Nov. 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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Matt Hoh : IDF Kills During ‘Ceasefire’
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Adjudging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, November 18th, 2025.
Mato will be here with us in just a minute on the IDF.
Still killing, still destroying, still genocide during the so-called ceasefire.
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Matt Ho, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
What did the United Nations Security Council agree to yesterday?
And why were there pictures this morning of this reprehensible Danny Dannon, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, embracing Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador?
Well, thanks for having me on, Judge.
You know, essentially what the UN did yesterday was to recreate or reenact or to cosplay early 20th century European powers colonizing the world.
You know, this is essentially the same process, more or less, that we see after the First World War, where the British get their mandate, the French get their countries, you know, throughout the Middle East.
And that's what we have here.
We're stepping back in time 110 years, essentially.
What this is, is nothing more than a colonization of Gaza.
It is a determined effort to rip Palestine apart.
That's one of the things I think is not getting enough attention here is that by putting Gaza under the authority effectively of the United States as a territory, as a colony, as a protectorate or a mandate, you've essentially split Gaza, divorced it from the West Bank.
So one more level of doing Israel's bidding here.
What we're looking at is the disenfranchisement, the diminishment, the destruction of Palestine.
There is no pathway to a statehood.
This is colonization.
This is the defeat of what the Palestine resistance has been trying to achieve, not just for the last two years, but for the last decades, for the last eight, nine decades.
So what we saw happen yesterday at the Security Council was abhorrent.
It is one of those black marks on history.
And for the Palestinians, it's nothing new.
It's not just their outright enemies, those who would colonize and destroy and take from them, but also to the rest of the world that gives them lip service, but then at the end, turns their back on them as they just did.
And why?
Why is their Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters desert them?
Judge, I think it's the same as with the rest of the world.
I mean, it wasn't just Algeria and Pakistan, but it was the other 10 members of the United Nations Security Council that turned their back on them.
It was nations that will state that this is a genocide, nations that will call for sanctions, nations that may even do things, diplomatic efforts, recall their ambassadors, or certainly all these countries voted to recognize a Palestinian state.
You know, as we've seen that play out every year in the UN, where it's the United States, Israel, and a couple of small countries that the United States essentially owns voting against Palestinian statehood and the rest of the world voting for it, those nations went along with the U.S.
I think this resolution, this board of peace, this transitional governance by an international stabilization force, however they want to describe it, is just a farce.
It's an ability to provide these countries with some form of plausible deniability that we went along in a good faith effort under the United Nations resolution.
We didn't intend for it to be stuck, Gaza to never get out of this temporary status.
We didn't intend for this nebulous, vague, impossible pathway to peace to prove to be really impossible.
So it's just more the same from the international community when it comes to the Palestinians, just an abandonment of them.
They're useful to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians are useful to these nations around the world when they want to mouth off against the Americans or when they want to show America's hypocrisy or where they want to pander to their own people, particularly in the global south or in the developing world or the third world.
But when it comes to the reality of standing up to the Americans with regards to Palestine, then they say, no, it's easier for us to go along with the Americans than to actually do something substantial, do something worthy or do something of any significance for the Palestinians.
And that's what we have here.
I think many countries are tired.
They want to see this go.
They want to get back to business as usual.
There are benefits.
I don't know if you saw this, Judge, but the Germans who only recently put a partial weapons halt.
So up until 2023, Germany provided 30% of Israel's weapons.
And then finally, last August, two years into the genocide, Germany puts in place a partial weapons ban to Israel.
And now they've already removed that weapons ban.
Just this past week, the Germany said we're going to start selling weapons back to Israel because there's peace now, right?
I mean, so for many of these countries, it's the ability to now get back to business as usual.
And then for some that actually are adversaries to the Americans, like the Russians and the Chinese, I believe why they abstained is they want to see the Americans get stuck in another endless war, which makes sense.
If you're the Russians and the Chinese and you wanted to see the Americans jump into something that could prove as intractable or as costly as, say, Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam, then sure, let the Americans take ownership of Gaza.
Them, talk about possibly putting troops there and let's see where that, how that affects uh, the Americans.
