Aug. 18, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Talk of protests, but that doesn't get across what happened in Washington. | ||
| I've been following this stuff for nine months and even I was shocked. | ||
| To see an upside down red triangle, a Hamas target sign, painted on the Columbus monument with the sign Hamas is coming. | ||
| Seeing people waving Hamas flags, but their faces wrapped in the keffiyehs. | ||
| America has a serious domestic extremism problem. | ||
| This isn't about criticism of Israel or this particular policy. | ||
| We have allowed a form of radical Islam to grow unchecked. | ||
| It is being nurtured by An attitude coming out from progressive circles and elite academic institutions that holds Israel uniquely responsible and guilty of everything that's wrong in the world. | ||
| These are merging together with a United Nations that is happy to amplify Hamas's lies and not hold it accountable for the way they're using Palestinian civilians as human shields and human sacrifices. | ||
| And these have merged into a truly monstrous movement that is not only denying the atrocities of October 7, not only condoning or excusing those atrocities, but glorifying | ||
| them and seeking out more of them with a truly terrifying bloodlust. | ||
| Joining me today is a former Israeli government spokesman and international media advisor | ||
| to the president of Israel, Elan Levy. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| I was about to say meet you, but we did meet briefly in Israel. | ||
| It's good to see you again in the free state of Florida. | ||
| It is good to have you here in the free state of Florida. | ||
| So my audience knows, and I just mentioned to you, I disappear for August. | ||
| So we are taping this at the end of July, but we're going to air it middle of August. | ||
| Obviously many things can change in America. | ||
| We're going through a quiet period. | ||
| Yeah, we wish we were going through a quiet period, or you certainly wish you were going through a quiet period. | ||
| But there's a lot going on in the world, obviously. | ||
| You had, I would say, because it's no longer your job, we'll get into your current job, but you had I think one of the most difficult jobs of all of The end of 23, let's say, into much of 24, representing Israel on the national stage. | ||
| So first, I guess, how does somebody get a job like that? | ||
| Give me like a minute bio, and then we'll go into everything else. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| It's not an easy job being a spokesman for Israel during a war. | ||
| The Atlantic said it's a job that's fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or preferably all three. | ||
| So I tick the boxes. | ||
| Look, when the October 7th massacre happened, I was a private citizen. | ||
| I was caught at home with these sirens that rang out at 7.30 in the morning when the whole country came under a massive missile attack. | ||
| And something amazing happened on October 7th. | ||
| The whole of Israeli society, which had been deeply polarized, some horrible political arguments, came together and everyone said, what can we do to help the war effort? | ||
| Because there's only one thing that matters right now. | ||
| Defeating Hamas, driving them back, bringing back the hostages, because we're in a war for our homes. | ||
| And so people started doing whatever they could. | ||
| Dizengoff Square near my home became a central point where people would donate socks and toothpaste and whatever they could, and anyone who had a car was driving soldiers to their bases. | ||
| And I started giving media interviews from my living room as a former advisor to the president. | ||
| Within a few days I get a phone call from the Prime Minister's office inviting me to come and join the media efforts because this was the only story in the world. | ||
| And the eyes of the world were on Israel as it was still fighting back the Hamas invasion by air, land and sea. | ||
| And that started a roller coaster of nearly six months in which I found myself making Israel's case to the global media on television and radio. | ||
| So there's a kind of two prongs to this because on one hand for at least what 48 hours 72 hours you guys just had to deal with the immediacy of securing the border and it was the northern border as well and everything else and then also trying to live uh have a civil society function like that that is not easy. | ||
| October 7th was a moment when The state fell apart, essentially. | ||
| People in the kibbutzim, where Hamas death squads were rampaging, were wondering, where is the army? | ||
| And the country was saved because of a civil society that took responsibility. | ||
| Israelis didn't sit at home and switch on their TVs and say, well, it's okay, the government will take care of this. | ||
| People committed themselves to doing whatever they could personally. | ||
| For some people, it meant grabbing their weapons and going to fight in the kibbutzin. | ||
| We're recording this just after the Prime Minister's speech. | ||
| In Congress, he spoke of one of the young soldiers, an Ethiopian-Israeli, who ran eight miles to get to his base in order to help defend against the kibbutzin, because people didn't wait for the state or the government to do things for them. | ||
| They realized this is a fight for our lives, a fight for survival, a fight for our homes, and they just took action. | ||
| So then your profile gets elevated. | ||
| Now you're working for the Prime Minister's office. | ||
| Is one of the strange things that Israel is caught between is having to defend itself physically in a war against a terrorist organization that will literally do anything, and then also have to defend itself to Western media that basically gets pretty much everything wrong always, especially as it pertains to Israel. | ||
| You know, it often felt like I was living in a topsy-turvy world where the facts have no correlation with what is being reported in the media. | ||
| A media that will automatically believe anything Hamas says and disbelieve anything Israel says. | ||
| And we saw this right at the beginning of the war when Hamas put out a press release claiming that an Israeli airstrike had destroyed a hospital and killed 500 people. | ||
| And it turned out that it was a rocket shrapnel. | ||
| From the page of the New York Times, that's what it said. | ||
| A rocket shrapnel. | ||
| From Palestinian Islamic Jihad, fired from a cemetery, by the way, that had hit the car park of a hospital and killed a few dozen people. | ||
| And yet the story went around the world that Israel was somehow responsible. | ||
| And when I look now, for example, at world leaders accusing Israel of targeting healthcare facilities or schools inside Gaza and remaining completely silent, About how Hamas terrorists have weaponized and militarized those facilities. | ||
| Just yesterday, Hamas terrorists fired a rocket from inside a humanitarian zone that Israel had designated, that hit an onerous school. | ||
