March 21, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
19:29
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The Western Wall is just the outer wall of the holiest site, which is Temple Mount. | ||
| For the Muslims, it's their third holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. | ||
| But we respect that. | ||
| We understand what it means to the Muslim people. | ||
| And we facilitate, actively facilitate, freedom of worship for Muslims on Temple Mount. | ||
| Now, what does that mean? | ||
| Ramadan, every Friday of Ramadan, we have about 100,000 people coming to worship on Temple Mount. | ||
| So what's the Hamas script? | ||
| They send 200, 300 of their troublemakers, hooligans, terrorists, call them whatever you want. | ||
| Some of them are just hooligans, some of them are more serious hooligans, which is terrorists. | ||
| They lock themselves in on the Thursday night. | ||
| They take with them explosives and big rocks like this. | ||
| When people say, oh, they're throwing stones, they think it's pebbles. | ||
| It's rocks like this, you could kill somebody. | ||
| They go in, they desecrate their own mosque, they play football, they do whatever you think | ||
| you can imagine you shouldn't do in a place of worship. | ||
| And in the morning, they continue, they throw stones onto the wailing wall. | ||
| And so Israeli police have to go and clear out the site. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we know there's 80,000 peaceful Muslims coming to worship mid-morning, mid-day. | ||
| We go in, we clear out the 200 hooligans, and then the news and the media goes out by Hamas. | ||
| Jews or Israeli soldiers are storming Temple Mount. | ||
| They are going to stop worship on Temple Mount. | ||
| This is what goes out to the Muslim world. | ||
| The Muslim world is very emotional about Temple Mount, especially on Ramadan. | ||
| And then Hamas starts throwing rockets. | ||
| This is what it's been for the last four to five years. | ||
| I did not think I was going to see you so soon when we chatted last May, and obviously we're on this trip not for the best reasons, but I want to thank you for welcoming us to your home. | ||
| It's just a few hours before Shabbat. | ||
| It smells delicious in here, so thanks for taking the time in a kind of crazy During a crazy set of circumstances, so to speak. | ||
| Well, thank you for coming. | ||
| I always say Israel is the only country that people fly in for a war. | ||
| So thank you for flying in to actually see what's going on here. | ||
| Well, truly, it's been an unbelievably meaningful trip, and we're happy to be here and happy to help however we can. | ||
| So I guess first, well, how are you? | ||
| How are you, and by extension, how is the country? | ||
| And then we'll talk about the specifics. | ||
| Well, it really depends what hour of the day you ask me, but I think we've gone through the whole gamut of emotions here since October 7th. | ||
| from shock disbelief to depression to a really like lack of a world changed. | ||
| A world changed. | ||
| It was an earthquake for us in every single way. | ||
| And it's been an emotional rollercoaster because there's a really deep sense of trauma in the country right now. | ||
| On a personal level, I feel it all the time, so I'm working like a crazy person so that I don't have that moment to think about what's actually happened to us. | ||
| Nobody actually believed that in our country, It never happened since the Holocaust. | ||
| We could have such a brutal massacre. | ||
| We've had many wars, you know that. | ||
| But the massacre perpetrated on innocent civilians from babies to the elderly, to the rapes. | ||
| It's just something that you'd look at Africa and see Boko Haram, you'd see ISIS and what they did. | ||
| And we were all shocked. | ||
| We never thought it could happen here. | ||
| We never thought it would reach our doorstep. | ||
| We thought, and this is part of the trauma, we thought that our security service had our backs. | ||
| And I think that part of the process that we're going through emotionally is also that sense of insecurity that how could it have happened? | ||
| And so it's been really rough. | ||
| I don't recall a worse time personally for me in my life and for the entire country together. | ||
| And that's saying a lot because I moved to Jerusalem 23 years ago, 23 years ago in the middle of the second intifada, when bombs were blowing off in cafes 100 meters from here. | ||
| And this is so much worse. | ||
| Yeah, and it's not like Israelis or Jews in general are far into trauma. | ||
| And certainly you guys, I mean, between suicide bombings and stabbings and car rammings, I mean, this is just the next extension of all that. | ||
| But at the same time, what I've noticed this week is the resilience here is unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, I was out till 4 a.m. | ||
| at a club last night in Tel Aviv. | ||
| And it was like, it was happening and life was going on. | ||
| And it's really, it's remarkable. | ||
| Well, Israelis celebrate life. | ||
| And we did go through six weeks, two months, when the streets were empty. | ||
| We were in national mourning. | ||
| We were preparing for war. | ||
| We started the war. | ||
