Dec. 14, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I mean, everything is very much, if it's not on pause, then it's on slow down mode. | ||
| So, you know, the schools are working, but they're not up to full speed. | ||
| I get my son's high school, more than half of the teachers are in reserves. | ||
| So they have, and that's the case in most of the schools where you just have a lot of teachers that have been called up for reserves or the husbands of the teachers at the elementary school where most of the teachers are women. | ||
| So, I mean, you just, the entire, the entire country is mobilized and everybody goes to funerals. | ||
| I guess everybody, I mean, particularly where we live, there are a lot of soldiers who have been killed from our community and from neighboring communities. | ||
| And so we seem to go to funerals all the time. | ||
| So, we're on war footing as a country. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the host of The Caroline Glick Show as well as | ||
| senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate. | ||
| Caroline Glick, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Finally, I should say. | ||
| Finally. | ||
| Thanks for having me on your program. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Delighted, actually. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Well, I wish that you were on under better circumstances. | ||
| You're in Israel right now. | ||
| Obviously, I wanna hear the latest and hear how you are doing and all that stuff. | ||
| But I do wanna mention that when I was in Israel about eight months or so ago, I was on your show. | ||
| It is very obvious to me you are one of the clearest thinkers in terms of the politics of Israel and really the geopolitics of the whole area. | ||
| So that's really why I wanted to sit down with you now. | ||
| I guess, first off, How are you, what is the state of the country right now, the feeling of the people, before we get into the sheer political nature of everything? | ||
| Well, you know, we're doing fine. | ||
| Our son is in Gaza, and so that's a little bit, I mean, it's very, it causes a lot of anxiety, but, you know, the entire country is basically right now hostage in Gaza. | ||
| I just spoke this morning, To the father of one of the hostages there. | ||
| And he made the point that, you know, we have 7 million Jews who have been hostage to Hamas for many, many years. | ||
| They can shoot missiles at us whenever they want. | ||
| And we get to decide who sleeps in their bed and who sleeps in bomb shelters whenever they want. | ||
| We have on average 2,000 missiles have been shot from Gaza into Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah and the rest of them. | ||
| over the past over decades. | ||
| So this is something that just has to end. | ||
| And you have a great sense of determination in Israel, the likes of which really I haven't seen. | ||
| I don't think I've seen before, although I've seen us in very, very determined moods, | ||
| like during the height of the terrorism at the beginning of the century from 2000 to 2004, | ||
| and particularly in 2002, which was the worst year | ||
| of the Palestinian terror onslaught then. | ||
| So I've seen us very, very determined in the past, but the mood here is still different. | ||
| People understand that this is a war for our very existence, that if we don't eradicate Hamas and significantly bring down Hezbollah's ability to attack us from the north, then we are going to be, our actual existence is going to be brought into question because everybody expects us to do this. | ||
| We have to do it. | ||
| We can't live securely with these jihadist terror groups on our borders. | ||
| And so the determination really is, I think, the main thing that people feel Even more than the anxiety, which is also extremely strong. | ||
| Yeah, can you just talk a little bit about just what day-to-day life? | ||
| I mean, I think it's hard for Americans, I obviously have an international audience, but I think it's hard for people in virtually any other country on earth to imagine what it would be like. | ||
| I mean, not only the hostage situation, where it's such a small country that everyone knows somebody who knows somebody who was either killed or hostage, but the onslaught of rockets keeps coming. | ||
| You still have to have an economy, you still have to send kids to school, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Can you just talk about that a little bit? | ||
| I mean, everything is very much, if it's not on pause, then it's on slow down mode. | ||
| So, you know, the schools are working, but they're not up to full speed. | ||
| I get my son's high school, more than half of the teachers are in reserves. | ||
| So they have, and that's the case in most of the schools where you just have a lot of teachers that have been called up for reserves or the husbands of the teachers. | ||
| At the elementary school where most of the teachers are women. | ||
| The entire country is mobilized and everybody goes to funerals. | ||
| Particularly where we live, there are a lot of soldiers who have been killed from our community and from neighboring communities. | ||
| And so we seem to go to funerals all the time. | ||
| We're on war footing as a country. | ||
| Everybody's on heightened alert. | ||
| A lot more guards everywhere. | ||
| In our community, the entrances have been sandbagged. | ||
| And so, you know, you just, and like my husband and I, we haven't put away our firearms since October 7th. | ||
| We carry them everywhere we go. | ||
| So, I mean, it's just, the country is mobilized. | ||
