Dennis Prager Show - Timeless Wisdom - The US and Israel: A Policy Debate

All Episodes

Previous Next

Nov. 24, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show

01:46:33

Timeless Wisdom - The US and Israel: A Policy Debate

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	November is National Family Caregivers Month.
	One in four Americans is stepping up to help older loved ones with everything from meals to bills.
	Family caregivers spend thousands out of their own pockets each year, and too many have to quit their jobs to keep providing care.
	Working families can't afford to wait.
	It's time to care for America's caregivers.
	Learn more at aarp.org/slash careforcaregivers.
	Paid for by AARP.
	Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
	Hear thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
	And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
	Good evening.
	Welcome to the very first Moscow speaker series entitled U.S.-Israel Relations: Consensus, Controversy, and Complacency.
	Tonight's program features three insightful observers on this vital subject.
	There is no region in the world today more important than the Middle East, and no relationship within that region than the relationship between the United States and Israel.
	So tonight's program is both timely and very important.
	Before we begin our program, I would like to take note of the passing today of Senator Arlen Spector.
	The United States has lost a great leader, and Israel has lost a true friend in Senator Specter.
	Zikranad Livracha, may his memory always be a source of blessing.
	The Jewish Federation is proud to be a sponsor of this evening's program together with Temple Sinai, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the Las Vegas Review Journal.
	Thank you to Rick Hollander, President of Temple Sinai, and all those who are responsible for organizing this evening's lecture.
	To Bob Brown, publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal, thank you for your generous support as our media sponsor.
	A special note of thanks to Jeff Moskow.
	A special note of thanks to Jeff for his vision and his generosity.
	It's Jeff's commitment to addressing critical issues and providing the resources, enabling our community to do so in a forum such as tonight.
	I look forward to many more lectures in the Moscow series in the future here on the campus at UNLV and throughout our community.
	And finally, I'd like to thank our host, UNLV, and President Neil Simatris for your support and for serving as our host.
	And now to introduce our panel, it's my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Neal Smatches.
	Thank you, Elliot, and welcome.
	It's a lovely Sunday evening, the best time of the year here in Las Vegas, and I imagine that this gives all of you an opportunity to stroll outside on a beautiful, beautiful evening.
	And we're so glad that you joined us.
	You know, last Tuesday, President Clinton gave a talk for our foundation, and so we've had quite a week.
	And at his talk, he said, one of the things that isn't happening in America is that we're not sitting down and discussing big things.
	We're not acting together.
	We're not solving problems the way we used to.
	And so it's a real delight for me to be able to welcome all of you here, to at least be able to hear what I hope will be a spirited dialogue about U.S.-Israel relationships.
	This is, to me, what universities should do.
	We should convene, and we should discuss, and we should work as a community to make things better.
	And so I hope you all are here in that spirit.
	I hope you'll all be informed, and I'm sure that the conversations that we have here, and these are just part of the conversations that we have at the university, will be edifying to all of you.
	I want to say just specially, and I know Elliot has already thanked him, but the UNLV Foundation is so very proud to host the Moscow Speaker Series.
	And Jeff, you're doing great, and we're really proud of this series, proud of you, and we wish you great health.
	This is something special.
	And I think everybody here, I just ask you to join in with me in a big round of applause, wishing both health and thanks to Jeff.
	Well, as most of you know, Joe Klein is one of the nation's most honored and respected political columnists.
	He's a regular contributor to Time magazine, which is so impressive.
	I once had my name in Time magazine, and my mother called me, and it was just the best thing ever.
	So you writing in it, I just can't imagine.
	He's written the best-selling novel, Primary Colors, which many of you probably saw as a movie.
	Hopefully, you read it as well.
	He spent over two decades covering the Middle East and has dealt with most of the key leaders in the region.
	He's a veteran of 10 presidential campaigns.
	How's this one going for you, Joe?
	Klein has been praised for his dogged reporting, a thorough and subtle grasp of the issues, and a clear-eyed, compelling style.
	He's the rare political junkie who loves the intricacy of policymaking, has extensive sources not only within the United States government, but throughout the world, and is at home as much in Damascus as he is in Des Moines.
	This evening, Joe has challenged the challenge of keeping our program on track and focused while questioning and probing our two incredible guest speakers.
	That's a formidable task, but one that he's uniquely qualified to handle.
	So, ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Joe Klein.
	Hi.
	Thank you, Mr. President.
	I'm going to bring out the panelists in just a second.
	Thank you very much.
	Who is that?
	We don't have an empty chair.
	Well, we do have three empty chairs.
	First of all, let me say how happy I am to be here, and I'll tell you a quick story.
	Back when Ed Koch was mayor of New York, he had a trivial stroke.
	He said it wasn't trivial to me, but they rushed him to the hospital, and right on his heels came Andrew Stein, who was the city council president, next in line to be mayor, if Koch couldn't perform the function.
	And so Ed Koch had his umbilical cord attached to all news radio all the time.
	And he heard Andrew Stein saying, you know, Stein went up to see him, and he came back downstairs, and he said, the mayor is fine.
	He's just speaking a little bit more slowly than usual.
	And Ed Koch heard this, and he sent his press secretary, George Ars, down to speak to us and said, the mayor wants you to know that he is fine and that he was speaking a little bit more slowly than usual.
	But he always speaks a little more slowly than usual when he's speaking to Andrew Stein.
	And for me, a crowd like this, I spend a lot of my time out in the rest of the country, and sometimes I feel I have to speak a little bit more slowly than usual, but this is home.
	And so it's really great to be here.
	I remember at one point I saw my pal Les Gelb, who was the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, introduce Yitzhak Rabin one day as saying, Yitzhak Rabin was born Sean O'Malley in Kansas City, Missouri.
	His parents changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin so he would have a future in Israeli politics.
	So I'm kind of tempted to do that.
	Avram Berg served many years as a tumbler at Grossinger's.
	Dennis Prager was a noted cosmetologist.
	But actually, these people don't need any introductions.
	Avram Berg is the head of the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy and an Israeli politician and peace activist of longstanding.
	Dennis Prager is a nationally renowned conservative talk show host and author.
	And why don't you guys come out?
	And I'll tell you what we're going to do.
	These are the days of Dennis.
	Avram.
	Speak slowly.
	You know, in terms of moderation, I think I'm going to be a little bit more active than Jim Lehrer.
	I kind of lead toward the.
	I'll be a bit passive than Joe Biden.
	I lean toward the Martha Radit School.
	Also, I've been covering these issues, not for 20, but for 30 years.
	I am that old.
	And I've covered, I think, every Israeli election and every Israeli war during that period.
	So I'll be a little bit more active.
	And we're going to divide this into three sections or pods in this gym.
	What was he talking about, pods?
	I mean, this is a really fraught time, as you know, as you well know, in the region and here at home.
	And there are three areas that we're going to discuss tonight.
	There are no ground rules.
	I will separate you guys if you start hammering each other like Howard Berman and his debate partner in Los Angeles a few days ago.
	But then after about an hour of this, we'll turn it over to you, and we will ask questions in the polite, time-honored, and very understated way.
	The Jews have been known to do so throughout history.
	The first area that we're going to talk about is the situation overall in the region.
	Over the last few years, we've seen momentous changes taking place in the Middle East.
	We've seen the Arab Spring.
	We've seen governments fall.
	We've seen dictators fall.
	We've seen Iran moving toward the greater enrichment of its uranium stocks and perhaps toward the activating a nuclear weapon.
	And we've seen the nations around Israel begin to collapse like Syria.
	And I would ask, I'd open this up by asking, well, let's start with Avram since she lived there.
	Of those three things, Iran, the instability caused by Arab Spring in general, and the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood now controls Egypt, and the chaos in Syria that may engulf the region.
	How do you rate those as problems?
	What's the most serious one that Israel faces now?
	And could you discuss them generally?
	And then, Dennis, you can come back on that.
	Thank you very much.
	Good evening.
	It's a pleasure being here.
	I take it that since it's Las Vegas, I have to gamble.
	Okay, but just being here is a gamble.
	Yeah, well, it's a risk.
	We used to ask my mother, Mam, what, are you an optimist or a pessimist?
	And she said, of course I'm an optimist.
	Today is much better than tomorrow.
	So I have a kind of a different approach to the threats, dangerous problems.
	I see opportunities.
	I mean, seeing everything as a shadow, seeing everything as a darkness, well, it's a way of life, but I live a different life.
	I just come here from Turkey, which was an amazing couple of days in a kind of Aduanist governmental think tank, speaking about the region, which was a different point of view.
	I mean, you have Muslims and Muslims from all over the place talking about what's going on there.
	And what you feel is what we see as a big threat, all of the sudden, maybe there is an opportunity there.
	Maybe the Turkish model, which is a kind of a very interesting one and developing one, they like to export it to Egypt.