| We were scared. | ||
| And what's amazing in this country, and this is kind of the little point of light for me, because through this trauma, you have to find some light. | ||
| Otherwise, how do you get up in the morning? | ||
| And for me the light is really the resilience of the Israeli people. | ||
| That not only the civil society that has stepped up in such an incredible way. | ||
| Do you know that 80% of the country is volunteering right now for the war? | ||
| Nobody has. | ||
| Nobody has these numbers. | ||
| Nowhere in the world where 80% of the people are currently volunteering in something from kids to the elderly. | ||
| Everybody's involved. | ||
| And so first of all, you have that social sense of solidarity and cohesion. | ||
| We're all in this together. | ||
| And there's resilience that this is not going to bring us down. | ||
| We've had bigger enemies than these clowns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, we've had the Roman Empire, the Babylonian Empire. | ||
| We're still here. | ||
| So this is not going to bring us down. | ||
| So that really is the feeling to counterbalance the deep sense of loss. | ||
| So, since I mentioned it's just a few hours before Shabbat on a Friday in Jerusalem, right before we started you looked at your phone and you said something to the effect of, oh, we made it or something. | ||
| And what you were talking about was that Ramadan has begun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And oddly or perversely, I guess, they seem to attack on Jewish holidays and on Muslim holidays. | ||
| And you were basically saying, oh, we got through this first Friday Ramadan because so many people come to Jerusalem. | ||
| Can you just explain that a little bit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So let me tell you what the Hamas playbook has been for the last four years. | ||
| Because we've always had a war, a mini-war, not like what we're doing now, around Ramadan. | ||
| But this is the script. | ||
| 200-300 hooligans slash terrorists go to evening prayers on Temple Mount, which, you know, the reason why we have freedom of worship in this city is because it's under Israeli sovereignty. | ||
| When the city between 48 and 67 was under Jordanian sovereignty, Jews and Christians couldn't pray in their sites. | ||
| So we have freedom of worship. | ||
| We sacrifice our own freedom of worship for the sake of not increasing tensions. | ||
| Jews cannot pray on Temple Mount, even though it's our holiest site. | ||
| We don't allow Jews. | ||
| We allow small groups of Jews to go up there, but not to pray there. | ||
| And people don't really understand that that is the holiest site in Judaism, not the Western Wall. | ||
| For us, the Western Wall is just the outer wall of the holiest site, which is Temple Mount. | ||
| For the Muslims, it's their third holiest site after Mecca and Medina. | ||
| But we respect that. | ||
| We understand what it means to the Muslim people. | ||
| And we facilitate, actively facilitate, freedom of worship for Muslims on Temple Mount. | ||
| Now what does that mean? | ||
| Ramadan, every Friday of Ramadan, we have about 100,000 people coming to worship on Temple Mount. | ||
| So what's the Hamas script? | ||
| They send 200, 300 of their troublemakers, hooligans, terrorists, call them whatever you want. | ||
| Some of them are just hooligans, some of them are more serious hooligans, which is terrorists. | ||
| They lock themselves in on the Thursday night. | ||
| They take with them explosives and big rocks like this. | ||
| When people say, oh, they're throwing stones, they think it's pebbles. | ||
| It's rocks like this. | ||
| You could kill somebody. | ||
| They go and they desecrate their own mosque. | ||
| They play football. | ||
| They do whatever you think you can imagine you shouldn't do in a place of worship. | ||
| And in the morning, They continue, they throw stones onto the wailing wall and so Israeli police have to go and clear out the site. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we know there's 80,000 peaceful Muslims coming to worship mid-morning, mid-day. | ||
| We go in, we clear out the 200 hooligans, and then the news and the media goes out by Hamas. | ||
| Jews or Israeli soldiers are storming Temple Mount. | ||
| They are going to stop worship on Temple Mount. | ||
| This is what goes out to the Muslim world. | ||
| The Muslim world is very emotional about Temple Mount, especially on Ramadan. | ||
| And then Hamas starts throwing rockets. | ||
| This is what it's been for the last four to five years. | ||
| Now this year's different, because we're already in a war. | ||
| We've, you know, I think we've made them incapable, almost, because they're still throwing rockets. | ||
| We've made them completely incapable of throwing rockets in the same way, because we're in the middle of the war. | ||
| They've already thrown their rockets. | ||
| And we've dismantled many of the sites where they launch their rockets from. | ||
| So my fear this year, Hamas called out everybody to go and to start a confrontation with the Israeli security services. | ||
| For weeks we debated what we should do about it. | ||
