True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 386: Red Line
Aired: 2024-06-13
Duration: 01:40:42


=== Dark Brandon's Angry Time (01:40) ===

[00:00:00]  Let me see if I can do a Netanyahu.
[00:00:02]  No, don't.
[00:00:02]  I really.
[00:00:04]  Oh, that's not where you're going with that one.
[00:00:06]  Let me see.
[00:00:07]  Oh, you want me to be my real Netanyahu impression?
[00:00:09]  No, not.
[00:00:10]  That's not safe for work.
[00:00:13]  It's been so nice to be invited to Congress here.
[00:00:18]  It's such a large room, but it feels so intimate with all of you here with me today.
[00:00:23]  I appreciate your support very much with the money.
[00:00:28]  It's a little distasteful to talk about, but hey, we're all friends here.
[00:00:32]  I do have a little bit of a problem with the college thing going on.
[00:00:36]  First of all, too expensive, or maybe not expensive enough.
[00:00:40]  But second of all, the students like me so much.
[00:00:43]  It makes me feel confused because I myself, of course, Philadelphia, a college area town with many universities and things of that schools of other lower style there, like a high and middle.
[00:00:56]  And I just don't understand why everyone's so angry with me all the time.
[00:01:02]  My thing is like, remember all the laser eye biting people?
[00:01:26]  Yeah, I forgot.
[00:01:27]  They were kind of like, yeah, who were trying to like make to me magic Dark Brandon?
[00:01:31]  And I'm like, you want to see real Dark Brandon?
[00:01:34]  They should, it's like, he should just be like, fuck it.
[00:01:36]  Netanyahu's not coming to Congress.
[00:01:38]  We're going to have him speak at the DNC.

=== Border Trash Bags (03:55) ===

[00:01:40]  Oh, yeah.
[00:01:41]  He should be like, we just.
[00:01:42]  Fucking Chicago, baby.
[00:01:43]  Fuck it.
[00:01:44]  He's my VP.
[00:01:45]  Is Kamala officially the vice president?
[00:01:48]  They should be co-VPs.
[00:01:50]  They should be co-VPs.
[00:01:51]  That would be cute for her.
[00:01:52]  I know.
[00:01:53]  I'd like that for her.
[00:01:54]  You don't really see much of her these days, huh?
[00:01:56]  Yeah, they don't trot her out enough, which is a shame.
[00:01:58]  They should send her to Israel to figure this whole thing out.
[00:02:02]  They should.
[00:02:03]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:04]  Well, you know, that was always the best thing was that his first deployment of Kamala was sending her to the border.
[00:02:10]  And it was just like, man, you, well, Biden really didn't like it.
[00:02:13]  Well, the problem is, so this has actually been a running problem with Kamala, is when they sent her the border, she just brought like giant trash bags full of, yeah, no, no, no, no, like press Xanax from the border and just brought them back completely illegally.
[00:02:26]  Did not talk to one immigration official.
[00:02:28]  When they sent her to Southeast Asia, she was lost in an opium den for two weeks.
[00:02:34]  No idea what happened.
[00:02:35]  Ukraine?
[00:02:36]  That was all volume.
[00:02:37]  Oh my God.
[00:02:38]  The value and unfortunately in prostitutes.
[00:02:41]  It was not good.
[00:02:44]  And then now they've just, she's just kind of like, they've got her on methadone maintenance.
[00:02:48]  You know, she's, she's living in a, in a, like a halfway house in DC.
[00:02:52]  And I just, I think that she'll be able to kind of get her life together enough to run.
[00:02:58]  But, but, and it's good the Hunter stuff is happening to kind of like show us what somebody's successful recovery looks like.
[00:03:05]  But I got to say, the prognosis is not good.
[00:03:07]  Welcome to True Anon.
[00:03:09]  My name is Braze.
[00:03:11]  My name is Liz.
[00:03:13]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:15]  And Professor.
[00:03:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:18]  Apparently, you know, he's not doing well.
[00:03:20]  He's not doing so good.
[00:03:21]  Not this one, the other one.
[00:03:23]  Well, he's a little under the weather.
[00:03:25]  That's true.
[00:03:25]  He's got a little cold.
[00:03:27]  But this is True Anon.
[00:03:28]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:29]  Hello.
[00:03:32]  We are in our new studio.
[00:03:34]  We're in our new studio.
[00:03:34]  In our new table.
[00:03:35]  You guys, for the first time in my life, I designed a table.
[00:03:41]  Liz did design this table.
[00:03:42]  And I think it's pretty good.
[00:03:44]  It is a good table.
[00:03:45]  It's very nice.
[00:03:46]  It's got a really solid base.
[00:03:49]  A Herman Miller base that we found on Facebook Marketplace, which is a great resource.
[00:03:55]  I don't use it.
[00:03:56]  This is my first time using it for outfitting the studio space, Facebook Marketplace.
[00:04:01]  I had to set up a fake Facebook.
[00:04:03]  You did?
[00:04:03]  Yeah.
[00:04:04]  Because I don't have Facebook.
[00:04:05]  What was the name?
[00:04:06]  Well, I guess don't say it on here.
[00:04:08]  Was it your real name?
[00:04:09]  Yeah.
[00:04:10]  Well, now you got to change it.
[00:04:12]  People don't know my real name.
[00:04:13]  That is true.
[00:04:14]  That is true.
[00:04:15]  Mordecai.
[00:04:19]  It is fantastic.
[00:04:20]  Thank you.
[00:04:20]  Shout out to Paris for making this motherfucking table.
[00:04:23]  I didn't build it.
[00:04:23]  Paris built it.
[00:04:24]  He did a fantastic job.
[00:04:26]  Wonderful job here.
[00:04:27]  But yeah, I like sitting across from the two of you because it makes me feel like I'm interrogating you guys.
[00:04:33]  I'm both the good cop and the bad cop in one.
[00:04:35]  A little bit of East Meets West, you might say.
[00:04:40]  Or you might not, judging by that silence.
[00:04:43]  We are talking about Palestine today.
[00:04:47]  And we actually just finished the interview.
[00:04:48]  It was really good.
[00:04:49]  Yeah, I think it was really great.
[00:04:50]  We talked, I mean, we kind of went all over the place.
[00:04:53]  But we're really focusing on the politics of aid, the United States, and what the hell is going on in Israel.
[00:04:59]  Yeah.
[00:05:00]  And so without further ado, here's our interview and discussion, really, with Dylan Saba.
[00:05:19]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to True Anon Podcast.
[00:05:26]  We have with us today Dylan Saba, a lawyer, a lawyer, an attorney?
[00:05:31]  What's the difference?
[00:05:32]  They're the same.
[00:05:33]  Why are there two names for it?

=== Mission to Deliver Aid (13:21) ===

[00:05:35]  I'm not sure.
[00:05:36]  In the UK, they're different.
[00:05:38]  There's like a barrister.
[00:05:39]  Yeah.
[00:05:40]  And another one.
[00:05:40]  Who's a formal, informal?
[00:05:43]  Because you don't say like, oh, I've got a, I got a whole book at home of attorney jokes.
[00:05:47]  I got my lawyer jokes.
[00:05:48]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:05:49]  Yeah, you don't say, look at my attorney, dog.
[00:05:50]  I'm going to jail.
[00:05:51]  Yeah, unless they're talking about you, because look at my attorney.
[00:05:55]  Well, not my attorney, but look at some people's attorneys.
[00:05:58]  Dylan Saba from Palestine Legal and a writer.
[00:06:02]  See, I knew I should add something to writer because now it just seems like a weird way to end that sentence.
[00:06:08]  Dylan, I've been waiting to tell you this joke for about a week now, but now I can't remember what the punchline was.
[00:06:16]  But Dylan is half Palestinian Christian, half Jewish, which means he gets his okay, let me see if I can do this.