	And all of a sudden, Egypt works in a kind of a very interesting democratic process.
	And imagine that the Middle East will have Turkey, Egypt, maybe Syria later, Tunisia and Libya, working under the Turkish model, which is economically very stable and promising.
	There is a democratic process.
	It's a different opening to the region.
	I see it as a window.
	Iran is no doubt a long-term issue, and still it is open for two different observations.
	The first one is you hear rumbles, you hear the elephants walking in the forest.
	It is not just the students and the green revolution of a couple of years ago now, it's the merchants of the bazaar.
	That's the hardcore economy who really say we're not happy with it.
	So it means that the international sanctions and the international pressure on Iran works.
	The second is, as an Israeli, I would like to be more reluctant than most of our political system.
	We do not have to jump to the head of the line.
	It should not become an Israeli issue.
	It is, and it should be, a world issue.
	It's an issue for the Muslim neighbors around Iran, from Pakistan on one hand to Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on the other hand.
	It's an issue for the Chinese and the Russians.
	It's an issue for the Europeans.
	It's an issue for the Americans.
	It is an issue for us.
	I don't like the way our political system across the board jump to the head of the line and said, it's ours, it's ours, it's ours.
	Let the world first do what the world has to do, and then we should move onwards.
	All in all, I will say that, yes, a Middle East without a nuclear armament is a better Middle East.
	Is it possible?
	There is a big question mark that is never debated and never discussed.
	And this is Israel who has a denied arsenal.
	It's the most official denied arsenal.
	I think it was President de Gaulle who once said nothing is official till denied.
	So, this was so many times.
	It was so many times denied.
	So, it's officially official.
	This arsenal was an asset for so many years.
	I'm not at all sure that for the next couple of decades, this nuclear Israeli-denied arsenal will be always an asset.
	Maybe it becomes a liability.
	Okay, Dennis, why don't you go ahead and then I'm going to come back?
	Because you really are optimistic, aren't you?
	Of course, I'm a utopian as well.
	And a left-winger.
	Yeah.
	Egypt is governed by a man who's recently demanded of the United States.
	In fact, the first thing that he said after he was elected, President Morsi, was that the United States should release the blind sheikh who was responsible for the first Twin Towers bombing.
	And these people fill me with less optimism than my distinguished colleague this evening.
	I have very little optimism with regard to the Middle East at this time.
	I think that Israel is surrounded by cultures that are largely benighted.
	The Arab intellectuals who released the United Nations report some years ago acknowledged that I think it was Greece that prints Greece, that prints more books translated from foreign languages than the entire Arab world from Morocco to the Gulf.
	Of course, if you say these things today, people call you Islamophobic, or I'm surprised we don't have the term Arabophobic, but somebody will undoubtedly come up with it to still voices that try to tell difficult things that exist in the world.
	An Israeli has really two choices: to wake up and deny reality and be optimistic, or to confront reality and be a bit sad.
	Most people prefer to be happy.
	Not all.
	I have written a book on happiness, and I do an hour a week on my radio show on happiness.
	I speak on happiness a great deal.
	There are people who prefer to be unhappy, but they're a small segment of the human population.
	Israelis are confronted with a terrible issue.
	And I think that I understand, I'm not opposed to it, so I'm not psychoanalyzing again my distinguished colleague this evening, but I understand the urge to believe that, gee, the people surrounding me really don't want to destroy me.
	It's a very desirable thing.
	You don't want your little girl or your little boy to wake up thinking that his neighbors want him dead, think that he is the child of apes and monkeys.
	And so there is a great yearning to find any bright spot that exists.
	I have that yearning too.
	I would love that to be.
	I have no great attachment to the permanent status of the West Bank as being part of Israel.
	But I do have a very deep desire to see Israel survive as a Jewish state.
	I interviewed in Ramallah last year, the chief spokesman of the Palestinian Authority.
	He actually denied to me, I have it recorded.
	I played it on my radio show.
	He denied that there is a Jewish people.
	There is no such thing as a Jewish people.
	Remember, Yasser Arafat said Jesus was not a Jew.
	Jesus was a Palestinian.
	And I have always, having written a book on anti-Semitism, I am well aware of Jesus being a very good litmus test to find pure anti-Semitism.
	When one denies the Jewishness of Jesus, one is engaged in anti-Semitism, whether it was a Christian who did it in the Middle Ages or a Muslim doing it now or Hitler who said that Jesus was an Aryan.
	This is what Israel is surrounded with.
	And so I'm not terribly optimistic.
	One day, perhaps, Arabs will decide that destroying Israel is not important, but rather building the Arab world.
	The day that Arabs decide that will be the greatest day in modern Arab history.
	The preoccupation with Israel, with a Jewish state the size of El Salvador, is the curse of modern Arab life.
	So we do have a different view on this.
	And one more thing, on the notion of it's ours.
	It's a certain irony here.
	I, for example, I speak to non-Jews most of my life through my radio and through my lecturing.
	Jewish life doesn't book me nearly as much as it used to because I'm a conservative and for much of Jewish life in reform and conservative synagogues, conservative Jews are not allowed to be invited.
	This is a fact of life, not an opinion.
	Less true than five years ago, Pamela.
	As true as five years ago.
	But I'll be happy.
	No, no, I'll be happy to discuss that with you.
	Just ask John Podhoritz when he's invited to, or any of the conservative Jews like myself.
	But that's a side issue, though not an insignificant one.
	We'll talk about American Jewry.
	Anyway, I tell non-Jews all the time, you are fools, and I use that language.
	You are fools, you non-Jews, if you think that the threat to Israel is just a Jewish or just an Israeli problem.
	That's exactly why 55 million people died in World War II, because you fools dismissed Hitler as just a Jewish problem.
	If you dismiss Ahmadinejad as just Israel's problem, you are repeating the error of the 1930s.
	Could I, let me just ask you one quick question, then I want to turn to Avram.
	Because we're not going to be politically correct here, and there is an Arab problem that needs to be discussed.
	But first, Dennis, you don't actually think that Ahmadinejad has any power, do you?
	Do I think that he personally has power?
	No, no, no, really, this is an important question.
	No, it's not an important question.
	Oh, of course it is.
	What matters.
	No, no, no.
	The leading Ayat Khomeini has power.
	The leaders of the Islamic Republic have power.
	If he is just a figurehead, it doesn't matter.
	They don't differ from his belief that the greatest mitzvah for an Iranian Shiite Muslim is to destroy Israel.
	Because, you know, it's always interesting to me how people talk about Ahmadinejad a lot as if he actually had power.
	He doesn't.
	The supreme leader does have power.
	And in fact, you realize also that on the nuclear issue, the supreme leader is, his views are unknown.
	The leadership of the Green Movement, all of whom I interviewed the last time I was in Iran, take a position that's more militant than Ahmadinejad does.
	They were against the negotiations, against the 20% deal.
	Ahmadinejad was in favor of it.
	So we're talking about real complexities here, and let's try and keep the Nazis out of it for a minute.
	No, no, no.
	The only reason I brought the Nazis in was to say what I tell non-Jews, that dismissing Jew haters as just the Jews' problem is a foolish, suicidal notion of non-Jews.
	That's all.
	That's the only reason I raise that issue.
	But I would make a distinction between the German military might, and this is a question I want to go back to Avram, because one thing you said that I thought was questionable is that you compared Egypt to Turkey.
	Now, Turkey, Turks are not Arabs.
	Iranians are not Arabs, they're Persians.
	And in Turkey, there is a history of governance, a history of integrity.
	It's a real country.
	I don't mean integrity in terms of honesty.
	I mean that it's a real country with real borders.
	It has an educational tradition, very much unlike the Arab states.
	And the people I know who really study the Arab lands and the Arab and Arab culture are very concerned about whether or not the traditions of education,
	rule of law, rights of women, and a lot of the other basic human rights that we have now seen are essential to creating democracies can come to exist in the Arab world.
	Now, what evidence do you have, Avram, for your optimism?
	Can I react to both or just to him?
	You can react to me.
	I was so many years in politics, so it makes no difference what you ask.
	I have my answers anyway.
	So just I'll try to combine them both.
	Mr. Prege, I listen to you very carefully, and I realize that it's much more comfortable to be a pessimist in America.
	Being a pessimist in Israel is a bit too pessimist, okay?
	Being a pessimist here, it's comfortable.
	So it's okay.
	But I don't buy this pessimism, neither by optimism.
	I read reality differently.
	At what sense?
	First, I don't like the equation of the Second World War, which is broadcasted massively from the current Israeli government and well echoed at the conservative circles of America, etc.
	By the way, I have a definition for you, apropos psychoanalyzing the self.
	I mean, I don't volunteer, but I offer you as a friend.
	You know who is a conservative, a liberal with a teenage daughter.
	Okay?
	So I have a couple of.
	Having said that, there's a lot of truth to that.
