Avi Yemini’s former advisor, David Keyes—Middle East studies expert and Netanyahu’s ex-spokesman—exposes Iran’s stolen atomic archive, revealing its nuclear ambitions despite recent strikes on Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. Keyes warns Trump’s ceasefire may embolden Tehran’s "monstrous dictatorship," citing attacks like October 7th and the Beirut Marine barracks bombing, while defending Netanyahu’s unyielding stance against Hamas as a strategic parallel to FDR’s post-Pearl Harbor resolve. His viral pranks, like mocking Iranian executions with free ice cream, underscore the regime’s brutality, yet critics like Dave Smith dismiss its threats to America. Keyes insists Israel-U.S. coordination, not hesitation, has stymied Iran’s progress, urging sustained support for dissidents via sanctions and Starlink to accelerate regime collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome back to the Yominia Report.
Today's special guest, David Keyes.
Well, I'm not going to bother trying to introduce you, David.
Your resume is impressive, but many people here wouldn't know you.
So how would you describe?
Who are you?
Well, I'm David.
I grew up in Los Angeles.
I moved to Israel with my whole family many years ago.
Been sort of obsessed with human rights and fighting dictatorships for a few decades.
So I started a number of human rights organizations, one with the founder of Human Rights Watch, one with Natan Sharansky, the famous Soviet dissident who spent nine years in prison.
And then I spent several years as Prime Minister Netanyahu's spokesman and communications advisor.
So that was a crazy few years, very interesting, very difficult, very challenging.
But I got to really see how things worked from the inside.
I then started a communications company.
We build some AI tools.
We make things go viral.
We fight narrative wars.
So I've always sort of been in this fusion between the Israel world, the human rights world, and technology and AI.
So like I said, it was impressive.
So I didn't know where to start on it.
So thanks for clarifying it for us.
What years are you talking about, you as the spokesman for Netanyahu?
Let's start there.
From 2016 to 2018.
2016 to 2018.
So not that long ago.
How was it being a communications representative for Netanyahu?
He's a pretty polarizing figure around the world at that period of time.
That was prior to all the big protests, maybe the beginning of it.
How was it?
It was the adventure of a lifetime, to put it mildly.
I hadn't served in government before that role.
And so I came in with fresh eyes, I would say.
And when I came into the job, I looked around and I said, I can't believe things are done this way.
I would really like to change some things here.
And so I brought the eye of, I would say, the private sector, some of the new media stuff.
I wasn't sure why we were so dependent upon traditional journalists.
So I really wanted to go direct to the people.
I thought we had amazing truth on our side, an amazing story to tell.
And so I tried to innovate in the Prime Minister's office.
But I also had access to things that are truly once in a lifetime.
I was tasked with the Prime Minister for exposing Iran's secret atomic archive that we stole from Tehran.
I got to meet with all the world leaders and sit in meetings with Shi and Modi and Obama and hang out with people like Elon Musk and other great figures of history, most notably Chuck Norris.
So it was fascinating.
It was amazing.
Non-stop pressure, 24-7 crises.
It's very hard to juggle all that.
The entire world is scrutinizing every syllable, every word that you say.
Constant fake stuff, misinformation, disinformation, just absolutely overwhelming amounts.
And that really also shaped my vision of the challenges that the free world and the Western world face because we are up against extremely motivated, well-funded, large organizations that have no qualms whatsoever about undermining every single value, every single story, every single truth with reckless disregard.
So that sort of puts a new frame on what this whole narrative space and communication space is.
But I was also obsessed with trying to understand what worked, the principles of effective communications.
Some of it's old school, like Dale Carnegie and Ogilvy.
But every day in the Prime Minister's office, I would print out a dozen academic articles about virality and persuasion and framing and resonance and reach.
And I tried to utilize that science to help us communicate more effectively.
So that's a sort of long-winded answer, but it was a really, really fascinating and difficult and interesting and wonderful time.
So every adjective you could possibly throw at it, I think I experienced to some degree.
How did you end up there?
How'd you go from the business sector to being a spokesperson for the prime minister of Israel?
They scoured the world for the most talented and brilliant spokesman, and I was...
I don't know why.
I've never gotten a call in.
No, no, no.
It was nothing like that.
I mean, I had been sort of in this space tangentially for a long time.
I studied the Middle East.
I studied Arabic at UCLA.
I did my master's at Tel Aviv University.
I was writing for all sorts of publications from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal.
And I had gone viral massively for pranking Iran's dictators and other dictators, really.
I did a series of sort of satirical pranks against the world's worst people.
What did you do?
What did you do?
A number of things.
The foreign minister of Iran came to NYU and I rented an ice cream truck and handed out free ice cream to celebrate 1,000 hangings in Iran.
I went up to the now foreign minister of Iran, Arakjia, asked him what his favorite way to hang gay people was.