| I think if you were trying to liken it to something that people can imagine, then it would be more like London under the Blitz, that there's just a sense all the time that the war kind of permeates everything. | ||
| All the small talk. | ||
| Life, you go into a mall and you feel it. | ||
| I mean, you feel it everywhere. | ||
| Can you talk about the tension between Israel having to go into Gaza to eliminate Hamas and then also having to try to keep the, I think it's around 122 hostages that they believe are alive right now, keep them alive and actually get them out, that those goals in some ways are in conflict with each other, which is making this obviously really complex. | ||
| Well, it's very complicated. | ||
| You're right, because they do seem to be in conflict. | ||
| And you also, I mean, I guess it's regrettable. | ||
| Maybe we shouldn't be surprised by it, but it's sort of vicious that, you know, how when you were here, we were sort of in the middle of a massive amount of political strife where the left had rejected the outcome in the elections in November of 2022. | ||
| And they were having these massive demonstrations all over the country all the time. | ||
| And so the people who are organizing these demonstrations are sort of this clique around a former prime minister named Ehud Barak. | ||
| And they have not allowed this war to really stop them. | ||
| So one of the things that they did was they capitalized on the hostage crisis and took over the PR campaign for the hostages family, really, like on October 8th. | ||
| And they tried to politicize the entire issue to make it about Netanyahu and use it as a pivot to call for his resignation. | ||
| And it's very ugly. | ||
| And so now you're seeing splits inside of the families of the hostages between a few of the families who are going with these political activists and many more who are not. | ||
| And it's sort of, it's a source of strife and it's being pumped up by our media here, which is also very politicized. | ||
| So that's kind of the ugly part of what we have here. | ||
| But I think that, I mean, Eitan Moore, I spoke with his father, Tsvika, this morning on my show, the program will be going up later today. | ||
| And, you know, the father said, look, it's very clear to us that Um, the only way to securely get our hostages out is to win and we can't lower the tempo on the operation. | ||
| And he may be sort of an extreme voice in the sense that he doesn't, you know, he told me that he and his son had had a conversation 2 months earlier about an earlier. | ||
| Hostage for terrorist swap that we did about 10 years ago for a soldier who had been held hostage for five years named Gilad Shalit. | ||
| And his son Eitan, who is now a hostage, told his father at the time, if I ever fall into the hands of Hezbollah or Hamas, I forbid you from making any deal on my behalf. | ||
| I don't want you to make any deal on my behalf. | ||
| So he might be sort of an extreme voice, but if you want to look in the middle of the spectrum, you have Prime Minister Netanyahu, And the other members of the war cabinet saying, look, the reason we were able to get the 108 hostages out that we got out during the temporary ceasefire that we did for seven days that ended a week and a half ago is because of our operations on the ground. | ||
| And if we hadn't done the ground operation and it hadn't been as fierce as it was at the outset already, then Hamas wouldn't have danced. | ||
| You know, there are two ways of looking at it. | ||
| One is that it's a way to compel Hamas to make a deal to let them out. | ||
| And the other one is that you can't stop. | ||
| You have to eradicate Hamas and we'll bring them back at the end. | ||
| What do you think the next step in all of this is? | ||
| So obviously the ceasefire is over. | ||
| Rockets are starting up again. | ||
| There's still the hundred plus hostages. | ||
| I mean, what is next? | ||
| So there are two, first of all, we have to eradicate, we have to finish the job in northern Gaza, in the center of Gaza, and then we're also working in the south now. | ||
| And one of the key places that we have to take over is Rafah, which is the border area between Gaza and Egypt. | ||
| And I've been very concerned all along that we didn't do this first, because it gives them continued control of an international border, and we already know that there's a lot of smuggling of weapons, and I hope not people, Uh, going through, uh, the, the border area with Egypt. | ||
| So we have to take care of that. | ||
| And the Americans are very opposed to Israel taking control of Rafa. | ||
| But if we don't do it, then we can't win. | ||
| So that's the major stepping stone in Gaza that we have to take care of. | ||
| And then there's a whole Lebanese front that really hasn't, we haven't begun to deal with in here too. | ||
| We're in a clash with the Biden administration. | ||
| Because we recognize that there is no solution other than a military solution to the problem on the border where you have Hezbollah terrorists, they're veterans of the wars of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and they've been trained to invade northern Israel, and they're right at the border fence. | ||
| And they also have 150,000 missiles and rockets pointing at Israel. | ||
| That they can shoot up to 4,000 rockets a day at Israel, and a lot of them have major, major payloads that can do strategic damage to the country, every inch of the country. | ||
| So there's no diplomatic solution to that. | ||
| And we also can't send the 60,000 Israeli civilians back to their homes in the border communities until we've taken care of the threat. | ||