	But I don't know if you have daughters, I suspect you're not that much of a liberal, but nonetheless, but nonetheless, I don't like this equation because of two major reasons.
	The first one is when you come and say it's thirty-eight all over again.
	Is it?
	Did we have a state in 48?
	Did we have such an omnipotent power in thirty-eight?
	Did we have two hundred denied bombs in 38?
	Did we have the unequivocal support of the most important powers and superpowers in the world in thirty-eight?
	Did we have even the Catholic Church changing the dogma vis-a-vis the Jews in 38?
	The answer is no.
	And therefore it's not thirty-eight.
	And if you say we are thirty-eight, you actually say that the entire Zionist endeavour failed.
	And I say we did not.
	We have issues.
	We have challenges, easy, it is not, we have capabilities, it is possible.
	But to bring us back to the Holocaustic discourse and say Israel was, is and will be driving its strategy from the trauma, and therefore forever we should have a trauma strategy rather than trust strategy, that's an awful suggestion for a state.
	It's an awful suggestion for a people, either as a political analyst or a political leader.
	The second is Turkey and the Arab world, etc.
	We don't know, the jury is out.
	I mean, revolutions are taking longer than a year and a half.
	So you look into it.
	You look into it and you say, listen, what do I prefer?
	Do I prefer Israel and America to continue their love affair with tyrannies in the region because it's good and convenient and therefore we buy our convenience at the price of oppression of other people around us?
	Or do we prefer to have difficult but decent relations with our neighbors that part of them and some of them really fought for liberation?
	I didn't say that Egypt and Turkey are the same, but I know that there is a motivation in Turkey and there is a readiness in Egypt in certain parts to explore potential models for democracies in the Middle East which are not American modal democracies.
	America tried with its conservative, right-wing Republican presidency of George W. Bush to impose the beauty of American democracy on Iraq top-down and failed because democracies are growing bottom-up and there are seeds there and are growing and we have to help them and we have to communicate with them.
	If you come with power and aggression and say that's the only model in the world, maybe it will not work.
	There are other models and the region as well as other regions outside of the Middle East see the world as a police-centered world rather than American-centered one or Western-centered one.
	And we have to listen to it rather than patronizing it.
	And when I say all of this together, I will say the follows.
	For me, there are two discussions.
	The first is about the Israeli strategy.
	I mean, it's very interesting.
	You ask, what do you say about what is your taking about what's going on in the Middle East?
	And immediately we speak about Israel.
	The Middle East is not just about Israel.
	It's about so many other things for the West, for the locals, for the East, for whatever it is.
	The first is about Israel.
	When I ask you, Joel, tell me, what's the security, what's the strategy of the state of Israel?
	You say bombs and submarines and planes and paratroopers and whatever.
	And I would say, no, That's not a strategy.
	These are tools.
	Did Israel ever have publicly or governmentally level any discussion about its strategy towards the Middle East, i.e., do we want to have a crusades philosophy which is high walls around us and totally separated from the area and that's it?
	Or do we want to integrate in the region?
	And what are the prices for each?
	And what are the tools you need for each?
	And as long as this discussion doesn't happen and strategy is military-only consideration, the question is a lame question.
	Last but not least, last but not least, we have to get used to the idea that maybe that within the next decade Israel will not be the only democracy in the Middle East.
	And we have to get used to the idea that as for now, as much as Israel within the borders of the Green Line is a fantastic democracy, Israel occupies between the Jordan and the Mediterranean the same amount of people, directly and indirectly, that voted under our occupation in the last 45 years less time technically than individuals in Damascus.
	Keep it in mind when you speak about being an optimist or a pessimist, for how long can you maintain and support and continue with this kind of an argument when it is a hollow one because you have such an awful problem in the midst of your being.
	You're making me feel a little bit like Jim Lehrer.
	I'll shut up.
	Let's separate these three.
	Dennis, I'll let you have a rebuttal and then let's drill down on each one of these three problems.
	A very interesting thing Avrenburg here said, it's easy to be pessimistic in America.
	What you did was, it seems to me, entirely confirm my point about how tough it is to be pessimistic in Israel.
	That was my whole point.
	And therefore, you don't want to be pessimistic.
	You don't want your children to grow up that way.
	So you have what I believe is a false optimism.
	But your comment only confirmed for me, not for me, confirmed in terms of logic what I said.
	I will add that I, in any event, whether it's easy or difficult to be a pessimist in America, I'd like to just say my own policy my entire life and my entire life has been very active in Jewish life.
	I have never believed that American Jews should tell Israel what to do.
	And I'm jumping the gun in the third point.
	Okay, all right, then I won't jump the gun.
	I'll just say that I hold that for whether there was a left-wing or a right-wing prime minister.
	If I want to influence Israeli policy, I should make Aliyah.
	But I will leave that for now.
	The entire Zionist endeavor failed if Israel is in danger of being destroyed.
	It's a non-sequitur to me.
	I never understood the Zionist endeavor, and I am sure you don't, as solely that Israel can survive, that a Jewish state can survive no matter who attacks it with what weapon.
	The Zionist enterprise was the ingathering of the Jewish people to have one place on earth where they determined their own fate and where non-Jews did not.
	That's what I understood as the Zionist enterprise.
	You offered a very interesting duality, either a trust strategy or a trauma strategy.
	I don't believe in either.
	I don't trust, and I don't operate from trauma.
	I think I try to operate from reality.
	I prefer a reality strategy to either a trauma strategy or a trust strategy.
	As regards high walls, sometimes high walls save lives.
	An American poet said, good fences make good neighbors, or high fences make good neighbors.
	Unfortunately, while any normal person, Jew or not, would love there not to need to be a barrier, it has saved Israeli lives, and that is not inconsequential to me.
	I do not want a Middle East without nuclear weapons.
	I want the Middle East where only Israel has nuclear weapons.
	And finally, the notion of America failing in Iraq because you cannot impose democracy top-down.
	Yes, you can, and we did.
	phenomenally successfully in Japan and in Germany.
	The reason that we were not able to impose democracy in Iraq is because of Arab values, not because of American values.
	Let me stop you right there because this raises a really important question.
	And to my mind, this is the most important question coming out of Arab Spring.
	The reason why we were able to help create a democracy in Germany and Japan is that they were discrete actual places.
	There was always a Germany.
	There was always a Japan.
	What we have in the Middle East is a series of countries that aren't really countries.
	We have a series of countries whose borders were drawn by Europeans in 1918 at the end of the First World War.
	And, you know, they were slapped together.
	Iraq was Winston Churchill's invention.
	He created it out of three satrapies, provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
	Now we have in Syria a situation where we have a minority sect ruling, a majority, 80% Sunni, and you have Kurds up in the north.
	And when I interviewed Assad six years ago, he said to me at the time, he said, I'm really worried about what's happening in Iraq because the Kurdish area of Iraq has become semi-independent.
	And I'm afraid that my Kurds, you know, my Kurds, are going to go join those guys.
	And so it seems to me that the immediate question isn't whether we can create democracies in fictional countries, but how this is going to actually shake out in the end.
	Because we're at a point now, I think, Dennis, don't you think that these people are going to create their own countries and their own borders, and it's going to be done without the imposition of Western neo-colonial power?
	And how should we, how do you think the United States should respond to these new realities?
	Isn't the fact of Kurdistan more real than the fact of Jordan?
	Yes, but I'm not.
	Your points are.
	The facts are accurate, but the conclusions are different than mine.
	If the Middle East were divided into completely homogeneous groups, Alawites have a strip of land the size of New Jersey, Shiites have a strip of land the size of Texas, Sunnis have a size of land of Alaska, nobody has anybody else, it wouldn't be one whit different.
	Iran is largely homogeneous and has no liberty.
	It's a values question.
	And tragically, Islam has not created a world of liberty.
	It never did.
	And it hasn't today.
	I believe Islam can be reformed.
	But in its current state, anyone who wants a Sharia-based state, Whether he is Sunni or Shiite, is anti-liberty.
	And so, my position is, my question is, how, given that, and I'm going to ask Avram for his point of view on this as well, given that, given these new and changing realities, what should be the United States' posture toward these places?
	Should we continue to arm Egypt?
	Should we continue to, you know, is the President doing the right thing by standing back in Syria and waiting to see how it shakes out?
	What can we do since clearly, in their minds, the era of us imposing our views and our values on the region is over?
	Well, I did want Avram to respond because I feel I had the last two, but since you're posing it to me, I will just say that when the United States was supportive of the dictatorship of the Shah, Iranians lived better.
	They had more freedom.
	Women had more rights.
	There was a better world for the average Iranian.
	So this equation of America with a non-democratically elected person in any given place as equals bad has not been morally true.
	I wish it were morally true.
	Then all we have to say is we will leave all the not perfectly elected leaders we support and those countries will be better.
	Sometimes it may be true, sometimes it isn't.
