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Oct. 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:31
Aaron Maté Trump Wants Palestinian Surrender.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for a judging freedom.
Today is Wednesday, October 8th, 2025.
Aaron Mate will be with us in just a moment on this so-called Trump peace deal.
Isn't it really a Palestinian capitulation that the president wants?
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Aaron, uh, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
Isn't this so-called a peace agreement?
I'm talking about the Trump Whitkoff Netanyahu, Jared Krishner peace proposal.
Just a trick to get the Palestinians to surrender hostages and arms.
If you look in this document, trying to see any recognition of minimal Palestinian rights, the minimal right to self-determination.
There's nothing in there.
There's one clause which talks about we recognize that uh a Palestinian state, a Palestinian self-determination is the aspiration of the Palestinian people.
Not the right of the Palestinian people, just the aspiration.
And that right there is the latest reminder that the U.S. and Israel have no interest in Palestine's minimal right to self-determination to freedom.
We recognize it as an aspiration.
Uh gives us no obligation to grant it as a right.
And the U.S. and Israel will not do that because the entire Israeli project is based on denying Palestinians the right to self-to self-determination to stealing their homeland, expelling them, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and now two years of genocide.
So Trump is now basically telling the Palestinians after two years of genocide, time to fully surrender, give up the remaining captives that are there, and then maybe we can get some form of Israeli pullback in Gaza.
But even there, it's very, very vague.
An Israeli withdrawal is tied to undefined conditions, which are all linked to demilitarization, which is basically telling Palestinians, um, give up even your right to resist military occupation, because there's no resisting us in Israel.
And so this is Trump trying to impose that now after two years of mass murder.
I mean, Netanyahu has no intention whatsoever as long as he's the prime minister.
You correct me if I'm wrong, Aaron, of pulling the IDF out of Gaza.
And he made that very clear right after he met with Trump and he claimed to accept Trump's uh peace plan and uh Trump had sort of suggested that this would entail an Israeli withdrawal.
And Nanya immediately told an Israeli audience in Hebrew that yeah, no, we're not pulling out of Gaza, along with declaring that there will be no Palestinian state.
So part of the reason Nanya won't do that is because his position in power, staying in power and not facing corruption charges, he relies on the support of fanatical ultra-right extremists who are already at the extreme end of a fanatical Israeli spectrum.
And if he announces any kind of serious withdrawal from Gaza, he will lose their support.
So just as he'd rather sacrifice his own captives to kill and expel as many Palestinians as as possible, Netanyahu is also not going to do something that will jeopardize his political uh power and anger the alter extremists that helped keep him in office.
Is it the public policy, the stated public policy of Israel, the all Palestinians, emphasis on all are legitimate military targets.
Correct.
The uh Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz recently made that clear as Israel continues its destruction of Gaza City, which up until a few weeks ago was the last part of Gaza that was livable.
There were still high rise buildings there, which Israel has since all demolished and there was uh hundreds of thousands of people sheltering there.
And Israel Cat, the defense minister said to all the Palestinians still remaining you have to leave and if you stay, you will be considered Hamas terrorists.
So that's one of the problems of the so called peace plan.
It's t you know an Israeli pullback is tied to demilitarization, der so called deradicalization, and Israel deeming areas to be terror free.
Well if Israel's saying that we consider ordinary civilians who remain in their homes to be terrorists, then what's to stop Israel from from saying that these conditions of being terror free are not met and therefore we're staying here for as long as we want I don't know why they would consider accepting it Aaron it is a complete if they give up their arms and the hostages what leverage do they have?
Well uh the captives are the only leverage that they have but the problem here is the suffering in Gaza is so catastrophic.
It's it's beyond description that Hamas might have no choice at this point.
I mean this is going on for two years.
Imagine and during two years of this let alone um I mean imagine even during just uh one day of this uh but this is what Palestinians have been facing for two years.
It's an absolute nightmare so Hamas is under pressure from people in Gaza because the suffering is so it's in the cruelty, the sadism of the Israeli occupation, you know, denying food, denying all the basics people need to live you know the cost of tents has been uh you know more than a thousand dollars at times so the people can't even afford to live in a tent so they have to sleep on the streets on top of all the other nightmares people have to face there's an acknowledgement in Trump's peace plan that Israel is the sole obstacle
to blocking aid because it says once this peace still goes through full aid will be resumed in Gaza.