| We have bolstered security on Temple Mount and we have stopped certain people, certain troublemakers from actually coming to worship in Temple Mount. | ||
| And so now I can breathe because it's 4.30. | ||
| Right, just the idea that it's like clockwork like that, the fact that you saw that and were like, all right, we're through it for today. | ||
| Four years in a row. | ||
| And Dave, I would get interviewed, and this year is different in the Jewish calendar because this year we have a leap year, but normally Ramadan and Passover and Easter are falling on the same week. | ||
| And two years ago, Good Friday, Friday Ramadan and the eve of Passover was on the same day. | ||
| And the BBC called me up every year And every year I do the same interview. | ||
| And I said to the BBC last year, please look up my interview from the year before, because I gave you the playbook and we are still in the same script and you're asking me the same questions. | ||
| But this is planned. | ||
| This is curated. | ||
| This is the excuse to start a war. | ||
| And of course, every war Hamas launches, their branding is fantastic. | ||
| The Al-Aqsa War. | ||
| I mean, when isn't it the Al-Aqsa War? | ||
| Let's go from the holiest city on earth to a rather unholy place these days, Washington, D.C. | ||
| Chuck Schumer yesterday gave what I thought was one of the most absolutely disgusting speeches I've ever heard, using his Judaism as a cover to attack Israel, go after Bibi, etc., etc. | ||
| What do you make of what he said and the implications for Israel? | ||
| Well, as an elected official, I'm always very careful to ensure that I don't get involved in anybody's internal matters, because I respect every country's sovereignty. | ||
| And I would have expected the same thing back. | ||
| And now you can agree or disagree with Bibi. | ||
| I can agree or disagree with Biden. | ||
| But it doesn't mean I'm going to call on the world to depose a democratically elected government. | ||
| And like I said, actually, I said to Breitbart yesterday that, you know, don't worry about us. | ||
| We have a very robust democracy. | ||
| The country will decide who our leaders will be after the war. | ||
| Now you could argue we should have an election straight after the war. | ||
| Some people are arguing we should have an election right now. | ||
| I don't agree with that. | ||
| I think we can't change horses midstream. | ||
| But I do believe that after the war we should have an election. | ||
| There are people who don't think we should have an election after the war. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| We are a very democratic nation. | ||
| I always say we're so democratic we're almost dysfunctional. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You guys have elections almost every year anyway. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| We really don't need Chuck Schumer to tell us who we can or shouldn't elect, just as I wouldn't tell the American people who they should or shouldn't elect. | ||
| And I'm very careful about this, even though I have my own personal opinions. | ||
| But I wouldn't do that because that's just not done. | ||
| And I feel very bad because you know what? | ||
| He had a fantastic voting record on Israel. | ||
| He voted against the ridiculous, appeasing Iran deal that Obama wanted to get through. | ||
| And so I just feel bad that he's ruined this record. | ||
| What do you make of him using his Jewishness as a cover? | ||
| To me it struck me as like the ultimate play of identity politics because Jews are privileged and here he is falling on the sword. | ||
| Well, I don't know when Jews became privileged. | ||
| Somebody should send the memo to my family who were kicked out of Spain and probably your family who part of them were carted off to the concentration camps. | ||
| I'm not sure where this Jewish privilege comes from because everything the Jewish people have achieved has been through blood, sweat and tears. | ||
| Nobody helped us. | ||
| We built it all by ourselves. | ||
| The American immigrants that came built themselves, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got to where they got to. | ||
| Nobody gave us anything. | ||
| And so I'm not sure where this privilege comes from, because everything we've done we've achieved and we've worked hard for. | ||
| I just hate it when they put these people to be kind of the court Jew, the house Jew. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You know? | ||
| If you are going to use the Jewish card, use it to make the situation better, and not to get involved in another country's politics, in Israel's politics. | ||
| Like I said, you can think whatever you want, you can even have an opinion, but to call out so directly, I think was out of order, and I dare say he's probably regretting it right now. | ||
| It seems like he is. | ||
| And also, from what I can tell, at least in Israel, it's barely 24 hours. | ||
| I mean, it seems like the country's rallying around Bibi now. | ||
| And a lot of people don't like Bibi. | ||
| I mean, it's the ultimate irony. | ||
