June 15, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
32:40
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I would say to Americans, please don't think that, oh, we do so much for Israel. | ||
| Also understand, Israel does a lot for us. | ||
| They innovate and create things that we end up seeing scaled up to a marketable level. | ||
| If people in America enjoy their cell phone, thank Israel for it. | ||
| They wouldn't have one unless the technology that originally came from the SIM cards and some of the original technology that became the cell phone developed here. | ||
| If you have a loved one that has had a cardiac procedure that maybe saved their life with a stent or with certain robotic procedures. | ||
| Be grateful to Israel because it was innovated here. | ||
| And then some things that are just pleasures. | ||
| If you like a cherry tomato or a seedless watermelon, guess where that came from? | ||
| It came here. | ||
| Drip irrigation. | ||
| Drip irrigation that transformed this land into a lush place with vegetables and fruits growing in places that used to be nothing but desert. | ||
| But then there are practical things. | ||
| The innovations that have come from Everything from navigation systems that we take for granted and assume that, well, that just happened, to the extraordinary level of defense mechanisms that keep us safe, whether it's a home security system. | ||
| There are so many ways. | ||
| They call this a startup nation for a reason, but Israel as a small country depends upon the U.S. to take an innovation and a creation, to put it in the marketplace, So that it's scaled up to a market of 330 million people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Music All right. | |
| U.S. ambassador to Israel, former governor of Arkansas, former TV star, guitarist. | ||
| What else? | ||
| What else should we throw into the intro here? | ||
| Grandfather. | ||
| Grandfather. | ||
| Seven wonderful grandkids that I am not getting to see very much these days. | ||
| In fact, not at all because I'm here. | ||
| 7,000 miles from them, but I wouldn't trade this opportunity for anything in the world. | ||
| And it's kind of like the fulfillment of a lifetime of activities that culminated with President Trump asking—well, not asking. | ||
| President Trump doesn't ask. | ||
| President Trump telling me that I'm coming to Israel. | ||
| Was it an immediate yes, like you didn't have to think about it, or did you have to go to your life? | ||
| Well, because he doesn't ask, he didn't call and say, would you think about it? | ||
| Can I ask you to do this? | ||
| Would you— Consider. | ||
| He calls and says, Mike, you're going to be my ambassador to Israel. | ||
| Simple as that. | ||
| But for me, it was the one thing that he would have asked me to do that I couldn't say no to. | ||
| I wouldn't have taken a cabinet secretary position. | ||
| I didn't want to babysit a bureaucracy. | ||
| I don't want to live in Washington. | ||
| I tell people I'd rather live in Jerusalem every day of the week and twice on Sunday than live in Washington, D.C. But this was... | ||
| I didn't need a job. | ||
| I was happy in the private sector. | ||
| I was enjoying what I was doing immensely. | ||
| And yet, when he called and said this, this was the culmination of 52 years of having come to Israel over 100 times, developing deep relationships with people here, and believing that the partnership that Israel and the United States has is so important, so critical, so sacred. | ||
| That I wanted to be a part of it. | ||
| And I think that President Trump has created opportunities to do something that is historic. | ||
| I told him that I felt he could be the president to do something of biblical proportion in the Middle East. | ||
| He probably likes that language. | ||
| Well, I hope so, because it's true. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And I'm excited to be part of what I think will be. | ||
| A complete realignment of the Middle East. | ||
| So let's talk about the biblical part before we talk about the political part, because everyone does the political stuff and yells about it easily, but I think the biblical part is the part that gets glossed over here, and I know you have a deep connection to this land because of that. | ||
| So you mentioned a 50-plus year relationship with this. | ||
| When did you, was it from your family growing up and your parents, and obviously your man of faith and all those things, but when did that connection start? | ||
| And just talk a little bit about we're here in Jerusalem. | ||
| It's the holiest city on earth. | ||
| Well, for me, it was 1973, July. | ||
| I was 17, had just finished high school, a month away from my 18th birthday and going to college. | ||
| And a friend who came from a wealthy family wanted to take a senior trip and go somewhere, wanted to come to the Middle East. | ||