[00:06:28]  That means he gets his, which means he gets his, which means you get some kind of food at some kind of other food thing.
[00:06:36]  I thought this was going towards a half-circumcision joke.
[00:06:38]  So now I'm pretty disappointed.
[00:06:40]  No, no, no, no.
[00:06:41]  I can tell you are a man who is treading his own path where that is concerned.
[00:06:45]  Thank you.
[00:06:46]  A new kind of dynamic at play here.
[00:06:49]  Dylan, welcome to the show.
[00:06:50]  You are not freshly back.
[00:06:52]  In fact, you've been back for a little bit, a little bit now.
[00:06:56]  But when I met you, you had just come back from Turkey, where you were supposed to have set sail on the flotilla delivering aid to Gaza.
[00:07:08]  Why did that not go down?
[00:07:10]  Why were you back?
[00:07:11]  Why were you not being arrested or shot at or delivering aid, best case scenario, in the Mediterranean Ocean?
[00:07:19]  Well, so the purpose of the mission, the purpose of the mission was to deliver aid.
[00:07:24]  Yeah.
[00:07:25]  Obviously, Gaza is in a humanitarian crisis.
[00:07:28]  The aid conditions have really only gotten worse since the flotilla was set to sail.
[00:07:33]  That was actually at a high point in recent months in terms of the number of aid trucks that were getting into Gaza.
[00:07:39]  But conditions have only worsened.
[00:07:42]  There is famine conditions throughout the Gaza Strip, especially in the north.
[00:07:48]  And so the purpose of the mission was to deliver 5,500 tons of aid by sea.
[00:07:54]  Sea is not the most ideal way to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip, but at this point, because the Israeli ground invasion has reached basically every part of the strip, there are really just not a lot of land crossings that are even available.
[00:08:08]  I was under the impression they control basically every, like, including the border with Egypt.
[00:08:13]  They control every crossing.
[00:08:14]  And so that's one problem.
[00:08:15]  But the other problem is literal destruction.
[00:08:17]  I mean, their ground invasions have destroyed the actual transport infrastructure.
[00:08:22]  So there's, I mean, there's a lot of problems with aid.
[00:08:25]  There's Israel not letting trucks in.
[00:08:27]  There's Israel imposing all kinds of conditions on trucks, getting in super arbitrary standards for what gets screened out and what get doesn't, all kinds of bureaucratic delays.
[00:08:38]  They're doing everything they can, basically, to keep Gaza starved.
[00:08:41]  But another one is actually just the physical difficulty of driving trucks over roads that have been destroyed by war.
[00:08:50]  Yeah, I mean, if you look at any pictures of like whatever given neighborhood of Gaza, it doesn't even look recognizable as having formerly been a city.
[00:08:56]  It just is like almost complete ruins in most places.
[00:08:59]  There's no recognizable road.
[00:09:00]  Totally.
[00:09:01]  So our plan was to deliver this aid via the sea.
[00:09:08]  And obviously, or maybe not obviously, but this is a major, this would be a major issue for Israel.
[00:09:14]  One, because it would expose that they are not allowing the aid in.
[00:09:19]  Two, it would violate their inspections regime.
[00:09:22]  So our position is that Israel is failing to meet its obligations under international law as an occupying power to provide for the basic needs of the occupied people of Gaza, which are the Palestinians who live there.
[00:09:35]  And so we refuse to allow any inspection, any Israeli inspection of the goods.
[00:09:41]  So they obviously oppose to that.
[00:09:44]  And historically, when the Freedom Coalition has run these aid missions to Gaza, what the Israelis have done is sent warnings, but ultimately raided the ships.
[00:09:56]  So they send their commandos in speedboats and helicopters to come and approach, board, commandeer the ship and arrest everyone on board and bring them to the port of Ashdad for processing and deportation.
[00:10:12]  So that's what's happened before 2024.
[00:10:16]  Now, obviously, the political stakes are much higher.
[00:10:20]  So this has been a political crisis for Israel in the past.
[00:10:23]  The political stakes of a political crisis now are way higher, right?
[00:10:27]  So if this goes poorly, let's say they kill someone on board or do something insane.
[00:10:34]  I mean, what the Israeli army has and all their military forces have demonstrated is that they sometimes have issues up the chain of command in terms of what people are doing and also a willingness to flout all kind of basic norms of warfare, even the ones that they themselves have been less willing to flout in the past.
[00:10:59]  So directly targeted aid workers, like in these very high-profile incidents like the World Central Kitchen.
[00:11:05]  So really, in undertaking this mission, the idea is that we don't know what's going to happen, but we're expecting a degree of force from the Israelis, either something that we've seen before in the past or something in excess of that.
[00:11:18]  There's not really too many scenarios in which they're like, okay, whatever.
[00:11:21]  Yeah, just come deliver this aid.
[00:11:23]  So what that means is that there's some high-profile incident at the end of this mission.
[00:11:30]  And because of how tenuous their overall position is in this war, so the vast majority, most of the international community has turned against them.
[00:11:40]  There's a lot of processes in motion in international bodies.
[00:11:45]  So at the UN, Security Council, the ICJ, ICC, there's a lot in play.
[00:11:51]  There's states that are cutting off diplomatic relations.
[00:11:54]  There are a lot of movements in the West, in the United States, to try and prevent arms transfers and political pressure building.
[00:12:04]  So they know that they're on very shaky ground.
[00:12:06]  And what that meant with respect to the flotilla is that, and the U.S. recognizes this as well, is that the U.S. and Israel and potentially other Western countries knew that their best shot at stemming off any kind of crisis for this would be to prevent us from leaving in the first place.
[00:12:25]  So what ended up happening, I mean, we spent a long time in Istanbul and there were ongoing negotiations with the Turkish government to let us sail from their port.
[00:12:36]  And the Turkish government was under pressure domestically to let this happen too, because, you know, very famously, the 2010 flotilla mission, the Mavi Marmara, was a Turkish vessel and resulted in an Israeli raid that killed 10 Turkish citizens.
[00:12:53]  And that is a very strong cultural memory in Turkey.
[00:12:57]  And a lot of the fundraising for our mission was from Turks, the vast majority.
[00:13:03]  So there's a degree of domestic pressure to let us sail and to support the mission.
[00:13:09]  But the Turkish government is also under a tremendous amount of pressure from the West, from Israel, not to let us sail.
[00:13:16]  So that was one piece, is the ongoing negotiations with the Turkish government that actually never fully got resolved when I was there.
[00:13:23]  They since have been resolved, and the Turkish government has basically just said no.
[00:13:28]  They shut it down.
[00:13:28]  They shut it down.
[00:13:30]  But before that happened, we had another international state diplomacy issue, which is the way that sailing the international waters works is you need a flagging authority.
[00:13:46]  So you have to sail under the flag of a state.
[00:13:50]  And generally, what that means is they impose some very basic kind of conditions of safety, what have you.
[00:14:00]  You're basically being sponsored.
[00:14:01]  You're being sponsored.
[00:14:02]  This is a legit crew.
[00:14:04]  They're not just renegade.
[00:14:06]  They're safe.
[00:14:07]  The vessel itself is safe.
[00:14:09]  It meets a certain amount of benchmarks, et cetera.
[00:14:13]  It's often, there's like a few main countries that you might be surprised by who do this flagging.
[00:14:21]  Liberia famously is one of the things that we're talking about.
[00:14:23]  We talked about that with, remember all the shipping lines?
[00:14:27]  Yeah, I know, but I don't remember what episode it was or what context it was.
[00:14:30]  But we did talk about that.
[00:14:33]  Yeah, I mean, for poorer countries, it's a pretty good business to run.
[00:14:37]  To lease out These flags basically and provide that state authority for folks to sail.
[00:14:46]  And usually it doesn't have any kind of political considerations associated with it.
[00:14:50]  Why would you do that if you were running a business?