I flew to Vienna to prank the nuclear negotiators of Iran and announced a faux human rights deal that reduced the rate of hanging from once every two hours to once every two hours.
What were their reactions?
They didn't like me too much.
Did they immediately catch on or did it take him a little bit of time to kind of work out what was going on?
I don't think anybody had quite done it in the way I had done it.
So I think they were a little bit startled, a little bit taken aback in the moment.
When Saudi Arabia hosted a job fair at the Gay Lord Hotel outside of Washington, I figured since they have the death penalty for gay people, I'd throw a gay party at the same time at the same hotel.
So I would do these kind of crazy stunts.
And I was trying to rename the streets in front of the embassies of dictatorships after political prisoners.
I was very inspired by the Soviet dissident movement and how the West sort of kept their names alive.
And so I tried to recreate that with the modern dictators.
So I was running around the world meeting with political prisoners and dissidents.
But I was also, I would say, changing the human rights narrative.
For a long time, it was, you know, Israel is this terrible country.
And we're going to get to the North Korea's and Chinas and Iran's later.
And the founder of Human Rights Watch, Bob Bernstein, who was the head of Random House for 25 years, he saw the situation and he was really miffed, irate.
And so he and I together tried to reset what it means to be a human rights organization.
So we helped launch this crowdsourcing platform that linked dissidents and dictatorships with people that could help them.
In the West, we tried to put the focus where it needed to be, which was not on the one open society in the Middle East.
It has many flaws, many challenges.
There's lots of people doing great work on human rights.
There's a free press.
They're criticized all the time.
And then you look a little bit east and you have these monstrous dictatorships which don't get a fraction of the attention and they're completely let off the hook.
So all that's a long-winded way of saying that I was really obsessed with this one topic and I was trying to make human rights great again.
And I was in touch with a lot of people in the prime minister's circle.
Natan Sharansky was my mentor.
I had met other advisors.
And so they reached out to me.
I was actually giving a lecture at Stanford and my phone rang and someone from the prime minister's office said, Would you like to be the prime minister spokesman?
We think you'd be the right person for the job.
So I almost fell over.
But I was very honored.
It was incredible and hopefully did some good.
Well, it sounds good.
I guess my question when I was asking you how their reaction was, we're just trying to work out: is it really because we're marveling at the sophistication of the Mossad right now in Iran, what they've managed to do over the last week and a half or whatever it is.
But by the sounds of things, you know, is it the sophistication of the Mossad or is it the fact that the Iranian regime is just really cavemen in suits?
Well, you know, I think when you're in government, you see the brilliance of some people with great resolution.
You see the incompetence of the system with greater resolution than you'd ever want to.
Government writ large, you know, just as a rule is totally incompetent.
I mean, there's just no incentive structure to really do well.
There's broken feedback loops.
There's incredible bureaucracies.
You can't fire people.
You can't hire the best people.
Salaries are low.
And on and on and on.
Government is not the place where innovation happens.
It's where innovation goes to die.
The private sector is truly what is capable, I think, of changing the world.
All that said, there are a few things which are very important that government does.
And probably the greatest shining example of that, of course, are these intelligence agencies, which have done marvelous, amazing, stunning, incredible work.
And so there's sort of this fusion between gross incompetence on the one hand, where nothing really works, you know, redundancies and just government's just a terrible thing, you know, on the whole.
But there's some good people working very hard, trying to do good.
It's really a mixed bag, but I don't think people who, you know, I've read all the memoirs or most of the memoirs of former spokespeople of American presidents, and I really identify with what they talk about.
Supposed Fusion of Failure and Success00:02:50
It's kind of hard to explain the pace and the balagan, you know, to use the sort of discombobulation of the system if you haven't been there.
And just you'd wake up in the morning and there'd be 15 critical things that happened that you didn't know that were coming.
I'll give you one random day, okay, because it just, I said at the end of this day, I got to remember this.
It was in 2017, and I woke up in the morning and there was a huge scandal that Al Jazeera had done a sting operation and caught some low-level guy in London, you know, talking his mouth off against the deputy foreign minister of England.
And so my phone's blowing up.
You know, this is a huge scandal at the time.
And then about an hour after that, tapes are revealed for the first time in Israel between the prime minister and an oligarch.
And it's the biggest story in Israel, and all the news are talking about it.
And then there's a government meeting that we go into, and the government almost falls because of a religion and state clash, and ministers are shouting at each other.
And then an hour after that, the military secretary walks in and says there's just been a huge terror attack in Jerusalem.
So we jump to the site of the attack and there's blood still on the truck that had rammed all these Israelis and the engine is still on.
And an hour after that, Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran, dies, sparking potentially revolution in Iran.
And so you just kind of zoom out and you're like, each one of these scenarios, you're supposed to be well informed about.
You're supposed to think, is it going to help or hurt if we talk about it?
What should we say?
What is the truth?
We need to know that.
And when it all happens at the exact same time, it's kind of hard to express what that feels like.