Five ten, fifteen years down the road from now, will the United States build a half a billion dollar military base somewhere on the border between Gaza and Israel, and to what end?
For American national security, God Judge.
You know I was thinking about this earlier today.
Uh, the day after 9-11 I was an officer in the Marine Corps.
I went and had breakfast with a colleague, my friend of mine, also a Marine Corps officer, and this is september 12th, and we spoke about how well you know the where were you?
I was at.
That was at a Waffle house in uh Quantico, Virginia.
Oh okay yeah so um, but at that time I was like actually, you know, I was attending a explosive breacher training uh, at Quantico.
Uh, you know that that's what I was going through at that time.
But the um uh, you know we're having this breakfast and both of us have read the book The Bear Went Over The Mountain about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
We knew enough about Vietnam.
We had been young lieutenants in the 90s and we had heard from generals and sergeants major, who have been in the Vietnam War how the United States would never do something like that again.
And so Jimmy and I are sitting there day after 9-11 saying how well, this is not going to involve the conventional Marine Corps, that there's no way the United States is going to get involved, like something like Afghanistan.
There's no way we get involved in someplace like Iraq, particularly since the vice president was the guy who you know uh earlier uh, eight years earlier had said that, or nine years earlier, had said that going to Baghdad in the first Iraq war would be a colossal mistake, would be stupid.
There's no way we're going to do any type of wars like that.
So we're just going to watch and see what happens.
And I, I say that I, I tell that story because there's no uh, underestimating the foolishness, the recklessness, the ahistoric arrogance of the American empire.
So, at first, when you asked that question, judge my first gut response, of course not.
There's no way we're going to jump into that quicksand.
There's no way we're going to build a base in the midst of the Holy Land, get involved in this conflict uh, you know, which has been going on for more than 100 years.
Uh, you know it makes no sense to do so, but the empire is irrational uh, in terms of what it wants, what it desires and what it needs.
And so this idea of possibly building a base there to what purpose, I don't really fully understand, but is not something I see as an impossibility, as it should be, to anyone who's rational and reasonable and has any type of historic uh.
You know, who has read any contemporary history, uh would expect it to be.
But so this base uh, whether it's used uh judge if it comes to fruition.
Whether it's used, uh just to oversee the international stabilization force, whether it's used to house the international stabilization force, whether it has American troops there who have to go and patrol into Gaza and they're hit by Ieds and Rpgs, just like me and my friends were in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That may happen as well.
I wonder how the American public will react.
Well, Trump will be out of office by the time Americans come home in body bags.
I'm going to guess you're not surprised that The Guardian has reported just late last week that since the ceasefire, which couldn't be more than two months now, 1,500 buildings in Gaza have been demolished by the IDF since the ceasefire.
Right.
That was, I believe it was October 10th was a ceasefire, Judge.
So it's been barely a month, five weeks.
You know, that the ceiling.
It's not a ceasefire at all.
No, there's been, this was last week that was reported.
There were 280 violations by the Israelis of the ceasefire.
So tack on another 30 or so or however many you need to get to the current number.
But the Israelis violate the ceasefire seven, eight, nine, 10 times a day.
They kill Palestinians every day.
Since October 10th, about 270 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire began.
Hundreds have been wounded.
And among those 1,000 or so Palestinians who've been killed or wounded, hundreds of them have been children.
On one day alone, during this ceasefire, the Israelis killed 46 children.
So this idea that this is a ceasefire is, and there are subtitles being generated right now.
I hope it's putting ceasefire in italics or it's putting quotes around ceasefire because this is not a ceasefire.
This is still the same type of organized, deliberate killing of the Palestinian people because they are resisting occupation as they have an experience for decades.
Maybe not in the scale and the scope of the last two years, but this type of killing by the Israelis of Palestinians is something that has been common to every Palestinian for the last eight decades.
Why do American presidents like to kill?
I think it's the imperial prerogative, Judge.
I think it's the trappings of the empire.
It's the right of an emperor to do so.
If there is an affrontage, if there is any type of temerity, if there's any type of disobedience, it has to be met by a level of violence and force that ensures everyone understands who's in control.
