March 15, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
32:53
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| They'll understand when you mention it to them that Hamas is using its own people as human shields. | ||
| They'll understand that. | ||
| And they know schools, mosques, hospitals. | ||
| And here I must tell you something I did learn in this war is that Hamas doesn't build tunnels under schools. | ||
| They actually build schools over the tunnels. | ||
| That's what I've seen. | ||
| Like, this is a strategy for Hamas. | ||
| It's not a tactic. | ||
| Now when you tell people, and you tell people in the international community that they're | ||
| doing it, and they'll see the weapons caches that you have in MAS and the underground terror | ||
| tunnels that you see on their hospitals, they'll understand it. | ||
| But they don't understand that they are becoming shills for Hamas, because the whole Hamas | ||
| strategy is to force us into a position where if we go after them, you have, even in the | ||
| most justified actions that you'll take, you're going to have unintended casualties. | ||
| Now, when those casualties happen, they're hoping that the whole world turns against Israel. | ||
| That's the strategy. | ||
| It's wash, rinse, repeat. | ||
| They do this all the time. | ||
| Now, I don't have any problem with people in the media showing the pictures that are tragic of every single civilian casualty in Gaza, but just laid at the doorstep of Hamas. | ||
| They're the ones who are responsible. | ||
| And by actually blaming Israel for this, What they're telling every terror organization around the world is you should use human shields! | ||
| Because it works. | ||
| and now Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer. | ||
| It's a pleasure to sit with you. | ||
| And first off, I feel like I owe you thanks because you've got a whole crew here that took good care of me. | ||
| I'm actually wearing your director's jacket. | ||
| We swapped something out at the last moment. | ||
| All right, very nice. | ||
| So I'm getting the Israeli hospitality here. | ||
| Good to have you in Israel. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| It's good to be here. | ||
| But Minister for Strategic Affairs, let's start with that, because there's a lot strategically going on here. | ||
| Well, I wanted to be Minister of Tactical Affairs. | ||
| Everybody's a strategist and no one's a tactician, but they won't give me that title. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, maybe you can give me a little tactical stuff here. | ||
| I was up north yesterday. | ||
| I was down south today. | ||
| Obviously, it's not a very big country, so you can do a lot in just a few days. | ||
| But there's a lot of issues at the moment. | ||
| That's exactly how I'm going to start. | ||
| It's not even a question. | ||
| There's a lot going on here. | ||
| How do you feel at the moment? | ||
| What would be the best way to sum up what's going on here at the moment? | ||
| Well, we're obviously in a war, and it's on many fronts. | ||
| You were up in the north where we have not moved to an all-out war, and we're trying to avoid that right now, and I hope that that can continue, but there's been skirmishes. | ||
| Most countries would consider it an all-out war when rockets are flying back and forth. | ||
| It depends what the bar is in Israel. | ||
| We've been fighting for a long time, so what a war in Israel looks like is what you're seeing happen in Gaza right now, and what you've seen happen over the last 160 or so days. | ||
| In the north, we've had back and forth with Hezbollah, but it hasn't blown up into an all-out war there, and I hope we can figure out a at least the diplomatic process that will enable us to get | ||
| about a hundred thousand Israelis back to their homes, but what those | ||
| Israelis will not tolerate, and rightly so, is they're not going to go back | ||
| to the situation that existed on October 6th where what happened in Gaza could | ||
| happen from Lebanon and they could just have an invasion of our | ||
| northern communities there, slaughter, kill, rape, burn alive. | ||
| The Israeli public is not going to tolerate that, neither in the south or in the north. | ||
| What we're trying to do is change the security situation in the north without a war, and we're trying to change the security situation in the south with a war. | ||
| And I think we've been very successful over the last 160 days, and I think we see victory in sight, because we have systematically dismantled Hamas's military machine because in Gaza Hamas | ||
| is not a terror organization their terrorist army and that army has been | ||
| methodically dismantled and we're on our way to finishing that we have | ||
| taken out 18 of the 24 battalions we have probably killed or wounded around | ||