And that was an average regular day.
And probably a bunch of other things happened on that day that I don't even remember.
As an Aussie, we want to know, I imagine in those years you worked alongside Mark Regev.
What do you think of him?
He was my predecessor in the job.
He was very nice to me.
He's a gem of a man and a very talented guy.
And I'm very appreciative.
When I first came into the job, I had a million questions for him.
And he would say, you know, ping me anytime.
We sat down in his office and spoke about what it means to have this job.
And, you know, we went through all the policies, which was an exhaustive process as well.
But yes, as I know, he went on to become ambassador, of course.
Yes, that was a good save because he's actually also my cousin.
So well done.
That I didn't know.
You did or you didn't know?
No, I had no idea.
He is our cousin.
Yes, he is.
Okay, so there's a lot happening.
And I think for the audience, just to be clear, we're filming this at the present time.
Fear Of Ceasefire00:15:23
President Trump has announced that there is a ceasefire.
Iran's foreign minister has come back with an interesting tweet, which if you read between the lines, it is saying that they agree to a ceasefire, but they say that they don't agree to no agreement.
It's just that if Israel stops firing, they'll stop firing.
But they agree to whatever terms.
So it's unpacking these Middle Eastern dictators and authoritarian regimes.
It's like you've got to operate on a completely different level.
I know we don't have to tell you that.
So that's where we are now.
It's meant to be taking into effect in about four and a half or four hours from now.
We can see Israel's operating heavily right now in Tehran.
There's news coming through of someone, an assassination at a higher level.
They haven't named who yet.
So a lot can change by the time this comes out.
I don't know where we'll be, but I guess this is a good time to hold you, test your prediction abilities, because on the right in America, and we'll get to that in a minute, they've been so horrible at predicting.
And I don't know how people have been so horrible at predicting.
And people have been so sure about how this will all play out if Trump does certain things or if America does certain things.
And it completely hasn't happened.
It looks like we're about to get what Trump always described as peace through strength.
But what do you think is actually going to happen now?
I don't know what's going to happen over the next few hours or days, but I think I can make some general predictions that I feel quite confident about.
The most important one being that the Iranian regime will fall.
You think no matter what happens?
You think no matter what happens?
No matter what happens.
But I think the barrier of fear has begun to start crumbling.
And I think that that's a process which is very hard to come back from.
And I think when it falls, it's going to fall very fast.
And I think that that's going to be a lot sooner than people expect.
I speak to more than a few Iranian dissidents, some of whom have been tortured in Evan prison.
And when you look back at the Soviet example, the dissidents, a guy named Andrea Malric wrote a book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984 or 1995?
And he wrote it in the 60s.
Meanwhile, the CIA, Robert Gates, said that the first time they even thought that the Soviet Union would fall was in 88.
So I think oftentimes the dissidents have a better read of what's happening on the ground, even than the benighted poli psi professors or pundits or anyone else.
So I feel very confident that the regime has never been weaker.
They've been unmasked as both cruel and incompetent and fanatic.
They've wasted bazillions of dollars on this stupid nuclear program instead of feeding their people and building hospitals and improving their water management and so many things that they could have done to improve the lives of their people.
So there's no real way from walking that back.
Now they may survive for a little bit and they're incredibly brutal and repressive and they have used tremendous force to keep their people down.
If I was a betting man, I wouldn't necessarily say this is going to last forever, the ceasefire.
And I'm very, very happy that the achievements that were achieved until now, primarily the destruction of these nuclear sites at Ford, Natans, and Esfahan, that is an absolute game changer and it removes the one truly existential threat from Israel summarily.
And for that, I think every sane person on earth, certainly every American, every Israeli, anybody who wants peace should be overwhelmingly happy because absent this action started by Israel and helped to be concluded by President Trump, I think that Iran could have very well achieved nuclear weapons, and I believe they would have used nuclear weapons.
So a lot of people, they don't take their rhetoric seriously, but I do.
And it was exactly the same with Hamas.
I speak Arabic.
I was listening to what Hamas leaders were saying in the run-up in all those years.
And they said, we're going to kill you all.
We're going to slaughter you all.
We're going to rip out your hearts and we're going to murder your children.
And Sinwar would sit with his interrogator in prison and say in the not-too-distant future, I will have murdered everyone you know.
And he was basically right.
And so we sort of, you know, too many people said, wow, they're not really serious.
And I used to, you know, fight with these people all the time, a thousandfold more with the Iranian regime.
And so I'm so happy.
It's one of the happiest days of my life, the fact that these nuclear sites in the bottom of mountains are ground into powder and they can no longer make the weapons for the foreseeable future that could truly kill millions of Israelis.
I think this act saved millions of lives.
Do you think, are you happy for the Sease Fire to go ahead now?
No, I'm not happy with the ceasefire because I think that it may throw a lifeline to this theocratic terrorist supporting dictatorship.