I think it's no greater an explanation than that.
I think it's no more complicated than that.
And I think some of them like to kill.
And if they don't, as Barack Obama himself said when he said, turns out I'm pretty good at killing people, I think they also learn to like it.
You know, this is probably, I don't know now, how many times I brought Dostoevsky now, Judge, five, six times?
You know, power and blood are intoxicating.
And that's what you have here.
You have a tyranny that has developed in this American government, the very thing the founders were scared to death of that allows for this type of brute force, that allows for this brutalization, that allows for humiliation of people.
I mean, essentially, that's what's being carried out here against the Palestinians is a humiliation.
When you're in Palestine, or even when you're in Iraq or in Afghanistan, you talk to those who are part of the resistance or support the resistance.
The word they use is humiliation.
That's the word they use over and over again.
So this idea that somehow now the Hamas, the Palestinian resistance will be disarmed and foreigners will come in and they will control our country and Donald Trump will be in charge of it all, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The humiliation is the most galling thing for the Palestinians, as it is for any people who are occupied, any people who are facing any type of oppression or injustice.
And so I think when you come back to it, it's this idea of furthering that control by the empire, right?
Furthering that control by the hegemon.
And the way you do that is through brute force that ultimately has its greatest expression in the humiliation it bestows upon the occupied people.
As we speak, President Trump is embracing Mohammed bin Salman, who, of course, his own CIA, because Jamal Khashoggi was murdered during Trump's first term.
His own CIA found that bin Salman ordered the butchering, literally, of Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey.
And when asked about this by a reporter in the presence of Mohammed bin Salman, Trump responded by saying, things happen.
Ask me another question.
Right.
Right.
This is a man who, again, remember when he campaigned in 2016, he said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and still get elected.
This is a man who the reality of other people don't matter.
And I think he admires the Crown Prince very much for the Crown Prince's willingness and ability to do such things.
I don't think anyone should doubt if Donald Trump had the ability to murder journalists, he would carry it out.
Later in that press conference, he basically instructed the chair of the FCC to take away ABC's broadcasting license, or at least investigate them with the ultimate goal of taking away their broadcasting license.
You know, I think when you look at the people that Donald Trump works with best, it's those who remind him most of himself.
And, you know, I mean, there is this admiration, this mutual respect between these despots.
But I think what it really comes down to is the transaction, right?
This idea that MBS is sitting there and he tells Donald Trump that the $600 billion that Saudi Arabia was going to invest in the U.S. last year is now going to be a trillion.
And that's all Donald Trump cares about.
That's all he wants to hear.
And so I think what you have there are kindred spirits, like minds.
And I think if Donald Trump had the ability to be more like the Crown Prince, he would.
I'm sure there's a real estate deal in there somewhere, Matt, for Trump Tower, Riyadh, or wherever else they're going to build it.
Meanwhile, as Karen Kwakowski calls him, and she's on after you, Quick Draw Pete, who calls himself the Secretary of War, is building up a substantial armada outside of Venezuela.
How can they not use that armada?
What would it cost to produce the Gerald R. Ford and all the accompanying ships there?
What would it cost the Navy just to bring that?
There's 10,000 Marines that they're feeding on those ships.
The ships themselves, Judge, are $20 billion.
You know, when you add the ship plus the air wing, it's $20 billion.
I actually was on a cruise this summer and we are in Marseille.
And who was docked next to us, who was burrowed next to us in Marseille, was the Gerald R. Ford.
And the only people, I'm sorry.
I said, oh my goodness, I didn't realize that a ship like that docked in a civilian port.
They do, and they have their Liberty Call.
And the only people on that ship, on my cruise ship, the only ones who are interested in her, the only ones who are gawking out her taking photos, selfies with them of the ship, everything else, who were in awe of it and celebrating her, were the Americans.
The Europeans and the Asians on the ship kind of looked at it and wondered, why do you have such things?
And then among the Americans, you know, particularly ones I got a Fujit and Tony Judge, started, you know, right going down this path.
I'd ask the Americans, you know how much she costs?
