Nov. 26, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
37:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| The Palestinians don't want them. | ||
| I mean, oddly enough, the Palestinians would prefer Hamas at this point. | ||
| They have like a 75% approval rating. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they committed these atrocities against Jews. | ||
| So the one thing that America refuses to recognize is just how radicalized the Palestinian people have become. | ||
| This notion that it's just Hamas, 40,000 terrorists, and then two million peace-loving people, that once Hamas, once the yoke of Hamas has taken off, you have this great opportunity for peace. | ||
| piece is not true. | ||
| All right, Ambassador David Friedman, I have to say it's a pleasure to have you in my home, | ||
| but this will not feel as, say, warm and fuzzy as last time we did this in Jerusalem just | ||
| about six or seven months ago, in light of everything that's going on in Israel. | ||
| So I guess first, what are you doing in Florida right now? | ||
| Why don't we start there and then we'll talk about everything else. | ||
| Well, I just came for a few weeks to see my family down here. | ||
| I had been in Israel when the war started with some other family members with some grandchildren. | ||
| I had to explain to my 12-year-old granddaughter, my oldest grandchild, As we, you know, rushed her into the safe room, you know, that there was a whole world out there, a whole ugly world out there that, you know, we hope our children never get to know, you know, and she would ask me, you know, why are the people that want to kill us so indiscriminately? | ||
| I mean, she didn't use that word, but why are they shooting rockets at us? | ||
| They never met us. | ||
| They don't know us. | ||
| Why do they hate us so much that they want to kill us? | ||
| That was a hard conversation to have. | ||
| So that's where I was, and after a few weeks of that, I thought I could be helpful here doing some media and some advocacy, so I came to the States for a few weeks. | ||
| So just to be clear, because a few things are changing on the ground as we're speaking right now, it sounds like there might be a prisoner swap and some of the hostages might be released. | ||
| We're airing this on Wednesday, or we're taping this Wednesday before Thanksgiving. | ||
| We're airing this Sunday after. | ||
| What would you say the state of the country is at the moment? | ||
| I mean, there's still a full-scale war going in every inch, back to south, east to west. | ||
| Look, the country was in shock for a couple of days, but then that, you know, that turned to anger and that very quickly turned to determination. | ||
| And they are determined to win this war and to eradicate Hamas. | ||
| And that's the real objective. | ||
| Now, you overlay on that the human tragedy of 240 hostages, | ||
| whose families are enduring the type of trauma and torture that none of us should ever know. | ||
| And of course, the ones who were held in captivity are probably enduring the same. | ||
| So Israel has these two goals that are not entirely consistent with each other, right? | ||
| Win the war, eradicate Hamas, but do it in a way where you can extract as many hostages as possible. | ||
| So yeah, we don't know what the deal is yet. | ||
| By the time this airs, we probably will know what it is. | ||
| Whether that deal is kept, whether it's, you know, what happens after that, you know, it's a dynamic, fluid situation. | ||
| Israel has done this before, having to trade prisoners for hostages, sometimes literally to just get remains back of Israelis. | ||
| Well, never like this, though. | ||
| Never like this. | ||
| But nothing like this, of course. | ||
| But how did they even go in and negotiate with people that did this in the first place? | ||
| It's not like, you know, I think a lot of people are struggling. | ||
| A lot of Westerners that don't really understand what's going on in Israel struggle to understand the disproportion. | ||
| They always talk about disproportionate, but the disproportionate realities between the two parties. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look, back in 2006 after the Lebanon War, they negotiated for two soldiers. | ||
| And they didn't know whether the soldiers were alive or dead. | ||
| And we all waited for the exchange. | ||
| And everybody's heart sank as we saw two bodies, two body bags being brought over the border. | ||
| That's how, you know, kind of despicable and untrustworthy these negotiations are. | ||
| So, yeah, there'll be, I'm sure, some unpleasant surprises here. | ||
| But remember, you know, one soldier, Gilad Shalit, was traded for almost 5,000 Hamas | ||
| terrorists, many of whom then returned to commit acts of terror and murder. | ||
| Now you're talking about 240 women, children, elderly people, Holocaust survivors. | ||
| And they're trickling them out. | ||
| You know, they're going to do maybe, I'm hearing, 10 a day for five days. | ||
| It's just the whole thing is barbaric. | ||
| But one thing about Israel that I don't think people understand, it's a country of Jewish mothers. | ||
| You know, the desire to see people saved, the discomfort that every Israeli has going to sleep at night knowing that somebody's kids are unaccounted for and they're being held in tunnels, it's unbearable. | ||