And I think that they may survive a little bit longer because of that.
I'm hoping that the people rise up.
I understand the fear and the reticence to do big military action.
And it's totally understandable not to want to send a bunch of ground forces or anything like that into Iran.
But what I'm most concerned about is how do we support the Iranian people, the long-suffering Iranian people, in their noble quest for freedom.
And my only fear is that people will say, well, now we have to respect the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We have to sort of make nice with this theocratic dictatorship.
I think we need to apply maximum pressure at every instant and support the people.
We need to make their political prisoners famous.
We need to sanction them.
We need to stop them from exporting terrorism.
We need to be ever vigilant on the nuclear file because they are not giving up their aims for one instant.
These guys are bin Laden on steroids.
They are Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on steroids.
They are true believers.
And it's very hard for rational and reasonable Western minds to even grasp the level of fanaticism.
But what would it take for you to not love your children?
That's the depth of belief that they have that they must destroy Israel.
So right now they're defanged.
They don't have the ability right now to do it.
But I don't think that they've given up even one iota their ultimate aim of imposing Islamic domination on the world, of destroying America and of eradicating Israel.
I hear all the arguments you're making there.
I've thought about it today, and I feel on one level.
So there's the actual war with Iran, which clearly Israel and the U.S., those final strikes by the U.S., have achieved, have set back Iran, even if they want to get back into the nuclear game, set them back years.
And that's if they survive as a regime.
But I feel like it's a tightrope because when you look at American politics, it was getting super fractured.
And Trump almost, if he doesn't pull out, if he doesn't get some sort of ceasefire now after striking so heavily, doing it, especially in the fashion that he did, announcing, you know, up to two weeks and then two days later, you know, smashing it and coming out and celebrating it.
And most of the country and most of the world, even here on, you know, left-wing TV, they found it really hard to criticize him as much as they wanted to, because even their contacts within Iran that they're talking to were celebrating it.
But we know as soon as that becomes drawn out, even within Iran, there may be this effect where people who don't really like the regime, but as soon as you start, you know, when the death toll rises, they may rally around their flag a little bit more or they just can't sustain it longer.
Who knows how?
But just prolonged wars never, you know, even just in America, the support would have almost certainly dropped, even if they're having some sort of gains.
But just the involvement itself.
So I feel like there's kind of this tightrope that you have to play, especially sitting here in the West, not in Israel.
I understand where, you know, half my family's in Israel.
I understand when you're sitting in Israel and all you're seeing is those ballistic missiles and especially in the beginning of it where you didn't know what capabilities Iran really had.
I think after a few days, people realized, okay, we can survive this.
There'll be a bit of destruction, but as long as we go into the bomb shelters, we should be fine.
But I think to give Trump that win within America, it almost helps us for any future issues.
So if Trump stops it now, claims, look at what I managed to achieve in what he's calling the 12-day war we did with Israel.
And he's saying we're a partnership in his speech that's going to be famous, I think, for all time, where he says, no team has ever, I don't believe no team has ever worked as well together in history.
It's just so beautiful.
He said it, I'm paraphrasing, he said it much better, but it's like a crazy statement to make.
Like no team has ever worked as well together as him and Bibby in getting this outcome.
So he's leaving on a high.
And I just can't see, you know, even if they manage regime change, you want the regime change to really come from inside Iran.
So I can't see from the, when you step back and look at it, it is super risky to keep going, isn't it?
There are risks associated with it, and I completely understand domestically the need and why he wanted to do that.
And we should not belittle even for an instant the tremendous accomplishments of the U.S. strike and the Israeli war.
But I also think, my argument would be that domestic politics, so Trump leaving this strike on a high, and every American goes, yes, the American might is back.
We won that.
Don't mess with us.
It gives us brownie points for later, if needed, and also political will from Trump, if needed, where he'll come and step back in, as opposed to if it was a bit more drawn out.
He may not be willing to.
He won't have the support from the people.
I think he's regained a lot of ground right now.
That would have been risk.
Maybe there would have been another fantastic win, but I feel like there are too many risks now to keep going.
It's a totally defensible position, and it's very hard to know the counterfactuals here.
It's possible that a few more weeks, a few more strikes, a few more leaders taken out, and you would have had mass defections, and the people would have risen up, and their entire stockpiles of ballistic missiles would be destroyed.
And perhaps the next many generations would be under a free and democratic Iran.
I guess we won't know that at this moment.
That's a real possibility.
So I don't want to discount that.
I spoke to an Iranian dissident with a PhD, a scientist, just an hour ago, and he said one more week was all we needed.
That's all we needed.
So I don't know.
The Crown Prince of Iran had just made a statement a day prior saying, I'm ready to lead this country in a different direction.
So I think we, look, what I found in all those years in the Prime Minister's office is that there's almost never a good option.
It's always between bad and worse.
And I understand why he's announcing this ceasefire now.
I think just we cannot keep, we can't take our eye off the ball even for an instant.