| 25,000 of the terrorists in Gaza about 40,000 | ||
| I think we're getting to the leaders, let me put it that way, which I think is very important for this war. | ||
| And also we have diminished By maybe over 90%. | ||
| Hamas's capabilities when it comes to firing rockets and also manufacturing rockets. | ||
| And now we're going through systematically through its tunnel network and destroying that. | ||
| And that takes a long time. | ||
| It's actually slow work. | ||
| Now Israel is criticized by taking too long. | ||
| But if you look at what the United States did, for instance in Mosul, you were dealing with one place, It took you nine months. | ||
| It didn't have this labyrinth of underground terror, a terror tunnel network to deal with. | ||
| And I think in that war, the ratio of civilians to combatants were maybe three to one or four to one. | ||
| You had only three or five thousand terrorists that you were fighting. | ||
| were ten times that many terrorists that were fighting. | ||
| And I think you ended up killing an estimate of around 10,000 civilians while you were | ||
| going after those terrorists. | ||
| So I think Israel is not only prosecuting this war very effectively, I think we're taking | ||
| action that no other country has taken in terms of getting civilians out of harm's way | ||
| and doing everything we can to mitigate civilian casualties. | ||
| And that's not what I say, it's what General Petraeus said in saying no one's actually | ||
| dealt with a situation like this, or John Spencer, who I think teaches urban war studies | ||
| at West Point. | ||
| So I think we're doing an exemplary job and we just have to continue and we have to win | ||
| this war because our victory here will also be a victory for the United States. | ||
| We are seen as... | ||
| as a forward position of the United States. | ||
| That's how our enemies see it. | ||
| You know, Iran, which is behind this whole terror axis, they call us the little Satan | ||
| and they call you the great Satan. | ||
| And the first thing you want to do is you have to defeat that axis. | ||
| And where we're going to defeat it is in Gaza. | ||
| We have to push it back and roll it back in Lebanon. | ||
| You have to deal with the Houthis, which you see they're closing the Bab al-Mandib straits. | ||
| So right now, when I look at the war 160 days in, Israel is winning and we're going to finish the job. | ||
| How complex is it to fight a war in a part of the world that the West doesn't fully understand? | ||
| So that Hamas is doing things that most people in the West cannot believe even occurred, even when they see the video, then they can't believe how they use human shields and hospitals and all those things. | ||
| So you're fighting a physical war, and then there's also the ideological war, and the PR war, and everything else. | ||
| Well, it's hard, but I can't say I didn't expect it, I think, on day one or day two, when there was this tremendous sympathy that was expressed for Israel in that few, that brief moment of sympathy that we had. | ||
| I said, you know, everybody sympathizes with the Jews when we're a victim. | ||
| The question is, are they going to support us when we move towards victory? | ||
| And I think what you're seeing is, month after month, there are so many different forces that will try to present a distorted picture. | ||
| They'll forget about what happened on October 7th. | ||
| They'll forget about the hostages, and we still have 134 that are being held there in Gaza. | ||
| We were able to get many of them out. | ||
| And they'll also They'll understand when you mention it to them that Hamas is using its own people as human shields. | ||
| They'll understand that. | ||
| And they know schools, mosques, hospitals. | ||
| And here I must tell you something I did learn in this war is that Hamas doesn't build tunnels under schools. | ||
| They actually build schools over the tunnels. | ||
| That's what I've seen. | ||
| Like, this is a strategy for Hamas. | ||
| It's not a tactic. | ||
| Now when you tell people, and you tell people in the international community that they're | ||
| doing it, and they'll see the weapons caches that you have in MAS and the underground terror | ||
| tunnels that you see on their hospitals, they'll understand it. | ||
| But they don't understand that they are becoming shills for Hamas, because the whole Hamas | ||
| strategy is to force us into a position where if we go after them, you have, even in the | ||
| most justified actions that you'll take, you're going to have unintended casualties. | ||
| Now, when those casualties happen, they're hoping that the whole world turns against Israel. | ||
| That's the strategy. | ||
| It's wash, rinse, repeat. | ||
| They do this all the time. | ||