| If you wanted to get rid of Bibi, he's had the opposite effect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So once there is the day after the war, which will happen at some point, how do you think this changes Israel going forward in terms of Not only the politics, but the culture here, and just this now realization that, you know, when these people talk about two states or peace, there's nobody to talk to. | ||
| There's no evidence that there's anyone to talk to. | ||
| And I think a lot of Israelis, the Israeli left has sort of collapsed because of that. | ||
| Well, you know, the Israeli left are thinking about other things now and not the two-state solution. | ||
| But let me tell you why that idea. | ||
| I'm not against the idea of a two-state solution per se in an ideal world. | ||
| What's the ideal world? | ||
| That the Palestinians should have leadership which is not corrupt, which is not genocidal. | ||
| If the Palestinians had an Anwar Sadat, if the Palestinians had a Nelson Mandela, a Martin Luther King, a Gandhi, then I would say, OK, you can do business with these people. | ||
| We don't want to rule the Palestinians. | ||
| We have no interest in being responsible for their lives. | ||
| It's why you left Gaza? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly! | |
| And that's why we went into Oslo. | ||
| And that's why 94% of the Palestinians are under the rule of the Palestinian Authority. | ||
| We get involved when our lives are at risk. | ||
| That's when we get involved. | ||
| We don't want to deal with them. | ||
| We want them to have autonomy. | ||
| But it seems very clear that either they cannot rule themselves, which sounds horrible, but the proof is in the pudding, as us British people say, or they actually don't really want a state, which they keep saying. | ||
| They're more interested in destroying our state than in building themselves a state. | ||
| And I go back to something that Bibi always says, and he's 100% right. | ||
| The problem of this conflict, or the essence of this conflict, is not that there isn't a Palestinian state. | ||
| The essence of the conflict is that there's a Jewish state. | ||
| So how do you think that changes Israel after? | ||
| I mean, do you think it fundamentally... Well, it seems like it fundamentally alters everything. | ||
| The country seems different to me now than it was six months ago, clearly. | ||
| I don't think we'll ever be the same again. | ||
| I've got to be honest with you. | ||
| I... This is... And I can't... You can't compare anything to the Holocaust. | ||
| You really can't, okay? | ||
| Because everything that's happened is one day in Auschwitz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| So I don't want... I don't like comparing. | ||
| But the brutality of what's happened here is kind of a loss of innocence that I never thought I've | ||
| lost. I'm a very positive person. | ||
| I'm an optimist. But there's a loss of innocence that I'm never going to recover from. And I think | ||
| I talk for the country when I say that. Also, there's this kind of loss of the | ||
| awe we had for our capabilities to defend ourselves. | ||
| Like, I know we're going to learn our lessons and I know this is not going to happen again, but the fact that it happened, what does that say? | ||
| What does it say about the leadership, the military leadership and the country? | ||
| Where was everyone? | ||
| Why were they asleep? | ||
| Why didn't they listen? | ||
| I'm very disappointed and disheartened also, but I know that the Jewish people always kind of, we brush ourselves off, we pick ourselves up, we've done it many times before, and we look forward and we do things bigger and better. | ||
| So we weren't prepared, it's not going to happen again. | ||
| That probably should be the ending because it was perfect, but since it's Jerusalem, just before Shabbat, tell me something about this city that people don't know. | ||
| They think too much about the strife and all of that other stuff, but something about the beauty of the city. | ||
| And it's truly beautiful. | ||
| I mean, it's an absolutely beautiful city. | ||
| Isn't it a stunning city? | ||
| It's a stunning city. | ||
| It's a 3,000-year-old city that King David built. | ||
| And why did King David, your namesake, you're his namesake. | ||
| So King David was a uniter. | ||
| And King David was the king of a few tribes that he wanted to unite. | ||
| And he understood, even though he was the king of Judea, there was Judea, there was Judah, and there was Israel, he wanted to unite the tribes into one people. | ||
| As you know, the Middle East is very tribal. | ||
| It's still tribal. | ||
| But he was very smart. | ||
| He was a smart politician and he felt that the strength of the Jewish people was in unity. | ||
| So he couldn't make the capital of the Jewish kingdom in Hebron, which was the capital of Judea, because he knew that people would think they're going to somebody else's patch. | ||
| So Jerusalem was neutral. | ||
| It didn't belong to any tribe. | ||
| And so, he created the capital of the Jewish Kingdom in Jerusalem so that it could be a place where everybody felt that this was their home. | ||
| And so, I want to finish with the fact that the DNA of Jerusalem is one of unity, is one of bringing in all the tribes, and it's one of diversity. | ||
| Shabbat Shalom. | ||
| Shabbat Shalom. |
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