mentality?
Absolutely.
It doesn't make a difference.
It's anything that makes it worse because Galant's not He's not murderous enough.
He's not extreme enough for Netanyahu.
Gallant, from what I can tell, the big issues between Gallant and Netanyahu, a lot of it boils down to Gallant representing the IDF and trying to make sure the IDF isn't overstretched, that the IDF is exhausted, doesn't collapse from internal wear and tear, and is able to...
You know, I mean, so you look at this, you've got a man who is happy to carry out genocide just as long as it's being done effectively and efficiently and doesn't degrade the Israeli army's ability to operate.
Well, we're going to praise, he's not genocidal enough.
He's not extreme enough, right?
I mean, so they want to replace him with who then?
You know, I mean, so absolutely.
It doesn't really matter in the sense that it's not going to improve any things.
It will actually only make things worse.
And that's a really scary thing to think is possible.
Do you think that Amos Hochstein and Bill Burns and the other American negotiators have finally recognized that the negotiation was futile from the start and that Netanyahu's appointment of this retired colonel as the governor, I'm doing air quotes because this is not lawful,
the governor of Gaza, I think that the ones who are the most Zionists in that group are dismayed that Israel has not been as receptive to our willingness to provide the cover they needed for their genocide.
So even those who are the most Zionists have to be upset at the fact that we have done everything for you over this last year.
We have given you everything you needed, everything you asked for.
We have provided cover for you in the media, politically at home in the U.S., as well as internationally.
We have protected you over and over again.
And this is how you're playing this out.
You're not willing to give us anything in return.
So even the most...
But at the same time, too, they're going to turn around and look at their political masters and say, this is what's best for them.
Staying in the good graces of Israel and its American lobby are the most important things.
That is job number one.
That is the commander's intent is to make sure that we win this election in November.
So they have to be frustrated by it, that they have given Israel so much, and this is what they're getting in return.
Certainly, I can't imagine that any of them have ever had a moment where they've been going about this in good faith.
They are as deluded and irrational and psychopathic as Boris Johnson, which may be the case.
But you look at a guy like Bill Burns and you know that is not the case.
Burns, I mean, who has been so prescient and honest and cogent, particularly, say, we most know of what he is.
When I say that, mostly referring to his past with regards to his explanation on what's occurring in Russia, what will occur if we expand NATO, those types of things.
But we see Burns now, of course, with that, willing to disregard everything he said in the past about it, disregard his own honest explanations, his own sincere explanations of what's occurring, his own advice to multilaterally.
What can you tell us about this major general, a relatively young man?
Hamas is winning the war.
Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we're losing the war in a big way.
Do you know this fellow, know of this fellow, or why he would have made such a profound statement recently after retiring with the rank of Major General?
No, I don't know him, Judge.
He was the commander of the Gaza Division, so not only was he a retired Major General from the Israeli military, he also was there in Gaza running operations for the Israeli military.
At least a period of 18 months or two years or however long they keep those billets for.
I will say that sounds very familiar, this idea we never lost a tactical encounter.
That was certainly the case for us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, particularly a period of time, particularly 2004 through, say, 2012, the best killers in the world were American Marines and American soldiers.
No one was going to beat an American squad in a gunfight anywhere in the world.
And we lost those wars.
The difference between us losing those wars and the Israelis losing this one is Iraq and Afghanistan are 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 miles away from us in the U.S. Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem are right there on top of Israel.
And so when you lose that war, what does that actually mean?
And I don't mean this since the Palestinians are going to take over, but the pressure on Israel.
This collapse that we keep seeing, these warnings that keep coming out of senior Israeli officials.
And when you look at it, whether it's their military, whether it's their economy, whether it's their politics, this idea of Israel eating itself alive and that Netanyahu's policies being suicidal, you continue to see more and more evidence for this.
Certainly, you understand why people are not investing in Israel.
Terrible investment.
This is why its credit rating keeps getting diminished.
So it's certainly understanding.
And the frustration that these men who are speaking out, former Israeli generals, or say Roman Barr, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel's version of the FBI, the frustration they must have witnessing this, witnessing this suicidal path that Israel is on.
For something that they cannot even win.
It's impossible to win.
You know, this occupation, the resistance will go on as long as they're occupied.
And they see themselves being further isolated in the world.
So tomorrow in the United Nations, the United Nations General Assembly is going to vote on a resolution put forward by the Palestinian delegation.
The first resolution the Palestinian delegation has been able to submit since they were seated.
Which is a great thing to see.
But the resolution, of course, calls for Israel to end its occupation and it's going to the United Nations General Assembly.
So not the Security Council.
This resolution will go to the General Assembly.
It's not a binding resolution, although there are pathways for the UN General Assembly to issue a binding resolution through what's called the Uniting for Peace actions.
But tomorrow we should see a vote coming out of the UN General Assembly just one week before all those hundreds of heads of state come.
195 or however many come to New York for the annual UN General Assembly get-together, if you will.
And I do believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to come as well.
I think that's correct.
So you could have this resolution of the entire United Nations stating Israel must end its...
So, I mean, if you're an Israeli who believes in their country and who wants to see their country continue and you see all this going on, the frustration, the despair must be mounting every day.
Matt Ho, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Excellent, excellent analyses on both Ukraine and Israel.
Your time is much appreciated.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.
Thanks, Judge.
Of course, all the best.
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