| I grew up dirt poor. | ||
| We were the prince and the pauper, if there ever was this odd couple. | ||
| We were roommates in our freshman year of college, have remained close friends all these years. | ||
| He wanted to take this trip. | ||
| His dad said, now, son, I'm not going to let you go over there by yourself, but if Mike Huckabee will go with you, I'll pay his way. | ||
| So he did, and I did, a trip of a lifetime. | ||
| I mean, I never thought I would get 40 miles from my hometown, a little nondescript town in South Arkansas that nobody had heard of until Bill Clinton ran for president. | ||
| And so we came. | ||
| We went to Syria, to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Egypt. | ||
| No, we didn't go to Egypt. | ||
| We went to Turkey. | ||
| Cyprus, Greece, all of the Middle East. | ||
| Israel was on that agenda. | ||
| And when I came here, there was something that absolutely connected with me. | ||
| And it wasn't anything because of the beauty of the country, because frankly, in 1973, wasn't that beautiful? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was pretty close to Third World. | ||
| It certainly was a struggling economy. | ||
| People lived on Kibbutzim because they had to, to survive. | ||
| Roads were horrible. | ||
| One lane, very primitive. | ||
| Cars were a bunch of old Russian junkers that people had, I guess, somehow gotten down here. | ||
| It was anything but this magnificent promised land. | ||
| But it wasn't an aesthetic thing that connected me to it. | ||
| It was spiritual. | ||
| Honestly, what I can tell people is that there was something about this land. | ||
| I felt at home in a place I'd never been. | ||
| There was a deep, personal, emotional, spiritual connection that I sensed then that I never got over. | ||
| And I started bringing groups of people in 1981. | ||
| I brought tens of thousands of people here over the course of the past 45 years. | ||
| And it's just been an incredible experience to see this land come alive, literally from the prophets of the Old Testament. | ||
| The dry bones live again, the flesh is on those bones, and the desert has bloomed. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I can tell you, I feel that. | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started. | ||
| I feel that particularly in Jerusalem, even more than Tel Aviv, and this is where it all started. | ||
| Are you shocked that more people don't understand the biblical connection to this land, that we're so lost in politics that people kind of gloss over all of that stuff and how important this is? | ||
| Yeah, I'm amazed that there's an ignorance of history. | ||
| That a lot of, particularly Americans, have. | ||
| They act like that Israel was constituted in 1948, and that was the first really Jewish presence here. | ||
| And you want to say, no, it kind of goes back about 3,800 years. | ||
| And there is a, and it's not just a mythical history. | ||
| The archaeological evidence of the Jewish people's connection to this land is overwhelming. | ||
| And there is not one verse of Scripture. | ||
| That has ever been controverted by any discovery in archaeology. | ||
| It's the converse. | ||
| Every single archaeological discovery in this land, and there have been a lot of them, and some incredible ones, have affirmed, yeah, the Jews have been here for all these years since God first told Abraham, come to this land, going to give it to you, going to be a blessing to the world. | ||
| And so this land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is really remarkable in that the continuity, Are you amazed living here, seeing that they're still digging now and finding new things? | ||
| We went to the City of David, not on this trip, unfortunately. | ||
| We went about a year ago. | ||
| And to see that they are uncovering the very steps that Jesus walked. | ||
| He definitely would have walked those steps on the way to the temple. | ||
| And they're just uncovering that now. | ||
| I mean, it's incredible. | ||
| After 2,000 years, they're still digging stuff up. | ||
| I was here one day. | ||
| And the day before this was a few years back, the archaeologists had discovered this tiny little bell that would have been on the hem of the garment of a high priest during the time of Jesus. | ||
| I got to hold of them a hand the day after it was discovered. | ||
| It was in pristine condition. | ||
| It still actually rang. | ||
| Two weeks later, when I got back to the States, it was a big news story breaking in the U.S. about this amazing archaeological find at the city of David. | ||
| But this is true whether it's It's why it's so incredible when people say, ah, the Jews don't have any connection here. | ||