Well that's a uh open acknowledgement that Israel is preventing full aid from going through now because otherwise if it weren't preventing the delivery of aid it you know the that delivery wouldn't be conditional on Hamas accepting and isn't it also in an open acknowledgement that the so-called US Israeli I forget what they call it humanitarian foundation is a supposedly providing aid is a farce.
It is because it says that once this deal goes into effect the UN will resume the the delivery of aid well I thought as we were told by Israel and the US and their apologists that the UN was corrupted it was compromised by Hamas and therefore and that's why it had to be replaced with the so-called Gaza humanitarian foundation.
Now this plan is saying forget that the UN will resume aid and in fact no groups involved uh with either side will be involved in the will in the delivery of aid and that includes the Gaza Humanitarian foundation because obviously that's a US Israeli creation run by US contractors.
So that uh fiction there that we had to replace the UN because they're corrupted and they're tied to Hamas and we'll be more efficient through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian foundation the plan is admitting that that's all a farce.
Here's uh Prime Minister Netanyahu just three days ago on October 5th saying the IDF he's saying effectively the IDF is not going anywhere.
Cut number two I think what we need is uh a system of a division of responsibility Israel will have overall security responsibility to prevent terrorist resurgence from Gaza uh but in Gaza we need a civilian administration that is uh administered not by um not by people who are uh committed to Israel's destruction, but those who are committed to leaving peacefully with it.
President Trump has undertaken himself to head that civilian authority, to have the governing board of that civilian authority.
And I think that's a good development.
So if we have that, I think we can have a different future for Gaza and for Israel and for everyone in the region.
Tony Blair is the head of the civilian authority.
Why is that?
Tony Blair's a war criminal.
Yes, but uh that qualifies you for such a position uh in Washington if you've been if you've been involved in uh imperial wars and destroying the Middle East as Tony Blair has for well over two decades.
And in fact, if you look at Trump's plan, this is basically Tony Blair's plan.
That's why they're giving Tony Blair a role here, because they basically stole Tony Blair's ideas.
It's been his vision to basically hand over Gaza to a group of so-called technocrats, which really means people in the region who will do the bidding of Israel and the U.S. And so that you know, wealthy people that Tony Blair is connected to, all of tech oligarchs can come in, make a lot of money off of Gaza, bring in slave labor, and expel as many Palestinians from Gaza as possible.
So that's why Tony Blair has a role here because Trump is basically copying his plan.
And the plan really, it's not that different from the so-called Oslo peace process.
The whole goal of the Oslo Accords uh was as Ashloma Ben Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister uh described it.
It was neocolonial.
It was basically let's find collaborators to rule over the Palestini population for us.
We we don't have to do the job of policing them.
Let's get a collaborationist regime to do the dirty work for us, to police them, you know, keep them in line, and we'll take the land that we want.
That was basically the premise of the oscillation.
That's effectively what Netanyahu just said in that clip that we ran.
It's a collaborationist civilian regime to do the dirty work.
We're not going to arrest uh shoplifters or clean the streets.
We'll just shoot people we think are dangerous.
Yes, and the fact that Netanyahu uh is saying that um it speaks to how absolutely extreme the Israeli political spectrum is because even Netanyahu's opponents share that vision.
So look, take 30 years ago this month, uh just weeks before he was assassinated, he takes Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who was the architect of the Israeli Accords.
30 years ago this month, he gave a speech to the Knesset where he talked about his vision for a future Palestinian entity.
And he made clear to say, we're gonna give them less than a state.
This will not be a full state.
They'll have some limited autonomy, but their main function of this less than Palestinian state will be for the Palestinians to police their own people, and we will keep the land we want.
We're not going to go back to the June 1967 lines.
We're going to keep the major West Bank settlement blocks that make an actual Palestinian state impossible.
That was Ytaq Rabin.
Now, what was net what was Netanyahu doing at that time?
Netanyahu was inciting against Rabin and basically accusing him of being a traitor.