| So, as tough as they are, and they're incredibly tough and strong and great fighters, they're also, a lot of Jewish mothers just want their kids back. | ||
| And this balance, You know, it's really a tough decision to make for the leaders of the country to make that decision. | ||
| Is that the weird thing that's going on here, that it's kind of baked into the code that the Jews will survive this, that these horrible things happen, that's what every holiday and most of the holidays are about, and a bunch of us are killed, and then here we are, and let's acknowledge what happened, and let's eat, and continue. | ||
| And that sort of feels like what's going to happen here too. | ||
| Look, I have no doubt Israel is going to survive. | ||
| You know, one of the important perspectives here is, think about, you know, 1,200 people were slaughtered on the 7th of October. | ||
| So, to compare that, for example, to the Holocaust, right? | ||
| That event, in Holocaust terms, happened every day for four years. | ||
| Picture October 7th, every single day, for four years, and that's the Holocaust. | ||
| And we survived the Holocaust, right? | ||
| So, we're going to survive this. | ||
| Um, but we're not, we're not, you know, we're not our parents or our grandparents, you know? | ||
| I mean, I'm not as tough as my grandparents were. | ||
| I mean, I didn't grow up that way. | ||
| I grew up in a very comfortable life as you probably did and everybody else we know, right? | ||
| Well, we both grew up in Long Island about three, three miles away from each other. | ||
| It was okay. | ||
| We're not cut out, we're not cut out for this. | ||
| We're not cut out to be, you know, ripped away from our parents and stuck in a, in a, in a hole in the ground. | ||
| I mean, that's not what our gen, thank God, it's not who we are. | ||
| So now, you know, this episode is causing all of us to think about what we're made of and how strong we are and how we're going to survive. | ||
| We will survive, but it's causing everybody to really rethink all their assumptions. | ||
| How do you feel, I mean, as the former U.S. | ||
| ambassador to Israel in a time of peace, a time of really extraordinary peace and peace deals, and there were seemingly other peace deals that were about to be signed. | ||
| It sounds like Saudi Arabia might have been signed the following week. | ||
| I mean, the contrast of what you saw there and what you helped make happen there versus where we're at now has just got to be mind-blowing. | ||
| It's mind-blowing. | ||
| It's frustrating. | ||
| I'll tell you, my wife said to me the other day, aren't you glad you're not there now? | ||
| And I said, no, actually, I'm really frustrated that I'm not there now. | ||
| I would love to be there now. | ||
| Because while I can't tell you I'd achieve a better outcome, It's an unprovable, at least in my mind, I know how I would deal with these barbarians. | ||
| It'll be very different. | ||
| Because I dealt with them before. | ||
| We had these skirmishes before. | ||
| It wasn't anything like this. | ||
| But when I was in office 2019, Hamas, you know, shot rockets and attempted at least to kidnap some soldiers. | ||
| Um, we delivered very different messages at all times to the highest, you know, levels through intermediaries, intermediaries sometimes directly, you know, you harm one hair on an American, you know, we'll wipe you out. | ||
| You harm one hair on an Israeli, the Israelis will wipe you out with our enthusiastic support. | ||
| You know, we didn't leave any room for ambiguity. | ||
| We didn't talk about, you know, a two-state solution. | ||
| We didn't talk about, you know, Palestinian dignity. | ||
| We just didn't touch that stuff. | ||
| We just said, we're not interested. | ||
| We'll talk about that when things are quiet. | ||
| Right now, you end this or we will, you know, unleash the full wrath of both the American or Israeli government, whatever is applicable. | ||
| And I mean, I'd love to be delivering that message right now. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's meaningless from somebody who's no longer in office. | ||
| Well, so what do you think happened in terms of messaging that clearly Hamas or the guys running it in Qatar or the Iranians got a different message, either tacitly or subtly, that they would be able to get away with something like this? | ||
| Hammy, look, it began with Afghanistan. | ||
| It continued through Russian Ukraine. | ||
| It's a function of a president who just, you know, spews weakness. | ||
| I mean, you know, just doesn't have the acuity or the vigor to really portray America as a strong country. | ||
| We gave $6 billion to Iran. | ||
| We're about to give another $10 billion to Iran. | ||
| We lifted all the sanctions on Iran that we had in place. | ||
| Iran, when we left office, was selling about a billion dollars worth of oil in a couple of years. | ||
| Now they're up to $60 or $70 billion a year. | ||
| We made Iran a very rich country. | ||
| They were broke when we left. | ||
| They were broke. | ||
| And on top of that, we had, you know, assassinated their head, the head of the snake, if you will, the head sponsor, the head architect of all the terror attacks. | ||
| And you know what Iran did in response? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Because they were afraid of us. | ||