	In Iran, it was not true.
	It is a tragedy that, to the extent that we could, and I'm not sure we could stop it, but to the extent that we could have stopped it, it is a tragedy for the Iranian people first and foremost that we allowed the Shah to fall to the medieval barbarians who run Iran today.
	Avram, this is really interesting, by the way.
	We have a perfect pessimist and a perfect optimist.
	Avram, what do you think that the United States can do?
	And do you agree with me that we're about to see some reshuffling of the country lines and the roster of players in the region?
	I wish the issue was just, okay, a policy decision tomorrow morning and then we go immediately to implement it, because it sounds that we have a deeper issue here.
	I mean, if I listen with an innocent ear to Dennis's introduction, it sounds bad.
	The generalization.
	Whenever it goes to generalizations, I remember others who were generalized in terms like these that are incapable of this and incapable of that, and people in the audience applauded and where it led us.
	I listened to more fine-tunes.
	And I will say as follows: it was very difficult and still difficult to certain quarters of Christianity to accept democracy.
	When I listen to certain quarters of religious, evangelical, Christian, messianic fundamentalists in America and their attitude toward democracy and certain values that were supported by Dennis just a minute ago, I say they have no clue what democracy is all about.
	Give me the Turkish one.
	Give me the Egyptian one in the Tahrir Square rather than some of the radio shows and the preachers and the snake dancers around.
	When I listen, when I know, and this is something I know a little bit more, how difficult it was and ease for Judaism and certain quarters within Judaism to merge into democracy, it's a painful, long schlep.
	I mean, when you go to Williamsburg, when you go to Monsieur, when you go to Nebrat, when you read the swastikas in Mehsharim in Jerusalem, when you see women exclusion in Beit Shemesh, we have issues.
	And these people are sitting in the government.
	These people decide for you who is a Jew.
	These people do not accept your marriages here in America because they are reform and conservative one.
	In the only democracy in the Middle East.
	So it's not an issue about bad-mouthing us or bad-mouthing them.
	It is a different issue.
	When Huntington came after the war came down in Berlin and came with the concept of the clash of civilizations, I felt that something is wrong there.
	It is not all of us, Westerners, versus all of them Muslims, it is some of us versus some of them.
	There is a clash of civilization, but the clash is between the civilization of democracy and the civilization of theocracy.
	And it happens within Judaism, within Christianity, and within Islam.
	And there are democratic Muslims, and there are fundamentalist Jews and the undemocratic Christians.
	So the question is not immediately to stand all of us versus all of them, but to find kind of alliances and cooperations and understandings and having a lot of patience of perseverance for the press for the for the process to take off.
	And I've no doubt, I mean, I talked to some of my friends in Egypt, to many of my friends in North Africa, of course, in the West Bank and other places.
	And I have the feeling, and it's nothing more than the interviews that you two have done.
	I simply don't talk to these high-up people.
	I talk to Amkha.
	And my feeling is that once the genie of freedom is out of the bottle, nobody will be able to put it back.
	That's the whole story.
	This is what happened in Tahrir Square.
	This is what happening nowadays in Ramallah with all the difficulties.
	Now, even if you look at it from a practical point of view, America should have some kind of a backbone.
	I mean, at least one part of it.
	It was the United States of America, Georges Bush, United States of America, who imposes elections in the West Bank.
	And once Hamas was elected, they said, we don't accept it.
	In a very democratic way, I mean, at least as democratic as Florida of a couple of years ago.
	Okay?
	I mean, if you really want to introduce a notion of election and one person, one vote, don't cut it off a minute after.
	And even now, Israel indirectly deals with the Hamas, negotiates with the Hamas, cooperates with the Hamas, and coordinates with the Hamas.
	Because in the Middle East, today's extremist is tomorrow's moderate.
	So the question is how you talk with whom and not how you boycott with whom and how you generalize it in such a way that you feel so comfortable in the comfort zone of like me people only and all the rest of them do not do not exist.
	And I understand Denis's policies.
	Yes, I want to be the only one with a nuclear toy in the Middle East.
	And whomever will have next the potential, I will bomb them all.
	Turkey and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan, I will bomb them all.
	Come on, what kind of a real politic is this one?
	I mean, how can you leave?
	How can you advise a government?
	How can you advise a policy like this?
	A policy should be what is the long-term existence in the region, and a real patriot is not a one who gives me a patriot missile.
	A real patriot is the one who helps me to help myself to have a long-term sustainable existence.
	And I'll tell you something.
	There was an international survey done recently.
	The Israelis are the 14th in the world in the measure of happiness in the world.
	The 14th nation in the world in the measure of happiness.
	The last one to believe that their country will be there in 50 years' time.
	So today I'm very happy.
	Tomorrow, Ove.
	And I say a real patriot is the one who helps me to be there 50 years' time rather than having a quick buckup of happiness today with mitzvahs and weapons and hating them all.
	Can I ask, you know, this has been a really wonderful general conversation.
	But I want to ask a very specific question before we go on to the Middle East peace process.
	What do each of you think about President Obama's policy toward Iran?
	Do you think it is succeeding?
	Do you think it's insufficient?
	And if you think it's insufficient, what do you think we should be doing?
	Dennis?
	I first have to respond to just one point.
	I want you to be in charge.
	I want you to feel in charge.
	I do.
	But I'm going to use a very sharp word, and I mean it literally.
	You heard a libel, L-I-B-E-L.
	And as one who has spent much of my life fighting anti-Semitism and writing about the blood libel against the Jews in the Middle Ages, where Jews would kill Christian children and use their blood for matzah, you heard a libel of Christians virtually on the same level.
	And I accuse you of anti-Christian bigotry and ignorance.
	And in stating that evangelical Christians are not for democracy, that, sir, is a lie.
	And if you can back it up, I want you to back it up, or, because I don't want to put you on the spot, you said you know more about Israel, and I share your critique of much of Haredi life.
	I think that there are in our group true theocrats.
	I agree with you.
	Not among Christians.
	It was evangelical Christians, what we now call evangelical Christians, who founded the greatest free country in the world, the United States of America.
	It is central to Christian theology, central to American Protestant theology, that you separate church and state.
	They are adamant about it and have been since the founding of this country.
	So if you would like to offer proof otherwise, go ahead.
	Now or later.
	Now.
	Because I accused you of a libel against America's evangelical community.
	First, I'm happy that we agree that some of the Jews are not perfect.
	Okay, I mean, it's a good thing.
	Now, the second is, I also accept immediately, automatically, when somebody accuses me or describes me as an ignorant, I accept it.
	I mean, for sure, there are more I don't know than I know.
	But somebody who looks at even the political reality of America that has a constitutional, a constitutional definition of a wall of separation between church and state, and you look how this wall becomes lower and lower in the last couple of decades, and you see how the separation generalization I love it.
	Let me make one correction, Dennis.
	The United States of America was not founded by evangelicals.
	Such born-again Christians did not exist 2003 years ago.
	It was founded by people who believed in the European Enlightenment.
	Some of them, like Thomas Jefferson, were just barely Christian.
	Some of them were deists.
	Some of them were just Gnostics.
	And some of them were agnostic.
	But what Avram was talking about is what Avram was talking about was the particularly American form of evangelical Christianity that began to develop in the burntover section of New York in the 1820s, and there followed a series of revivals, but really became a coherent political movement after the Roe v. Wade decision.
	That's a different form of Christianity than we've seen before.
	They tend to teach Revelation rather than the Beatitudes.
	And so I find them kind of weird when it comes to Christianity.
	Well, wait, wait, wait.
	No religion has any monopoly weirdness.
	No, I just want to say that.
	We have at least as much weirdness in Judaism as Christians have in Christianity and Muslims.
	It is not the point at all.
	Your point was that evangelical Christians are anti-democratic.
	You have given no example because there is no such example.
	It's a calumny and a libel unless you provide an example.
	I will drop it if you say, let's leave it.
	I don't want to make a big deal, but it is a big deal if it is not answered.
	Let's drop it.
	I would expect a Jew to defend Judaism.
	Let's drop it.
	No.
	Let's drop it.
	I want an answer.
	Give an example of where some of you hate evangelicals.
	You're bigots.
	I want to know.
	And it is.
	It's a bigotry.
	It's okay to differ with them.
	It is not okay to lie about them.
	All right?
	Hold on.
	We who have been lied about should never lie about other religious groups.
	Dennis.
	Dennis, you've made your point extremely eloquently.
	Fair enough.
	Avram, do you have a response?
	Because I'd really like to go to the Obama administration's policy on Iran.
	I think the audience would like to hear about this too.
	So, Avram, yeah?
	I'll give just a short one.
	I mean, I don't know why.
	I mean, I'm too tired to get angry, but at least jet-legged.
	I meet a lot of groups of whatever school of thought they're coming from, of Christian evangelicals.
	And listen, I never made the generalization, not even this evening.