And for as much as Iran fears America or fears Israel, they fear something much more, and that's their own people.
That's their greatest fear.
So I think so long as we keep up maximum support for the people of Iran, making their political prisoners famous, ensuring that they have starlinks and free internet, making sure that there are powerful economic sanctions if they continue to support terrorism, which of course they will.
So we just need to be vigilant.
I don't know exactly what's going to happen.
My instinct was we need to continue supporting the people in this moment.
And my fear is that these tinpot tyrants rage back and continue repressing over 90 million people, continue manufacturing ballistic missiles.
But the beauty is now at least we know of the supreme, you know, the superiority of American and Israeli intelligence, armaments, military, and drive, that they can truly wipe out entire huge swaths of what took them just years and tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in half an hour are just gone.
That's amazing.
And the penetration of Israel is legendary.
I mean, from the beepers to the atomic archive to knowing exactly where these nuclear scientists are, the entire world should be in awe.
Wiping that a lot of these people.
the top brass of the military in Iran in the first few hours.
I think, and I guess, you know, where I'm sitting, I'm hoping like you, I am hoping for a regime change, probably like most Israelis.
The way to achieve it, I don't know.
I'm not going to profess or pretend to be any sort of expert.
But I would imagine what we've seen over the last two weeks shows that the Mossad clearly has, unlike the Shimbet failures in Gaza, clearly in Iran and even in Lebanon, The Mossad are there and they do have a really sound presence.
So I would hope that they're the ones at this point that can pick up the thing and help the local dissidents to rise up and to take it down from the inside.
Because almost worse, I don't know if there was a regime change now for Trump forced by essentially sustained another week or two military bombardment.
If...
if the government had fallen, but somebody, some other bad group had picked it up, I don't know what Iran's landscape is like.
We know obviously they've got the crown prince or whatever, who you just mentioned, made this speech last night.
Endless Predictions Debate00:13:12
But I don't know what kind of real support he has within Iran.
Is he really going to be the leader?
Or is some other group that we don't know going to fill that vacuum?
And that is one of those potential risks where it could backfire for somebody like Trump and the United States and by extension for Israel.
Because as soon as you lose popular support for it within America, which we saw so many people trying to affect this time, it's going to become harder and harder for Israel to be able to rely on their friend, wouldn't it?
I understand what you're saying.
And again, there's a lot of validity to that position.
I can't discount it really at all.
I can only say that I will be satisfied if we continue to support the Iranian people.
The length of the war, it's very hard to know.
It's very hard to know what will come after.
There are certainly risks associated with it.
But what we can't do is become lackadaisical about who the Iranian regime is.
And I'm so happy that the president of the United States stood up and said, no, these guys that chant death to America, these guys, I mean, think about the litany of horrors they visited upon America.
You have some pundits out there saying, Dave Smith said, Iran is no threat to America whatsoever at all.
End of story.
Okay, well, let's go through it for a second.
They tried to assassinate the president of the United States.
They denied me saying it.
They denied it.
Of course they deny it.
Not Iran.
No, no, no, I don't think Iran denies this.
Dave Smith.
I know Iran denies it too.
They also deny it.
Right.
Or they haven't heard of it, right?
And they say, I've never even heard of this, as we heard recently.
But Google Farhad Shakari.
Go read the DOJ indictment about this guy.
They tried to kill Pompeo and Bolton and Hook.
They funded and armed the people who murdered 48 Americans on October 7th.
They funded the people who shot the drone that almost took out a U.S. consulate in Tel Aviv.
They murdered and maimed thousands of American soldiers.
They tried to blow up a restaurant in Washington, D.C.
Okay?
And on and on.
This is the beginning of the list, not the end of the list, the beginning, not to mention the murder of the Marines, of course, in Beirut and many, many other things.
Go look at who the Times and Axios was saying was the number one cyber threat to the American election.
It was Iran.
Who hacked Trump's advisors before the election?
It was Iran.
So you have a regime which was attacking America non-stop, whose main goal is to cripple and undermine America, Israel, and the West.
And then you have people saying this isn't a threat at all.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
That makes no sense whatsoever.
So at least I'm happy that the leader of the free world said enough is enough.
You cannot incessantly kill our people, just try to destroy our allies, hack our elections, try to murder me, the president, and all of our senior officials, and get away with it.
And they were getting away with murder.
And the previous administration, of course, had rewarded them with hundreds of billions of dollars.
That was insanity.
Were you worried at any point during this conflict in the last two weeks that Trump wasn't going to step up, especially with the level of noise coming from his own side?
You know, I was trying to read the tea leaves like everybody else, and I was pinging friends that are close to that circle.
I was confident that he would do something about it.
And he definitely had a little bit of deception in there, I think aimed at the enemies of America.
And good on him for doing the head fake of the two weeks.
But I think what can happen now is that every enemy of America can know with crystal clarity that they cannot fuck with America.
