Dr. Eli David analyzes the "Palestine cult" and "Pollywood" propaganda, exposing how actors like "Mr. Faffle" fabricated victimhood while celebrating October 7th. He argues that Israel's two-decade absence from Gaza allowed Hamas to build unchecked tunnels, noting that over 80% of West Bank residents still support the terror group. Dismissing a two-state solution as fiction, David insists invading Rafah is essential to rescue hostages and eliminate leadership. He praises Elon Musk's acquisition of X for preserving free speech against platform bans and concludes that Israel, a resilient "startup nation," will emerge stronger from this crisis. [Automatically generated summary]
I think I kind of became aware of you during COVID.
You were very outspoken against lockdowns and mandates and vaxes and all of that stuff.
Which was very difficult to do here in Israel, also very difficult to do in America.
But I think in the last, you know, five or six months since October 7th, you've really kind of caught fire in the online world.
But I said to you right before we started, I don't know what you do in real life, actually.
I just see you pretty effective on Twitter, so maybe we could just do a little of that for a minute or two, and then we'll talk about the state of the world and everything else.
Well, as I mentioned, trolling on Twitter is not my day job.
You don't get paid for that?
No, actually.
My main business, I'm an AI researcher, entrepreneur.
I teach at the university, founded several companies, sold several companies, all AI-based.
Artificial intelligence for cybersecurity, healthcare and other stuff.
But that's what I do.
So as somebody who's doing AI and my all life is just numbers and understanding numbers, making sense of them.
Now, when COVID started, and I guess all of us looked at the numbers and looked at the recommendations and saw there's nothing that correlates between the real life data and the recommendations.
We spent here over 200 billion shekels, that's about 50 billion dollars, on the cost of lockdowns and mandates.
And at a time now that we need money for real important stuff, we have of course budget limitations.
And everyone admits privately that it was absolutely wrong to spend all that money for chasing a mild respiratory virus, but nobody's publicly admitting that.
Right, okay, so you become outspoken at that time, then October 7th happens, now you're really, I think, one of the leading voices online in advocacy for Israel, and you also do it in a kind of funny way, in a trolley way, as you said, and everything else, but just tell me what life has been here What life has been like for you here, your family, that sort of thing?
And I think for all Israelis, it was a crazy day, a life-changing day.
And since that day, every Israeli I know is trying to do what they can.
In different aspects, behind the scenes, publicly.
And so what I could do, and I started doing from that day, was just echoing what we feel, what we see here to the world.
I remember on October 7th, on the day of October 7th, even before Israel started doing anything in Gaza, which was a few days later, on October 7th I saw on Twitter such a huge wave of anti-Semitism That I've never seen in my life.
So, people who say that is a result, a reaction to the war and what Israel does, that's nonsense.
I saw that on October 7th.
I saw many videos of Palestinians cheering and just giving out candies, celebrating the massacre and kidnapping.
You meet those liberals, they have no chance of finding Palestine or Israel on the map, or any country on the map, but they know that they are pro-Palestine, because that's the current thing.
Just like we had the Covid cult, people who know nothing about virology and immunology, but they know that you have to get your fifth booster and your third mask.
This is a Palestine cult.
You have to be pro-Palestine even though you have absolutely no idea about anything relating to Palestine.
It made us focus back on the existential problems we have, that it doesn't matter how many years we are post the Holocaust, there are still so many people who want to massacre us.
And there are so many people who cheer and celebrate.
As we are massacred.
So we always need to be vigilant, defend ourselves.
And 50 years after the Yom Kippur War, in which we were surprised, again, another surprise, another hefty price we paid.
We don't have the luxury of ever putting our guns down and not be vigilant.
And that was a very, very painful reminder of that.
So as an AI guy, do you think Israel was relying too much on technology and not enough with soldiers on the ground or intelligence on the ground or anything else that led to some of this?
Definitely not being with boots on the ground in Gaza was part of that.
It is not that... I don't think there was any problem with technology or AI.
Any kind of technology you use is as good as the data that you feed into that.
Now, when you don't have any presence there for almost two decades, and a very limited amount of data that you feed your systems, You can rely on them.
The systems are good.
They could be great, but if you're not fitting relevant data into them, they will not produce relevant results.
If I train an AI model that has never seen a photo of a cat, it will not be able to recognize a cat, even though that's a very easy task to do.
And the same here.
You see in Judea and Samaria, They want to kill us just as much as people in Gaza want to kill us.
And if you look at opinion polls, still more than 80% of people in the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, they celebrate October 7 attack.
They glorify that.
They support Hamas.
The reason they're not succeeding in doing that is because we are there, we're present there.
We're present there doesn't only mean tanks and troops, it means also access to data that we can feed the advanced technological systems.
But when we left Gaza two decades ago and essentially said, take it, it's your autonomy, do whatever you want, we didn't have access to data there.
And they did whatever they want.
That is taking billions of dollars of European aid, Building the terror tunnels, longer than London Underground and Paris Metro combined, and building weapons.
According to opinion polls, more than 90% of people in Israel are now opposed to a Palestinian state.
So when some people say, the Israeli government doesn't represent the people, Of course, there's lots of criticism from people towards the government, mine included.
But on things like a two-state solution, nobody believes in that.
We can live in a fancy world in which we live in tooth fairies and Santa Claus, that's fine.
You can believe in that.
But it doesn't turn into reality.
And right now, a two-state solution is just as much fiction as believing in tooth fairy.
At some point, you either have to smile or cry as a way of dealing with a tragic situation.
Now, I try to see the sarcastic part of everything, to be also cynical, because also that's the messages that do work.
You can convey the message more effectively.
This war is our lives, but Most of the people in Europe, in North America, when they look at this, they have no obligation to start reading lengthy essays about the subject.
So, it is our duty, even when we convey the information, convey it in a way that they actually read it.
Showing also some cynical part of it.
Look at what happened, sorry for the typo, that was... It kind of allows them to read it without getting bored and ah, yeah, another, same thing.
For decades you see camera crew sending someone in and some painted ketchup on them as if it's blood and then immediately the aids come and he's almost dying.
Since I found you on Twitter and we're talking about Twitter so much, how appreciative are you of what Elon Musk has done with Twitter to allow some of the debunking of this nonsense and overall defend free speech?
I think Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter may be a greater service to humanity than Tesla and SpaceX and other great things he's doing and will be doing combined.
Free speech is the cornerstone of Western democracy, and we took it for granted.
But we saw, especially during COVID, that we cannot take it for granted.
Even today, accounts get banned for posting pro-Israel videos on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok.
Of course, that's completely terrible on a different level of its own, on all other social media.
The only place that you can actually speak freely is an X.
Of course, there are downsides to that too.
We see some of these anti-Semites that are turning to big accounts.
That's a price I'm willing to pay for having free speech.
And we should all be thankful to Elon Musk for the amazing job he's doing
for preserving the Western values and Western democracies.
You know, Israel is known in the tech community as a startup nation.
The start-up nation and the technologies coming out of Israel, that is not just one angle of Israel.
That is Israel.
The whole country is a start-up nation, which is all about encountering a difficult or impossible solution, but trying to find a way around it, to survive, to succeed, to thrive.
That's all about building tech companies, but that's all about this country as a whole.
When we founded the company in 1948, against all odds, all Arab countries attacking us, and to this day you see everyone wants to kill us, but in these moments we see the whole country united for every problem we're finding solutions, and I'm confident that we will come much stronger out of this As a country, as a civilization, and especially our economy will come stronger out of this because this is what we are, the Startup Nation.