	I said some off and some are there.
	And I see the cooperation, the existential, eschatological, messianic, political, and finance cooperation between extreme right religious Christian elements and extreme right religious nationalist settlers in Israel.
	How they finance them, how they support them politically, how they enable them to actually perpetuate the occupation with means of theology and means of finance.
	And it all drawn as if from the shared biblical heritage.
	If this is what is being drawn from the shared biblical heritage, it is not democratic, it's fundamentalist, and if you ask me, it's not even human.
	Humanistic, I'm sorry.
	Okay, we're going to let it drop there.
	But I think that as the moderator, I have to say that you haven't provided an answer about American evangelicals and democracy and comparing Jewish settlers with American evangelicals, kind of like apples and freight trains.
	So they're coming.
	We'll get to the settlers in a minute or two.
	Let me just go back to Obama in Iran.
	Dennis.
	Yeah.
	Dennis, what should Obama do about Iran?
	Has his policy been successful?
	Has his policy been successful?
	Those are two questions.
	And what should he do if it hasn't?
	And what would you do if it wasn't?
	We're getting a lot more questions.
	I mean, I really feel I have to give you direction because it's been a there are two things that I wish he had done differently.
	One, I wish that he had supported the Green Revolution from the outset.
	And no one can argue that he did.
	People argue that he waited a sufficient amount of time.
	Others say he waited too long.
	I think he waited too long.
	The United States of America should be known for a love of liberty.
	And if there is any chance of the removal of this terrible genocidal regime in Iran from within, that is something we should be pushing.
	Wait a minute, they've committed genocide where?
	No, no, the genocide desiring.
	I should have added the word desiring because they wish to destroy Israel.
	Genocide, you know, the clown up front who is uses loose words.
	No, no, this is not.
	No, Okay, the destruction of Israel.
	If we call what has happened in Darfur genocide, and that is a UN word, then I think that if millions of Israeli Jews were killed, then you can use the word.
	But I don't want to get fixated on the word.
	If you prefer mass murder, can we go back to the pressure?
	Be that as it may.
	I will.
	Have you seen that?
	Because the sanctions were weak.
	Okay, so the sanctions.
	I think that's the only thing for real right now.
	I want you to address those.
	Yes, well, no, no, you asked me if I thought his policy was good.
	I think that he should have supported the Green Revolution.
	I think there needs to be a radio-free Iran, just as there was a radio-free Europe.
	I think we should be bombarding Iran with other messages, with counter-messages.
	I'm not sure that you would even oppose that.
	I'm not speaking for you, obviously, but I don't know if we would even have a difference.
	Hey, Dennis, you ever hear of BBC Persia?
	Yes.
	Okay, don't start me on the BBC, okay?
	No, no, no, no, but BBC Persia...
	All right, if BBC Persia is functioning as a radio, you asked what America should do.
	BBC is not run by America.
	So I'm answering on behalf of the voice of America is not the powerful voice for liberty that it once was.
	And in any event, we should have supported the Green Revolution.
	We should be doing everything to undermine the regime from within.
	That is possible to be done.
	I'm sorry?
	Don't you think we are?
	I don't think we are.
	You heard of Stuxnet, right?
	Yes, but Stuxnet was Israeli and we think American.
	Nobody has ever assumed responsibility.
	From my sources, both Israeli and Americans say that on the No, no, no, no.
	You've got to let me finish here, occasionally.
	That the level of intelligence cooperation between the United States and Israel right now is unprecedented.
	It isn't just Stuxnet folks.
	There are other computer viruses.
	There are even viruses that enable us to be inside their computers so we will know if they ever decide to actually start building a bomb.
	And just from a fact-based perspective, I was in Iran during the Green Revolution.
	It was the first time in 20 years I had a run from the cops, the besieged in this case.
	And let me say to you this: that of those million people in the streets, along with me, most of them have very mixed feelings about the United States.
	They believe that we provided the chemical precursors for the mustard gas that Saddam Hussein used to create 100,000 of the 1 million casualties that Iran took during that war.
	Rockets rained down on Iran.
	The other thing is this: that in Iran, there's a proud history and a real paranoia about Western involvement.
	And if I can promise you, if the president had spoken up passionately at that point, it would have given the Supreme Leader leave to consider all the people in the streets traitors and kill them in droves.
	And so this was an act of prudence, sort of like George H.W. Bush not going to the Berlin Wall because he didn't want to rub the Russians' nose in it.
	He wanted to make a deal for United Germany.
	Now, I asked you about the sanctions.
	You think they're working?
	Well, I don't have a good answer on whether they're working.
	And by the way, folks, your comments were right on.
	I think that there is a lot of ambivalence in Iran vis-a-vis the United States.
	And I think that part of the reason is what you said.
	And as Kissinger said at the time, unfortunately, when Iran fought Iraq, they should both lose.
	It would be like Stalin fighting Hitler, and who do you root for?
	I mean, in the final analysis.
	You know, really, I can't.
	No, no, no, no, you can't.
	You can't tell me what analogies I can't use.
	No, no, no, but you don't have to use them, but I'm allowed to use them.
	When massive evil fights massive evil, I am using the example of massive evil fighting massive evil that most people.
	I think that the people who went into the streets in Tehran on the night of 9-11 out of sympathy for Arab dead are not massive evil.
	They're just people.
	The mass of people in both these countries are just people.
	I've accepted the people.
	And so very.
	Wait, the massive Russians were not evil and the massive German regime.
	No, but you want to do war.
	That's a pointless point.
	The regimes do evil.
	The people who are not evil is irrelevant.
	Why would you root for war, period?
	Why would I root for war, period?
	Because when you because I'll tell you why, because sometimes, unlike the bumper sticker, sometimes, tragically, in this very, very difficult world we live in, where evil can triumph, war is the answer.
	Tragically.
	I wish it weren't.
	Because Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers, not peace activists.
	Okay?
	That's why.
	And therefore, sometimes war is a good thing.
	I don't understand the question.
	And I'd agree with you.
	But in that case, what was accomplished by that war?
	The only thing that was accomplished by that war was that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, and millions of soldiers on both sides were wounded or chemical victims of the war.
	It did nothing to advance the course of humanity or the cause of freedom.
	But you and I are now debating, and I want to get back to Avram.
	What's your position?
	I enjoy it.
	I mean, I wish you both to lose.
	Okay.
	Avram, what should be the U.S. policy on Iran?
	And do you think what Obama is doing is working?
	I agree with them.
	It's about the Green Revolution.
	The potential was out there in the street, and there should be a better communication between the West and it.
	Just a kind of anecdotal anecdote.
	I have a couple of friends, I can say many, let's say, two dozens of friends who are Iranians in exile, that their partners in life with their husbands and wife are commuting.
	So three of them, four of them, were in the streets during the Green Revolution, and we tweeted each other.
	And it was an amazing experience to hear from them in the street.
	As you said, they're human beings.
	They're friends of mine when it's outside of that.
	We're going there, we're going there, we are hopeful.
	Tell your political system to say this is to say that.
	And eventually it was a cynical realpolitik all over, and it didn't work.
	So I really agree that it should have been supported much more massively now that, as I mentioned earlier, the merchants of the traders and the merchants of the bazaar are already joining forces with the economy.
	There is a new potential.
	I hope we won't miss it.
	Whom should we not miss?
	We should not miss the younger generation.
	I mean, Iran is not just the Shia.
	There are many minorities.
	And Iran is a very dual reality.
	In Riyan, in Iran, in Tehran, you can find alcohol online cheaper than in Tel Aviv.
	I mean, that's a fact of life.
	I mean, you have.
	I know.
	When you go to the middle of the morning.
	And you have.
	It's a contradicting reality.
	And the one thing to pay attention to, or one of the things to pay attention to, there was an interview given in Haaretz a couple of weeks ago with Ephraim Halevi, the former head of the Israeli Mossad.
	And he said Iran has a lot to do with its history, and we should dignify it.
	Iran looks for its status in the region and its position in the world.
	Don't humilate it.
	Respect it and invite it into the conversation.
	And he is not a kind of a no-goodnik like me.
	I mean, he was the head of the Mossad.
	And having said that, we come to Obama.
	I know the enthusiasm of wars.
	I heard people so happy about going out to wars in Israel, in Europe, over here.
	The first day of the war is a very exciting one.
	The last one is a little bit.
	I don't remember many wars that ended up so good.
	And as I think I'm the only one, maybe I'm the only one on this panel who participated in few, and my children do a little bit of it.
	I'll be a little bit more reluctant when I use the tool of war.
	Leave it for last, and even then be very careful.
	Now, what I expect, what I expect President Obama to do is to redo and accompany with deeds his Cairo speech.
	The Cairo speech was a fantastic opening, and then nobody walked through the door.
	And it's about time if he will be re-elected, if and when he will be re-elected, to reopen the whole issue of America and the non-American realities.