And that's a beautiful and amazing and brilliant thing.
The fact that they know that there are real serious consequences, that you can't threaten the annihilation of a people and a state.
You can't try to kill the president of the United States and just get away with it.
That was an insane position.
So this is a great sort of rebirth of sanity, I think, in the Middle East.
And I think for generations, people will talk about and think about and praise and laud the action that destroyed.
And huge credit to Israel, too, my goodness, for taking this bold move apropos wrong predictions.
Do you know how many people said that the Prime Minister of Israel did not have the boldness, the gumption to do something like this?
Endless people on TV.
It's all talk.
He doesn't mean it.
It's all he's never going to do it.
It's obvious.
He's just blustering.
Blah, He's true.
He's just trying to get the states to do it.
He won't do it alone.
Yeah, and then he took that bold decision alone.
Yeah, what would you say to the although, like, I don't know if he when we say he took it alone, yeah, he started alone, but clearly when I was reading the room and especially in hindsight, when you look at the timeline, him and Trump were clearly working together behind the scenes.
They weren't working against each other as was being reported in the media.
It was a game of deception that was being played.
And because of timing, if you look at like this, the first thing was the 60 days, day 61, Israel strikes, which was only a few days after he said, oh, we'll look at two weeks or what?
Oh, no, that was next.
But it all lined up perfectly.
And what happened then is just before they struck, Trump had kind of calmed them down by planning that meeting for the Sunday.
So they weren't on edge worried that something was going to happen in that period.
So unless you believe the narrative that Bibby Netanyahu was just completely defiant to Trump, Trump must have been in on it.
And as he says in his own words, it was the best team in history.
Well, it's a great reminder that people have no idea what they're talking about, frankly.
And that was another thing I saw in government.
It's like, have some humility about what you don't know.
Stop speaking so goddamn confidently about it.
It's so true.
It's so true you say that because even people that, you know, like what's his name from the war room, Bannon, Steve Bannon, like all these people were trading on their previous relationships.
Even Tucker, like these people were trading on their old or whatever relationship they had in that particular period.
And like they have some sort of insight into what's going to happen.
And it turned out none of them were right.
Yeah, well, I think there's layers of problems here.
The first one is just everyone needs to realize that if they're not in the room with the president at that moment, they don't know what is happening.
Okay, they may have spoken to someone who spoke to somebody who sees something in a certain way, who has an axe to grudge, who spoke to an anonymous person who wanted to twist it.
And then the media took it.
It's like a game of telephone.
And the social media rumor mill just operates ad nauseum.
And so people just take bullshit factoids that are not true at all and then build layer upon layer upon layer.
And I just saw the number of things that I knew to be true.
I would be in a meeting, I'd walk out of that meeting, and I would see covered everywhere the exact opposite of what just happened.
I saw the speculation about everything, every decision I was involved with, the prime minister, and I would see just endless, endless people with a thousand percent confidence.
It's one thing to have an opinion, perfectly valid, reasonable, okay.
But it's another thing to lose perspective that you might not know everything.
And we have an epidemic of people who think they know everything about everything.
So my clarion call is a little bit of goddamn humility about what you don't know.
And I think that's proven to the nth degree with this latest.
Yeah, and I wanted to get onto the new phenomenon that I'm seeing there.
But before I get to that, you mentioned Dave Smith.
One of the arguments that he's brought forth over and over again when it comes to this, forget Gaza, when it comes to the Iran-Israel conflict was Bibi Netanyahu has been telling us for 30 years that Iran is just weeks, months, or even a year away from obtaining that nuclear weapon.
Why should we believe him?
What's the answer to that?
Thank you for asking that question.
That's a very important question.
It comes up all the time now, and it's sort of parroted as truth.
And Dave Smith on Peers gave two options.
He said, either Benjamin Netanyahu was mistaken or he's lying.
Now, I spent years with the Prime Minister, and I think one should be modest enough to think for even just an additional section.
Is it possible that there is another explanation for this?
So let me explore that for one second.
It's possible he's mistaken.
It's possible he was lying.
But let's just, for you know, for shits and giggles, explore a third option.
Is it possible that for the last many years, Iran has been close to getting a nuclear weapon, but a 24-7 covert war waged by the greatest intelligence service in the world with thousands of people working on nothing but this to deny Iran nuclear weapons?
Maybe that had something to do with the eternal pushing back of Iran.
I mean, call me crazy, but according to foreign sources, every month or two, some nuclear site would malfunction mysteriously, and centrifuges would spin a little too fast or a little too slow.
And miraculously, every five or seven days, a top nuclear scientist would meet his maker, thank goodness.
And every six months or so, some treasure trove of Iran's secret atomic material would be smuggled out somehow and found its way to the military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Is it possible that that had something to do with the fact that why Iran hasn't actually achieved nuclear weapons?
I would say that that is the dominant reason, knowing something about this.