You know, it's $20 billion, about $15 billion for the ship itself, and $5 or $6 billion for that airwing.
That's just to buy those things, then alone, the millions and millions of dollars a day to operate.
And you know, we have 10 more just like her.
And you want to wonder why we don't have the same level of health care or education or infrastructure as other countries do?
There's your answer.
It's because we're spending trillions and trillions of dollars to maintain a failing empire.
I mean, the amount of money that that's spent on these things is enormous.
So to answer your question about whether we would use the Ford because it costs just because it costs so much to keep her there, I don't think so.
I think this government, our leadership, is so, they're so out of touch.
They're so insane.
They're so lustful in their greed, right?
Whether it be for war or for their own profit, that it doesn't matter what it costs because this is what they want.
If it costs, you know, tens of millions of dollars a day to keep the Ford and her sister ships there off the coast of Venezuela, then so be it.
That's the cost of showing the flag.
That's the cost of gunboat diplomacy.
That's the cost of running the empire.
And so this sickness pervades all through Washington, D.C.
I mean, you have, you know, Ray McGovern has retitled the military-industrial complex as the Mickey Man, which is, let me see if I can do this: the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academic, technology, and think tank complex.
Right.
Because that's the reality of it, Judge.
Everybody is getting rich off of this.
Everybody is doing incredibly well.
It's just not the weapons companies that are making obscene profits.
It's all those companies that work with the weapons companies.
Right.
So it's the banks.
It's the hotels that build the hotels right next to the new buildings these weapons companies are constructing, right?
I mean, this money spreads out.
It's the golden era.
It's the time to get the gold.
We have trillion-dollar defense budgets.
And the reality is when you, it's a self-licking ice cream chrome, right?
It's this thing, this thing eats itself, right?
And regenerates itself that way.
So the money gets washed through the weapons industry.
It goes back into Congress.
Congress puts it back into the Pentagon.
The Pentagon gives it back to the weapons industry.
And it's just this constant cycle.
And just like a snowball going downhill, it grows.
And so now we have trillion-dollar weapons budgets.
Half of that goes directly to the contractors.
And most of half of what they make every year, these weapons contractors, they don't put back into their manufacturing facilities.
They don't put back into their employees.
They put it back into dividends.
They do stock buybacks.
Last year, the weapons companies spent more and stock buybacks and dividends than they did in actual profits, right?
They had it go into debt.
They borrowed money to give money back to their investors.
Meanwhile, they're getting essentially half of a trillion-dollar a year budget.
This is the type of sickness that pervades not just our government, but our corporations.
And then we, the taxpayers, are the ones who are putting into this, let alone the fact that what's the reality of Lockheed and Raytheon and all these other companies putting money back into themselves, just enriching their CEOs and their investors.
The reality is that we can only produce 600 Patriot missiles a year.
The reality is we can only produce a handful of FAD missiles a year.
The reality is that it takes us years upon years to build weapon systems, whether upon their ships or their ground vehicles or their aircraft that in the end don't work.
It's been 50 years since the Army has been able to build a new tank.
The F-35 is how many decades old now?
And half of them still can't fly on any given day, right?
I mean, and the reality is that the empire is collapsing.
That's exactly right.
So, I mean, it's as we've put our tax dollars into this, and as we get suckered, as they take from us, Judge, and they fail to invest in the things that we need in society, like healthcare, like education, like infrastructure, as people are drowning with the overhead costs of daily life, as people are living paycheck to paycheck, et cetera, our government is just taking this money and giving it to the corporations.
You know, the tagline, the joke about the war in Afghanistan, where we spent more money on reconstruction for Afghanistan than we did for the entire Marshall Plan following World War II.
The joke was that although reconstruction didn't work in Afghanistan, it certainly worked in Northern Virginia and Maryland, right?
The suburbs of D.C., whereas we spent $300 million a day for the war in Afghanistan for 20 years, that's where that money went.
Didn't win us a war $300 million a day, but it made a lot of people and a lot of corporations very wealthy.
Sad story, but true.
Thank you, Matt.
Thanks very much, my dear friend.
And thanks for letting me go across the board from Venezuela to Israel to Virginia.