[00:14:52]  Yeah, basically.
[00:14:53]  You're in my own country.
[00:14:54]  What was the country that you were flagged?
[00:14:57]  So we were flagged by Guinea-Bissau.
[00:14:59]  And this was an arrangement that my understanding is that it came to be roughly in February of this year.
[00:15:10]  Oh, wow.
[00:15:11]  And I don't have any hard evidence that these are related, but it looks like there was some diplomatic outreach from Israel in March of this year to Guinea-Bissau and some public declaration of friendship, blah, blah, blah.
[00:15:25]  This didn't really come on folks' radar as a cause for concern, again, because there was no expectation that this would become, like this flagging element would become so politicized.
[00:15:38]  But what ended up happening is, so we were delayed several times.
[00:15:45]  One of the delays was mechanical.
[00:15:47]  Another delay had to do with these ongoing negotiations with the Turkish government.
[00:15:52]  But then the last delay while we were still there in Istanbul is in the 11th hour, the day before that we're supposed to sail, we find out that Guinea-Bissau has requested an inspection of the ship.
[00:16:04]  Now, this on its own is not like, okay, we're done, but why would they be requesting an inspection of the ship?
[00:16:11]  The ship has already been inspected.
[00:16:13]  It's very, very, it's way above code in terms of, you know, they thought it was.
[00:16:20]  Yeah.
[00:16:21]  Not so hot.
[00:16:23]  But once that, yeah, once we got word of that, it was pretty quickly understood that this was the result of diplomatic pressure of some kind from the state of Israel.
[00:16:36]  And ultimately, what happened is they did the inspection, they dragged their feet on the inspection, and even though we passed the inspection, because there was nothing wrong with the boat, they ended up saying, okay, well, you still can't sail unless you give us written paperwork saying that you are not going to go to Gaza.
[00:16:55]  And you're going to have to give us a signed form from whatever port that you are delivering this aid, that they are going to accept you, blah, blah, blah.
[00:17:03]  And then basically, you know, within hours, we're like, okay, it's done.
[00:17:08]  Yeah.
[00:17:08]  So they were obviously like they knew you guys were a flotilla that was going to Gaza.
[00:17:14]  Everyone knew, yeah.
[00:17:15]  Like it was, there was no.
[00:17:16]  It wasn't hidden.
[00:17:17]  It wasn't hidden.
[00:17:18]  Yeah.
[00:17:19]  And I don't know what happened.
[00:17:21]  I would love if there was some investigative journalist to go find out if it was like someone got paid off.
[00:17:28]  I'll give you $1 more than the Israelis gave you if you tell me what happened.
[00:17:32]  Yeah.
[00:17:34]  Yeah, I want to know if it was more carrot or stick.
[00:17:36]  I'm just personally curious.
[00:17:37]  Like what?
[00:17:38]  I mean, that's the problem with like a tiny little country is that like both of those are pretty work pretty well.
[00:17:44]  Yeah.
[00:17:44]  Although I don't really know what stick they'd use against Guinea-Bissau.
[00:17:48]  I mean, it could be personal.
[00:17:50]  Yeah.
[00:17:51]  Oh, like against a person.
[00:17:52]  Yeah.
[00:17:52]  Yeah.
[00:17:53]  I didn't even consider that.
[00:17:54]  Yeah.
[00:17:54]  Whatever.
[00:17:55]  I mean, the Israelis love surveillance, so I'm sure they found any kind of dirt that they also, yeah, yes, yeah, they do.
[00:18:01]  And so after that, it was just like, this is, so the age just sitting there.
[00:18:06]  Well, no.
[00:18:07]  So the age, the aid was sent to off to Egypt and is, you know, I mean, I don't know what has gotten through or what is just sitting there, but it is, it's gone as far as it can go in that respect.
[00:18:22]  The plan is to sail again.
[00:18:23]  So the lawyers for the Freedom Flotilla Coalition are hard at work trying to find a new flagging authority and a new port of departure and aim still to sail this summer.
[00:18:36]  So that is the plan.
[00:18:39]  And it will be, the flotilla will be reloaded with the necessary aid.
[00:18:44]  And I think it will be just as critical.
[00:18:47]  I mean, like I said, April was actually a high point for trucks getting in to Gaza.
[00:18:52]  It was like something like 160 a day.

=== UNRWA's Role in Crisis (15:13) ===

[00:18:57]  And the average has dropped down way, you know, down to like 60 a day now.
[00:19:04]  And remember, this was after the World Central Kitchen strike, all of these big assurances from the Americans about aid, pressure domestically.
[00:19:16]  And it's just really devastating, but all of that's basically fallen away.
[00:19:20]  I mean, they're not even really talking about it so much anymore.
[00:19:22]  You wrote about this in March in N Plus One.
[00:19:25]  You wrote this great piece called Aid Wars, where you're talking about kind of the politics of aid and, you know, how much of it is sort of just like another battleground for Israel, but also the United States to kind of wage war against the Palestinians.
[00:19:43]  And that sort of like the things that they can't, I don't know how you put it exactly in the piece, but that there's only so much that they can accomplish through combat methods.
[00:19:52]  And there's, you know, restricting aid, controlling aid, and politicizing aid is yet just like another way for them to achieve some of their objectives.
[00:20:02]  Maybe you can talk a little bit about kind of the Americans' role in a lot of this.
[00:20:06]  Definitely.
[00:20:06]  Because I think for people at home in America, it's very confusing.
[00:20:11]  And I think there's this general sense from people who are not following a lot of stuff.
[00:20:15]  We'll say from like Joe Blow on the street, who just kind of, you know, gets what he can from the New York Times and I know and CNN or whatever he's watching or from his kids yapping in his ear that they're sort of like, oh, well, we're doing our best, but it's just crazy.
[00:20:30]  There's just like kind of a general sort of, it's just tough.
[00:20:35]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:36]  Like an air of like exasperated finality, like, well, we're trying.
[00:20:40]  Yeah.
[00:20:41]  And so are we trying?
[00:20:43]  Well, we're trying to do a lot of things, and help the Palestinians is not very high on that list.
[00:20:48]  Okay.
[00:20:48]  So the U.S. takes a long view on its strategic imperatives in the region and also how it relates to its enemies overall.
[00:20:58]  And it has, I think that the kind of blob mentality has this self-conception of sophistication.
[00:21:06]  And there's a sense in which I think there is an understanding both concretely with respect to this war, but also military ventures more broadly, that you can't win everything that you want to win with military power.
[00:21:20]  And that is especially true against guerrilla forces.
[00:21:24]  Because the guerrillas can draw wars out.
[00:21:30]  And we saw this.
[00:21:31]  We see this in Afghanistan, but also dating, I draw a comparison to the Philippine War at the beginning of American military ascendancy at the beginning of the 20th century.
[00:21:44]  But there's this phenomenon, right, where the conventional military has this qualitative military advantage over its opponent and through hubris and violence thinks it can dominate the guerrilla into submission.
[00:22:01]  And it just doesn't work because guerrilla strategy is all about drawing out those forces into these long wars of attrition where they may be bloody, but no decisive victory can be won.
[00:22:16]  And so my assessment is that what the U.S. is trying to do is to say, okay, the military strategy alone is not going to cut it.
[00:22:24]  And the U.S. has been signaling this with respect to this war for a while, right?
[00:22:27]  So, you know, Defense Secretary Austin is talking about a strategic defeat months and months ago.
[00:22:32]  From his hospital bed.
[00:22:34]  Yeah.
[00:22:34]  Or wherever he is.
[00:22:35]  He's got Bolsonaro syndrome.
[00:22:37]  So he's just in and out of that motherfucker.
[00:22:39]  And so I think what they, what the U.S., and we're going to get to like aid and how that factors in here.
[00:22:46]  But I think what they are trying to do is find ways to control the political reality in Gaza through different means.