| There's really no way that they can claim that this land belonged to them at some time. | ||
| For you as a Christian, is that doubly confounding? | ||
| Because obviously... | ||
| So it's a denial. | ||
| It's not just a denial of Judaism. | ||
| It's a denial of Christianity. | ||
| Well, and that's something, Dave, I think a lot of Christians don't really recognize, that you can't be a Christian without having the foundation of Judaism. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| Some of my Jewish friends have said, what is it about these evangelical Christians? | ||
| You guys, sometimes you love Jews more than we Jews do. | ||
| And I said, well, because we owe the Jewish people. | ||
| We owe, really, And so, for us, this is incredibly valuable for us to be able to say thank you. | ||
| Without the Jewish faith, there is no Christian faith. | ||
| I say to my Jewish friends all the time, you can be a Jew. | ||
| You don't have anything to do with me. | ||
| You don't need me. | ||
| I can't be a Christian without the entirety of all of this history of God in our world leading up to Christ. | ||
| You know, don't forget that part of this, that there's never been a more influential human being in the history of the world. | ||
| For me, he's Messiah. | ||
| Maybe he's not for the Jews. | ||
| They don't see him that way. | ||
| But even they won't deny the incredible influence that he had or that he was Jewish. | ||
| Do you think in some sense then your faith, By being the ambassador now and having it not be a Jewish person is actually more valuable in some way. | ||
| I mean, even the way I can hear you talk about that. | ||
| You know, I worried when the president first asked me to do this job. | ||
| I thought, well, maybe it won't be received well by Jewish people either in America or in Israel. | ||
| They'll say, ah, we needed the Jewish person. | ||
| The polar opposite has been the reaction in both Israel and the United States. | ||
| Everyone I know was thrilled when we heard it was you. | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| They're not real fond of me. | ||
| We'll get to them in a minute. | ||
| No, but the reaction that I've had from Jewish friends and even Jewish people that don't even like me personally, but here's what they said. | ||
| If you were Jewish and you came to the position of ambassador and you said, yeah, I really care deeply about Israel, they'd say, okay, he's Jewish. | ||
| What's he going to do? | ||
| He's got it. | ||
| There's no choice. | ||
| I'm not Jewish. | ||
| I don't have to have any feelings or sentiments. | ||
| But mine come from deep within. | ||
| They come from personal observation. | ||
| It's not that I went to a class somewhere at university. | ||
| It's not that I read a book or watched a film. | ||
| I've been living this process. | ||
| I've lived it, seen it, watched it, heard it, experienced it for 52 years. | ||
| And all of the views that I have are not someone else's transmitted to me. | ||
| They are mine, that are deeply embedded in me by the personal firsthand observation. | ||
| I'd love to do more on the spiritual and biblical side. | ||
| And maybe next time I'm here, if you have some time, I'd love to walk the old city with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please do. | |
| I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the other day, and I was able to hold the key, which has been in one family for over a thousand years. | ||
| And it's just incredible. | ||
| And all my guys can feel that, obviously. | ||
| But let's get a little more to the job and just sort of what's happening in the world right now. | ||
| So you get the job at a bit of an odd time, obviously. | ||
| I mean, obviously this is a war-torn land to some extent, but it's in the middle of an existential war. | ||
| What do you feel your role is in that? | ||
| And are you happy to have this job at this time? | ||
| Well, I really am delighted, grateful to the president for giving me the privilege. | ||
| And that's the way I look at it. | ||
| It's a privilege to serve him, to serve our country. | ||
| To represent the United States to the state of Israel. | ||
| I like to tell people, the U.S. has friends, it has allies, but it only has one partner. | ||
| Israel is its only real partner. | ||
| By that I mean that the level of cooperation and affiliation that we have with each other is much more like a marriage than a bromance. | ||
| And the reason I say that is because the level of intelligence that we share, military hardware that we Build upon each other with medical technology, economic transformation that has happened on both sides. | ||
| The extraordinary way in which we are linked is such that it is unlike any other relationship that we have with any other country on earth. | ||