| They fired from inside the humanitarian zone and hit a school. | ||
| Meaning hit a school in their own territory. | ||
| They hit one of their own schools. | ||
| They hit a Palestinian school. | ||
| But you won't hear a word of criticism from the international organizations that are supposed to be advancing peace and security. | ||
| And time and time and time again we hear media reports that will be accusing Israel of operating against Palestinian hospitals. | ||
| As if the terrorists were not using their basements in order to wage military operations. | ||
| For me personally, one of the turning points in the war was an interview I had with Sky News in the UK. | ||
| This was during the first hostage release pause when Israel had agreed to a pause in the fighting and would release Ten Palestinian prisoners for every one hostage we got back. | ||
| Sorry, three Palestinian prisoners for every one hostage. | ||
| And the news anchor asked me whether the fact that Israel was willing to release three Palestinian prisoners for every one hostage meant that Israel valued Palestinian lives less. | ||
| Now I responded by raising my eyebrows in a comical and dramatic fashion and that went viral across Israel because it really spoke to something a lot of Israelis feel. | ||
| That sometimes it doesn't matter what we do or what we say. | ||
| There are always going to be people around the world who will twist our morality against us. | ||
| And if the fact that we're willing to put dangerous criminals and terrorists back on the street in order to get back babies, babies for God's sake, who are abducted by Hamas death squads, means that somehow we're the immoral ones, then we definitely have an uphill climb here in explaining ourselves to the world. | ||
| So did you have any sense of how hostile the media was going to be or dishonest or anything else? | ||
| Because I almost think at this point That the Israeli foreign minister's office should just not be doing these interviews anymore and just say, you're all liars. | ||
| We're just going to do what we got to do. | ||
| And that's that. | ||
| I know that there's probably reasons you can't do that, but. | ||
| Yeah, look, I hear this a lot in Israel as well. | ||
| People say, what's the point of explaining ourselves to the world? | ||
| They're going to hate us anyway. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| After October 7th, I don't think we need to explain ourselves to the world. | ||
| After October 7th, I think we know exactly why we are fighting to destroy Hamas, bring back the hostages, make sure October 7th can never happen again. | ||
| And there are many other people in the world who owe us answers. | ||
| UNRWA owes answers about why it's indoctrinating Palestinian children, letting Hamas terrorists fight out of its schools and funding salaries of terrorists who took part in the But do you think those answers will ever come? | ||
| I mean, they basically are a terrorist organization. | ||
| I don't have a problem saying it. | ||
| UNRWA is a Hamas front. | ||
| UNRWA is a Hamas front and the Knesset has just passed, in the first reading, a bill that would designate UNRWA as a terrorist organization. | ||
| But my point is this. | ||
| There are many people in the world who owe Israel answers. | ||
| The World Health Organization owes us answers why they pretend. | ||
| That terrorists get immunity if they hide in the basement of a hospital because they attack Israel for acting against Hamas terrorists hiding in a hospital instead of against the Hamas terrorists hiding in that hospital. | ||
| But Israel is not the United States. | ||
| The United States is the world's only superpower. | ||
| It spans a whole continent and the United States can have the luxury sometimes of saying, we will do what we have to do to defend our interests and the whole world can go to hell. | ||
| Israel is a small country. | ||
| We're only 9 million people. | ||
| We're in a very hostile region. | ||
| What we are encountering right now is a war in which Israel is under attack by the Iranian regime and its proxy armies on seven different fronts. | ||
| And in order to win that, in order to win this proxy war against the shared enemy of Israel and the United States, we need the support of our allies. | ||
| We need our allies to stand behind us and give us the military, moral and diplomatic support and to put sanctions on our enemies. | ||
| Not to give more funding to our enemies like UNRWA, which is a Hamas front while threatening Israeli leaders with repercussions. | ||
| And that's why it's so important for Israel, despite the hostility in the international media, to stand for the justice of our cause and to dispel the lies. | ||
| And by the way, that's part of what I'm doing in the United States now, as part of a global tour to try to make Israel's case and bring the truth to light. | ||
| So you must have been pretty pleased with Bibi's speech yesterday, because I thought he did a fine job of that. | ||
| It was a very powerful speech. | ||
| It sounded almost like a highlights reel of the top zingers that have come across my Twitter feed. | ||
| One line after the other. | ||
| He definitely didn't come up with the chickens for KFC line. | ||
| I've heard that one before. | ||
| He didn't come up with chickens for KFC. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| There were a few lines where people texted me saying, did the Prime Minister take that from you? | ||
| I said, no, that was his line actually, but I was amplifying it. | ||
| Some very, very powerful lines. | ||
| Look, Prime Minister Netanyahu is an outstanding orator. | ||
| His last speech in Congress was, I think, one of the best speeches of the 21st century. | ||
| You're talking about like 10 or 12 years ago? | ||
| Nine years ago when he spoke in Congress to oppose the Iran deal. | ||
| It was a powerful speech in which he reminded the United States of the importance of standing behind Israel as we fight against our common enemies in pursuit of total victory. | ||
| To try to dispel the lies that are being told about Israel and remind the United States why it is so important to stand with Israel rather than throw us under a bus because this is a war that you would like to make go away. | ||
| We also want this war to go away. | ||
| One of the lines I keep saying, we didn't start this war, we didn't expect this war, we didn't want this war, but it's a war that we have to win. | ||
| Because if we don't win it, there will be a next time. | ||
| And it will be worse. | ||
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Right. | |
| So what would you say to all of the people that didn't, the Democrats, let's say, who didn't show up to listen to BB? | ||
| I think it was a terrible mistake. | ||
| You have right now your main ally in the Middle East fighting for its life against the Iranian regime and its proxy armies on seven different fronts. | ||
| The war started with Hamas on October 7th in Gaza, but since then we've been under non-stop rocket attack from Hezbollah in the north, which has 200,000 rockets. | ||