| Now, I don't have any problem with people in the media showing the pictures that are tragic of every single civilian casualty in Gaza, but just laid at the doorstep of Hamas. | ||
| They're the ones who are responsible. | ||
| And by actually blaming Israel for this, What they're telling every terror organization around the world is you should use human shields. | ||
| Because it works. | ||
| There's very little terrorism you know against non-democratic societies. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because it doesn't work. | ||
| Because terrorism is supposed to scare the public, which is supposed to affect the policy of the country, and then people can change their policy because of terrorism. | ||
| If the use of human shields works, it will continue. | ||
| So all those people around the world who are blaming Israel for what is happening in Gaza, they're not only endangering Israel's security, they're endangering the Palestinians. | ||
| Because it's the Palestinians who will suffer the most from this tactic. | ||
| We're gonna have to win this war, we'll have to get rid of Hamas, and that's the best way that we'll end this use of human shields and give the Palestinians a different future. | ||
| Right, and the simple truth is, hostages notwithstanding, I mean, if you wanted to have ended this war in three days via the air, you could have, in essence, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, we didn't do what the United States did. | ||
| During World War II, neither in Germany or in Japan, and we have prosecuted this war in a way that, in my view, and I, you know, I was born and raised, as you can hear from my accent, in the United States. | ||
| So I always ask myself, whenever I'm thinking about, it can't help it because I came here at the age of 25, I always ask myself what I call the WWAD question. | ||
| You know, what would America do? | ||
| Because that's the standard. | ||
| Now, America's not a perfect country, but it's the most moral superpower in the history of the world, and if those people don't believe it, they just have no understanding of history. | ||
| It's not a perfect country, and you can't hold countries up to a standard of perfection. | ||
| Not the United States, and not Israel. | ||
| You have to judge America or Israel based on how would another country react under the same type of threat. | ||
| Now, just imagine, on October 7th in the United States, that a terror force would have streamed across your border, And killed 50,000 Americans. | ||
| Because that's, in relative terms, that's how many Americans would be. | ||
| Imagine that they would take 10,000 Americans hostage. | ||
| And they would take them over the border back into their territory. | ||
| What do you think the United States would do? | ||
| And while you're fighting that war, they're firing rockets and you've got half of your country's running to bombshell. | ||
| If it had happened for Mexico, we would have bombed Canada. | ||
| I got you. | ||
| Maybe, I don't know, but I'm telling you, honestly, and I tell this to people, interlocutors, U.S. | ||
| senior officials, they really have nothing to say when I say it, because they know they would take action that would be at least as tough as the action that Israel's taking. | ||
| And a couple of other things that I think it's important for your audience to understand, because when you think about wars and foreign wars, you're thinking about a war thousands of miles away. | ||
| You were down in the south? | ||
| This is hundreds of yards away. | ||
| I'll say yards and not meters for the American audience, but it's hundreds of yards away. | ||
| And the second thing you have to understand about Israel, we are a citizen's army. | ||
| We are not sending our troops that maybe affects one percent of our public to some distant land. | ||
| These are our sons and our daughters and our brothers and sisters. | ||
| They're the ones who are fighting the war. | ||
| In the war cabinet when I sit there, I mean I have children in the army, Gadi Eisenkot, who's a member of the war, he lost the son in the army. | ||
| How many countries around the world, democratic countries today, are making decisions about war when their own, where their own children are in harm's way? | ||
| This is, the entire citizens of Israel are committed to ensuring that what happened on October 7th never happens again, and we have to achieve that victory or else this country has no future, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| Not because Hamas Can destroy Israel. | ||
| It can't. | ||
| It can't. | ||
| But every, all the buzzers that are circling around Israel from this region are going to look at one thing. | ||
| That organization that committed the atrocities that they committed on October 7th. | ||
| The rapes, the murders, the burning of babies alive, the killing of children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. | ||