[00:22:55]  And what October, you know, before October 7th, the United States was trying to manage the conflict, right?
[00:23:01]  And the Israelis were trying to manage the conflict as well.
[00:23:04]  And they had different ideas about how to do that, right?
[00:23:06]  And different ideas with respect to UNRWA.
[00:23:09]  So, you know, this is not the first time that the U.S. defunded UNRWA.
[00:23:14]  Trump defunded UNRWA in 2018.
[00:23:18]  Can you explain real quick what UNRWA is to listeners?
[00:23:21]  Yeah, so UNRWA is a refugee organization.
[00:23:25]  It's a part of the United Nations, the special body of the United Nations set up to provide basic services to the community of Palestinian refugees.
[00:23:33]  And they operate in Palestine, but also in refugee camps elsewhere.
[00:23:40]  And just to be clear to our listeners, we've talked about this on the show before, but it is a different organization, or it is a separate organization than the regular refugee resettlement organization that the UN has.
[00:23:52]  And it is, I would say, one of the Israelis' worst enemies.
[00:23:56]  Yeah.
[00:23:57]  So yeah, it's a separate organization.
[00:23:59]  Refugees.
[00:24:00]  systems in general tend to operate through like patchwork kind of statuses and organizations, what have you.
[00:24:06]  But it is, yeah, it is, the category of Palestinian refugees is qualitatively different than refugees as they exist in like broader conventions.
[00:24:16]  But yes, so I mean, it's been the antagonist for Israel and for the American right because it is kind of unique as a direct service refugee organization in that it is primarily composed of the population that it is intended to serve.
[00:24:33]  So in Gaza, it's 90% staffed by Palestinians.
[00:24:38]  And it's also responsible for a lot of the cultural reproduction of the people of Gaza.
[00:24:42]  So a lot of schooling happens through UNRWA and other basic services.
[00:24:48]  It's really, I mean, it has a lot of problems as an organization and definitely is issues of corruption and what have you.
[00:24:56]  But the good of UNRWA, what it does well is serve as this really rooted in community organization to provide for basic needs and for education.
[00:25:12]  And it's been for the long time, for a long time, it's been a boogeyman of the Israelis who have this mythology around what Palestinian education is that is actually connected with UNRWA's mandate.
[00:25:25]  So UNRWA has a broader mandate for who counts as a refugee.
[00:25:30]  It includes the descendants of displaced Palestinians.
[00:25:33]  And that really lives in the Israeli psyche as like a, oh, you know, this is what, if we kill UNRWA, like we'll kill the right of return.
[00:25:42]  Because we'll kill the idea of a Palestinian refugee born in the diaspora.
[00:25:47]  That's exactly what the Israeli mindset is.
[00:25:50]  And one of the reasons I think a lot of people get confused as to why they hate UNRWA so much.
[00:25:56]  Right.
[00:25:57]  Beyond just the regular thing of that it teaches their enemies how to read or whatever.
[00:26:01]  But like they view it as something as like UNRWA as in a way, bearing a unique part of the responsibility for the fact that there is still such an idea as like a Palestinian right now.
[00:26:14]  Because I mean, again, I'm not even trying to explain this to you guys, just to any listeners that might not know.
[00:26:19]  A lot of Israelis are just like, Palestinians are Jordanians or they're Egyptians or they're Lebanese or they're Arabs and all Arabs are, it's the same kind of guy.
[00:26:29]  And so just like, send them to fucking Jordan.
[00:26:31]  They're Jordanians.
[00:26:32]  Well, that didn't exactly go so well before.
[00:26:36]  But so like the fact that UNRWA is like teaching them like, you know, as Palestinians, but also allowing them to like exist as like the grandson of somebody or great-grandson or great-great-grandson of somebody who was expelled from their village is still technically a refugee, according to UNRWA.
[00:26:54]  That is prolonging this crisis.
[00:26:57]  Yeah, that's the fear.
[00:26:59]  That's why it has such a strong kind of like psychological role.
[00:27:04]  But okay, so back to the Americans, though.
[00:27:07]  So Biden comes into power and his administration says, okay, we're going to restore funding to UNRWA.
[00:27:14]  And this is in 2021 when he's elected.
[00:27:19]  But they too are, you know, they too want to reduce the political power of Hamas.
[00:27:29]  And the approach that they took with it is to say, okay, we want UNRWA to be funded, but the conditions on it are going to be compliance with extremely draconian U.S. counterterrorism laws.
[00:27:49]  So what they say is like, okay, you can get the funding back, but you need to make sure that not a single dollar, not a single parcel of aid ever gets in the hands of anyone who's affiliated with Hamas.
[00:28:02]  And that is enforced through USAID.
[00:28:07]  And so effectively what they're doing is turning, this is before October 7th.
[00:28:13]  This is in 2021.
[00:28:15]  They are trying to turn the aid regime into a surveillance.
[00:28:19]  It's a police surveillance regime.
[00:28:20]  Surveillance, counterinsurgency operation.
[00:28:23]  And it's something like, what, like over 10,000 Gazans work for UNRWA, too.
[00:28:30]  It's like, I think the biggest employer.
[00:28:32]  It's a major employer.
[00:28:33]  It's the biggest, probably single employer in Gaza, but like it's, you know, it's a major, major, major employer there.
[00:28:38]  I mean, 10,000 out of a population of, what, 2 million is a lot.
[00:28:43]  I didn't know about the counterterrorism law guidelines.
[00:28:46]  That makes a lot of sense because one of the things that, I mean, obviously the Israelis hate UNRWA, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:28:52]  But one of the main pieces of propaganda I noticed that they've been pointing out is like whenever they find anything UNRWA related, mostly like sacks of rice and shit like that, in what they say is a Hamas compound area like that, that will be photographed like the same gravity and same sort of like propaganda tone as like a gun.
[00:29:15]  And that almost, I mean, obviously like their whole thing is, you know, they're all UN Hamas, UNRWA's Hamas.
[00:29:21]  But like that puts that in the light like, oh yeah, they're trying to, this is like must be a, essentially showing evidence to your American partners.
[00:29:29]  Yeah, totally.
[00:29:30]  Well, you saw it got trotted out again.
[00:29:31]  I mean, even later, remember when the whole, when they, I mean, I'm sure you're getting to this, but when they moved to defund UNRWA, strangely enough, the same day that the ICJ ruled on the South Africa case,
[00:29:48]  just out of pure coincidence, of course, you know, that's what they pointed to, that, oh, everyone in UNRWA or however many people in UNRWA were actually are members of Hamas and some of them were in the October 7th attacks or whatever you want to, yeah.
[00:30:07]  And so they used that as justification to then, you know, defund them again.
[00:30:12]  And I believe other countries did as well with no real, there was no real investigation or anything into that, obviously.
[00:30:19]  But they were able to do so because of all of these things that were set up.
[00:30:22]  Yeah, so the years prior.
[00:30:24]  The narratives were all set up, right?
[00:30:25]  So the U.S. is already insisting on not only these surveillance components to the aid distribution and all these counterterrorism laws, but also really pushing for quote-unquote neutrality standards within education to say, you know, to really, because again, like it's really hard to overemphasize the mythology of Palestinian education in like the Israeli fear mind palace.
[00:30:54]  I think people get like a little bit of a sense of it because the way that a lot of like I was about to say like of the crazier Israeli pundits, but like I genuinely, outside of like a few like, you know, limp noodle Haaretz writers, like that's most of them.
[00:31:15]  But like a lot of like the English language propaganda you'll see from Israelis talks about, we'll talk about children in a way that like, listen, in war, like there's some countries that are like, we got to smoke, we got to kill a lot of kids, right?
[00:31:31]  For whatever reason.
[00:31:33]  But usually they'll pretend at least to like be like, well, it's a tragedy that it's happened.