| The entire northern border of Israel has been depopulated. | ||
| Sixty When I saw you in the hotel that you gave a talk at, I mean we're at a hotel on the beach in Tel Aviv and most of the hotel was people from the north who are now living in a hotel. | ||
| And if we're talking about the beach in Tel Aviv, just the other week we had a drone attack from the Houthi terror pirates, Iran's Islamic pirates in Yemen. | ||
| They fired a drone at Tel Aviv that approached over the beach. | ||
| I was sitting On the beach, until just a few hours before, a drone the size of a car came all the way from Yemen and crashed into a residential building, killing one of my neighbors. | ||
| Terror attacks from the West Bank, from Judea and Samaria. | ||
| Rocket and drone attacks from Syria, from Iraq, from Iran itself. | ||
| In April, Israel was the victim of the biggest ballistic missile attack in world history, after Russia's initial attack on Ukraine in the early hours of the war there. | ||
| And I say eight fronts because there are attacks on Jews in the diaspora as well. | ||
| And yesterday we saw the horrific image of the upside down red triangle being sprayed on the Columbus monument in New York. | ||
| The upside down red triangle is how Hamas marks out targets. | ||
| in its videos. | ||
| And someone had spray-painted on the monument, Hamas is coming. | ||
| This is not criticism of Israel, this is a direct death threat against the Jews of America. | ||
| So you have an ally that is fighting for its life against a terrorist regime in Iran that calls us the little Satan and you the big Satan. | ||
| And it's important to stand in solidarity with that country and give it what it needs to fight. | ||
| Look, the future of the free world in the West is going to be determined in the first half of the 21st century by the fate of three countries that are at risk of extinction by aggressive neighbors. | ||
| Israel at the hands of Iran, Ukraine at the hands of Russia, and Taiwan at the hands of China. | ||
| If Israel falls to Iran, Ukraine falls to Russia, and Taiwan falls to China, that is not going to be a world that is safe for the West, for the free world, for democracy. | ||
| And these are all proxy wars. | ||
| Iran sees its real enemy as being the United States and it wants to weaken Israel to weaken America. | ||
| It wants to hurt us in order to hurt you. | ||
| That's why it's surrounding Israel with a ring of fire and trying to watch it burn and watch it bleed. | ||
| The Russia war against Ukraine is Russia's war against the United States through Ukraine. | ||
| China's attacks, well, surrounding Taiwan, they haven't quite invaded yet. | ||
| China's moves on Taiwan are also an attack on the United States through Taiwan. | ||
| And I think it's important for leaders in the United States, on both sides of the aisle, to zoom out, look at what the geopolitical map looks like, understand who your allies are, understand who your enemies are, and work to strengthen your allies. | ||
| How much of this though, putting the geopolitics aside, it's just about the Jews. | ||
| It's not really much more complex than that. | ||
| It isn't. | ||
| No other country would be expected to feed the people trying to kill them. | ||
| No other country would be told that they have to drop leaflets and make phone calls and send texts. | ||
| Like, we just kind of all know it and it just is and I think it's worth mentioning every now and again. | ||
| It is because what is so crazy about this current moment and the protests we're seeing against Israel, I call it the Tentifada on campus, is the derangement. | ||
| It's not about criticism. | ||
| It's about trying to make Israel a symbol of evil incarnate by calling it a fascist apartheid white colonial blah blah blah that is guilty of genocide and starvation and everything. | ||
| Taking a country that is a dispersed and scattered Minority. | ||
| Coming back to their ancestral homeland from across the globe, from places like Morocco and Ethiopia, and calling that a white settler colony, shows that actually this isn't something that has to do with reality at all. | ||
| This is a derangement and the same pattern of anti-Semitism that historically has never been just a prejudice. | ||
| It's never been about not liking Jews. | ||
| It's about constructing a mindset in which the Jews are ultimately responsible for Everything that is wrong in the world. | ||
| And when you see protests saying that fighting for the Palestinians is a social justice cause, and a climate cause, and an LGBT clause, and a racial equality clause, you see that they are not talking about Israel as a real place, they are talking about it as a symbol of evil because it is a way for societies to deflect attention and responsibility for their own failures. | ||
| So is that, to me, that's what it actually all is. | ||
| That all the Arab countries kind of need Israel because if Israel didn't exist, their own people might be like, man, our governments are kind of shitty to us. | ||
| But as long as they can basically point to Israel, and I think most of the other countries, the European countries, they need Israel to be like, ah, that's the cause of all the problems because the French don't want you thinking that they're actually occupying Historically, just as in failing societies, the Jews were the one thing people could agree on. | ||
| in the world and everyone can just be like, ah, those guys, you know, they're old people, bible, | ||
| you know, whatever. Historically, just as in failing societies, the Jews were the one thing | ||
| people could agree on. They can't agree on anything. They can agree they don't like the | ||
| Jews so they scapegoat the Jews. | ||
| For decades you had that in the Arab world as well. | ||
| The one thing that these countries can agree on, at least raising the cause of hating Israel, is what unites them. | ||
| You see it at the United Nations as well. | ||
| Why is that organization so systematically, institutionally weighted against Israel? | ||
| Well, most of those countries aren't democracies. | ||
| They don't see eye to eye on most issues. | ||
| The one thing they can agree is to find a scapegoat and to accuse it of being responsible for all the world's problems instead of taking responsibility for their own actions. | ||
| But I think it's beginning to crack. | ||
| We saw it beginning to crack with the Abraham Accords under the Trump administration, where he was able to get peace and normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. | ||
| For the first time, these countries looked at Israel and said, wait, hang on, why are we scapegoating Israel? | ||
| Why are we joining this insanity of boycotting the most dynamic, vibrant economy in the Middle East? | ||
| In order to do what? | ||
| In order to give more breathing space to the Palestinians who aren't serious about achieving peace with Israel and just want to extend their forever war against Israel with American taxpayer money? | ||
| Why are we doing this? | ||