Because in his view, Rabin was giving the Palestinians too much.
So Rabin, who was saying we're going to steal their land, all we're going to do is use uh their leadership as collaborators to police them.
That for Netanyahu was going too far.
Uh because he didn't want to give the Palestinians anything.
And the following month, Rabin was assassinated by an extreme right Israeli who had been a follower of Netanyahu's and who would agree with Netanyahu's position.
Now, 30 years later, Netanyahu was saying something very similar to Rabin.
We're going to find some collaborators, they can place the Palestinians, and we'll take the land we that we want.
Good God.
Was Netanyahu ever credibly accused of fomenting the assassination or being involved in any way?
I think the most credible accuser was Rabin's widow.
Uh she accused Netanyahu of inciting her husband's assassination.
Well, 30 years ago, two years ago was uh of course October 7th.
How has Israeli life, political, cultural, commercial, changed in those two years?
Well, I haven't been to Israel in a long time.
So I speak from a distance, but just reading the polls, uh, it's a country that's just off the charts and its fanaticism.
A majority supports the genocide, a majority supports expelling Palestinians.
A majority just doesn't see them as equal human beings.
If you look at the protests, they're mostly focused on the captives and Netanyahu's abandonment of them.
You know, very small percentage are actually concerned about the plight of the indigenous Palestinians who are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands.
And they're insulated from the consequences of their government's actions because it's a it's it's an apartheid colony.
Um if you live in Tel Aviv, even though there's a genocide going on in Gaza, and you know, ongoing ongoing terror attacks and land theft and land theft of Palestinians and the occupied West Bank, which you can see from Tel Aviv, uh, you're completely insulated.
You go to the beach, you you go to nightclubs, it's a it's a nice life.
And uh so Israelis are you know physically uh and politically insulated from the horrors of what they're causing, and they're also just spiritually, they don't care for the most part.
Just uh this is just the mindset now inside Israel.
Are they still being denied uh the truth of the suffering and genocide in Gaza by the Israeli uh military censors?
I've always been skeptical of this claim that you know Israelis are uh are being denied the uh the uh the reality.
I think they know.
I just don't think they care.
That's my sense.
Again, I'm not there, so I I speak from a with a limited um insight here.
But it's not my sense that Israelis don't know what their government's doing in Gaza.
I think they do know for the most part, and they support it.
That's why the polls show consistently support for ethnic cleansing, support for uh attacking Gaza's infrastructure, support for the blockades.
You know, there are those scenes that we've seen of like Israelis going to the separation barrier with Gaza and you know, taking part in these protests to block the trucks that are not even being allowed any in any way.
You know, this is a fanatical society that for the most part supports the destruction of Gaza.
Here's uh our mutual friend, great friend uh Max Blumenthal last night on another podcast that uh arguing as persuasively as he's uh as he always is, Israel will never be at peace.
Number 17, Chris.
They'll never enjoy security and they'll constantly be at war.
And then finally, and this is one of the other lessons of October 7th, because Israel has been I don't think any of us expected Israel to still be pushing ahead with this genocidal rampage in Gaza two years after.
Israel cannot be at peace for political reasons, not just Netanyahu, but just Israel, because it will lose its value to the U.S. as an attack dog in the region.
It will lose its value as a strategic asset to U.S. empire if it's at peace.
Like, oh no, we don't actually want to take out Iran.
We don't actually want to uh, you know, we're not we're not gonna fight Hezbollah.
We have a hudna.
We're we're not gonna sell you, we we're not actually going to keep selling weapons.
Actually, our military industry is gonna be uh reduced.
Well, then uh we'll reduce aid to you, and you don't really matter anymore.
And you're just gonna shrink away into the region.
So Israel for the rest of our lives will be engaged in this kind of war as it expands its secret nuclear facility at Demona outside the purview of the IAEA as it has been doing for the last two months in very aggressive fashion as it ramps up the Samson option.
Can Netanyahu possibly exist in office with the war over.
Well, no, because uh if uh he withdraws from Gaza, if he minimally recognizes Palestinian rights, which of course he's reflexively wired to not do, but let's say for some uh, you know, if hell froze over and he did, he would lose the support of the ultra-extremists in his cabinet people like Itamar Ben Gavir and uh Smotrich.