That is the dominant reason.
Iran was close.
They are close.
And so many experts have said, they said if Iran chose to develop nuclear weapons, they would be weeks away from it.
That's what Tulsi Gabbard said.
Listen to Carrilla, what he said.
Listen to, it's okay if you want to discount all Israeli intelligence, that's fine.
I don't.
These are people I know.
These are people I worked with.
You know what I mean?
These are people that I have family members who worked it.
So I believe these geniuses who are capable of finding every nuclear scientist.
I believe that their assessments are true.
And I have seen the results of what this war has done to Iran's nuclear ability.
Absent Israel's efforts, they would have had nukes a decade ago, a decade and a half ago, perhaps.
I don't know.
So Dave Smith should be tipping his hat to these brave and brilliant intelligence agents that stopped a theocratic, genocidal, mass-murdering, terrorist regime from acquiring the most deadly weapons known to man.
Lying or mistaken?
I don't think so.
It's the result of this incredible, persistent, massive, covert war that you could fill the Library of Congress with examples of what has been done in order to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
That is the reason they don't have nuclear weapons today.
And by the way, just one more quick thing.
Having been, it was my job to take Iran's secret atomic archive and tell the world about it.
Okay, I spent so long just on this one project.
This trove showed copious amount of documentation that Iran had planned, plotted, said the number of warheads they wanted, where they wanted to detonate it, who was involved, and on and on and on and on.
And this is the same regime that said we have never sought nuclear weapons ever.
Ever.
That's what the entire leadership of Iran says to this day.
It's so comical that it so.
I could go on and on about this, but yes, that thing I do find, I do find laughable, yes.
Okay, so just before I let you go, and I appreciate your time, I know it's getting later there.
We have seen this phenomena in the US where the, I guess, Iran lost this war, but the other group that seems to have lost this war domestically in the U.S. is what's been dubbed as the woke right.
The Woke Right's Defeat00:10:14
And so you see your Candice Owens and what do they call him, Catalsson or Tucker Carlson.
But there's a whole list of them.
It's kind of become a trendy thing on the right to join these people that have pretty much predicted everything in this war wrong, which has been almost a savior, like for all the reasons that I mentioned before, because it would have just been horrible if they gained any momentum beyond just the online clicks for the period that they got to enjoy it.
But now, obviously, their credibility has been shot, which is exactly what we need to show that they don't know what they're talking about.
Again, this is all what we sort of unpacked already.
But I want to ask you, what is happening in America?
Because it's trickled down here as well, and it's now happening in Australia.
It's happening around the world.
There's this kind of group who identify as part of the right.
Not necessarily even Dave Smith.
Dave Smith is a libertarian, so he was kind of left in the middle.
He's all over the shop as long as anti- But there's the right wing that have identified as conservatives that almost every single one of them, if you look back at their tweets four years ago, five years ago, it was staunchly making the arguments against themselves today.
And nothing's changed.
Israel is exactly the same.
And a lot of these ones like Candace Owens will say, oh, well, when you butcher 50,000 people, then what do you expect?
But that argument's bullshit because the problem is from day one of Israel's, you know, only days after October 7th, she was already talking in this tone.
So it wasn't actually what happened in Gaza that caused it.
There was a shift.
Do you have any theory as to what happened and what's happening?
Well, I don't think there's ever been a monolith on any political side about what people feel.
And going back to the 80s, there were many different opinions on the right and the left.
I try very hard not to ascertain people's motives for what drives them to say what they say.
So I'm never going to be one of these people that's, you know, oh, well, this guy's funded by that.
And so therefore he believes this.
Or this person just wants clicks or this person is trying to curry favors with this group.
I'm not inside people's heads.
And I think a big mistake that people make often on the other side towards people with my views is they try to say, oh, you're saying this because you think X, Y, and Z.
I just prefer to look at the argument itself.
And on that, perhaps I agree with Dave Smith because he seems to say that a lot.
Let's just unpack the argument.
And that's where I find their ideas so offensive.
When you have this idea that Iran is no threat to America after it's killed and maimed and murdered so many Americans, you need to explain that because that makes no sense.
And I could give dozens and dozens of example of the Iranian regime attacking, both physically and ideologically, everything that America stands for.
That makes no sense.
If you're going to go, like as Tucker said, and you're going to say, you know, I've never heard of this assassination attempt.
Well, read up about it.
It's really important.
And if you want to say it's fake, go ahead.
You can say it's fake.
Let's have that debate at the very least.
Let's hear from the intelligence agencies.
Let's hear from the DOJ.
Let's hear from the FBI.
If you think the FBI is lying, fine.
But it should kind of be upon you to explain how and why they're lying.
So I just find so much falseness and so much vacuous logic at play about really important issues.
I can't quite, I can't kind of cycle analyze what's behind it.
I don't know what's behind it, but it's definitely there.
It's definitely dangerous.