| And so the genius of the Abraham Accords was the ability to bring together countries that should see eye to eye, that should be working together, and bring them together in order to advance their own common prosperity. | ||
| And what the Prime Minister spoke about in his speech in Congress was upgrading the Abraham Accords into an Abraham Alliance, into a regional security infrastructure in which these countries are able to operate together to face down our common enemy, our common enemy within the Middle East, ours and yours within America, which is Iran. | ||
| And saying, look, these countries have an interest in rolling back Iranian aggression, in not letting Iran export its form of radical Islam that it's been threatening to do since the Iranian Islamic revolution. | ||
| And I hope that whoever wins in November, that will be a number one priority in the Middle East. | ||
| Not to send American boots on the ground. | ||
| We don't want that. | ||
| It's to help the partners, the countries that should be partners, join forces to protect themselves. | ||
| I mean, I hate to tell you, there's only one of the two candidates that's going to do that, regardless of whether it's Kamal or not. | ||
| I mean, there's only one party that is willing to do that. | ||
| You know, I wouldn't be so sure about that, because I think the Biden administration has been trying to get a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And in fact, when the Biden administration came in, they ditched the entire Trump agenda. | ||
| They did a 180 degree turn. | ||
| And there was only one policy from the Trump administration that they kept, and they even kept the brandy. | ||
| And that was the Abraham Accords, because they realized that that was something that helps to advance America's interests. | ||
| And I can tell you, before I was in the position as the government spokesman, I was President Herzog's foreign media advisor. | ||
| And the president's office in Israel is a revolving door of visits from American senators and congressmen. | ||
| If you want to know where they are during their recess, they're visiting Israel. | ||
| And the one thing they all wanted to talk about was the Abraham Accords. | ||
| How the United States can help countries in the Middle East join forces to unlock the potential of the relations between them so that they can get on with the work of protecting their common interests and American interests on the ground without needing a constant American presence there. | ||
| So how does this war end? | ||
| The war in Gaza? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's start there. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get the seven front thing. | ||
| But how does Gaza end? | ||
| The war needs to end in an Israeli victory. | ||
| Because otherwise there will be a next time and it will be worse. | ||
| The lesson that Israelis learned from October 7th is that the whole strategy of saying, yes, there is a terrorist In retrospect, doesn't that sound completely insane? | ||
| armed to the teeth with rockets, but we can contain it. | ||
| We'll know if they're about to invade us. | ||
| That doesn't work, okay? | ||
| We cannot live with terrorist states armed to the teeth on our borders. | ||
| Certainly not while they're holding hostages. | ||
| In retrospect, doesn't that sound completely insane? | ||
| I mean, when I went down there to the kibbutzes and we could hear bombs going off still, | ||
| you look at the fence and the fence is like, I mean, I have a more vibrant, | ||
| a more secure fence outside of my house. | ||
| And yet you look at the Egypt border fence and Egypt seemed to know what they were doing with trenches and three fences and cement and everything else. | ||
| I mean, the Israeli fence was basically, it was basically a chain link fence with some barbed wire. | ||
| Like, doesn't that in retrospect seem completely insane? | ||
| And I get that there was technological surveillance and all that. | ||
| Israel really wanted to believe, and we managed to convince ourselves, that Hamas was deterred. | ||
| Yes, they're evil anti-Semitic scumbags and bastards and they would kill us if they had half the chance, but they couldn't possibly be so crazy as to invade Israel because they know what we would do to them. | ||
| And on October 7th it turned out that yes, our enemies really are that crazy. | ||
| They are psychopaths. | ||
| All the suffering that has happened since October 7th is because Hamas's leaders declared war with the deadliest terror attack in world history after 9-11 and then lured Israel into an urban war while holding hostages and firing rockets at the Israeli home front. | ||
| In hindsight, if we'd known what Hamas was capable of on October 7th, perhaps Israel should have launched a preemptive war in order to knock Hamas out of action. | ||
| And by the way, that is something that is on the mind of decision makers now, as we look to Lebanon. | ||
| Because there's already a war raging. | ||
| Since October 8th, over 6,000 rockets, 60,000 people have been forced to flee from their homes. | ||
| Their homes are being destroyed. | ||
| Rockets, suicide drones, daily attacks. | ||
| And Israelis are saying, we cannot live with this threat on our borders. | ||
| Maybe it will have to be soon, maybe it will be in a few years time, but at some point this is a threat that we are going to have to neutralize. | ||
| Because the world had Israel used to thinking that sometimes a terrorist group will fire rockets at our cities and it's just something you have to accept. | ||
| That they can fire rockets at Tel Aviv, where you have a minute and a half to run to shelter, or at Sderot, or the neighbouring Kibbutz Sin, which are so close that the artillery shells would sometimes hit before you even hear the siren. | ||
| And Israelis, in the aftermath of the wake-up call of October 7, are saying, no, we are not willing to put up any longer with this threat. | ||
| This is not a new normal that we're willing to tolerate. | ||
| So you ask me how the war is going to end? | ||
| The war has to end with an Israeli victory. | ||
| It has to end with Hamas removed from power. | ||
| Disarmed, so it can never do October 7th, so it can never return to 20 years of constant rocket fire, and with all the hostages back, because otherwise there will be a next time, and it will be worse, and it will be worse, you know why? | ||
| Because Hamas will think that the free world, the West, stopped Israel from defending its own people after suffering the barbaric atrocities of October 7th. | ||
| They will think that they have the United Nations, and the ICJ, and the ICC on their side, you know? | ||
| A few years ago I remember seeing a report that Hamas had tunnels going under the border from Gaza into Israel. | ||
| And there was a fear that Hamas could use these tunnels in order to invade Israel and perpetrate a massacre in the kibbutzim. | ||