| So to come in at this time where the country's basically on a seven front war, you can probably argue it's on an eight or maybe nine front, actually, and then if you compound that with... | ||
| That's a lot of work to clean up. | ||
| Well, I told people, give me time, give me 60 days to get this all figured out. | ||
| What day are we in right now? | ||
| And I think we all look at the whole state of Israel and we say, you know, it's a complicated part of the world. | ||
| That's to put it mildly. | ||
| Israel is a very unique place. | ||
| It occupies a tiny little footprint the size of New Jersey. | ||
| The Muslim countries of the world. | ||
| Many of whom would love to see it destroyed, own 644 times the amount of real estate that Israel does. | ||
| Israel represents 0.02% of the world's population. | ||
| So it's a tiny fraction. | ||
| But you would think that they were the most important influence in all of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe because, first of all, they have, on a positive side, more Nobel Prize. | ||
| That's amazing for this little country. | ||
| But it's also a country that is the center of so much attention, most of it negative, and that has grown with the anti-Semitism that we have seen in epidemic proportion in the US, Europe, and so many other parts of the world. | ||
| So it's a place that is of strategic importance to us. | ||
| It is a place where the battles are viewed geopolitically, but one cannot understand these battles without understanding the spiritual or the biblical history of it all. | ||
| Without that, it makes no sense. | ||
| And so it's a place where every day is a challenge. | ||
| I spend half my time in a skiff with classified briefings. | ||
| Much less ceremonial role to the ambassador of Israel and much more strategic day-to-day dealing with military, intel officials, the government of Israel. | ||
| Did you realize that when you were coming in or did you think you were mostly cutting? | ||
| No, I had a pretty much clear idea that this was not going to be primarily deciding what hors d 'oeuvres to serve at a reception next Tuesday. | ||
| And that just shaking hands, cutting ribbons, and hugging babies would not be the biggest part of the job. | ||
| It's still a part of it, of course. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| But the biggest part is meeting with Israeli government officials. | ||
| It's not uncommon for me to be in the prime minister's office till after midnight. | ||
| I've spent more time with the prime minister than I've spent with my wife since I've been here. | ||
| I told him a couple of weeks ago, I said, if I spend any more time with you, I'm going to want you to put me on your family health insurance policy as a dependent. | ||
| Then the courts might start looking into you. | ||
| They probably would. | ||
| You know, he's the subject of an extraordinary level of lawfare that we see in the United States against President Trump, and there's so many similarities. | ||
| It's almost stunning. | ||
| What would you say to somebody who's not anti-Semitic, who's not, like, someone that just says, hey, I'm an American, I don't care about any other country, I'm not singling out Israel, but I don't think that relationship is special, I just don't want America to have anything to do with anything. | ||
| Because there does seem to be some growing version of that. | ||
| And I don't think it comes from hate. | ||
| I think it comes from, there's a feeling of a certain set of people that it's just like, America, America, America. | ||
| You know, I understand only to a degree where people come from on that. | ||
| But it's a very short-sighted view. | ||
| I'm an America first guy. | ||
| You know, I'm a MAGA guy. | ||
| And I was from the time that Donald Trump obliterated me and 16 other people on the stage in 2016. | ||
| But I immediately turned and supported Trump. | ||
| And sometimes before that, when you were running for president, your message was actually very much about that. | ||
| I appreciate your recognizing because I was MAGA before there was a MAGA. | ||
| I think you and Newt really captured that thing before. | ||
| In 08, I was the one that was out there saying, you know, we're losing the blue collar and those really should be our constituents. | ||
| There were so many things that, President Trump was able to encapsulate the message and get it to a broader audience than I ever had the resources to do. | ||
| So that's why when I left the race in 2016, two things. | ||
| One, I never said anything unkind about Donald Trump in the election. | ||
| And you were the last one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were the last one. | ||
| But the other thing was I immediately endorsed him. | ||
| And people thought, wow, why did you endorse him? | ||
| Why not, you know, one of the guys that maybe looked more like an evangelical? | ||