| All the horrific things that they did. | ||
| What happened to that organization? | ||
| Are they standing or are they not? | ||
| Do they still survive in Gaza or not? | ||
| And I had a senior official in your government came a couple months ago and he spoke to the War Cabinet. | ||
| He says, Hamas is an idea and you can't destroy an idea. | ||
| And I said, Nazism is an idea, and there are Nazis running around Charlottesville who have tiki torches that they got from Bed Bath & Beyond, but they don't have a state called Germany. | ||
| ISIS is an idea. | ||
| And in the Middle East there are many places, and even in Europe and probably some of the United States, where if you went into some young people's bedrooms, you're going to see the black flag of ISIS. | ||
| But they don't have a caliphate. | ||
| Our goal in this October 7th war is we're going to end them as a military army in Gaza. | ||
| It's going to be finished. | ||
| And anyone who doesn't understand Israel's determination to see that job until it's done has not spent any time in this country. | ||
| So then let me ask you the hard question related to that, which is it does seem like the clock is ticking on that. | ||
| I mean, the American administration, to my chagrin, seems to be a little wavery when it comes to Rafa and all that. | ||
| How do you make sure you can do that? | ||
| I don't think the clock is ticking, because we're a sovereign country. | ||
| We appreciate the support that we've gotten from the United States. | ||
| And as the Prime Minister said, he hopes that support continues as long as it takes. | ||
| I think it's in the United States' interest to continue to support its most important | ||
| ally in the region and I would argue perhaps its most important ally in the world, also | ||
| because of the technology battle that you're in and Israel being such an important source | ||
| of technology to ensure that this century remains another American century. | ||
| But the United States is going to have to make their decisions. | ||
| What I'm telling you is we're going to fight until the job is done, with or without U.S. | ||
| assistance. | ||
| If we're forced to stand alone, we'll stand alone. | ||
| But I don't think we stand alone. | ||
| I think you see broad support among the American people. | ||
| What's interesting, there was a poll that came out a couple weeks ago, and that was | ||
| Israel versus Hamas, and it was about 80-20. | ||
| Now, I would love, I would hope, that when Americans are faced with Israel or Hamas, it would be 98 to 2. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| It was 80-20. | ||
| What's interesting to me is they did the same poll, November, December, January, February, and it didn't move. | ||
| It was consistent. | ||
| Despite all the images, despite all the attempt to distort and demonize what Israel is doing, I think the American people, by and large, get it, that this is a battle of civilization versus barbarism. | ||
| And they want us to defeat this barbaric enemy. | ||
| I think they get it. | ||
| I think there's broad support in the Congress. | ||
| I think it stretches across both parties. | ||
| And I hope very much that the Biden administration, which I'm telling you I appreciate out of the gate, There was more clarity from the President. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's good versus sheer evil, I think he said. | ||
| And this is worse than ISIS. | ||
| And he was right. | ||
| And I think you have to understand the importance of winning this battle and defeating them. | ||
| Because this will not only be a victory for Israel, it will be a victory for the United States. | ||
| By sticking with us until the end, you're projecting to all your allies around the world that you will stick with an ally until the end, even when the going gets tough. | ||
| and your victory will project American power in the region. | ||
| And this is a place, by the way, where you can achieve a victory. | ||
| I mean, we're going to achieve a victory without the United States, but with the United States, | ||
| I think that affects global interests of the United States of America. | ||
| And if you don't, if there is, God forbid, some sort of break, what is the message that | ||
| you're sending to your allies elsewhere? | ||
| We are seeing not only in the Middle East, but much far beyond the Middle East. | ||
| And I'm sure you travel around and you see it. | ||
| How America deals with Israel is how your other allies, it could be in Europe, it could | ||
| be in Asia, and certainly in the Middle East. | ||
| how they think you will deal with them. | ||
| Will you be there until the end? | ||
| Will you fight until the job is done? | ||
| Or will you be a kind of fair weather friend? | ||
| That's why we appreciate what they've done for the last five or so months, | ||