| And I remember thinking that that was alarmist and they would never do that because if they just went into the kibbutzim and burned people alive in their homes and abducted babies like they did on October 7th, it would be obvious to the whole world who the bad guys are, and that Israel is fully within its rights and duties to fight back and neutralize that threat. | ||
| And yet we saw that's exactly what happened on October 7th, and it was so quick that the narrative turned on October 7th already, the protests in the West, the celebrations of what had happened on October 7th. | ||
| And we find that even when Israel is The victim of the most barbaric unprovoked attack by terrorists who, I'll put it bluntly, were using violence that was almost intended to provoke Holocaust memories when they burned whole families alive. | ||
| I need the word almost. | ||
| I think it was deliberate. | ||
| That even then we don't have the world on our side. | ||
| And that's why it's so important for supporters of Israel who understand the importance of it standing up against the Iranian regime and its proxies on seven different fronts, to stand up vocally for its right to defend itself and to neutralize those threats so we don't go back to a world in which terrorists can think that they can perpetrate these barbaric atrocities and get away with it because they have the United Nations. | ||
| It's interesting because I still think in some respects that makes the argument that Israel shouldn't bother trying to explain itself because no matter what, ultimately it's about the Jews and that's just the way the world will operate. | ||
| Which, by the way, I don't think it's the world's people. | ||
| I think it's either the power structures that exist or something like that. | ||
| I mean, I went and I saw the 47 minute video. | ||
| I will literally never be the same having seen it. | ||
| And yet people pretend that that's not real. | ||
| So it just kind of is what it is, I suppose. | ||
| You know, it's very easy to fall into a funk of thinking that the whole world is against us and they hate Jews. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| There are many people who are. | ||
| And they're psychopaths, and they're lunatics, and the protests that you are seeing on campuses and the Campus Tentifada, there is a bloodlust of people who are not only justifying attacks against Israelis and Jews, but relish it. | ||
| But most people are not there. | ||
| And when I go on TV to explain Israel to the American audience, I remember that most Americans are not like that. | ||
| Most Americans are good people, are decent people who just want safety and prosperity and security for their families and for other people around the world. | ||
| And it's important for me to dispel the lies that Hamas is putting out, that it's laundering through the United Nations, through the narratives that are getting spread at the elite institutions of the United States. | ||
| So that the people in the middle don't think that Israel is really guilty of all these nasty, horrible things that they're trying to convince you. | ||
| Because if those lies go unchallenged, if people who know the truth don't speak out, then that will become common knowledge. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The whole world will hate the Jews. | ||
| And of course they will if we're really guilty of all the horrible things that we're being accused of. | ||
| But there is a fight that can be won. | ||
| And that's why even after leaving my position as a government spokesperson, I've continued to try to fight the media fight from within civil society to say most people can still be won over because they don't have firm opinions. | ||
| And at the end of the day, most people are naturally sympathetic to Israel's cause. | ||
| Because what are Israelis asking for at the end of the day? | ||
| The right to go to sleep and not wake up in Gaza or Lebanon in their pyjamas? | ||
| And I don't think it's too much to ask for. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that literally nobody wants the Palestinians? | ||
| Like if we were to just believe the narrative and let's say Israel was the most evil country in the history of the world and committing genocide and all these things, let's just pretend all that was true and it's all of course not true. | ||
| If all of that was true, you would think that one out of 22 Arab nations might be willing to take in three Palestinians. | ||
| None have taken in any. | ||
| I guess a few of them are now showing up on the streets of Paris. | ||
| But what do you make of that? | ||
| In essence, they want the conflict to continue because nobody wants the Palestinians. | ||
| I think many Arab states are beginning to realize the Frankenstein's monster that they have created. | ||
| The reason that after Israel's war of independence, the Palestinians who were displaced received their own UN agency that uniquely in the world keeps them as refugees generation after generation, receiving American taxpayer money for free healthcare until such a day as they can move to Tel Aviv and destroy the state of Israel. | ||
| The reason the Arab nations did that was to wage a forever war against Israel. | ||
| Once these Arab states realize that Israel is actually important for regional security in the Middle East, and they have more to gain by working together with Israel, trading with Israel, building military alliances with Israel, what are they supposed to do with this ideology that they have created that is waging a forever war against Israel? | ||
| Israel cannot reconcile itself to Israel's existence in any borders whatsoever and is determined, as they say, from the river to the sea, which means no Israel. | ||
| And, you know, I'll say to my enemy's credit, when they say things, I take them at their word. | ||
| They understand that there is a very serious extremism problem here. | ||
| And whereas Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, American allies, have taken amazing steps to de-radicalize their curricula, move their populations in a more open-minded direction, the Palestinians have done the opposite. | ||
| Because they believe that the war of 1948 is still not over. | ||
| That Israel will ultimately disappear if only they put enough pressure, if only they commit enough barbaric atrocities against it, if only they drag it into enough perpetual conflict that they can bleed the country dry. | ||
| And I hope that, you know, before it was assumed that peace with the Arab world had to go through the Palestinians, first you have to solve the most thorny conflict with the Palestinians, and then the other Arab countries will come around. | ||
| And I remember Secretary of State John Kerry saying, read my lips, separate peace accords with the UAE, not going to happen. | ||
| And then the Trump administration proved him wrong. | ||
| That was the inside-out strategy. | ||
| Solve the hardest problem, then you do the easier ones. | ||
| The genius of the Abraham Accords is to do an outside-in strategy. | ||
| You start with the countries that have never had a direct conflict with Israel and share interests with it, like Morocco and the UAE. | ||