| I said, because he's the only guy on that stage that was not a wholly owned subsidiary of some special interest group. | ||
| And I loved his message. | ||
| Look, I was in from the beginning. | ||
| And to this day, I've never had anything but great respect, praise, and appreciation for what I believe to be the most extraordinary president in American history because he's a disruptor. | ||
| He didn't come in and say, oh, let's oil the machinery and keep it just running and humming like it has been. | ||
| Because like it has been has destroyed the livelihood and the lives of a lot of people. | ||
| But to get back to your point, there are people that don't understand Israel. | ||
| I'm an America first guy, but I'm not an America only guy. | ||
| That's short-sighted. | ||
| It's also foolish and it's dangerous because we live in a great big world and whether a lot of Americans understand it, their guns pointed at us too. | ||
| So for us to pretend that we can just live in our own environment and have nothing to do with anyone, anywhere, that's a very, very narrow and frankly, and I'll use the word, I'll be careful with it, but I'll use it. | ||
| It's an ignorant way to look at the world because you can't live that way. | ||
| You have to understand who else is in this world with us. | ||
| Do we have any responsibility, not only for them, to them, but with them? | ||
| With Israel, I would say to Americans, please don't think that, oh, we do so much for Israel. | ||
| Also understand, Israel does a lot for us. | ||
| They innovate and create things that we end up seeing scaled up to a marketable level. | ||
| If people in America enjoy their cell phone, thank Israel for it. | ||
| They wouldn't have one unless the technology that originally came from the SIM cards and some of the original technology that became the cell phone developed here. | ||
| If you have a loved one. | ||
| That has had a cardiac procedure that maybe saved their life with a stent or with certain robotic procedures. | ||
| Be grateful to Israel because it was innovated here. | ||
| And then some things that are just pleasures. | ||
| If you like a cherry tomato or a seedless watermelon, guess where that came from? | ||
| It came here. | ||
| Drip irrigation. | ||
| Drip irrigation that transformed this land into a lush place with vegetables and fruits growing in places that used to be nothing but desert. | ||
| But then there are practical things. | ||
| The innovations that have come from everything from navigation systems that we take for granted and assume that, well, that just happened, to the extraordinary level of defense mechanisms that keep us safe, whether it's a home security system. | ||
| There are so many ways. | ||
| They call this a startup nation for a reason. | ||
| But Israel, as a small country, depends upon the U.S. To take an innovation and a creation to put it in the marketplace so that it's scaled up to a market of 330 million people. | ||
| So as ambassador in wartime, do you feel that they should be doing something different on the PR front? | ||
| That's been a lot of what I've talked about with a lot of people. | ||
| And it seems odd to me because it's like there's a real war and a PR war. | ||
| And I suppose if I was in a real war, I'd be focused on that too. | ||
| And then the PR war gets lost, but we... | ||
| Yeah, I think it's fair to say that in the first few weeks after October the 7th, Israel had a really strong messaging system that was out there. | ||
| You had people every day on the cameras presenting the message and delivering information that was very valuable. | ||
| For whatever reasons, Israel has taken a lot of that off the table. | ||
| They're not out there on the offense and giving the message they're at best defending. | ||
| And they're defending against a monolithic media that hates them and a monolithic international community that also hates them. | ||
| So it's probably maybe an area that if the Israelis asked me, what should we do better? | ||
| I would say, do a better job of messaging the truth. | ||
| I'm not talking propaganda. | ||
| The truth is the best weapon that Israel has. | ||
| But the world isn't hearing the truth. | ||
| They're hearing from BBC and CNN and AP and New York Times. | ||
| And this week, you know, I put out a very strong statement when they issued a total bogus report. | ||
| Where did they get their information? | ||
| They got it from Hamas. | ||
| I mean, good gosh, when you're getting, you're parroting a press release from Hamas. | ||
| This is about the aid that came in. | ||
| Yeah, about the humanity. | ||
| They said that, you know, all these horrible things that happened on Sunday, it simply didn't happen. | ||
| We had first hand. | ||
| Eyewitnesses there. | ||
| We had people positioned there. | ||