| So losing that deterrence is really the, I think, the single event that has caused all these problems to happen. | ||
| That, you know, we spend seven, eight hundred, you know, billion dollars a year on our military. | ||
| If no one thinks we're going to use it, if no one thinks that we know how to use it, It's a waste of money. | ||
| Is that just the reality of the Middle East? | ||
| That it really just boils down to that more than anything else? | ||
| You know, you can just say nice things. | ||
| It's just not how it works over there. | ||
| Yeah, look, in the Arab dialect, you know, when people say, it doesn't matter, they have a phrase in Arabic it translates to, it's just words on paper. | ||
| Words on paper don't mean anything. Words don't mean anything. | ||
| It's just they gauge you the way they gauge each other, which is, is this guy going to deliver the kind of strength | ||
| that we have to take seriously? | ||
| And Trump, for whatever people thought about Trump, there were no new wars, he was unpredictable. | ||
| which is an asset, you know, in the Middle East. | ||
| And occasionally he acted with extraordinary determination and force. | ||
| And it kept, at least in that part of the world, kept it extremely safe. | ||
| What do you think Israel could have done differently? | ||
| I mean, so there hasn't been an Israeli or a Jew living in Gaza since 2005. | ||
| Egypt also has a border with that, with Gaza, obviously. | ||
| And it was part of Egypt before. | ||
| I mean, what could they have possibly done differently? | ||
| They said, take it, we want nothing to do with this place. | ||
| Yeah, and they really don't want it and they don't want it back either. | ||
| But it's sort of like, you know, the dog that catches the car. | ||
| I mean, you don't, you may not want it, but it wants you. You can try to forget Gaza, but Gaza's | ||
| not going to forget you. | ||
| And I think there was a lot of wishful thinking. Look, Israel during this period, you know, | ||
| from 2007 when Hamas took over, while Hamas is radicalizing the Gaza Strip, Israel's becoming, | ||
| you know, a first world economy, you know. | ||
| Their GDP per capita is going up to a top 10 in the world. | ||
| They're building things that nobody ever thought possible. | ||
| And they don't want to think about the old days. | ||
| They want to get it out of their minds. | ||
| And I think the politicians thought that way as well. | ||
| So every now and then, every three or four years, Gaza would erupt. | ||
| They'd shoot a bunch of rockets into Israel, you know, extraordinarily, you know, a war crime of, you know, undoubtable and significant proportions. | ||
| It's funny, you can kind of like brush that away, but no other country on earth would tolerate two rockets shot in. | ||
| But from that perspective, it's just like, ah, yeah, every couple of years. | ||
| So Israel was like, how do we make this go away? | ||
| It's not like, how do we end this for the next 20 years? | ||
| It's how do we make it go away? | ||
| So they'd shoot back and there would be some, you know, back and forth. | ||
| And then Israel would make an announcement that, you know, We have, you know, we have caused Hamas to pay a huge price, you know, for their malign activities. | ||
| And then Qatar would come in with like a suitcase full of cash, 15 million bucks. | ||
| They'd spread it, with Israel's permission. | ||
| Spread it around, kind of assuage all the hard feelings, and then Israel will go back to creating the most innovative technology in the world and becoming the startup nation and, you know, you know what Tel Aviv looks like, you know, the most expensive city in the world to live in. | ||
| And then a few years later, Hamas will come back stronger. | ||
| Now, they're getting stronger and stronger and stronger through this period, notwithstanding, until we had October 7th. | ||
| And now you can no longer ignore it. | ||
| And the only thing Israel could have done different would have been to have tried to obliterate Hamas when it was much weaker than it is today. | ||
| The world would have looked at them like, what are you doing? | ||
| Like, why are you doing this? | ||
| In retrospect, it would have been better for everybody, including the Palestinians, had Israel gone in 10 years ago than now. | ||
|
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What does the end of this thing look like? | |
| Look, I think it's a great question. | ||
| I'll tell you what it doesn't look like, because there have been all these suggestions that Biden and Blinken have said, look, get rid of Hamas and then put in the Palestinian Authority and we'll have a two-state solution. | ||
| That has zero possibility of being successful for two reasons. | ||
| Number one, the Palestinian Authority is not that much better than Hamas. | ||
| They're incredibly corrupt. | ||
| They pay terrorists to kill Jews. | ||
| They have a pension system where the more Jews you kill, the higher the pension you get. | ||
| So they're no good. | ||
| We don't have that plan here, do we? | ||
| We have a different pension plan. | ||
| I hope you don't have that plan. | ||
| I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you don't have that plan. | ||
| It might make our relationship a little bit more challenging. | ||