	One of them is Iran.
	One of them is to address the street in Iran and invite it differently as we expected him to do at the Green Revolution, and then to accompany this with deeds.
	As for the sanctions, it looks like they work.
	As for the hidden world that all you know about, I only read about it in the paper, so it's not hidden anymore.
	So what do I know?
	We're going on here.
	Let me ask two let me combine two questions because I would like to have at least a little time for QA and we've been going on.
	But let me ask you in general about the peace process.
	Process you have, peace we do.
	But the question is: is it too late for a two-state solution?
	Number one, I'll go to Avram first with this.
	And number two, what should America's role be in this process?
	And question three is.
	How many is two?
	Listen, I'm Jewish.
	Come on.
	It's this kind of two.
	Okay.
	And the third question I think is inherent in the second, and it's the one that Dennis really wants to talk about, and that is what should be the role of American Jewry in this absolutely fraught situation.
	I'll go for the first two, and then maybe I'll agree or rebound or rebuttal about Dennis's third one.
	For years, I felt that since the horns of both sides, the Israeli and Palestinians, are so locked, we need an external responsible adult to come and to get involved.
	I don't see any, in the near future, any responsible adult ready to walk into the region, neither the Europeans nor the Americans.
	So it's about us.
	So what is it about us?
	The formula of the two-state solution, it's not an eternal one.
	It is not a one to stay there forever.
	And my feeling is that its days are numbered.
	Some say it expired already.
	To be replaced by what?
	That's a very good question.
	Chaos, the continuation of the ongoing status quo, occupation, discrimination, one-state solution with discrimination against 50% of the population like we have today, or a one-state solution or federation or control.
	I don't know.
	But not a two-state solution because it looks like there is no readiness to go about it, and it will not wait there forever.
	Having said that, there is one consideration that should be the Israeli consideration.
	I take it that many of you have been to the region and you know how you eat falafel in the region.
	When I was a little boy, you gave five shekels to the falafel vendor and gave you a pita falafel and done deal some balls into it, some salad, some tahina, go away.
	Boy, next one, please.
	Today, it's a free market.
	It's a Milton Friedman of the Falafel.
	So you have a free salad bar, and everybody loads whatever he can into the pita.
	Okay, now I'm an Israeli.
	I'm not a sucker.
	It's for free.
	I put a heap like this, ten times the size of the pita.
	I don't care that half of it is on the floor as long as it's for free.
	Now, every Israeli would like to have three falafel balls into his pizza or her pizza, his pita.
	I'd like to have the greater land, the big biblical promise, the greater land of Israel, for me and for me only.
	I'd like to have a total, absolute, comprehensive democracy, and I would like to preserve the Jewish nature and mainly the Jewish majority of the state of Israel.
	Now, it doesn't work.
	If you want to have a total democracy, you either have to give up on the greater land of Israel or to give up about the Jewish character of the State of Israel.
	If you want to keep the Greater Land of Israel, you have to give up either democracy or the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.
	So, strategically speaking, we have to give up one Falafel bull.
	Which one will it be?
	Which one will it be?
	For many years, Israeli leaders from right and from left, I mean, right, it started with Menachem Begin, and they came David, who understood that he has to do something about the national rights of the Palestinians, of the land of Israel, continued with Shamir In Madrid and ended up in Oslo, Oslo and all of its offsprings, said we give up the Greater Land of Israel in order that within the Green Line,
	we should have a good, solid democracy, Jewish majority with a Jewish character.
	In the last couple of years under Netanyahu's government, it looks like the Greater Land of Israel has a higher value than all the others.
	And therefore, you see a de facto annexation and a de facto expansion of the presence of Israel at the West Bank, so much so, and I don't know why it passed so unnoticed.
	Recently, I read somewhere that 16 intelligence organizations of the American intelligence community issued a report about the post-existence of the State of Israel in the Middle East.
	In the year 2020, in 20 years' time or whatever, among the things they mentioned that would bring about the disappearance of the State of Israel is the 700, I take it, including Jerusalem, settlers in the occupied territories.
	And it opens up with a statement by no other than a conservative like Henry Kissinger, who says Israel will not be around in the year 2022.
	This is a wow.
	I don't understand why strategically and politically and existentially nobody paid attention to it, but this is the issue.
	It's the very existence of the State of Israel in the eyes of its own citizens, in the eyes of the region, and in the eyes of the Americans, which is the backbone of Israel.
	So the future of the peace process depends a lot about the understanding of the Israeli masses as well as the Israeli leadership.
	What is the real key or highway to a sustainable long-term Israel in the region?
	If we don't pay attention to it, we just continue as is, it's the end of the state of Israel the way we know it.
	What would replace it?
	The jury is out.
	Dennis?
	It will probably surprise many of you, and perhaps you certainly, I largely agree.
	I think I want a Jewish state and I want a democracy, and I have no desire for a Jewish state to have half of its population people who are not Jewish, who have no intention of assimilating into that state as people assimilate into the United States and take on an American identity.
	The difference between us is not in what we want in this regard.
	I would like two states.
	It's who we blame.
	That's our difference, I think.
	I blame the Palestinians, and you blame Israel, or you blame both.
	I blame the Palestinians, 99%.
	They were given the chance to have their own state and decided that it was preferable to blow up Jewish children in pizza parlors.
	That is from Bill Clinton, not a conservative.
	Let's go on, Dennis, to your concerns about America's role in this process.
	If you believe that there should be a two-state solution and that there should be a peace process, what role do we play?
	And let me ask you: what role does the U.S. government play, and what role should American Jews play?
	Okay.
	The United States should play one role, in my opinion, and that is to make it clear that it will not allow Israel to be destroyed.
	That is the greatest role.
	That, ironically, is the only possible role America can play, in my opinion, to actually further peace if there is any chance.
	Because the moment there is a perception of a weakening of America's support for Israel, you invite the very thing none of us here, left or right, wants.
	So, beyond that, it is for the two parties to get together and make peace.
	And if they can't, then they can't.
	And you go on.
	All of my life, I am now, I find this hard to believe, but I am now 64 years old.
	All of my life, I have heard Israel has a limited time to have peace and a second state, certainly since 73, if not even 67 in some quarters, but certainly 73.
	And it has never turned out that way.
	I'm not saying it isn't true.
	I wish tomorrow that the Palestinians awakened and said, this is ridiculous.
	The Quran itself recognizes Jerusalem.
	It recognizes itself that there is a Jewish people and that there is a Jewish land.
	We're crazy preoccupying ourselves.
	We could have a federation with Israel and we could become the European Union of the Middle East.
	Although that's a poor analogy today, but still.
	I wish that they did.
	But they're telling me, and they would even tell you, there is no Jewish people.
	They don't believe it.
	There is only a Jewish religion.
	There is no Jewish people.
	We have no roots there.
	They really believe that.
	I debated as a student, a junior in England, junior year in college.
	I was in a university in England.
	And I debated a Jordanian consul.
	And I'll never forget, and it's never changed.
	Whenever I have debated pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab spokesman, it's been the same thing since then.
	And that year was, that was 1969-70, before the 73 war.
	And I looked at the audience, all of whom basically not Jewish at the University of Leeds in England, and I said, here's the difference.
	I and virtually every Jew I know, American, British, or Israeli, recognize that the Palestinians have a right to their own state and have a history in this area.
	They don't believe we have a right to a Jewish state.
	Am I right or wrong, Consul General?
	And that ended the debate.
	I won the debate.
	I won all the debates against Arab spokesmen because it's easy to win the debate.
	They don't believe we belong there.
	We believe they do belong there.
	And until you have that symmetry, not America, not Russia, not China, not El Salvador can do a damn thing about it.
	I have some.
	I have some.
	All right.
	Aram, you can respond to that.
	And then I really want to go to questions from the United States.
	As for El Salvador, listen, listen.
	I take it that if I like to take your previous methodology, I will say somebody will sue you because you say as if all of them say there is no such a thing like a Jewish people.
	So let me at least out of them cut off a group.
	I just come here.
	I told you I was in Istanbul.
	That was the beginning.
	I spent the weekend in Vienna.
	I participated there in a very interesting, maybe the only one now in the realm of the Israeli and Palestinian group exploring together various things that we discuss here today.
	And the most fundamental one, including the resolutions we are working on, it's not a political, it's a more, I would say, metapolitical thing, is the total recognition of why they're getting wider and wider quarters among the Palestinians, that the Jews are there to stay, there is a right for the Jewish state, there is a right of the Jewish people, and here is our rights.
	And there should be a conversation of rights rather than a conversation of guilt and accusations and generalizations.
	So very soon you might find yourself empty-handed in these debates of yours because there is a growing segment of the younger generation of the Palestinian people.
	Okay, I hope you're right.
	I hope you're right.
	I don't want to win those debates.
	No, no, no.