| a little bit more, and we hope that it will continue until we win this war. | ||
| And we don't have to wait years or even months. | ||
| This thing will be finished in weeks. | ||
| Once we start in Rafah, which will happen soon enough, it's going to be several weeks, and then I think we're | ||
| going to finish the heavy fighting stage of this war. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Does that then ignite the other stage of the war, which seems to be the north? | ||
| I mean, that seems to sort of be what some of the chatter is about, that that needs to be dealt with rather than fighting a two-front war. | ||
| But that, as you said, those 100,000 people, I don't think most people across the world realize that 100,000 Israelis are not, I didn't know it until a few days ago, until I was there, are not in their homes right now and haven't been for months. | ||
| And then I realized at my hotel, In Tel Aviv, there are plenty of people from the north, so does that just sort of lead to that to some extent? | ||
| Well, we don't know. | ||
| I hope that we're going to be able to resolve that issue diplomatically. | ||
| I think it's possible, but Hezbollah should know and the international community should know that if Israel's not going to accept a situation indefinitely where you have 100,000 citizens who can't go back to their homes, when you have essentially a security zone inside the state of Israel, Right. | ||
| Do you have any faith that UNIFIL and that the UN... I mean, they're not supposed to be there right now, right? | ||
| I don't have any faith in UNIFIL. | ||
| I mean, you should read, if you've never read it, Resolution 1701, which was passed by the UN Security Council. | ||
| It reads as brilliantly as the Soviet Constitution. | ||
| It's really a work of art, okay? | ||
| It doesn't do anything that it says it's going to do. | ||
| So I don't have faith in the UN or international organizations. | ||
| I do have faith I do have faith in the IDF, I do have faith in the resolve of the people of Israel, and I hope that Hezbollah understands that if we cannot resolve this issue diplomatically, if you're not going to push your Radwan forces, which are like the Nakba forces down in the south that poured over into Israel, the several thousand that did that and committed those atrocities on October 7th, they have a Radwan force in the north. | ||
| Anti-tank weapons and things like that. | ||
| They have to be pushed back several kilometers off of our border. | ||
| And we have to have, I think, new rules of the game of what's going to happen in the north because we're going to not allow our people to face that type of threat. | ||
| We hope they understand that. | ||
| Let's solve this thing diplomatically, because if we don't solve it diplomatically, we're going to have to no choice but to solve it militarily. | ||
| That is not our preference. | ||
| You know, as I said, we're fighting in the South and changing the security reality through a war. | ||
| We hope we can change the security reality in the North without a war, but the goal is to change the security reality. | ||
| We're going to return those people to their homes, whether we do it diplomatically or we do it militarily. | ||
| If you don't mind, maybe we'll shift from strategic and tactical stuff for a moment. | ||
| I want to see something kind of on the spiritual side, because in one sense, I'm Jewish, and since October 7th, I've definitely felt a renewed spirit. | ||
| I've always loved Israel and had a connection there, but I felt something. | ||
| I think a lot of Jews are feeling that. | ||
| And one of the things I've been saying on my show is that, you know, every holiday we celebrate the fact that we weren't all destroyed, we survived, we eat. | ||
| And I think the survival part is kind of built in. | ||
| It's sort of baked into the way that it works for the Jews in a way. | ||
| And I just wonder, well, I suppose you agree with that, but do you feel that as you're part of this country right now? | ||
| Do you think the people really feel that, that this is just a continuation of a story that is at least 5,000 years old? | ||
| That's not a question you're going to get on CNN. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| I think, you know, we believe that in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us. | ||
| And they're defeated. | ||
| We believe that they're defeated also by, you know, By somebody who we have in our corner for about 4,000 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I would say when I was Israel's ambassador in Washington that I met a lot of ambassadors, many that we don't have diplomatic relations with. | ||
| There's 192, 194 ambassadors in Washington. | ||
| I must have met 150 or 160, maybe more. | ||
| Never met the ambassador of Babylon. | ||