| We knew exactly what happened, and that didn't happen. | ||
| But they presented as if it did, and they never mentioned why the IDF was even in Gaza. | ||
| Talk about hostages. | ||
| Talk about 1,200 people massacred, brutally massacred, and just savagely murdered by Hamas. | ||
| They never mentioned it. | ||
| What do you make of the fact that Hamas killed many Americans? | ||
| Actually, just this morning, two American bodies were recovered. | ||
| Two Israeli-American bodies were recovered. | ||
| But in a certain sense, people don't think of them as Americans because they were here. | ||
| You know, like their names are not household names in America, but everybody knows, you know, Abrego Garcia, the MS-13 gang member who sent back home to El Salvador. | ||
| It's really depressing to me that a lot of Americans don't understand that part of the reasons that When I tell people that number, and I say this to members of Congress who come on a CODEL, a visit of Congress delegation, they're shocked by the number. | ||
| They say, are you sure? | ||
| I said, absolutely, our consulate, we keep up with this stuff. | ||
| 700,000 Americans live in Israel. | ||
| So part of the reason that you cannot ignore this relationship is because so many Americans live Right, right. | ||
| That's a huge number of people, second only to Mexico in the number of Americans living in a foreign country. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So you think about that. | ||
| More than live in Canada, more than live in anywhere else in Central or South America, the UK, France, Italy, any country in the world, more Americans in Israel than anywhere but Mexico. | ||
| So you obviously have the hostage pin on. | ||
| What do you think they should be doing right now? | ||
| Because to whatever extent you can talk about it, because, you know, I've talked to tons of people since I've been here. | ||
| And, you know, there does seem to be this conflict between destroying Hamas and ending the war, which everyone wants, because this can't go on forever. | ||
| And yet we know there's at least 20 living people on top of about 50 some odd bodies. | ||
| Everybody wants the hostages home. | ||
| I don't think there's any doubt about that except the people who love Hamas and some of these idiots in the U.S. who parade the streets and wave a Hamas flag. | ||
| Some of them say the dumbest things, like Queers for Palestine. | ||
| I'm thinking, yeah, why don't you wear that T-shirt over in Gaza? | ||
| Yeah, try in Palestine. | ||
| Yeah, let's see how that works. | ||
| But that's the idiocy and ignorance that we're dealing with. | ||
| What I would hope people understand is the reason hostages are still there is the same reason we had the slaughter on October 7th, Hamas. | ||
| They're the ones who are prolonging this. | ||
| This has gone over 600 days now, almost twice as long as the Iranian hostages that were taken in 1979 at the embassy there. | ||
| This has gone on because Hamas has continued to hold and torture the living and Kept the dead from being returned to their families for a respectful and proper burial. | ||
| It's a hideous thing. | ||
| Nobody wants it to continue. | ||
| But here's the question. | ||
| Do you let it in just saying, okay, let's call it a draw and walk away and let the hostages come home, but Hamas stays and they continue to be able to govern a piece of Gaza, what's left of it? | ||
| Or do you say they have to be destroyed? | ||
| The president's message has been clear. | ||
| Hamas can't stay. | ||
| They can't govern. | ||
| They got to go. | ||
| That's been the message of the Israeli government. | ||
| I would suggest that anyone who says, well, just, you know, let them stay. | ||
| Would that have been an appropriate message in 1944? | ||
| Would it have been okay to say, you know, this thing has gone on so long, World War II. | ||
| Why don't we just let some of the Nazis stay in Germany? | ||
| They can rule. | ||
| They'll just have to behave better, but we're going to let them stay. | ||
| And no, we bombed Dresden. | ||
| Let's say we did. | ||
| The Brits, for heaven's sakes. | ||
| And now you got the UK telling Israel, just call it a draw. | ||
| You got Macron in France saying the same thing. | ||
| How much of that do you think is because of their own internal sort of immigration jihadist problem? | ||
| It seems like it's a lot to me. | ||
| I think it's driven, a lot of it, politically. | ||
| But they ought to put their brains in their heads when they get up in the morning, take it off the nightstand, insert it in, and go to work with it. | ||
| My gosh, look at your history. | ||
| Tell me that you would have let the Nazis continue to hold power. | ||
| Nobody would have said that. | ||
| The French might have. | ||
| They might have. | ||
| But Churchill would never have done that. | ||
