May 13, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
08:08
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Ramadan holiday right now, as I'm talking to you, the moisten and the mosque are blasting for the holiday. | |
| Tension around the Temple Mount, the Jerusalem Day Parade, which marched through some of the Muslim areas in Jerusalem. | |
| All of those factors, the biggest, biggest factor by far, the Palestinian elections. | |
| or rather the non-holding of Palestinian elections as Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, enters the 16th year of his six-year term. | |
| And he keeps on delaying those elections because he knows he's in the loons. | |
| He's going to leave to Hamas. | |
| This time, Hamas wasn't going to put up with it. | |
| So the way you prove that you're a good Palestinian is not by attacking Mahmoud Abbas, the way you prove you're good Palestinian is by attacking Israel. | |
| Wow, that was perfect. | |
| That was concise and understandable. | |
| So, let me give you a question, as we say in America, but you're familiar enough, from left field. | |
| Do you believe, and I'm not looking for an answer, I really am just curious, do you believe that if Donald Trump were still president, this would have happened? | |
| It could, but the reaction on the part of Israel might have been different. | |
| Why? | |
| Because whenever Israel goes to war with the terrorists, whether it's Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel needs three things in the United States. | |
| It needs ammo. | |
| Because we pretty much run out of ammo after about a month or certain types of ammunition. | |
| The United States is supposed to give us that type of ammo back, resupply us. | |
| We need what I call the diplomatic and political iron dome. | |
| Who's going to cast a veto in the Security Council? | |
| Who's going to prevent the International Criminal Court from finding us guilty of war crimes? | |
| And then the third thing we need in the United States is the morning after diplomacy, who helps to build areas that have been shattered, who negotiate ceasefires. | |
| Now I think with the previous administration, we could have been 100% certain that we would have gotten 100% of all three categories. | |
| With the current administration, that's yet to be seen. | |
| So did that play any role in Hamas's decisions or Israel's decisions? | |
| Well, I can't vouch for Hamas, but I think Hamas understands that there is a new America in town, America that's less involved, more pulling back from the region generally. | |
| And we've seen it in the reactions of the administration so far in this sort of pulling on both sides to exercise restraint. | |
| Israel is taking rockets that are designed to massacre men, women, and children. | |
| And we're defending ourselves. | |
| So we can call on both sides to de-escalate and calm down. | |
| You know, that's putting us on a moral plane with Hamas. | |
| It's like giving Hamas a prize. | |
| It's saying, you know, okay, keep shooting rockets at the Jews. | |
| We're going to treat you respectfully. | |
| And bad message. | |
| By the way, I'd like to note to my audience something that very few people in the media note. | |
| You said the Jews and... | |
| That is exactly how Hamas always refers to Israelis. | |
| I actually played, Michael, you'll find this, I think, very interesting. | |
| I played a translation done by some major U.S. network, I don't recall which, where the speaker, I know enough Arabic to know what the word Jew is in Arabic. | |
| The speaker said Jews and the translator said Israelis. | |
| I just, I find. | |
| Hamas refers to a prison. | |
| Yeah, no, Hamas refers to you as Jews. | |
| Yes, right. | |
| So that's their battle. | |
| Their battle is with Jews. | |
| And I think it's significant because when you mentioned it, you were simply echoing exactly how they speak. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Interesting enough, some of the people who have been killed by Hamas rockets have not been Jews. | |
| Right. | |
| Including an Indian foreign worker and two Arabs. | |
| Yes, two Israeli Arabs. | |
| So that leads to, for me, one of the key questions, and I'm afraid of your answer. | |
| I'm hoping against hope I don't get the answer I don't want. | |
| What are Israel's Arabs, not the Palestinians in the West Bank, what are Israel's Arabs saying? | |
| Well, it's difficult to generalize. | |
| There are riots that have gone on in some of our communities, which are both Arab and Jewish mixed communities. | |
| I live in one of them, Joppa, and there's a massive police presence on the street tonight in full riot gear, poised for upheavals by the Arab residents of my city. | |
| I live side by side and live, I think, in a great degree of coexistence. | |
| But that was true in a neighboring town of Lug, where there was prejudice. | |
| Actually, a pogrom. | |
| Three synagogues were burnt in the state of Israel. | |
| Three synagogues went up in flames in the city of Akko. | |
| A great restaurant. | |
| This was the best restaurant. | |
| The owner of which he made his life work to work together with poor Arab kids and teach them how to cook. | |
| He actually brought them to the White House. | |
| They served the president once. | |
| The Arabs in Akko burnt the restaurant down. | |
| This is an immense tragedy, Dennis. | |
| It's an immense tragedy. | |
| For Israel, but first of all, it is a tragedy for Israeli Arabs. | |
| They have made great leaps in recent years. | |
| Israeli Arabs are actually more self-social and upwardly mobile than Israeli Jews per capita. | |
| Israeli Christian Arabs are more affluent and better educated per capita than Israeli Jews. | |
| And in recent elections, the Israeli Arab parties proved that they can't even make an Israeli government without Arab participation. | |
| They've become part of the Israeli political game. | |
| All this was actually very good news in the state of Israel. | |
| And in one night, in one night, it has been set back years, maybe irreversibly. | |
| That's what I was afraid of. | |
| It's got to be for you living in an Arab-Israeli city, Arab-Jewish city, whatever one wants to refer to it. | |
| It has to be disconcerting. | |
| It's depressing. | |
| Depressing. | |
| That's even better. | |
| Depressing more than disconcerting. | |
| Yes. | |
| It's sort of your thinking. | |
| So it's hopeless. | |
| I, Michael Oren, not a naive man, former ambassador to the United States, historian, world traveler, writer. | |
| And I'm thinking this whole time, look, we seem to be getting along really pretty well, and their advances are enormous, and then, poof, they try to burn down my synagogue and my restaurant. | |
| And, you know, you don't want to blame an entire population for, you know, for the ravages of several hundred radicals. | |
| You know, I have a green grocer down the street. | |
| It's where I buy all my groceries. | |
| It's from Mohammed. | |
| And Mohammed pulls me aside and says, don't let anybody pull you. | |
| You're the luckiest Arabs in the entire Middle East. | |
| No other Arab in the Middle East have what I have. | |
| They don't have my democracy. | |
| They don't have my security. | |
| They don't have my economy. | |
| He says, you know, something? | |
| I got criticism of this place, but I love the state of Israel. | |
| So he says to me, Mohammed the green grocer. | |
| You know, I don't think he's going to be out there burning cars and burning synagogues. | |
| And I don't want to tarnish Mohammed the Green Grocer with the rapaciousness of these other people. | |
| But it is still very depressing. | |
| God, is that true. | |
| I have a few more questions. |
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