| Never met the ambassador of Imperial Rome. | ||
| And I didn't meet the ambassador of the Thousand Year Reich, but there is an ambassador of Israel. | ||
| So I'm quite confident That we're going to survive this enemy, and people who don't understand what it means when you put the Jews back in their historic homeland, and their willingness to fight against anybody. | ||
| Look, we fought the Greeks. | ||
| You know, and they left us that holiday of Hanukkah, and one of the worst diets. | ||
| Don't tell her she didn't believe that. | ||
| Don't tell her that. | ||
| We fought the Greeks and won. | ||
| We were one of the only peoples in antiquity who were able to do that. | ||
| We went against Rome. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Fighting against the world's superpower at the time, in order to defend ourselves and our land. | ||
| I mean, Hamas, with all due respect to St. | ||
| Lawrence, Hamas, you know, we've seen much bigger than him, and he will be in the dustbin of history. | ||
| This Hamas terror organization is going to be wiped out. | ||
| But I believe, and maybe it's because I'm a person of faith, you know, I believe in the eternity of the Jewish people, 100%. | ||
| But we have to understand, we've lost our sovereignty. | ||
| in the land of Israel before. We lost it twice. | ||
| And this is the third chance we have. And what we need to do, I think one of the | ||
| most important things, is to remain united as a people within Israel. To | ||
| understand and appreciate what's the meaning of Jewish sovereignty. We're a 4,000 | ||
| year old people. | ||
| How much of that time were we a sovereign people? | ||
| Well, there was a few centuries from the time Joshua crosses the Jordan to Nebuchadnezzar came from Babylon and destroyed the first temple, and then there was another period of sovereignty for about a century when the Maccabees re-won their freedom, and for the last 75 years we've been a sovereign people too. | ||
| So, less than a quarter of the time that we've been a people, We have had sovereignty in our ancient homeland. | ||
| And so that's a precious gift that was given to us by the generations who fought for Israel's independence, who won Israel's independence, and who built the country. | ||
| And what we have to do, what I see my role as leaders, is you get past this precious gift The baton is now in your hands. | ||
| You're going to run your leg of the race, and you have to leave the country in a stronger position than you found it, and make sure that you secure this priceless gift for future generations. | ||
| And I believe that we will. | ||
| Is that the irony of what's happening right now? | ||
| Because when I was here in May, there was this big fight over judicial reform, and there were protests on both sides each way, and everyone kept saying how divided the country was and all that stuff. | ||
| And now, there seems to be almost no division here, which, you know, you put three Jews at a table, you got eight opinions. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of shocking, and yet again, I think it's sort of baked in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I think that's true. | ||
| And, you know, I don't know yet. | ||
| I haven't seen that it was the disunity in the months before that triggered this particular attack. | ||
| You know, there'll be a commission of inquiry, and they'll have to look at all the evidence there. | ||
| I haven't seen that, but I definitely think it didn't help. | ||
| And I think when you're divided, you're projecting a weakness to your enemies. | ||
| And unfortunately, Israel has a lot of enemies. | ||
| And it's important, I think, to project internal strength. | ||
| I think that radiates throughout the region. | ||
| And I hope, in the wake of October 7th, that we will find a way to keep this country as united as its soldiers. | ||
| I mean, you see that, the soldiers that are there, that are fighting. | ||
| Remember, we're a citizen's army. | ||
| It's not one or two percent that are fighting this war. | ||
| It's 50, 60, 70. | ||
| They're fighting, and they're united, and the rest of the stuff, the noise that sometimes you see from the politics, they kind of tune out, and I hope we'll be able to retain this tremendous sense of unity moving forward, and that it will propel Israel forward. | ||
| Look, you have essentially a catastrophe that happens on October 7th. | ||
| And the test is how you're going to respond to this catastrophe. | ||
| Will we militarily defeat Hamas and deliver the Iranian axis a blow? | ||
| Will we be able to maybe achieve a peace and a normalization with Saudi Arabia, which would be a diplomatic blow to that axis? | ||
| We have to take this terrible tragedy and catastrophe and we have to flip it into a strategic victory. | ||
| We did it 50 years ago, by the way. | ||