| The other thing is that the Palestinians don't want them. | ||
| I mean, oddly enough, the Palestinians would prefer Hamas at this point. | ||
| They have like a 75% approval rating. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they committed these atrocities against Jews. | ||
| So the one thing that America refuses to recognize is just how radicalized the Palestinian people have become. | ||
| This notion that it's just Hamas, 40,000 terrorists, and then two million peace-loving people, that once Hamas, once the yoke of Hamas has taken off, you have this great opportunity for peace. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| Now, maybe it will be true in a generation or two, but the end looks like a long period where Israel will be in control of the Gaza Strip. | ||
| It's going to retain control of Judea and Samaria, likely with more episodes of violence there. | ||
| And they're just going to have to hunker down and kind of, you know, try to divide the Palestinians into two groups. | ||
| This is what I would do if I were them. | ||
| This is my vision of the future. | ||
| You get a bunch of money from their friends, their new friends in the Gulf, and you say, guys, all you Palestinians, look, you want to kill us or you want to work with us? | ||
| OK, let's forget about all the statecraft for a minute. | ||
| You want to kill us? | ||
| You want to work with us. | ||
| You want to kill us? | ||
| We're going to kill you first. | ||
| OK, we're not going to live with a bunch of guys that want to kill us. | ||
| You want to work with us? | ||
| OK, we will help build better infrastructure, better schools, better hospitals, better roads, and try to work with you to get you to a level where you can start to But is the irony, though, that that's exactly what they could have had for the last 17 years, right? | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| And that's sort of the gist. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So, but here are the choices and make them make the choices and then act in accordance | ||
| with those choices. | ||
| But is the irony though that that's exactly what they could have had for the last 17 years, | ||
| right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And that's sort of the, what do you do with that? | ||
| It's the failure of the West. | ||
| See, the West thinks that every human being is the same, you know, kind of stripped bare of, you know, geopolitical and socioeconomic issues. | ||
| They're all the same. | ||
| Like, if you treat them well, every human being will ultimately veer towards the good. | ||
| It's not the Middle East. | ||
| I mean, there are people, look, Osama Bin Laden came from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| He had $100 million, right? | ||
| Didn't stop him from being radicalized and being a terrorist. | ||
| It doesn't flow that just because you're treated nicely, you're going to treat others nicely in return. | ||
| And that's the Middle East. | ||
| You've got a lot of very, very challenging population centers there surrounding Israel. | ||
| Is the other problem, you mentioned two problems, but that there's another third massive problem, | ||
| which is that it wouldn't be a two-state solution, it would be a three-state solution. | ||
| And for some reason nobody talks about that, but the West Bank and Gaza are not connected | ||
| and then you have two entities. | ||
| So it's not a two-state solution. | ||
| Nor has ever been. | ||
| Now look, you can't create any contiguity between Gaza and the West Bank. | ||
| You could build an underground train if you wanted to, but it would just be silly. | ||
| You've got bigger problems. | ||
| I mean, the logistics are challenging, but the real problem is who's going to run this? | ||
| You know, there is nobody out there who has shown any capacity to lead their people. | ||
| There's no Martin Luther King in the Palestinian world. | ||
| There's no one who has that level of inspiration who wants to live in peace, who preaches peaceful coexistence. | ||
| It's not part of the culture, you know. | ||
| It's not politically correct to say these people don't want to live peacefully. | ||
| But, you know, for the Israelis who are living there taking the risk, you know, that's the reality. | ||
| You know, don't tell them these are peace-loving people when everything they study and learn and teach is designed to just foster hatred against the Jewish people. | ||
| Is Israel going to allow the UN and all these ridiculous NGOs and everybody else back in there to do all of this? | ||
| I mean, they were the ones that were teaching this stuff and hiding what's going on at the hospital and everything else. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| It really highlights the difference between the administration. | ||
| We cut off all funding to the PA. | ||
| We cut off all funding to UNRRA. | ||
| We said, look, you want to teach kids math and science, we'll give you money. | ||
| We want everyone to be educated. | ||
| You want to teach them how to put on a school play where half the kids dress up as Jews and half the kids dress up as terrorists and they take the guns and they shoot the Jews and the Jews lie down and play dead and the parents get up and applaud? | ||
| We're not giving you money for that, you know? | ||