[00:31:38]  It's census.
[00:31:38]  You know, we don't want it to happen, blah, blah, blah.
[00:31:40]  But like, and the IDF kind of like takes that tact.
[00:31:43]  They try to be a little more professional about it sometimes.
[00:31:45]  But then like a lot of the civilian commentators, including ones that are like pretty prominent, will talk about Palestinian children as if they are already, they're terrorists.
[00:31:53]  And they are indoctrinated from birth, you know, to become, you know, Jew killers, you know, on the kibbutz at night.
[00:32:03]  And a lot of that has to do with like they're being educated in these UNRWA schools that Jews are the devils or whatever.
[00:32:10]  Like, you know, they're reading the protocols of the Elders of Zion.
[00:32:13]  They found, didn't they find like some, what was it, like a copy of Mein Kampf or something?
[00:32:18]  Right.
[00:32:18]  Someone's a bootleg copy of Mein Kampf, which, of course, my own dealings with trying to boot like my own copy of that have not been going well, but for another time.
[00:32:28]  But like that in like these teenage girls' rooms, they're like, look, and like that obviously they're pointing like this is like the unwrah education they're getting here.
[00:32:36]  I love that teaching mind.
[00:32:37]  That's so absurd.
[00:32:38]  I know.
[00:32:38]  Imagine meet a 13-year-old who's never left Gaza.
[00:32:41]  And they're like, you're like, they're not teaching you fucking Minecraft.
[00:32:47]  What are you talking about?
[00:32:48]  Well, I think like, I mean, I'm curious, you know, what you'd say, but I would assume that what they're really afraid of isn't, you know, whatever kind of battle tactics that are being taught or not taught or whatever, but that the politics of Palestinian identity as a concept are what is getting passed down and taught and fortified generation to generation to generation within these institutions.
[00:33:12]  And to effectively extinguish Palestinians, you have to attack the concept itself.
[00:33:20]  And they've done it almost everywhere except for in Gaza.
[00:33:24]  That's right.
[00:33:25]  That's right.
[00:33:25]  And that's the kind of last battleground.
[00:33:27]  Yeah.
[00:33:27]  No, that's exactly right.
[00:33:28]  That's exactly right.
[00:33:29]  And Palestinian national identity has always been strongest in Gaza.
[00:33:32]  And it's always been kind of the bastion of Palestinian resistance.
[00:33:37]  And there is not the same systems for trying to stamp it out.
[00:33:44]  And so there's these really crude tools and it's really horrific and violent.
[00:33:50]  And yeah, so that was the conception of UNRWA in Israel and in the United States before October.
[00:33:58]  And since October, the urgency of getting rid of Hamas has become existential, not just for Israel, but for the United States as well.
[00:34:07]  And I think that this is actually an underappreciated point.

=== Why Israel Needs Victory (15:27) ===

[00:34:10]  Because for Israel, it makes sense, right?
[00:34:14]  So Hamas is an armed national liberation group committed to the strategy of armed struggle, landed a major and majorly embarrassing and humiliating blow on Israel with October 7th.
[00:34:30]  Any end to this current cycle that is seen as a victory for Hamas, like presents the image of victory, which, to be frank, would be the case if there was a ceasefire when people have, you know, since people have been demanding it.
[00:34:48]  Like if there's a ceasefire in the week of October 10th, it would have been a major Hamas victory.
[00:34:54]  And a ceasefire basically any time after that would have been as well.
[00:34:58]  And this is why this is existential for Israel, right?
[00:35:00]  Because it is not just the acute humiliation for its political leaders.
[00:35:06]  It is a message sent to the rest of the Middle East, the rest of the world, that Israel is a paper tiger, that its security systems are not what it purports to be, that it did not prevent this attack, and that it failed in the war in responding to this attack.
[00:35:26]  Basically, the way they see it is, you know, this is a ticking bomb for the next October 7th.
[00:35:32]  And I don't think that's crazy, actually.
[00:35:35]  I do think that that is the message that a lot of actors in the region would get.
[00:35:41]  And, you know, I mean, my response to that is like.
[00:35:44]  How could they not, though?
[00:35:45]  I mean.
[00:35:45]  How could they not?
[00:35:46]  And look, you know, this is the settler colonial state doing bloody, horrible occupation.
[00:35:52]  So, I mean, what do we think is going to happen here?
[00:35:54]  But the point that I think is underappreciated is that for the United States, yes, this is our ally in the region, and we want to protect our allies.
[00:36:08]  But also, I mean, listen to what Nasrallah, what the Hamas leaders, like what they're all saying.
[00:36:13]  They are all saying Israel is America's proxy.
[00:36:16]  Yeah.
[00:36:16]  Right.
[00:36:17]  America is the true enemy, et cetera.
[00:36:20]  If the United States is taking a long view, right?
[00:36:22]  Then a major blow to what their opponents are saying is the outpost of American empire, a major success of armed struggle as a tactic, is not going to be, that's not a good sign for where things are going insofar as the United States is invested in maintaining its empire elsewhere.
[00:36:42]  Absolutely.
[00:36:43]  And especially not, you know, the timing with the way the other battlefield is going in Ukraine is not, it doesn't bode well for the America's reception abroad as the kind of like, you know, the world superpower that cannot be defeated anywhere.
[00:36:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:57]  I mean, that is, you know, you mentioned that.
[00:37:00]  Like, that's something Nasrallah brings up a lot in his speeches very famously, that like America is the country that's behind Israel.
[00:37:10]  And he's right.
[00:37:11]  I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, even just in the specific instance of the literal bombs that are being dropped on Gaza.
[00:37:20]  I mean, I think anyone who's followed the news knows that like a lot of those are made in America.
[00:37:26]  In fact, Ukraine has gotten a little salty about the fact that Israel has taken a little bit of precedence, which is actually like, if I was them, I'd be like, I mean, just purely from like a defensive war here, a neutral standpoint, you know, I don't think anyone should get bombs, but I'm like, I would say Ukraine probably does need them more if you're just talking about pure needs.
[00:37:46]  Again, nothing in a political position here, if I do need them a little more.
[00:37:50]  But yeah, I mean, and I think that like this is a pretty watershed moment, right?
[00:37:56]  Israel's security infrastructure is purported to be the best in the world.
[00:38:02]  The IDF are these elite troops.
[00:38:04]  They are unstoppable on the battlefield.
[00:38:07]  And the fact is, is like, well, okay, you know, they beat the shit out of these really ill-equipped, ill-prepared, poorly led Arab state armies, you know, 60s and 70s.
[00:38:21]  They were pretty effective in defanging the PLO.
[00:38:25]  Well, not necessarily the IDF themselves, but just the general political infrastructure of the U.S., Israel, et cetera, along with some military stuff.
[00:38:36]  But this is a different time.
[00:38:38]  Like, we are living in a different time.
[00:38:40]  And, like, you know, what do they say?
[00:38:42]  Like, good times make soft men or whatever.
[00:38:45]  It's like, Israel, I'm sorry, but because you were the little innovation nation in the motherfucking Middle East, you have a shitty army of 19-year-old majors who are not doing very well.
[00:38:55]  But it's not even just that it deals like a huge blow to their national identity or like their projection in the world.
[00:39:02]  It also, like, it is a massive part of their export economy.
[00:39:06]  Yes.
[00:39:07]  And I mean, something to talk about is, and I don't know, maybe we get there in this conversation later or whatever, but if and when this conflict is over, I don't even know what that even means or what that, I mean, what Israel will look like.
[00:39:24]  Because, you know, when Nasrallah is saying that about, you know, the U.S., you know, supplying all this stuff or the U.S. is, or excuse me, that Israel is a U.S. proxy or whatever.
[00:39:34]  I mean, we are also completely and totally supporting their economy 100% at this point.
[00:39:39]  It would bottom out.
[00:39:41]  All of the tourism is dead.