| We were attacked in the Yom Kippur War, and it was terrible for the first few days. | ||
| Everything was reversed. | ||
| We won on the battlefield, and that actually led to a peace between Israel and Egypt. | ||
| Without that fight, without that Yom Kippur War, where under terrible circumstances we | ||
| were able to reverse the tide and win the war, we never would have actually forged that | ||
| peace. | ||
| And so my hope is we're going to win the war in Gaza, hopefully deter a war in the north, | ||
| and then move towards continuing to expand, which we did with the Abraham Accords, to | ||
| continue to expand the peace with partners in the region that really do want to normalize | ||
| with us. | ||
| And I think you can see that in how they are responding, what is happening in Gaza. | ||
| You know, in the Middle East, a lot of times it's not what they say, it's what they don't | ||
| It's kind of the Hound of the Baskervilles. | ||
| Pay attention to who's not barking. | ||
| Read between the lines. | ||
| And I think these countries want us to win. | ||
| I can tell you in my conversations with people in the region who'll be nameless, they all told me from the beginning, you know, defeat Hamas. | ||
| Destroy them. | ||
| Just do it in three weeks without any civilian casualties. | ||
| So I said, where's that Harry Potter magic wand that we can wave and figure out how we're going to get there? | ||
| But they want us to win. | ||
| And the other thing to remember, and this, Bin Laden got right. | ||
| He says people follow a strong horse. | ||
| You know, the Prime Minister says, you know, people are waiting and looking and seeing who's going to win. | ||
| Is this the Iranian access and its Hamas proxy? | ||
| Or Israel, backed by the United States, is Israel going to win? | ||
| And the way I would explain it in American terms, having been born and raised in the United States, before 2016, I knew exactly two Chicago Cubs fans. | ||
| And then all of a sudden they won the World Series and those hats came out from everybody. | ||
| We're lifelong Cubs fans. | ||
| People follow winners, not losers. | ||
| And that's why it's also critical for Israel to win and win decisively. | ||
| How refreshing would it be for you as a spokesman for the country to be on the other side where | ||
| Israel has won, maybe the Abraham Accords have expanded, and then you could talk about | ||
| all of the brilliance of this country. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things I find when I come here. | ||
| If I'm frustrated by anything when I leave, it's that so much time has to be spent on security and all of these things, even in good times, when there's such brilliance and excellence and something truly incredible happening here. | ||
| I agree, but you know, it's going to happen. | ||
| I know it's inevitable that it's going to happen. | ||
| I think our victory is inevitable, and I think that brilliant and promising future with this wonderful story, it's happening too. | ||
| And you just, you have to have a little perspective. | ||
| You know, that's what I think sometimes is loss, and we Jews have a unique capacity of seeing the glass as one-sixteenth empty. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So we're always looking, and it actually is part of the reason why we're constantly looking to improve, constantly looking to change the world, because we're looking at what's wrong. | ||
| We don't look at all the good things. | ||
| The most difficult thing for Jews is actually gratitude. | ||
| And that's in our name. | ||
| If you know where the word comes from, Yehuda, it was Leah, was the mother of Judah, and it was the fourth son, and she knew she was going to have more children than any of Jacob's wives. | ||
| It's gratitude. | ||
| That's what being a Jew means, is to have gratitude. | ||
| It's the most difficult thing. | ||
| Gratitude. | ||
| And I would tell the Prime Minister for many years when, you know, occasionally people are critical of the Prime Minister, you may not know that. | ||
| I haven't heard that. | ||
| But I would say... I don't read the New York Times, so I don't know. | ||
| What are you complaining about? | ||
| I mean, look at Moses. | ||
| He does ten plagues, he splits the sea, he goes up for forty days and forty nights, he's eight hours late, he gets a golden calf. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We're very tough people to govern. | ||
| We always want that extra thing. | ||
| But if you look from a perspective of Jewish history, understand this. | ||
| A hundred generations of Jews Dreamed of living at a time when there's a sovereign Jewish state. | ||
| We are now three moving to a fourth generation of Jews that have realized that dream. | ||
| And that brings with it, I think, a tremendous responsibility, as I said, to secure that dream for the future. | ||