| And that's what a typical, you know, third grade play looks like, sponsored by the United Nations in the Gaza Strip. | ||
| I want to jump back to the human element, because everyone's doing the politics part everywhere. | ||
| But the human element, you mentioned talking to your granddaughter as this was happening. | ||
| So you're a grandfather. | ||
| You also live in Israel. | ||
| I walked around Jerusalem with you. | ||
| It was unbelievably peaceful. | ||
| We had lunch on a beautiful day, and all I kept thinking For those five days in Jerusalem, specifically, was how peaceful it was. | ||
| And I even said to you, as we were walking through the mall there, I said, where are all the soldiers? | ||
| There used to be soldiers everywhere. | ||
| And you said, well, they've figured out other ways to do things now. | ||
| That sense, when you're walking around Jerusalem now, just gone altogether? | ||
| I mean, I guess what I'm asking is, what is it like for a country to now exist in two months of this? | ||
| How do these people function? | ||
| Are people going to work? | ||
| Like, what's the... | ||
| Look, Jerusalem, I was there two weeks ago. | ||
| It wasn't back to normal because so many fathers are off at war. | ||
| You know, this is a reserve army. | ||
| Lots and lots and lots of guys, and women too, are off to the front. | ||
| So you don't see the streets are more quiet. | ||
| But you know, there are people shopping, there are people walking around. | ||
| I was at that same mall walking around. | ||
| It's just quieter because there aren't that many people around. | ||
| That will come back. | ||
| Jerusalem is, you know, Jerusalem was not bearing the brunt of this, because, you know, it's interesting, the Hamas, they can't control their rockets, right? | ||
| So, you shoot an errant rocket towards Tel Aviv. | ||
| If it's long, it hits Haifa. | ||
| If it's short, it hits Ashkelon. | ||
| Either way, you're killing Jews, right? | ||
| So, that's all good. | ||
| You shoot a rocket at Jerusalem, and it goes too far, you could hit the Al-Aqsa Mosque, right? | ||
| So, they don't want to do that. | ||
| Well, they blame Israel for that. | ||
| They would blame it, but, you know, there is a way to prove that. | ||
| Jerusalem, you know, was actually, after the first two or three days, the sirens really were not as prevalent. | ||
| But look, there's just a fog that's sitting on top of the Jewish people right now. | ||
| This is not like anything else before, not just because 240 hostages, which is about 238 more than ever before, | ||
| right? | ||
| So let's put that in perspective. | ||
| Not just because, um, the border was breached at, you know, the | ||
| Southern border was breached, which hadn't been breached in 50 years. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But because you saw the hearts of the Palestinian terrorists and there weren't | ||
| It was like a piece of coal there. | ||
| I mean, the violence, the rape, the slaughter of children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. | ||
| We looked at that and we said, it doesn't matter what we negotiate. | ||
| It doesn't matter what we, what we, what the ultimate, you know, geopolitical, you know, these people, are barbarians. You know, we used to say they're animals, | ||
| but they're not animals because we like animals. You know, animals don't do this, don't hurt people | ||
| for pleasure. I think people on the left, you know, like I'd lived this world for five years as | ||
| ambassador. | ||
| I spoke to lots and lots of people and I had spent 30 years, you know, negotiating all kinds of things. | ||
| So I can size up people pretty quickly. | ||
| I had sized up a lot of these people, you know, early on that, you know, we're never going to make a deal with them. | ||
| They're not worth spending time with. | ||
| I went back and met with Trump several times in the Oval Office and gave him my view, but There was always a movement on the left, good people, you know, people of good faith, wishful thinking, but who said, you know, we can, you know, if we just kind of move closer to them, they'll move closer to us. | ||
| And you know, oddly enough, most of the people that were killed in the South Were lefties. | ||
| Were lefties, yeah. | ||
| These were people that had dedicated their lives towards coexistence with the Palestinians. | ||
| And I think those that survived... That's literally why they were living down there. | ||
| Yeah, they wanted to live along the border and they would, you know, they'd meet at the border and they would, you know, they cared so much about showing that they wanted to coexist and live peacefully. | ||
| And they wanted to encourage the Palestinians to improve their lives and to live better lives. | ||
| And the people that survived and saw the film I think they're the most in shock because their entire | ||
| premise about the relationship, about living in Israel, the entire premise was proved to be faulty. | ||
| And that's tough when you're living your life on a forty-year premise and it turns out to be just completely wrong. | ||
| And that's the toughest part here. | ||
| Of course, the people that, you know, and that's why, that's the other reason why there will never be a two-state solution anymore, because it's no longer just about, you know, drawing borders and figuring out, you know, the details. | ||