| And the Americans, on the other hand, are saying, no, no, no, we want to avoid a war. | ||
| And they're trying to push this diplomatic deal with Hezbollah that would require Israel to surrender sovereign territory to Hezbollah in exchange for another temporary ceasefire, which will just further imperil the country. | ||
| So we have sort of two clashes over the border between Gaza and Egypt on the one hand and the border zone with Lebanon on the other hand that we're going to have to try to figure out how to navigate. | ||
| Do you think that survival is baked into the code with the Jews? | ||
| Obviously, as we're talking right now, we're in Hanukkah. | ||
| It's the story of survival of the Jews in the Judean hills, where Rashida Tlaib doesn't want any Jews to live right now. | ||
| But Jews have been there for over 2,000 years. | ||
| It's actually quite more than that. | ||
| But that the survival piece is in it, everything you're saying. | ||
| It's like, here we go, another challenge, another holiday commemorating another disaster, but we're still here and we will be here after this. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I mean, it is one of the enduring characteristics of Jewish history, really, is that, and we talk about it on Passover during the Seder, where we sing a song that says, in every generation, Our enemies stood up to destroy us and then God saved us from them. | ||
| And here we're seeing it again. | ||
| And it is sort of, there's a poetic justice almost in the fact that we're marking Hanukkah now, that the war began with a one-day holocaust on Simchat Torah, the last of the four High Holy Days at the start of the Jewish New Year. | ||
| And now we're entering the third month in Hanukkah, because Hanukkah, and I spoke about this on my show yesterday, which is that, you know, Hanukkah is sort of a, it's a, it commemorates a victory over two types of anti-Semitism. | ||
| One is a physical one, like Hamas that comes in and wants to physically annihilate us or Iran or Hezbollah. | ||
| But the other one are the people who are denying us our right to our own identity, to our traditions, to our heritage, and to our land. | ||
| So the sort of progressive Jews of that time, the Hellenized Jews, were saying, Well, we should take on the Greek ways. | ||
| We should make sacrifices to the Greek gods. | ||
| They set up a statue of Apollo in the temple in Jerusalem, and they were making sacrifices to it, and all kinds of other idolatrous practices that they were adopting from the Greeks. | ||
| And the Greeks themselves were denying Jewish history, saying that we had no right to the land. | ||
| I mean, it's a very, very similar 2150 years ago to the kinds of things that you're seeing on college campuses today and at the UN, where you have the full breadth of Jewish history just being erased from the record and being replaced by this fake history that that doesn't include anything Jewish in the land of Israel. | ||
| So it's very similar and it's extraordinary. | ||
| It's remarkable. | ||
| How, when it comes to the Jews at least, history always repeats itself. | ||
| Always. | ||
| It never changes. | ||
| It's always just constantly repeating itself and never is farce. | ||
| Do you think there's something that Israel could do to not repeat itself in terms of the PR war, which it seemingly always loses? | ||
| I've sort of come to the position that Israel should stop offering their PR people and their members of parliament and everything to any of these news organizations. | ||
| No country should have to defend their right to do whatever they have to do to survive. | ||
| As you said, it's an existential battle. | ||
| Being put on with largely progressive maniacs who would love for the state to fail. | ||
| So why do it? | ||
| Do you think that there is a different way to look at PR going forward? | ||
| I mean, I suppose this will change everything one way or another. | ||
| Look, my personal theory of PR and of diplomacy and of really everything in life is to be good to your friends and bad to your enemies because then people will want to be your friends and they won't want to be your enemies. | ||
| And so I think, The idea of trying to make nice, give scoops to press organs like the New York Times, or NBC News, or what have you, is just self-defeating. | ||
| You shouldn't do that. | ||
| You should be giving the scoops to the news organizations that actually support you and want you to win, and then dry the rest of them out. | ||
| There's no reason why they should be benefiting from any sort of ancient prestige that they earned 100 years ago and have since completely squandered. | ||
| So I agree with you. | ||
| I think we do have to change the things that we've been doing. | ||
| I've been arguing this for two decades, actually, and it's sort of a Sisyphean task because it's always that shiny, bright object right there. | ||
| Oh, we're going to get good coverage in the Times. | ||
| Oh, they're going to say something nice about us here or there. | ||
| And I think that it's almost a battered wife syndrome that you just say, you know, maybe they'll like us tomorrow if we make the soup just right. | ||
| So I think, you know, you're right. | ||
| I long ago abandoned the idea that anybody who is not, you know, willing to countenance the truth is ever going to want to countenance the truth. | ||
| Because for whatever reason, the cost benefit analysis that they do professionally, personally, and what have you, doesn't factor in truth and right. | ||
| So why should you try to argue with them on things that they don't care about? | ||
| Has there been much discussion about whatever the security failures were, | ||