| Then you move into the countries that have a bit more conflict, like Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And eventually, when the Palestinians realize that the Arab world isn't going to give them indefinite credit, They're going to be the ones who are going to sue for peace on the best terms they can get, instead of thinking that the Arab world will help them bleed Israel dry until they get the best terms that they want. | ||
| So where does Qatar fall into all this? | ||
| Because they seem to be the pocketbook of this entire thing. | ||
| The leadership is in Qatar. | ||
| I know you said some nice things about our administration and I understand why, but I'm an American so I don't have to say nice things about my administration. | ||
| To me, this war could have been over on October 8th. | ||
| All Biden had to do was call Qatar and say, we're going to bomb Doha if you don't have these hostages released immediately. | ||
| I don't think it would have been much more complex than that. | ||
| Maybe I'm very simple and you can explain to me if I'm wrong. | ||
| Qatar is a deeply problematic actor. | ||
| And they're funding the stuff on the campus. | ||
| Funding certain protests or just Al Jazeera, which has done more than enough to brainwash people around the world. | ||
| Hosting Hamas leaders on their campuses. | ||
| Spending so much money on American campuses and think tanks in order to buy public opinion. | ||
| This war could have ended very quickly if Qatar had threatened Hamas leaders in Qatar with arrest, deportation, unless they released the hostages. | ||
| But wouldn't that take United States pressure? | ||
| They're not going to do it themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And if I may be critical of the United States, we need to see... We're in Florida. | ||
| You're in a safe zone here. | ||
| We need to see serious pressure from the United States and the free world on Hamas and its backers, Qatar, Turkey, and Iran, to force them to let the hostages go. | ||
| Hamas responds to pressure. | ||
| Hamas will not respond to the UN Secretary General urging them to discover a sense of political courage. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| Why is the UN Security General urging the terrorists who burned families alive on October 7th to find political courage? | ||
| They don't need anyone telling them to be responsible or to discover the magnitude of the hour. | ||
| They need serious pressure in order to choke off their funding supplies, choke off their pipelines, make it clear that they are isolated. | ||
| And by the way, that is what I think was what was so powerful about the Prime Minister's speech in Congress. | ||
| Because Hamas leaders will be watching it from inside their tunnels in Gaza, seeing the Prime Minister of Israel getting standing ovation after standing ovation in the legislature of the most powerful country in the world and realizing that the walls are closing in on them. | ||
| Instead, we found ourselves having an argument? | ||
| About how much Israel should allow itself to be blackmailed and extorted by a terrorist organization to get back babies brutally abducted from their beds on October 7th. | ||
| How many terrorists we have to release? | ||
| How much we have to jeopardize our national security by giving parts of Gaza back to Hamas? | ||
| When the question should be, what pressure can the United States and its allies put on Hamas and its backers to let the hostages go? | ||
| And I think it's important that the United States start acting like a superpower. | ||
| Not take a conflict avoidant approach to resolving this problem with Hamas. | ||
| Challenge it head on and I think the remarks by a former President Trump saying that they have until November to release the hostages because if he comes into office and they haven't released them there will be consequences is exactly the line that the United States should be taking instead of expecting that the terrorists who beheaded people on October 7th are going to respond to your calls for them to be responsible. | ||
| You were being very diplomatic for the first part of that answer, but I think we got the answer, actually. | ||
| Because that really is just the truth. | ||
| They will only respond to one thing. | ||
| Nobody wants war, but a little pressure speaks awfully and carries a big stick. | ||
| It does something. | ||
| That's just reality. | ||
| I don't want for a moment to suggest that the United States has not put its backing | ||
| behind Israel in getting the hostages back. | ||
| And I've spoken to hostages' families who are so appreciative of the regular updates | ||
| that they're getting from the administration, keeping them in the loop about the negotiations. | ||
| But I'm saying Hamas's leaders are sleeping in hotels in the same country that hosts the | ||
| biggest American army base in the Middle East. | ||
| You have leverage and you should use it against the terrorist organization that is holding | ||
| eight American hostages, five of whom we presume are still alive. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So let's say there's a day after, or there will be a day after the war one way or another. | ||
| Hopefully all the hostages come back alive, but wherever that falls out, let's put aside the North for a second. | ||
| I mean, what does the day after look like at this point? | ||
| It depends what we mean by the day after, because as I said, this is not a war between Israel and a Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza. | ||
| I wish that were the case. | ||
| It's a war in which Israel is fighting for its life on those seven fronts. | ||
| Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen. | ||
| Iran is trying to destabilize Jordan to open an eighth front, and they're trying to get the Taliban on board to open a ninth front, and I mentioned attacks on Jews around the world, and that's the tenth front. | ||
| So even if the war ends with Hamas, that still leaves the unresolved question of Hezbollah in the north. | ||
| Now let me tell you something. | ||
| Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. | ||
| It's a terrorist army. | ||
| It's sitting on 200,000 missiles. | ||
| That's more than all of NATO put together apart from the United States. | ||
| It has a fighting force that can easily beat most NATO countries in battle hands down. | ||
| It is by far the most powerful army on Israel's borders and it doesn't belong to the state of Lebanon. | ||
| It is a proxy army that answers to the Iranian regime in Tehran. | ||
| For nine months now, They have been relentlessly bombarding northern Israel. | ||
| And I've said they've forced people to flee from their homes. | ||
| They can't go back. | ||
| Those kids aren't going back to school in September. | ||
| And the question is, what is Israel going to do about it? | ||
| Now, it prefers a diplomatic resolution. | ||
| Push Hezbollah away from the border where the UN says it's supposed to go, north of the Litani River, so it can stop these attacks and people can go back to their homes. | ||