| He would never have said, yeah, this has just really become a very cumbersome war. | ||
| All wars are cumbersome. | ||
| All of them are hurtful. | ||
| Innocent people die. | ||
| It's a horrible thing. | ||
| Nobody is suggesting that war is beautiful, pretty, romantic. | ||
| It's none of those things. | ||
| It's carnage. | ||
| It's innocent people that get killed. | ||
| In the case of Gaza, a lot of the innocent people who are killed are killed because Hamas gathers them and puts them in a place that the Israelis have openly announced. | ||
| We're going to attack this place. | ||
| If you're a civilian, get out. | ||
| Who else in the history of warfare has ever told people, get out of this spot. | ||
| This is dangerous. | ||
| What does Hamas do? | ||
| They push the civilians, including children, into those very places. | ||
| This would have ended October the 8th if Hamas had said, okay, we did our damage. | ||
| We surrender. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| But they haven't. | ||
| And 600 days later, anything laid on the table they say no to? | ||
| This war is not going on because the Israelis want it to go on. | ||
| I've heard that here. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| I'm with them every day. | ||
| They want it to end. | ||
| Believe me, they want it to end. | ||
| That's all I've heard. | ||
| It's not happening because the U.S. wants it to continue. | ||
| Of course we don't. | ||
| We have no reason for it to continue. | ||
| It continues because of the savages of Hamas who keep it going. | ||
| Let me ask you one last thing, combining sort of everything we talked about here. | ||
| So you have your religious side and your spiritual side and now the political side and the embassy side. | ||
| Do you feel that those are always locked in together, or do you ever have moments when those things are in conflict with each other? | ||
| No, I see it integrated. | ||
| I don't see that I have a compartmentalized, okay, this is my faith view, this is my geopolitical view. | ||
| I mean, if I need to separate them only for the purpose of articulating the role of this, maybe part of it, but you can't really And that's why it troubles me when I see people back home in the U.S. And they have very, maybe it's anti-Semitic, but it's certainly anti-Israel attitudes. | ||
| And I believe it's out of ignorance. | ||
| I hear some of the things they say. | ||
| I read some of the things they say. | ||
| And I wonder, what happened to you? | ||
| When did you stop? | ||
| observing the world and just coming up with your own conclusions that are based on, at best, one trip for three or four days. | ||
| That troubles me deeply because it fans this whole flame of believing that we don't have a role and a relationship with Israel that matters. | ||
| And I would tell you, yes, we really, really do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, I do have to throw in a bonus question because you were in the news last week because there was all this stuff about how Bibi and the President Trump are fighting with each other. | ||
| You quickly told me right before we started, but we may as well do it on camera. | ||
| Apparently not true, according to the ambassador. | ||
| Well, it's not true. | ||
| You know, it's like a marriage. | ||
| I've been married 51 years. | ||
| I can tell you, my wife and I don't agree every day on everything. | ||
| But we stay married because we're committed to each other. | ||
| We've created a relationship and, you know, we're going to be married till one of us dies. | ||
| And the other one will hopefully not be charged with the murder that is inevitably involved. | ||
| But it's going a little sideways right at the end. | ||
| It's really got rough there at the end. | ||
| I tell people that the reason the U.S. and Israel is not going to have a divorce is because if it were to happen, neither side could afford to pay the alimony for the separation. | ||
| We're in too thick. | ||
| That may trouble some people, but it frankly is something that ought to give people on both the Israeli and American side some comfort. | ||
| But no, there's not this big problem between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. | ||
| They talk often. | ||
| There's no one that probably has had a closer relationship with the president than Prime Minister Netanyahu. | ||
| And I think that this is a manifestation But the truth is pretty simple. | ||
| Our countries are in the strongest possible partnership one could hope for. | ||
| And he ends it like an all-star. | ||
| A pleasure, sir. | ||
| Dave, so glad to have you here. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Please come back often. | ||
| I look forward to seeing you when you're back in Israel. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |
Export Selection