| And it's happening. | ||
| It's happening now. | ||
| It's happening by our soldiers in Gaza. | ||
| It's happening in high-tech companies in Tel Aviv. | ||
| It's happening throughout the country, north, south, east, and west, that combines both the ancient You know, the ancient story of the Jewish people and the people of Israel with this tremendous modern juggernaut of technology and innovation that's Israel, it's all happening. | ||
| And yes, we have enemies that are trying to destroy us. | ||
| That's an old story. | ||
| Just remember that. | ||
| People have lost, I don't know how much you've discussed antisemitism, but people don't have a historical perspective on antisemitism. | ||
| Because in a certain way, the Holocaust has distorted not only the world's view of antisemitism, but the Jewish people's view of our own history. | ||
| Because Hitler is like a sun that blocks out all the antisemitic stars from the sky. | ||
| But if you look century after century, The attacks on October 7th happened multiple times a century to Jews. | ||
| In different places. | ||
| It could be in Morocco. | ||
| It could be in Germany. | ||
| It could be in Poland. | ||
| It could be throughout the world where you had Jews and one day 1,200 Jews die. | ||
| Sometimes it's 10,000 Jews. | ||
| And people lose sight of that. | ||
| The new story is not that Jews are hated. | ||
| The new story that was changed by the birth of Israel is that we have the ability to fight back. | ||
| That's the new story. | ||
| Not what happened on October 7th, but what happened right after when the soldiers rallied and have gone into Gaza and have taken on this terror organization. | ||
| And we will wipe them out. | ||
| Hamas is not Rome. | ||
| Believe me. | ||
| We're going to win this war and you're going to see we're going to secure a brilliant future for this country. | ||
| Tell me, my last question, tell me one thing about Israel that people really should know that they don't know that has nothing to do maybe with politics or the geopolitical situation or anything like that. | ||
| Wow, there's so many different things about Israel that I think... First of all, people should know that Israel's safe. | ||
| And I'm saying that in a time of war, when you're here. | ||
| I mean, this should be one of the most dangerous times. | ||
| I remember 20 years ago, during the so-called Second Intifada, which we had the worst terror wave that we had in our history. | ||
| They did a study of a New Yorker's two-week trip to Israel, and they plugged in every place in Israel where this New Yorker was going to go, and what were the odds of something happening to them. | ||
| And they found the most dangerous part of that two-week trip was the cab ride to Kennedy Airport. | ||
| Yeah, which now is definitely worse. | ||
| So, you know, you see it because you're seeing Israel only through CNN, and you only see it when there's war. | ||
| A lot of people don't come to Israel because they think it's a war zone. | ||
| Well, you're here. | ||
| And your team is here, and you can see what's happening, and the normalcy of the country despite all of this. | ||
| I feel safer at a cafe in Tel Aviv than New York City. | ||
| You have rampant homeless people everywhere, and drug addicts, and people pushing people over. | ||
| Exactly, levels of violence, murders, and things like that, if you look at Israel compared to other countries, it's much smaller. | ||
| So I think that's one thing they don't know. | ||
| The other thing that they may not realize is the sense of solidarity in the country. | ||
| This place, and I know this having been born and raised again in the United States, there are very few events that unite all Americans. | ||
| You know, I think 9-11 was like a moment where everybody was sort of united, or the Kennedy assassination now. | ||
| And sometimes, election day, every four years, you know, you have everybody having a moment as a country, whatever side you're on. | ||
| Israel is a rollercoaster of solidarity, where everybody is connected to the highs and lows of this country. | ||
| Not only is it heartening and not only does it give you strength, it's exciting. | ||
| I mean, Israel is by far the most exciting country on earth. | ||
| And when I would be ambassador and I would speak to American audience and try to explain to them about how exciting Israel is, I said, you have to understand, Israelis go to Manhattan to unwind. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And the Americans would laugh, and the Israelis say, why is that funny? | ||
| Yeah, we go down wide. | ||
| Because the place has so much action. | ||
| This is a place of tremendous energy, tremendous innovation, and a place that also has a tremendous future. | ||
| It's an honor, sir. |
Export Selection