| It's about Can we ever again trust these people to be our neighbors without protecting ourselves, you know, in ways that they can never do this again? | ||
|
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So at the end of the day, does this just boil down to the Jews? | |
| That it's just that these people simply do not want Jews there, no matter what concessions are made? | ||
| I mean, this is what the Israeli right. | ||
| I mean, Netanyahu has been saying this for a long time. | ||
| It doesn't matter what you give them. | ||
| It doesn't matter what you offer. | ||
| It doesn't matter what infrastructure you leave them with or whatever else. | ||
| They do not want Jews there. | ||
| They simply will never stop. | ||
| They won't. | ||
| And look, they were doing this in 1929, the big massacre in Hebron. | ||
| They were doing this long before 1967 when Jordan was in control of the West Bank. | ||
| I mean, this is not about, you know, it's not about the land. | ||
| It's about whether or not there can ever be a Jewish state smack between, you know, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. | ||
| And, you know, look at Israel's neighbors, you know. | ||
| You have a dictatorship in Egypt in a failed economy, a dictatorship in Jordan in a failed economy, a terrorist state in Syria with no economy, and a terrorist state in Lebanon with no economy, and Israel's smack in the middle. | ||
| Now, why do they want to inject in the middle of that Another terror state. | ||
| I mean, the last thing the world needs is another terror state. | ||
| We're smack dab in that region. | ||
| And I think Israel's going to hit a point where they just have to say, look, you know, we tried. | ||
| We're not going to do it. | ||
| We're willing to live in peace as long as we have to maintain security control over all of it. | ||
| Like I used to always tell my friends who say, you know, we want to get out of Gaza. | ||
| I said, again, as I said earlier, Gaza's not going to forget you, even if you want to forget Gaza. | ||
| Same thing with places like Jenin and Ramallah and the West Bank. | ||
| You want to get out of there? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| It's never going to leave you alone. | ||
| Is there an irony there that Bibi didn't want to leave Gaza in the first place in 2005, so he was right about that, but yet this thing happened under his watch, so there's going to be a reckoning of some sort at the end of this? | ||
| Well, look, he left the government because he was against the Gaza evacuation. | ||
| He was right there. | ||
| I think that, you know, in the aftermath of that, as I said earlier, this idea of placating Hamas just because, you know, it's not worth the distraction on your path to this economic and technological juggernaut you're creating. | ||
| I understand it, okay? | ||
| And maybe I would have done the same thing, you know, in those circumstances. | ||
| But in hindsight, Hamas was allowed to get way too strong, given how strong their view was to destroy the State of Israel. | ||
| So as somebody that now has spent probably most of your life, but certainly the last couple of years, defending Israel on the national stage and explaining the history of the land and helping these deals be made and everything else, when you see the craziness on the streets of London and of Paris and in New York City and all of these places, and that so many people are so confused about the reality, what can be done about this? | ||
| Because on a sheer numbers level, It's not looking good. | ||
| In a reality level, if we get people to reality, I think it would be just fine. | ||
| No, the numbers are terrifying. | ||
| You know, you see people yelling from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. | ||
| You ask them, what river and what sea? | ||
| They have no idea. | ||
| They have no idea. | ||
| So this is just kind of piling on to this anti-Semitic Sentiment that has existed, you know across Europe look The first thing that look I right now I think the only country that can really be saved is America I mean, I just want to save America, you know, we're good. | ||
| I think we've lost Europe I don't know how to save it. | ||
| I'm not smart enough to figure that out When I left London just a couple weeks ago, and I literally drove by one of the rallies, and when I was getting on the plane leaving, I thought, is this the last time I'm coming back to this place? | ||
| That's a weird... Yeah, it's a shame, because London's a great city, and Paris is a great city, but not anymore. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| So, we've got to save America. | ||
| I mean, that's really, I think, and that's really important to Israel also. | ||
| At the end of the day, Israel, you know, if Israel only has an alliance with America and no one else, Israel will be fine. | ||
| Israel without America scares me. | ||
| That really scares me. | ||
| It's all about some basic things, and I don't want to make this political, but shut the freaking border. | ||
| Get rid of the people who don't deserve to be here. | ||
| That's what happened to London and Paris, right? | ||
| They let everybody in and they're paying the price. | ||
| We can't replicate London and Paris. | ||
| So that's the first thing. | ||