[00:39:42]  That's such a big sector.
[00:39:44]  All of the kind of like technology and export and, I mean, if we're talking about like weapons technology, like it's not the best sales.
[00:39:50]  It's not the best.
[00:39:51]  It's good on them little bullpops now after October 7th.
[00:39:54]  Yeah, you're not winning any kind of sales pitches with the eight-month kind of protracted guerrilla war that you're doing Pegasus shit so good.
[00:40:04]  Where's Sinoir at?
[00:40:07]  And everything else.
[00:40:08]  I mean, and that's not even talking about just like the economy of like their service economy internally is completely and totally gutted.
[00:40:15]  Like it is, you know, and then that's not even getting into the political realities, you know, internally in Israel right now as well.
[00:40:23]  And I just, I don't know where they go from here.
[00:40:36]  So I want to bring it back to aid.
[00:40:40]  Yes.
[00:40:40]  And also, I know, because like I keep starting to talk about it and then end up on these like insane tangents, but it's all relevant.
[00:40:46]  And I also want to bring us back to the battlefield because where we're at now is like, yes, existentially, Israel needs a victory.
[00:40:54]  They need it to restore the image of their power.
[00:40:57]  The United States needs a victory because we don't want Israel to collapse and we also need to win decisive victories against the terrorists, right?
[00:41:07]  We've been trapped in this thing for a long time.
[00:41:11]  But there are some issues.
[00:41:13]  And the issues, the main issue is that Israel is not really running a very successful ground invasion if the object of the ground invasion is to destroy Hamas as a military and political force.
[00:41:26]  Is that the object of the ground invasion?
[00:41:31]  I think that the ground invasion has multiple objects.
[00:41:34]  It's like over-determined on the Israeli side, and there are actors that are using it for various ends.
[00:41:41]  I think that there are actors within the Israeli state that do want to seize and reoccupy Gaza.
[00:41:46]  There are actors that are focused on dealing a devastating blow to Hamas.
[00:41:55]  I think the common interest is retribution against the Palestinians.
[00:41:58]  I think that's the one thing that everyone agrees on.
[00:42:00]  And from the reservist all the way on up to the prime minister, and that's what we've seen holistically, is that the campaign is one of punishment.
[00:42:11]  And that, I think, has overtaken the strategic interests, especially where those strategic interests have proven very difficult.
[00:42:19]  But that seems to be almost like maybe that's also a reason why it has been not a failure, but has been very complicated for them to win.
[00:42:29]  Yeah, and this is like kind of classic instance of how guerrilla warfare destroys the conventional military, right?
[00:42:40]  Is that the conventional military is so incensed by the tactics of guerrilla warfare that they're driven insane and they respond by like wanton violence against civilian populations.
[00:42:56]  And this is again, all the way back to the Philippines.
[00:42:58]  I was about to say, yeah, Philippines, massacres and massacres, piles of bodies of civilians, because they didn't know everyone else was in the jungle.
[00:43:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:06]  Yeah, so, you know, yeah, if you are a, if you're a macho IDF soldier unit or whatever, and, you know, your options are like, okay, do this complicated thing where we're going to go into a tunnel and pray to all hell that it's not an ambush, you know, or have fun shelling some civilian home for fun.
[00:43:27]  Like, of course, you know, that's going to feel better.
[00:43:30]  So, but, but, and, and, and that's been the, I think, overarching dynamic and why this war has extended for so long.
[00:43:39]  Because the United States needs victory.
[00:43:41]  Israel needs victory.
[00:43:42]  So the war is not ending.
[00:43:44]  But for those reasons, it has really turned into, or maybe was from the beginning, but it's like largely this campaign of vengeance.
[00:43:52]  But eventually the clock runs out, right?
[00:43:53]  Yeah.
[00:43:53]  Because this can't actually continue forever.
[00:43:56]  And I think that the moment that we are in now is that from the American perspective, and again, America generally holds the keys here.
[00:44:04]  There's like, I think Nathan Tankis on Twitter recently pulled up some old Kissinger quote that says, the Arabs have a monopoly on oil and we have a monopoly on getting the Israelis to withdraw.
[00:44:18]  And that's why we can never negotiate because if we start, there'll be no end to it.
[00:44:22]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:23]  Clever man.
[00:44:24]  Well, I mean, this is the classic problem of fighting a guerrilla army is that just like it's you, it's you kind of can't win.
[00:44:30]  I mean, you have to just like realistically, you just have to kill everybody because it is an amorph.
[00:44:36]  It's by its nature rather amorphous.
[00:44:40]  And like, you know, I was thinking about this after our, we talked to that party and I was like, well, how would they fucking win here?
[00:44:47]  I guess the closest that they could do would be to kill Sinwar and like to kill like the upper upper echelons of Hamas leadership.
[00:44:57]  Most people outside of Israel, probably most people in Israel, don't know those people's names.
[00:45:01]  Those people can be replaced.
[00:45:03]  I mean, you know, it is, it is not like, it's very difficult to do this.
[00:45:07]  And so to win here, and I think that's kind of partially why, and we were talking about this before we started recording, partially why the Rafa, they want to do this sort of, like the Rafa operation is probably going to take a long time.
[00:45:20]  And they said it's because there's two Hamas battalions in there.
[00:45:23]  That means nothing.
[00:45:24]  But I think it's really because after that, geographically, they have control.
[00:45:33]  And I'm doing little air quotes here, to control of Gaza.
[00:45:37]  But again, the problem with guerrilla warfare there is that like you don't have control of Gaza.
[00:45:42]  There's still a lot of those little red triangle videos, they're coming out of the north where you've had control for months and months and months.
[00:45:48]  And so control means nothing when you have a guerrilla force that does seem really have a lot of ways to get around Gaza around you and shoot you from buildings.
[00:45:58]  And so it seems really interesting too, because it seems like they're not, they have no, they cannot or they don't want to be an occupying force, which sounds like a crazy thing to say about the occup the state that is an occupying force in some ways.
[00:46:13]  But they take these parts of the north or they take these parts and then they leave, right?
[00:46:18]  And they've been doing that over and over and over again because it seems like they cannot or don't want to establish actual fields of control.
[00:46:26]  So they're allowing all this stuff to kind of come back.
[00:46:28]  So what I'll say is that they do want to be an occupying force and they don't want to resettle.
[00:46:34]  Okay.
[00:46:34]  And I think that what they are trying to do is set up a system similar to the West Bank where they exist along the outskirts of the territory.
[00:46:45]  They have their military routes where they can just come in, do raids, and leave.
[00:46:51]  And I think that actually what's happening in the north is test running what that system could look like long term.
[00:46:58]  So they are trying, they are, I mean, and I don't, again, I don't think this is everyone, right?
[00:47:04]  But I think that this is like a controlling, this is like the controlling consensus in the war cabinet at the moment is like, okay, yeah, we can't actually resettle, but we can't leave permanently or else they will just reconstitute because we have not eliminated them.
[00:47:22]  And so I think that they are trying to figure out a way to do that where they just have unimpeded authority to come in and come out.
[00:47:29]  But the difference is they want to do it without the PA.
[00:47:32]  It's a good, it's kind of an interesting question why the Netanyahu is so opposed to the PA.
[00:47:37]  My guess.
[00:47:38]  He fucking hates the PA.
[00:47:39]  He hates them.
[00:47:40]  He hates them.
[00:47:42]  And when there's such good security laps.
[00:47:44]  I was going to say.
[00:47:46]  It's kind of like hating a sycophant friend of yours.
[00:47:49]  It's like, oh, man, you're so cool.
[00:47:50]  I love hanging out with you.
[00:47:51]  It's like, all right, bro.
[00:47:53]  I think that keeping Palestine divided is in the, I think that maybe it is, there is a fear that if you have Gaza and the West Bank unified under one government, that it will be, there will be momentum towards statehood.