So no, and what Max is saying there is um is unfortunately, I think, really correct.
And if you look at when Israel became an asset to U.S. power, there's a very clear date.
It's 1967, June 1967, when Israel launched a war against uh its neighbors, claimed to be acting defensively, which was a fraud, and stole their land, and in the process did it dealt a serious blow to Arab nationalism.
And from the US point of view, Israel did it a great service because uh it showed that alternate it it showed that uh that Arab nationalism in the region could be weakened.
And that served the cause of basically the U.S. and their allies, their client governments controlling the Middle Eastern uh oil reserves.
And access to those energy reserves gives you a lot of power in the world.
So Israel showing they could serve that function as an attack dog for the U for the U.S., as Max talked about, made it a strategic asset.
And that's why it has to be, as Max explained, perpetually at war.
And that means rejecting multiple diplomatic opportunities that could have resolved all of this.
You know, as I like to really stress, and it's important, and I think it's hard for some people to um acknowledge because people don't want to deal with the reality that Israel exists, and we hope it will disappear because it's such an evil state.
But there have been opportunities for Israel to still exist within secure borders, offered to it by the Palestinians and all of Israel's neighbors.
The Arab Peace Initiative 2002, the entire Arab League offered Israel full normalization, if it simply withdrew from the occupied West Bank in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and let the Palestinians have a state in 22% of their historic stolen homeland, which for Palestinians is a major concession.
Israel wouldn't even accept this major concession by Palestinians and their allies, including Iran, which later on signed on to this initiative as well.
So Israel has rejected so many diplomatic opportunities to the point where it used the years of the so-called Oslo peace process, not to make peace, not to reach a Palestine state, but to undermine a Palestine state by pretending to negotiate peace when really all they were doing was trying to prop up a collaborator government as we talked about earlier and expanding the West Bank settlements to make a Palestinian state impossible.
You know, talking about stealing land, is there anything in the so-called Trump peace proposal, Aaron, about the West Bank?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
No, it's not even mentioned.
And this is part of a deliberate strategy by Israel and the US to basically separate Gaza and the West Bank, not just physically, which it already is, but politically as well, to make them into distinct entities, which weakens Palestinians' national power.
If you have two different Palestinian uh enclaves controlled by two different factions, then it's just how can you um who do you even negotiate with and and how is anything even achieved?
And that's a deliberate Israeli strategy.
That's why Netanyahu thought he was doing something clever by propping up Hamas inside of Gaza, because he knew that so long as Hamas was in power in Gaza, it would be that much harder for Palestinians to have international acceptance and be able to uh form a cohesive political entity.
That's also why Israeli governments have kept the most popular Palestinian political leader, Marwan Barguti, in prison for more than two decades because they know he's one of the few people who could unite all the Palestinian factions.
And remarkably, Hamas, even though Marwan Barguti is not from Hamas, Hamas has put Marwan Bakuti at the top of their list of prisoners that they want released as part of a deal with Israel.
I think that was a major goal of October 7th.
They were taking a gamble, which of course completely failed, that Israel might value the lives of its own people to the point where it's willing to release people like the most popular Palestinian political leader, Marwan Barguti.
But of course, Israel above all is committed to Jewish supremacy and occupation.
So there'll be no negotiating with Hamas on that front.
Is this fellow uh likely to be released if Trump's plan goes through?
Well, if Hamas had its way, and if the Palestinian people had their way, I think he would.
Uh but the problem is Israel, what is their project?
Is as Max talked about?
It's just it's perpetual violence and aggression.
So they will do anything they can to avoid and to undermine the Palestinian cause for self-determination.
And so are if you're Israel, are you are you going to release someone who's known as uh Palestine's Mandela if your goal is to destroy the Palestinian political project?
So Israel will do all it can to avoid releasing someone like Marwan Babuti.
And so far, the U.S. governments, whether it's under a Democrat or Republican, has given them carte blanche to proceed.
Aaron Monte, great conversation, my dear friend.
Very, very uh enlightening.
Thank you very much for your time.
Look forward to seeing you again soon.
Thank you, Judge.
Sure.
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