	I want you to win every debate.
	It makes me stronger when you win debates.
	No, no, it doesn't.
	The second one is: you ask about the American role.
	I'll tell you what is my concern.
	And I take it that the applauders in this room will not like it very much.
	In the last couple of years, because of the politics of the state of Israel and the Israeli government, Israel is becoming less and less bipartisan issue in America and become a very political.
	And if we shall continue like this, it will be one-sided issue only.
	It will belong to the Republicans only, and all the rest of them will go wherever they go.
	The fact, the way my prime minister gets involved and steers the American politics and the American presidential election, maybe it's good for America, or maybe it's good for one of the candidates.
	It's bad for the case for America unequivocally, for both sides of the aisle, to support this Israel, to leave Israel beyond and above any political controversy within America.
	And I feel this deteriorates.
	The second is what should be the role of America.
	The role of America should stop one day to say we are here to ensure that Israel will not be erased, etc., because it's not going to be erased.
	It's a strong, viable, it's unbelievable how strong Israel is.
	Unbelievable.
	This is not the issue.
	The issue is the quality of the existence in the Middle East.
	So the role of America is not about the mere physical existence.
	For this, we don't need it so much the way it was eloquently expressed by Dennis here, but to say, Israelis, we are here if you want to help you and the Palestinians, if you want, to have a better quality of life the way both nations deserve.
	That's the role.
	This is what Carter did.
	This is what Clinton did.
	This, I hope, what Obama will do in his next term.
	Okay, let's turn this.
	I told you.
	I told you.
	I can tell that we 70% of American Jews will vote Democrats.
	Yes.
	Can I just say, I'm going to make a statement about this, and then we're going to go to questions.
	I want you to know that I've never seen a foreign leader of any country involve himself as directly and in as partisan fashion in an American presidential campaign as Bibi Netanyahu did a month ago.
	That is, I have never, ever.
	How did he do that?
	How did he do that?
	Yeah, how did he do that?
	There needs to be a red line in a certain state.
	And now he's saying that by saying that the America needs to, by criticizing the president, he criticized the president in the Oval Office last March.
	And I will goes around saying that President Obama wants to throw Israel under the bus.
	He says that President Obama's position on Israel is a return to the 1967 borders, period.
	That is, that is, that's a lie.
	It's not a lie.
	President Obama has never said that.
	Wait a second.
	Wait a second.
	You're being very impolite.
	What President Obama has said is that he favors a return to the 1967 borders with mutually agreed upon land swaps.
	That has been the position of the United States President since Richard Nixon.
	It is also the position of the Netanyahu government.
	But Bibi doesn't like the fact that the President tried to take a different position than he took on the expansion of the settlements.
	And so, therefore, he has involved himself in our campaign in a way that I feel isn't in Israel's best interest in the long term.
	But that's just me.
	Let's go to questions.
	All right.
	It is.
	Let's go.
	Wait a second.
	You're right.
	I'm not going to.
	All right.
	Let's go to questions.
	All right.
	Let's go to questions.
	Okay.
	Let me stand up so I can see you.
	Do we have microphones here?
	I think we have a microphone on the left, microphone on my right.
	If you want to ask a question, go over there.
	I'm sure you have no questions.
	I don't see a thing.
	Yeah, is someone at?
	Yes, Chief.
	Just a captain.
	My question is, just like you stated a month ago, in my impression when I watched the United Nations, what I watched was Prime Minister Netanyahu putting his line in the sand, saying, and that's how I perceived it, was with all the sanctions that have been put in place, with all the investigations of the enrichment of uranium in Iran.
	Obviously, Iran is of the greatest concern to our state of Israel.
	Do you believe for both speakers, do you believe that that is actually a line in the sand for Prime Minister Netanyahu to basically place a warning saying if they receive intelligence that they are that close to that enrichment of uranium to provide a nuclear weapon, that it's not going to matter what anybody else thinks, that they're going to act.
	And that's what's going to happen.
	Do you believe that that was the impression that he was giving?
	Or do you believe that it was another type of tactic?
	You're talking about Netanyahu's statement at the UN.
	I was talking about his statement before the UN.
	When he made the red line statement and criticized Hillary Clinton.
	Yes.
	I just want to make a note before I answer that specifically that I believe it was in the mainstream media.
	I get all my news from mainstream media, so no one should ever say on my show or anywhere that I got it from a conservative source.
	And the mainstream media reported just last week, I don't recall which newspaper I wish I did, that a majority, a great majority of Israelis do not trust this president.
	Now, it's either you don't have to agree with the majority of Israelis.
	Look, the majority of American Jews do trust this president, and the majority of Israeli Jews do not trust this president.
	Israel has elected democratically its prime minister who speaks in the name of the majority of Israelis.
	Now, you could say they're fools.
	That, in fact, Barack Obama is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had, as these two gentlemen believe.
	I don't.
	Wait a second.
	Wait, You said that we never had such collaboration with Israel that he has taken.
	No, You don't like that I'm repeating you.
	No, no, I don't like that you're extrapolating.
	I said, by the way, I have been trying to find out unsuccessfully why President Obama hasn't seen fit to go to Israel over the last four years.
	Oh.
	But saying that.
	Is that not important?
	Saying that is very important.
	But saying that is not the same as reporting a fact, which is reported to me by CIA and Mossad, that the level of cooperation between Israeli and American intelligence is the greatest that it has ever been.
	Listen, if you have CIA and Mossad connections, you're beyond my knowledge, and I can't argue.
	All I know is why doesn't that fact impress Israelis?
	Just please answer.
	Why doesn't that fact impress Israelis?
	Of course it is.
	There will be a mistake.
	I will tell you.
	Listen, I was for many years the Speaker of the Israeli Parliament.
	It was an easy experience then tonight.
	Okay, I mean, it was...
	I take that as a compliment.
	That's the real...
	That's the real thing.
	But having said that, I want to correct one thing only.
	There are many people around the world, around the entire world, and many people around Israel who believe that every four years, 264 million Americans are going to the ballot box in order to elect the best president for Israel.
	Well, this is not the case.
	Okay?
	It's your president.
	Now, the president should be first.
	The good president for Israel is first one who is a good president for America, and second, a president who is well respected and a good leader of the free world.
	These are the only two criterions of who is a good president for Israel.
	Now, of course, living in our little shtetl with all the enemies around, okay, we look at the poets in order to see is it good for Eiden or Schlecht for Eiden?
	But is it a relevant question?
	The answer is definitely no.
	Can I inject a bit of reality here?
	We are now.
	Time is up.
	Let's ignore that and keep going.
	Question over here.
	Thank you.
	First, I just want to challenge you about Iran and that the Shah was so great.
	I mean, remember that the CIA overthrew a democracy in Iran, the government of Mossadegh in the 50s that brought the Shah in 54 or whatever.
	That brought the Shah into power.
	So to say that there wasn't democracy and that the Shah was so great, remember that that was a coup that the CIA supported.
	We can't go back to Shah and say that was so good without acknowledging that we actually brought him to power.
	Okay, so let's, by the way, we're going to keep these really short since we are out of the country.
	Yeah, okay, that's fine.
	I wasn't that long.
	I mean, the fire marshal is I appreciate you mentioning that the contemporary political.
	I don't need an answer about that.
	Okay, it doesn't answer.
	I'm sorry.
	One moment.
	Listen, if you don't need an answer, don't make the statement.
	All right.
	Fair enough.
	It's okay.
	Should we go to the next one?
	Pretty loud.
	Let's go to the next one.
	Oh, wait a minute.
	Why did Taba fail then?
	That's a question about U.S. policy, and I thought that was unfair.
	I didn't know as long as that.
	What did what?
	No, no, you were perfectly appropriate.
	You don't have to, even though you differ with Monza.
	Well, I don't feel like the United States has actually been an honest growth.
	And I don't think that.
	That's not a question.
	That's a statement.
	No, no, I don't mind statement.
	On behalf of me, I don't mind statements longer than you.
	I do.
	I do, and I'm running the show.
	You're right.
	Okay, you're right.
	I want to hear you.
	You think you do.
	Okay, let's have a question over here.
	One question.
	The Palestinian population is growing at 4.7% per year, which means it doubles in about 15 years.
	Egyptian population is growing about 3% a year, which means it doubles in 23 years.
	I don't see survival of Israel.
	I have six children.
	You see children.
	I tried to rebuffle, okay?
	Okay.
	But if the population grows, it doubles every so that doubling time.
	And then, to the math, right, 69 years, it'd be eight times as many Palestinians as there is presently.
	I cannot see the future of Israel when you have eight times the Palestinians and three and a half times the Egyptians in 50 years or thereabouts.
	And Israel will fail.
	Comments.
	Anyone want to respond to that?
	Everybody's promising Israel's death.
	You're a greater prophet than I. What can I say, or any of us up here?