[00:48:09]  And that is now the most pressing concern for Israel.
[00:48:14]  And Netanyahu is investing everything he has, his entire political career around being like, I'm the guy who will prevent statehood and anyone else is going to cave to the Americans or whoever else and allow a Palestinian state to form.
[00:48:29]  So, I mean, I think that's the plan.
[00:48:31]  And I think that the conversations around the day after are largely a red herring for that reason.
[00:48:36]  One, because Hamas is not eliminated.
[00:48:40]  And two, because I think that Israel is already trying to roll out its day after plan.
[00:48:45]  I don't think it's going to work.
[00:48:48]  I think that without any de jure governance in Gaza, it will either be anarchy or the resumption of Hamas rule.
[00:49:01]  So my question is: where does the U.S. come in?
[00:49:04]  Okay.
[00:49:05]  Because you say that without any kind of like governing structure or any kind of whatever.
[00:49:11]  And I immediately think, well, the United States loves kind of coming in with troops on the ground and making sure that everything's okay.
[00:49:20]  And so this is where we get back to aid, right?
[00:49:23]  So the United States is running up against its limit in terms of how much standard warfare it can continue to support.
[00:49:33]  And it's not just, it is because, okay, you know, once they do Rafah, it's done.

=== U.S. Limits in Gaza Conflict (15:19) ===

[00:49:38]  But there's other concerns as well, right?
[00:49:40]  Domestic political pressure in the United States.
[00:49:42]  So Biden's under a lot of heat.
[00:49:45]  He is not looking like he's in great shape for the election.
[00:49:49]  I mean, it's pretty close.
[00:49:50]  In general.
[00:49:50]  But yeah.
[00:49:53]  And he wanted to wrap this up months ago for that reason, to just get this off of the political agenda.
[00:50:00]  But there's other stuff too, right?
[00:50:01]  So the longer this war goes on, the more things escalate in the north with Lebanon, and we should talk about that.
[00:50:10]  But also escalate on the border with Egypt as well.
[00:50:14]  The Camp David security arrangement between Israel and Egypt is really one of the bedrocks of American policy in the region.
[00:50:22]  And they own Cece.
[00:50:24]  So there's not, I don't, I mean, I'm not an expert on this stuff.
[00:50:29]  But my sense is that Cece is still in the bag, but the risk is popular discontent within Egypt, potentially like an officer's coup of some kind.
[00:50:40]  But there's already been incidents, and there's already been rising dissent.
[00:50:47]  If Israel does fully and permanently take control of that crossing and that's viewed as impeding on Israeli sovereignty, then there's the potential that that security arrangement could fall apart.
[00:51:00]  And the U.S. really doesn't want that.
[00:51:03]  And so there's escalation with Lebanon.
[00:51:06]  There's potential Camp David falling apart on that border.
[00:51:13]  And also they still are pushing for this global deal with Saudi Arabia, this is the big Brett McGurk plan since before October is they're going to find a way to permanently manage the conflict and the great handoff.
[00:51:34]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:51:35]  So they can wash themselves and pivot to Asia.
[00:51:38]  It's funny.
[00:51:39]  We're always trying to pivot.
[00:51:42]  You mentioned the Saudi Arabia stuff.
[00:51:44]  And it is really funny that that's like, I mean, that was the big Trump-Kushner plan, right?
[00:51:50]  And McGurk.
[00:51:51]  That like, you know, Saudi Arabia is going to be sort of like our other, like, we're going to essentially, there's going to be this like anti-Iran axis within the Middle East there that's going to reshape a new paradigm.
[00:52:06]  We're going to make everything different.
[00:52:07]  And, you know, we saw a taste of that.
[00:52:09]  I think it was Pompeo, Netanyahu, and MBS were at NEOM when Trump killed Soleimani.
[00:52:19]  They were there.
[00:52:20]  That's when Pompeo was like, guys, we're about to do something really crazy tomorrow.
[00:52:25]  And I think spiritually begin 2020 in coronavirus.
[00:52:29]  That is my view on the after effects of that.
[00:52:33]  The NEOM Lab League.
[00:52:37]  I think whatever they were doing, the trio was doing in NEOM was that spicy.
[00:52:42]  Yeah, I view NEOM as like the barrel of a gun pointed at the world.
[00:52:45]  And they put in a chemical bullet there.
[00:52:49]  But Yeah, and I think this is this is, I mean, I can guarantee you there's probably a lot of people in the State Department who, after October 7th happened, were not like worried about whatever was going to happen in Gaza or even Israel.
[00:53:01]  They're just like, oh, God, like, we were so close.
[00:53:03]  We were so close.
[00:53:04]  We were so close on this.
[00:53:05]  Yeah, put forth their gamer failson make work program.
[00:53:09]  Exactly.
[00:53:09]  Because, you know, one thinks that, like, if this had happened a decade from now, it would not be an American pier that's floating away in the ocean, although it didn't really float away, but like that is that is slowly breaking.
[00:53:18]  But a Saudi-made one certainly would have been a lot of people.
[00:53:20]  Exactly.
[00:53:22]  Just made completely out of glass and just like I thought you guys were great at making fake islands.
[00:53:28]  Staffed entirely by Colombian mercenaries.
[00:53:31]  But yeah, I mean, one imagines that there were some eye rolls at the State Department there after that.
[00:53:39]  And we really have had to like have had to kind of get back in there with, you know, send the fleet over there.
[00:53:44]  I don't remember which numbered fleet, but one of them.
[00:53:47]  And build that stupid fucking pier, which I'm not sure really any aid has been delivered through.
[00:53:53]  It probably has, but they say that it has, but there's mixed.
[00:53:58]  I mean, I think some minimal amount has gotten through, but really very much.
[00:54:02]  It's more of a PRF.
[00:54:03]  But there was also some serious questions about if it was being used to send IDF troops in during that hostage rescue/slash massacre that happened the other day.
[00:54:16]  And we did see people being, you know, prisoners or something being taken away in helicopters from right next to there.
[00:54:23]  You know, it's interesting.
[00:54:24]  I mean, I talked about this at the beginning of the episode, but one of the great contradictions of this conflict is the very visible, loud, apparent, like, and clear deprivations that Gazans are going through right now, whether it comes to food, living in tents, medicine, anything like that.
[00:54:45]  Fucking, you know, from tampons to whatever, like baby formula.
[00:54:51]  All that shit is just not there.
[00:54:53]  It's just, it's just gone.
[00:54:56]  But the issue is then you send in these aid trucks, but the aid trucks aren't allowed to have any escorts, right?
[00:55:01]  Except maybe IDF, who one of the more famous incidents shot a lot of people when they were trying to get to an aid truck.
[00:55:08]  You know, when people are in positions like this, where there is no food, where you have to look out for your family if you still have one, And people become, this is like one of the most classic from centuries and thousands of years things in warfare is like that people get very desperate and sometimes you know become kind of unruly.
[00:55:25]  You needed security infrastructure.
[00:55:26]  The IDF and the U.S. had said there will be no security infrastructure.
[00:55:31]  Policemen are Hamas.
[00:55:34]  The aid itself is Hamas, but whatever.
[00:55:36]  But like there can be no security infrastructure.
[00:55:39]  And so it's like our hands are tied.
[00:55:40]  These people are savages.
[00:55:41]  We can't give them any aid.
[00:55:43]  And this becomes then the mechanism of control, right?
[00:55:46]  And this is what we're getting to.
[00:55:48]  So if the U.S. is saying, okay, for all of these reasons, it's not strategic for you all to just be guns blazing and we just keep do this war, keep you know, keep this war going until Camp David has fallen apart and now we're in a regional war and all of a sudden we're in direct confrontations with Iran, right?
[00:56:03]  They want to say, no, let's slow down and let's do this another way, right?
[00:56:06]  And this then becomes the other way.