| or is that just kind of being punted right now in the midst of trying to deal with the hostages | ||
| and everything else? | ||
| Well, I think both, because I mean, I think, you know, we don't wanna have | ||
| a commission of inquiry on any of this until after the war, I suspect. | ||
| Although, I mean, I think what's come out already is that the head of military intelligence, | ||
| and I named Major General Arun Khaliwa, really probably it's actually unacceptable to me personally | ||
| that he hasn't resigned already, because we've found out that Israel has just, | ||
| you know, that there was a profound failure on his part and on the part of his senior officers | ||
| in the intelligence directorate, where we had the actual plans for the invasion. | ||
| And their training for it were being tracked on a daily basis by the, uh, by the field observers at the border who were, you know, we have all the security cameras who were, you know, who are, who are glued to their positions 24 seven watching all the movements at the border. | ||
| And they were constantly warning that Hamas was training for an invasion replete with taking of hostages and mass slaughter. | ||
| And, uh, and the head of the intelligence just dismissed everything as unrealistic as a fantasy. | ||
| And he didn't inform the prime minister of any of this or the defense minister. | ||
| So, I mean, this was really, uh, something that is definitely a firing, uh, offense and, and yet, you know, he and other top officers have said, uh, we failed. | ||
| It's our responsibility. | ||
| It's our fault. | ||
| And then none of them quit. | ||
| So I think in particularly in the case of the intelligence head, Khaliwa, that, you know, I wrote an article some weeks ago calling for him to resign immediately. | ||
| But, you know, we but but I think we're going to have to look into all of this. | ||
| Part of part of the problem is that it's not simply a question of how does how did the military assess threats, what they understood Hamas to be, how how in their imagination Hamas really was and that they believed that Hamas was not, had moderated for whatever reason because they wanted to. | ||
| But I think it's part of an overall conceptual framework, an ideological framework that has guided, just as is in the case in the United States since 9-11, that our elites have preferred to tell themselves a story about our enemies that is convenient for them. | ||
| But it doesn't reflect the identity of our enemies. | ||
| And this has a lot of ideological roots. | ||
| It has a lot of social roots. | ||
| So it's a much more difficult thing for one commission of inquiry dealing with one specific issue to deal with. | ||
| I think as a country, as a society, we have to have a reckoning with these people in our ruling class and how they misunderstood reality and tried to frame it in a way that made them comfortable and that put their advantages in the front and block the path of others. | ||
| That actually leads me to my last question just because we're short on time, but do you sense that what will happen in Israel after this will be a massive generational shift where the young people that are the soldiers right now in Gaza will eventually take leadership roles over the next few years and there will be this new Almost like a sort of new Israeli rebirth politically, culturally, philosophically, all those things. | ||
| Sort of what we're trying to do in America right now. | ||
| We've got two octogenarians running for president. | ||
| Everything you just described about the elite class protecting themselves, not protecting the people, not understanding the way the world really works. | ||
| And if people say they want to kill you, maybe they do. | ||
| That it might lead to something actually quite extraordinary after all this, even though maybe it's a little hard to see at the moment. | ||
| You know, it's like the difference between your head and your heart. | ||
| And your heart tells you one thing. | ||
| It tells you that, yes, that's exactly what's happening in Israel, that Israeli society is also undergoing an earthquake and that our people on the front lines and our people who get it, you know, behind and who have always gotten it, that there's this groundswell of a scream really for change and for a reckoning on the part of our failed leaders. | ||
| And for the entry of new leaders into the lifeblood of this country and leading it in leadership roles. | ||
| The fear that you have in your head is that the entrenchment of the powers that have controlled our country for so many decades is so deep that they're going to figure out a way to withstand the pressures coming from the ground. | ||
| So I think that we're in a very dynamic Position right now. | ||
| I believe that we are on the verge of a major shift in the way things are done in Israel But a lot of this so depends on our winning this war So many good things await us at the end of this very dark tunnel that we're in But we have to get through it and we have to win like we don't have any choice because if we fight to a draw If Hamas in any way survives this if Hezbollah isn't pushed away physically from our border in the North, then it's going to be much more difficult to get to the place that we have to get to as a society. | ||
| Carolyn, I thank you for your time. | ||
| Happy Hanukkah to you and your family, and let's do this again in a couple weeks, and you can keep us posted on what's going on over there. | ||
| I'd be happy to join you anytime. | ||
| Thank you for having me on, Dave. | ||
| Thank you very much. |
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