	The Palestinian birth rate is, in fact, diminishing rather substantially.
	The Israeli birth rate is higher than it was about 20 years ago.
	I don't make any predictions.
	I wish that there were peace tomorrow.
	I wish there were territorial compromise.
	The vast majority of Israelis would like territorial compromise.
	Their opponents want Israel dead.
	The fact that this is the same thing.
	Salam Fayad doesn't want Israel dead.
	It doesn't matter.
	You folks meet these elites who have no clout.
	Okay?
	It doesn't matter who you meet in Ankara.
	It means nothing.
	The fact is, Erdogan is a nemesis to Israel.
	That's a fact.
	When I, this thing, I've been told this my whole life since I was at the Russian Institute at Columbia University and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University studying Arabic and Russian.
	And I was told the same exact things then.
	Oh, you know, you're a little, you conservatives, you're anti-communist, you generalizations about communism.
	You know that the Russian communists and the Chinese communists hate each other.
	To which the answer was, so what?
	They both slaughter their people.
	So what?
	Morally, it makes no difference.
	These meetings you have with the elite, it's like Tom Friedman who wrote this great column at Tahrir Square.
	Look at this.
	This is the iPhone revolution.
	Bullshit.
	It was an Islamist revolution.
	Hey.
	These people live in ivory towers.
	Hey, hey, hey.
	Hey.
	I don't know who you're talking about here, but if you're talking about me, you got the wrong fella.
	I spend a lot of time on the ground in Israel, in the Palestinian territories, talking to actual Palestinians, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, embedded with our troops.
	I've also seen combat.
	And I will tell you this, that more often than not, these wars are started by leaders who want to portray the people who are not part of their country as somehow less than human.
	They're the other.
	The Palestinians, there are going to be eight times as many of them.
	There are more Palestinian doctors and lawyers than most other, you know, than in most of the other Arab countries.
	These are actual human beings.
	They bleed, they suffer, they die.
	They have been subjected.
	They have been subjected to the most terrible governments on the face of the earth.
	Didn't they elected them?
	No, they didn't elect them.
	Because it was not.
	You just told us that there was a free election.
	And that's the problem.
	Yes, he told me.
	I'm sorry, I'm talking about the family.
	They elected Hamas.
	They elected Hamas, and then Hamas staged a coup, at which point it was appropriate for us to do that.
	I know that you have your ideas, and you don't want to compromise them.
	Unfortunately, reality is more dynamic than you.
	There are people on the ground who are students and traders and agriculture and farmers and simple people and sophisticated people.
	Some of them cannot stand us.
	Some of them like to make peace with us like the Israelis from all across the rainbow of opinions.
	Some of them cannot stand them.
	Some of them will like to make peace.
	When you come and say time and again and time and again and time and again, they all hate us, they all want to destroy us, we need power, we shall fight them, we shall have war, etc., etc., doesn't correct it, doesn't make it right.
	What do you do?
	You just incite.
	Dennis, this is incitement toward another conservative round of wars and conflict in the Middle East.
	I'm living there.
	I'm not following your footsteps.
	Let's take the next question.
	There's a forum that was formed in the spring of this year called the Global Counterterrorism Forum.
	It was formed by the government of the United States and Turkey, as I understand, and according to the Secretary of State website is a cornerstone of this country's fight on terrorism.
	It consists of 31 countries, including 11 Arab countries, six of which belong to the Arab League.
	Can anyone up on there tell me why the number one victim of terrorism and certainly one of the world's foremost fighters of terrorism is not part of this forum?
	That's Israel.
	It should be.
	It should be.
	But could I clue you in a little bit?
	This forum is a fig leaf.
	It's meaningless.
	The fight against terrorism is being conducted by U.S. drones, U.S. Special Forces, CIA, Mossad to a certain extent, and we're doing pretty well.
	about Libya we're doing you know there are going to be there my son is a diplomat and he has And he has served in difficult embassies.
	He was chief of staff in the Baghdad embassy three years ago.
	And he will do.
	What?
	Wait a second.
	What do you mean, what about New York?
	Nine of my neighbors didn't come home that night.
	What are you talking about?
	What are you talking about?
	I'm saying that since 9-11, we have gotten very good at fighting these people and defeating them.
	We're not going to win every single time.
	We lost on 9-11 in Libya.
	But we have made major progress, and they haven't come here again.
	And when they've tried to, we've stopped them, right?
	But by the way, I do believe they will succeed at some point.
	It's an ongoing, it's an ongoing situation, and it's going to be the reality of our lives for the rest of the time that we live our lives.
	And the question is: how do you minimize this?
	I think that we've done a very successful job, starting with George W. Bush, with the exception of his war in Iraq, which most of the U.S. military opposed, and now with President Obama in limiting the damage the terrorists will do.
	But they're out there and they're going to strike.
	So they did succeed that one time in Libya.
	Next question.
	If you believe that the majority of Israeli want to have peace, how do you explain the continuous failure of the left in Israel?
	My institute, I'm chairing a new think tank in Jerusalem, which I established.
	We ran a survey about positions rather than political voting patterns.
	So the political blocs in Israel are still more or less the same on every issue: economic, peace process, church and state, you name it.
	But the political representation of the center-left crashed.
	And it crashed because of many, many reasons.
	Some of them have to do with the way we are being perceived, and some of them have to do with content.
	The way we're being perceived, we're being perceived A as arrogant and B as incompetent.
	Now, nobody votes for somebody who is either arrogant or patronizing or looks incompetent.
	Then, deep inside, we must go to a point, and this is when El Barra came back from the second Camp David, the year 2000 or so, and he said there is no partner, which could not be the role of the captain of the flagship of the center-left peace scam.
	If there is no partner, produce one.
	If there is no partner, change the partnership, do something about it.
	You can never give hope.
	He actually paved the road for a decade and a half almost of a no-partnership strategy of the state of Israel, which is not the case.
	I mean, Joe here mentioned Fayyad, and part of the security of the State of Israel today is because of the policing and military services and organs of the Palestinians rather than just of the Israelis.
	So something dramatic is happening their side, but we don't see it because Israel, thanks to the former leader of the Labour Party and the left, works under the assumption there is no leadership, and it will take a long, long time to restore this kind of damage.
	But when you wrap it all, I think that it all should come to a discussion which never really happened in Israel, who is a patriot.
	And today it looks that the one who throws or brings, introduces more fear to the hearts of the people controls the fear.
	So now we are about politics of fear.
	And everything is about fear.
	Iran is a fear.
	Demography is a fear.
	Economic is about fear.
	Everything is about fear.
	And we did not succeed to come again after Robin's assassination with an alternative, pragmatic, here and now, realistic politics of alternative to fear.
	That's, I think, the reason.
	Let's take one or two more questions and then I mean, Jeff, it's amazing to me that Jeff Moscow.
	Are you only one more question?
	Okay, well then he's next.
	I mean, Jeff Moscow had a heart attack a week ago.
	Can you imagine that?
	Let's give Jeff a round of applause for being here and for putting this and for putting this this evening together.
	Let's take a last question.
	I'll keep this very short and to the point.
	Joe, you seem to question what did World War II accomplish other than shuffling some borders in Europe.
	I'll ask you the question, what language do you think you would be speaking today if we didn't have World War II?
	Wait a second.
	Wait a second.
	I didn't say that.
	I said that at the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was divided by the European powers in a way that the United States, Woodrow Wilson, didn't like very much either, and that we're suffering the consequences of the lines in the sand that were drawn then.
	As for World War II, my father recently passed, was a commander in the United States Navy in the Pacific.
	That was the proudest, one of the things I'm proudest in my life is my dad's service and of the United States' role in World War II, the United States' role in World War I, the United States' role throughout the world.
	I believe that we are the most humane superpower in the history of the world.
	Okay, that does it.
	Let me just say that there's been a fair amount of heat, but I hope there's been some light as well.
	And I would caution all of you, and I would urge all of you to look carefully at these issues.
	These are complicated issues.
	Whenever it gets to be us against them, and with Jews, we have 5,000 years of it being them against us, there's a danger that we're going to avoid the complexities that may offer opportunities for us.
	I think that Israel is in a very difficult position, both demographically and geographically.
	But I'd also say that Israel is strong, not weak, and that unlike Henry Kissinger, I'm not worried about Israel being here 20 years from now, because we've got a nuclear arsenal.
	They're not going to mess with us, ultimately.
	But I do think it's important that we find a way, especially as Americans and especially the American government, to help civilize Arab countries that haven't had the kind of education systems that can yield democracies.
	I really agree with Dennis on that.
	And I think it's important that we understand, as Avram has said, that Israel is dealing from a position of strength in the region.
	And if we can reconcile those two, then we'll be acting in a very Jewish way because Jews have always been able to deal with complexity and thrive with it.
	You've been a wonderful audience.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you.
	You did a great job.
	Thank you.
	This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.

▲