It's definitely, I think, antithetical to the truth and to America's greatest attributes.
And I think in a debate, these ideas will lose, and maybe they are losing.
And by the way, you want to define what America first is.
Maybe the president of the United States and the spiritual founder of this movement should have a say in what it means to be America first.
That seems to me to be a reasonable asking.
Finally, before I let you go, you've obviously had a relationship with the Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Like I said in the beginning, he is a divisive person.
I know that prior to October 7, my mom was going to protest in support of him.
One of my brothers was going to protest against him.
So Israel itself has certainly been split over Netanyahu, at least in the last seven, eight years, whatever it is.
How is he as a person, on a personal level?
He's a complicated guy.
He's brilliant.
It's very hard to describe how well-read he is.
reads a book a week, has a photographic memory, remembers everything, is very intense, is very demanding, expects the best, is in the weeds on things, cares deeply, immensely passionate, feels that it's his life's mission to make Israel strong and safe.
All that said, I obviously had disagreements about policy matters, and I told that to him very frankly when I did.
But I think he's a historical figure, and I think that October 7th was obviously a failure of the system, and it needs to be investigated, etc.
I think the boldness and courage he has shown in going after Iran's nuclear program is legendary and historic and will be remembered for many generations to come.
So he's contributed an immense amount to Israel.
No one is perfect.
No one doesn't make mistakes.
I've had disagreements.
I'm sure there will be things I disagree with in the future.
But I think as a figure of history, he has contributed a tremendous amount.
And I don't like, I think it's unfair when people try to get in his mind as well.
I mean, they think they know him better than he knows himself.
There's a lot of things that aren't true out there from my experience at the very least.
And so I'm generally appreciative, even though I didn't agree with everything that has been done or surely will be done.
Do you think he has prosecuted the war generally?
So we've obviously got the Gaza part.
I don't think anyone can argue that the Hezbollah wasn't dealt with properly and now it seems like Iran has.
Do you think at least the Gaza part of this is prosecuted well?
And what would you say to people who think he's only sustaining the war because of his own personal judicial issues within Israel and the fact that once it ends, he has to face the music about how it started?
I don't think that's true at all, not even one iota.
You don't think it comes into his calculations at all?
Not really, no.
I mean, he meets with the families of the people that have been killed.
He's met with families of hostages many times.
He himself had a brother who was killed in battle.
He himself almost died several times in battle.
I think he does things to try to protect Israel.
As for the conduct of the war, there are surely things I would have done differently.
And this is where there's inherent complexity to this question.
I, for 20 years, have said our goal in Gaza needs to be total victory over Hamas, the total destruction of Hamas as a fighting force.
And so that was the policy I favored in 2007 and 8 and 9 and 10 and 11, all the way through to 2024 and 2025 when it started to happen.
So I wish that would have happened much sooner.
I think many, many lives would have been saved.
And I probably would have done a number of things differently in the war.
That said, I'm eternally grateful that he has held that line as a goal of the war because almost everyone who criticizes him would have long ago said, we're going to leave Gaza.
If Hamas is there, if Hamas isn't there, not really my problem.
We can't really defeat it.
You can't defeat an idea.
They're going to be there for all eternity.
Let's release any amount of murderers in order to get our people back.
And if Hamas has to remain in power, we'll deal with that another day.
I think that's insanity.
And the right policy is the policy that FDR chose after Pearl Harbor.
And that was the total defeat and destruction of the enemy.
And that's exactly what needs to happen with Hamas in Gaza.
We cannot relax for a moment and think even for an instant that they can remain after they butchered and burned so many innocent people and will do it again and again and again.
So it's complicated.
The Prime Minister deserves a lot of credit for not cutting and running.
And other generals and other high-ranking officials were desperate to do that, and they advised him to do that.
So it took a large amount of courage.
That said, I probably would have gone further and faster.
But I also have tremendous deference to someone who sits in that seat and is the decision maker and sees all the intelligence and has to cope with seven or eight or nine fronts simultaneously.
It's very easy to be a pundit.
Like, you know, the conversation we're having to sort of flippantly say, oh, they should do this, they should do that.
But when you're in the room with unbearable pressure, with so many different interests at the same time, with superpowers asking you to do this or that, with munitions dwindling, with people dying in the field, with attacks that come at the very instant you're thinking about everything else, it is very, very, very hard to make good and judicious decisions in those moments.
And so I myself have tremendous respect and deference for the Prime Minister and anybody who sits in that seat and has that most difficult job.
Pressure Cooker Decisions00:00:31
David, thanks for your time.
Where can people find you if they're interested in hearing more of what you've got to say?
Check out David M. Keys on X.
I occasionally post.
I didn't post for a long time.
I'm not really a creature of social.
Occasionally, I say things or make funny videos.
Hopefully, I like satire and humor, so sometimes I post things there.
That's about it.
Have a sub stack and things like that.
But thank you for the time and happy to have had this conversation.