Fleur Hassan-Nahoum exposes Hamas's four-year playbook of staging violence at the Temple Mount, where 200 to 300 terrorists desecrate the site at night to manipulate media narratives against Israel's 100,000 Muslim worshippers. She details the October 7th trauma, noting 80% of Israelis volunteer for the war effort despite unprecedented brutality, while criticizing Senator Chuck Schumer's interference and arguing the two-state solution fails without ending Palestinian corruption. Ultimately, she asserts that Jerusalem remains a unifying capital, emphasizing that the conflict's core is the existence of a Jewish state rather than simple territorial disputes. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.