| I think if we do that, now as far as universities are concerned, look, my alma mater that I'm totally offended by at this point, Columbia University, I started, you know, kind of talking to people there, and what they tell me is that there are more Palestinian teaching assistants at Columbia University than any other nationality. | ||
| And these are the ones that are teaching the kids. | ||
| I mean, they're teaching all the basic... And just by numbers, that makes absolutely no sense. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| I mean, certainly they're not that large a population. | ||
| They have a lot of support within the Middle East Studies Department. | ||
| You know, Columbia began with this fellow, Edward Said, who kind of was the intellectual founder of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, and he's got all those people in there. | ||
| And, you know, I would bet that, you know, they all got student visas and lied on the question whether they supported a terrorist organization. | ||
| So, if they've lied on their visa application, send them home. | ||
| I mean, we have to get really tough on who's in our country. | ||
| We have, I think there are a lot of dumb kids at college. | ||
| I mean, but there have always been dumb kids at college. | ||
| I mean, you know, that's what college is known for. | ||
| The energy behind those dumb kids ripping down posters of kidnapped children is coming from the faculty of these universities. | ||
| And, you know, look, one thing that, you know, people don't realize this, you know, but, you know, people call Donald Trump, you know, all the time anti-Semitic. | ||
| I have no idea why. | ||
| OK, certainly anything that they've attributed to him, they've misquoted. | ||
| I don't think his grandchildren know why either. | ||
| I don't think his grandchildren know why. | ||
| I mean, and I know, you know, personally know that he's not. | ||
| But, you know, in December of 2019, he signed an executive order that extended the reach of Title VI to religious groups. | ||
| The Title VI says you can't have any federal funding to an institution and a university that discriminates based upon race or gender. | ||
| Didn't say religion. | ||
| OK, because after the Pittsburgh shooting, he signs an executive order that says, I want to combat anti-Semitism, I want to extend this to anti-Semitic acts as well. | ||
| Anybody who discriminates against Jews, no more federal funding. | ||
|
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OK? | |
| We've got to enforce that, I think, aggressively. | ||
| And if we do that, because, again, there are some really good organizations right now that are fighting anti-Semitism. | ||
| You know how they go? | ||
| And they photograph every single idiot on a college campus saying something really stupid. | ||
| And then they figure out how to work the Google algorithm so that when you Google their name, it's the first thing you see. | ||
| That will quickly, I think, end the uprisings from the idiots. | ||
| Not from the ideological motivated people, but the idiots. | ||
| We can't get jobs if we keep doing this, so they'll stop doing it. | ||
| And I think that's a step in the right direction. | ||
| But we've got to be tough on our borders, tough on our illegal immigrants, tough on those that support Hamas, and tough on the faculty at these universities. | ||
| And I think if we do all those things, we'll be moving in the right direction. | ||
| And I don't think the Democrats will do that. | ||
| I think a Republican administration will do that. | ||
| What has happened to the Democrats? | ||
| Well, they're falling apart right now because, you know, the Democrats that my parents used to support, you know, I call them sort of like the Steny Hoyer Democrats, right? | ||
| You know, guy, you know, centrist, you know, pro-Israel, been around for 40, 50 years, you know, goes to every AIPAC, you know, meeting. | ||
| That's not where the energy is in the party anymore. | ||
| And I think a lot of Jewish people who traditionally voted Democrat, a lot of people kind of are center or center-left who supported the Democratic Party, Jewish, a lot of Jews, I think they're looking at what's happening now and saying, you know, what happened to our party? | ||
| It's not, it's never been my party, but it's, I think the, I think the Democrats are going, you know, and you know, you know where you saw it first? | ||
| You remember, I think it was two Democratic conventions ago. | ||
|
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Oh, when they wanted to take God out of Zarephath? | |
| No, when they wanted to make part of the platform that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. | ||
| And they got shattered out. | ||
| And then this guy says, look, you know, I'm just going to take it to a voice vote. | ||
| You know, let's just amend our platform to include that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. | ||
| The voice vote was negative. | ||
| You could hear in the crowd. | ||
| They were saying no. | ||
| And he said, OK, the eyes have it. | ||
| And he put it in. | ||
| But right there, I could tell, you know, you could tell that the party is no longer with Israel. | ||
| Yeah, so have you gotten any apologies from the lefty Jews that might have been annoyed with you for working with Donald Trump, who suddenly are like, alright, alright, wasn't so bad. | ||