| Sure, but the UN is in on it. | ||
| They've been on it this entire time. | ||
| Because Hezbollah has been using their peacekeepers as human shields and treats that UN resolution as a dishrag. | ||
| It has zero confidence in it, zero respect for it, and they have no reason to have respect for it because the UN will only speak up and make it about both sides or speaking about displaced Lebanese instead of talking about how Israel was the subject of an act of aggression. | ||
| by an Iranian proxy army that should not be there in the first place under the United Nations' own rules. | ||
| So I'm saying, even if the war with Gaza winds down, and please God we get back all of the hostages alive, it still leaves that proxy army in the north. | ||
| And it's possible that this conflict is going to segue into a much bigger war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. | ||
| It's possible that that could get pushed off, but it might again sprout up in another two years. | ||
| And for me and for Israel the most important thing is to make sure that we have global support and backing to defend our borders and our freedoms and our people against the Iranian regime and its seven fronts and start building a regional coalition to contain Iran and stop it from exporting radical Islam and exporting its revolution. | ||
| Instead of getting to a situation where the sword is on our throat and we end up with another potential October 7th from multiple throats. | ||
| I know we could do the political part in the geopolitics all day long but let's talk about just sort of Israel culturally for a little bit because I think that that actually would help people understand what's going on there a little bit more. | ||
| There are about two million Arabs who are equal citizens of Israel. | ||
| Mostly Muslims, but there are Christians too. | ||
| Somehow they don't get talked about much or the Houthis don't mind firing rockets at them either. | ||
| It's a little bizarre. | ||
| You know, let me tell you an amazing story. | ||
| I gave a TV interview near Jerusalem a few months ago and got in a taxi, Arab taxi driver, Muslim, Arab, from East Jerusalem. | ||
| And he asked me, how are you? | ||
| I said, terrible. | ||
| He says, why? | ||
| I said, because we're still stuck in this awful war. | ||
| He said, you're telling me. | ||
| I rescued two girls from the Nova festival. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| He said, yes, I was at the Nova Festival because the girls called me as their taxi ride. | ||
| And when I saw the paragliders coming in and the rockets at 6.30 in the morning, I grabbed these two drunk girls, put them in my taxi, drove out. | ||
| And my hands were shaking on the wheel as I saw the paragliders coming in. | ||
| And he told me a line I'll never forget. | ||
| He said, if Allah takes me tomorrow, I will die knowing that I saved two girls from the NOVA festival. | ||
| An Arab, East Jerusalem, Muslim taxi driver. | ||
| It was one of those moments that gave me strength. | ||
| He said, Hamas is worse than ISIS. | ||
| They murdered Arabs on October 7th. | ||
| 19 Bedouins were killed. | ||
| They abducted them as well. | ||
| Tells me Hamas is worse than ISIS. | ||
| And I wanted to say, stop the car, turn around, take us to Harvard. | ||
| I want you to tell people on campuses because this isn't obvious to these people. | ||
| I was in Canada just now and I told them, you know, people in Israel find it genuinely hilarious that there are people in Canada accusing Israel of being a white settler colony. | ||
| Because it's so detached from reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because Israel is a country that is a multicultural, multi-ethnic patchwork of people of many different faiths. | ||
| Three quarters of the population are Jewish. | ||
| As you mentioned, two million Arabs. | ||
| And the Jewish population as well. | ||
| Also very diverse. | ||
| The Jews who came from Europe were survivors of the Holocaust, or those who got out just in time before the deadliest genocide in history. | ||
| But add to that around 850,000 Jews from the Arab world who don't get spoken of much. | ||
| People don't know that until 1948 there were nearly a million Jews living across the region, including my own grandparents who were from Iraq. | ||
| In just a few years, that whole world disappears because they get persecuted, sometimes expelled, pushed out, forced to leave, and they go to Israel. | ||
| Not just that, Jews from Ethiopia as well. | ||
| I was interviewing An Ethiopian-Israeli woman for my podcast just a few days ago, and Alda, you know, how does it feel knowing that there are people on Columbia who think that you're a white colonizer? | ||
| And she just laughed and she said, look, we Jews spent 2,000 years in Ethiopia, disconnected from the rest of the Jewish world, constantly dreaming of returning to Israel and Zion and Jerusalem. | ||
| We had that idea way before Jews of Europe came up with the word Zionism. | ||
| And I think it's so powerful for people who come to visit Israel. | ||
| And realize that actually it's completely different from what they were expecting. | ||
| That it is this vibrant multicultural country that is trying to thread a very difficult needle of building a vibrant democracy out of so many different communities with different perspectives and histories and religious perspectives. | ||
| And somehow it works. | ||
| And it's that democracy we're trying to defend now. | ||
| What do you make of that somehow it works part of it? | ||
| Because when I was there a few months ago, it's the middle of a war, as I said, we went down south, we hear bombs going off, we go up north, we have to wear flak jackets and all of that stuff. | ||
| And yet you go to Tel Aviv and there's people playing volleyball on the beach, like it's somehow functioning. | ||
| It's functioning in the midst of a war. | ||
| Most countries, if anything like this happened to, well, first off, if something, if rockets got fired from Toronto into Detroit, we'd bomb Mexico. | ||
| Like, the fact that the country can function at all is fairly miraculous. | ||
| If you had rockets on Detroit from Toronto, you would have mass rioting and panic and looting in the streets. | ||
| I remember the night... One rocket, much less... | ||
| I remember the night that Iran launched 350 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones at Israel. | ||
| The news announced that the attack was on its way. | ||
| If you'd gone down a Tel Aviv high street that day, you would have seen all the bars were packed. | ||
| And if you'd asked people, what are you still doing here? | ||
| We're under attack from Iran. | ||
| They would have said, yes, but on the news, they said the rockets won't arrive for another seven hours anyway. | ||
| What's the rush? | ||
| And I remember just walking home and thinking, you know what? | ||
| Maybe I should buy a six pack of water just in case. | ||
| And that was how I prepared myself. | ||