| I do sense some lefty Jews are waking up right now. | ||
| There are a certain set of lefties in general, but obviously with Jews it's a little more specific. | ||
| Yeah, I think, look, I think, no one's come to me and apologized. | ||
| I do think that they are in pain right now. | ||
| They're looking at, you know, a lot of these lefty Jews went to the Columbia's and the Harvard's and the Princeton's and the MIT's and they're seeing what's happening on campus and they're seeing that the left is becoming decidedly, not just anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic. | ||
| And I think they're, I think it's, I can only imagine how they feel. | ||
| They feel betrayed, they feel like, you know, they're, again, when you believe in something your whole life and it turns out to be false, it's probably not a pleasant, not a pleasant experience, you know? | ||
| And I think that's where they are right now. | ||
| Is there anything else Israel can do on the messaging side? | ||
| You know, because obviously the lies travel fast. | ||
| They are amplified by algorithms now. | ||
| They're amplified by the BBC and the CBC and virtually everywhere. | ||
| And then Israel sends out people to correct the lies. | ||
| But it's a hell of a lot of work. | ||
| Look, I think we're... And also some people just simply don't care. | ||
| It's just Jews are the oppressor. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Look, I think that, and I'm sure lots of people won't agree with this, but I think that what Israel has failed to really communicate is the message that they're not just You know, a state surrounded by hostile Arabs, that they're not just a democratic state, that they're not just a place where, you know, people can live who are gay or trans or, you know, Arab or Christian, that, you know, that they're an inclusive... I mean, that's all true, and it is unique about a state in the Middle East. | ||
| But they've lost, I think they've buried the lead, right? | ||
| And again, the lead may not appeal to everybody, but the lead is that it's also the land of the Bible, you know? | ||
| And the Bible still sells more books than, you know, last time I checked it sells like 2,400 books an hour, okay? | ||
| The Bible matters. | ||
| I mean, you know, the values that we hold dear in America came from the Bible. | ||
| I mean, you know, the Declaration of Independence says that, you know, human rights were endowed by our Creator, right? | ||
| That was earth-shaking because it meant that they're not negotiable, they're immutable, right? | ||
| They come from God. | ||
| If they come from God, you can't change them. | ||
| The sovereign can't change them. | ||
| And all those rights, you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, They're sourced right in the Bible. | ||
| I mean, you can look in the Bible and see exactly where our founders got those rights versus any other human rights. | ||
| If we want to preserve our biblical heritage, or at least the biblical values, whether we're observant or not, it's not about being religious or not, but about observing these ancient but still relevant Judeo-Christian values, if we want to preserve them, you've got to get there every now and then. | ||
| You've got to get there, and you've got to recharge your batteries, and you've got to see where the covenants were given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. | ||
| You've got to see the path where Jesus walked. | ||
| You've got to see where the messages were delivered. | ||
| It really is a life-altering experience for people to do it at least once. | ||
| And you can only do it if the Jewish people retain control of the Jewish state. | ||
| OK? | ||
| Otherwise, it will go the way of all the other Judeo-Christian monuments that have been destroyed | ||
| by ISIS and others. | ||
| So that doesn't come across, because I'm not sure how many, how much of the Israeli population | ||
| really wants to emphasize that point. | ||
| I mean, Israel is, you know, we're all Jews, but it's largely a secular society. | ||
| But we can't lose sight of that. | ||
| I'm telling you, it really is important. | ||
| It resonates deeply within America. | ||
| You know, and again, you could think the Bible comes from God. | ||
| You could think it was just written by some really, really smart guy, you know, 3,000 years ago, you know, who just had some really great ideas. | ||
| But the book's the book, you know, and we're the people of the book, and that book is the reason why the Jewish people are still around today, 3,500 years later, when every other ancient civilization is gone. | ||
| It's the book. | ||
| It's the book that kept us together again. | ||
| Whether you believe in God or not, the book kept us together. | ||
| We should be focusing more on the book. | ||
| I don't think there's a better way to end this than saying, next year in Jerusalem? | ||
| Next year in Jerusalem. | ||
| No, this year in Jerusalem. | ||
| This year in Jerusalem. | ||
| Well, you'll be there in a couple weeks, but I'll make it for 24. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Looking forward, Dave. | ||
| Pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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