| When we had the drone attack from Yemen, It flew almost right above my head when it crossed the beach, crashed into a building, killing one of my neighbors. | ||
| Following morning, I woke up in the morning, saw the news, went, walked past, had a look, and then went to my workout. | ||
| The world goes on. | ||
| Israelis have learned the hard way to try to claim a sense of normality in the most abnormal circumstances. | ||
| They know that you can't let the terrorists beat you down and you can't let them dictate your schedule. | ||
| And if there's a terror attack at a cafe, that cafe will be open the following day because that's our form of revenge. | ||
| That's how we fight back. | ||
| We don't let them get to us. | ||
| We'll get to them, but we don't let them get to us. | ||
| And there's something so gritty and so resilient within the Israeli national spirit. | ||
| I wish we didn't have to be, right? | ||
| I wish we didn't have these attacks. | ||
| But I think that's where Israeli society has a lot to teach the rest of the world. | ||
| We get a lot of lectures from around the world, okay, from other countries saying, you should do this, you should do that. | ||
| I think that actually in this war, the Israeli society has shown itself steely, resilient, responsible. | ||
| Made up of people who take responsibility and don't wait for the government or the state to do things for them, and simply ask, okay, what can I do? | ||
| And just get stuff done. | ||
| And I hope that that lesson, the resilience and creativity and ingenuity of Israeli civil society, you know, we don't want the world's sympathy, but I think we've earned the world's respect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And well, I think, I think we're all going to need it because it seems fairly obvious watching those protesters outside of Congress while Bibi is here. | ||
| And just what we've seen over the last, you know, nine months with the campus protests, they're not far from suicide bombing. | ||
| They're not far from hijacking planes or every other thing that the Palestinians have ever exported. | ||
| And that's all they've ever exported. | ||
| So we better start thinking about this stuff seriously, which most of the world doesn't. | ||
| We have the luxury of not, I suppose, until you don't. | ||
| You talk of protests but that doesn't get across what happened in Washington. | ||
| I've been following this stuff for nine months and even I was shocked. | ||
| To see an upside down red triangle, a Hamas target sign painted on the Columbus monument with the sign Hamas is coming? | ||
| Seeing people waving Hamas flags but their faces wrapped in the keffiyehs? | ||
| America has a serious domestic extremism problem. | ||
| This isn't about criticism of Israel or this particular policy. | ||
| We have allowed a form of radical Islam to grow unchecked. | ||
| It is being nurtured by An attitude coming out from progressive circles and elite academic institutions that holds Israel uniquely responsible and guilty of everything that's wrong in the world. | ||
| These are merging together with a United Nations that is happy to amplify Hamas's lies and not hold it accountable for the way they're using Palestinian civilians as human shields and human sacrifices. | ||
| And these have merged into a truly monstrous movement that is not only denying the atrocities of October 7, Not only condoning or excusing those atrocities, but glorifying them and seeking out more of them with a truly terrifying bloodlust. | ||
| And I really hope that mainstream American society wakes up and realizes that Israel's enemies are America's enemies, and the surest evidence of that is they were literally burning the American flag outside of Union Station. | ||
| These are not people who have America's interests at heart, and even the vice president condemned them as being unpatriotic protesters. | ||
| This is a serious problem. | ||
| Our Vice President? | ||
| Yes, Kamala Harris. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Unpatriotic. | ||
| I might have missed that one. | ||
| This is a serious problem for America. | ||
| This is a movement that is seeking mass violence and siding with enemies that want to see death and destruction in the United States. | ||
| You know, I spoke about the Campus Tentifada and attacks on Jews as being the eighth front of this war. | ||
| Recently, the American intelligence DNI said that Iran is funding part of these protests. | ||
| And the reason is that when the students on campus are chanting, Globalize the intifada? | ||
| Iran knows that they don't mean let's have a nice peaceful struggle. | ||
| They mean blow up that bus! | ||
| Because that's what the last intifada was in Israel. | ||
| They mean murder Jews and Israelis wherever you find them. | ||
| And Israel has already helped European countries shut down Hamas sleeper cells inside Europe. | ||
| Iran is funding them because the supreme leader knows that when they chant from the river to the sea, they don't mean let's sit around a campfire in a liberal democratic bi-national state and sing John Lennon songs together. | ||
| They mean let's destroy the state of Israel through violent struggle and murder or expel its people. | ||
| And it's important to Face that head on. | ||
| And I know it can be very difficult within Western society to realize that there are some people who actually don't share universal values. | ||
| They don't see the world through the same eyes as us. | ||
| They don't want just what is good for their families. | ||
| They are driven by a radical violent religious conviction that seeks to impose a violent Islamic empire on the Middle East and crush the United States' most powerful ally in the region. | ||
| And you need to understand that before it comes for you next. | ||
| You know, there's one thing that Israel and its enemies agree on. | ||
| The West is next. | ||
| But we say it as a warning. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They mean it as a threat. | ||
| You like doing a softball interview or a combative interview more? | ||
|
unidentified
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Combative. | |
| Was this just too easy? | ||
|
unidentified
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I let you make your case, which I think is the just case. | |
| I enjoy the combative interviews because that's when I get really riled up and I'm able to focus on Attacking the misconceptions and the lies and getting the information out in the most effective way possible. | ||
| Sometimes when there's a softball interview, it's very easy to fall into a sense of complacency, but I think we've had a good conversation. | ||
| Next time I'll present, I'll pretend I'm a progressive. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Wrap your face in a keffiyeh. | ||
| Dave, thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more enlightening conversations about international issues, check out our international playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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