[00:56:09]  So there is a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe in the strip.
[00:56:13]  And that is the result of warfare.
[00:56:16]  And what the United States now is trying to do is, and I think this is my understanding of the humanitarian peer, because they don't want to reset up a situation in which Israel is, you know, the war is over and there's all this aid coming in, right?
[00:56:37]  That's going to take a lot of reconstruction and maybe in the longer term.
[00:56:41]  But in the shorter term, when really Hamas's survival as an organization is what's at issue and the image of victory is what's at issue, I think there's an understanding on the American side that you can create political conditions through this soft power, through the control over aid.
[00:57:01]  So what I would expect to see is that the United States is going to push for, and this is how I understand the UNRWA defunding, which I don't think is coming back, by the way.
[00:57:11]  The information, the basis for it was totally bullshit.
[00:57:15]  It's very strongly indicated that it came from torture, which I think was obvious kind of from the outset.
[00:57:21]  And even if it hadn't, I mean, it said there was the numbers are, let's say, malleable, but it was a dozen, half a dozen, four, 15, whatever UNRWA members participated in some way on October 7th through a secret dossier, which you're not allowed to see.
[00:57:38]  But the U.S., yeah, no one's allowed to see it, but the U.S. government's extremely convinced by it.
[00:57:42]  Yes.
[00:57:42]  There's no better recipe for, oh, that was torture.
[00:57:45]  Yes.
[00:57:48]  Yeah.
[00:57:49]  So the UNRWA funding is cut.
[00:57:53]  They are not doing anything really to pressure the Israelis to let more aid in.
[00:57:58]  They are creating a humanitarian crisis that then will be solved by the influx of American aid organizations, nonprofits, and things that are under the control of USAID.
[00:58:13]  And in that way, they will, I believe, attempt to facilitate the replacement of Hamas as a governing body.
[00:58:20]  So that will be the security infrastructure, basically.
[00:58:22]  I think so.
[00:58:23]  I think so.
[00:58:24]  And the U.S. is pushing for PA.
[00:58:27]  There's discussions in the Gantt's vision of some kind of coalition force between Europeans, Americans, whoever it is, right?
[00:58:38]  I think the authority is going to come on the back of 8-ROX.
[00:58:42]  And we'll see.
[00:58:44]  I think that there's still a lot of ways that this could go.
[00:58:48]  And yeah, it's hard to know what will happen because the U.S. could end this war.
[00:58:56]  They could have ended this war at any point.
[00:58:58]  So it's one thing to say it's in the U.S. interest to end this war and do their counterinsurgency, which I fully believe they want to and intend to do.
[00:59:07]  But there's also other considerations, right?
[00:59:10]  There's the issue on the U.S. side that if you move too quickly as the Americans, right?
[00:59:24]  And at this point, I'm like, should I not be giving the Americans advice?
[00:59:30]  Do you think that anyone in the State Department listens to True at all?
[00:59:34]  We're pretty siphoned through our handlers pretty lightly.
[00:59:36]  And so it'll just go to them.
[00:59:38]  So you're talking to us.
[00:59:39]  I mean, you're already giving advice to the Americans.
[00:59:42]  Okay, true, true.
[00:59:42]  Okay.
[00:59:44]  But if the U.S. forces Israel into a quote-unquote bad deal for Israel, like a ceasefire deal where they clearly take the L, right?
[00:59:56]  That's an issue for the Americans because then Hamas has won.
[01:00:01]  And that's, again, for the reasons we were talking about, that's something that they need to avoid.
[01:00:06]  But also, if they force a deal, it makes the likelihood of war with Lebanon go up.
[01:00:13]  And that's because you have no one in the Israeli political establishment who can own the loss, who can hold the back on Gaza.
[01:00:20]  And so anything that looks like a loss will motivate whoever, be it Netanyahu or Gantz or whoever is in power in Israel to go get their lick back by starting a war with Hezbollah.
[01:00:36]  And that goes against U.S. interest.
[01:00:39]  So that's why I think we are in this no man's land with Rafa, where it's an invasion, but it's not a full invasion, and it's kind of proceeding slowly.
[01:00:49]  Because what I think is happening is they are trying to have their cake and eat it too of do a Rafah invasion that allows Israel to claim some semblance of victory, but doesn't actually go over any of the tripwires that the U.S. is actually concerned with.
[01:01:08]  Like, I actually think that the red lines exist.
[01:01:10]  They just have nothing to do with Palestinian civilians.
[01:01:12]  We were talking about that last week.
[01:01:14]  Yeah, it's like the red lines.
[01:01:18]  When do they start using red lines?
[01:01:19]  I remember the first one I remember.
[01:01:22]  Surely he didn't.
[01:01:23]  I mean, there must have been ones before that.
[01:01:25]  But the Obama won famously.
[01:01:28]  But yeah, I agree with you.
[01:01:32]  People are talking about like, oh, yeah, Biden's red line is Rafael.
[01:01:34]  No.
[01:01:35]  Biden's red line is a wide regional war that the U.S. or even just Israel, but we'd have to be drawn into it too, that involves a bunch of different people, Israel, probably Iran, almost certainly actually, and that we have to get involved with because that would just not be good for Biden or for the U.S.
[01:01:54]  I mean, not that the president is always, whatever president is always concerned about what's doing best for the U.S., but that would just, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of upsides to that.
[01:02:05]  And I think one of those really is Lebanon.
[01:02:09]  Yeah.
[01:02:10]  Because there's a lot of problems here.
[01:02:14]  Gantz, Ben Gantz resigned on Sunday.
[01:02:17]  We're recording this, what is it?
[01:02:19]  It's Tuesday?
[01:02:20]  Tuesday.
[01:02:20]  So just a few days ago.
[01:02:21]  He had to delay it because of the hostage rescue operation, which I, this is just my own thing.
[01:02:27]  I have such a strong feeling that that was timed as a fuck you from Netanyahu to him.
[01:02:33]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:02:34]  Because Gant is resigning for six reasons, which I wrote down, which are, which I'm not going to go over all of them, but like, I think some of them are really important.
[01:02:43]  So one of them is that 60,000 Israelis, I believe from the north alone, let alone the ones from the South, are out of their homes.
[01:02:52]  So they've had to leave their houses, which is, I don't know what possesses you to be like, I'm going to move like a mile from Lebanon, especially from the area where Hezbollah is very active.
[01:03:05]  But that is not good for Israel's economy or political situation, right?
[01:03:10]  The South, same kind of deal.
[01:03:12]  A lot of people gone from their homes there.
[01:03:14]  That is a major fucking problem.
[01:03:15]  I think Gant is trying to just put that all on Netanyahu's shoulders.
[01:03:19]  And so he's like, I'm out of here.
[01:03:21]  One of his other things was the overthrow of Hamas rule and the demilitarization of Gaza, which is, we've talked about that's not going to happen and the establishment of blah, And the Haredi or draft bill.
[01:03:41]  And I think Gantz is trying to get out of there because he's like, this is a sinking ship.
[01:03:45]  But there's no, it's a no-win situation.
[01:03:47]  No win.
[01:03:48]  I really think so.
[01:03:49]  Like, what I think is that Netanyahu also realizes these same political realities.
[01:03:53]  And not only that, but on top of that, he has his pretty serious corruption charges, which I guess if they just put that trial on hold.
[01:04:00]  He's very, very vulnerable.
[01:04:02]  Yes, he is.
[01:04:04]  And I think that my personal view on that on this is that like I genuinely think that the U.S. just wants Netanyahu out and wants Gantz in.
[01:04:13]  I think Gantz also probably knows that he's like their best shot that they have.
[01:04:18]  Maybe Gallant.
[01:04:18]  I don't know.
[01:04:19]  But like yeah, yeah.
[01:04:22]  I think the U.S. wants Gantz.
[01:04:24]  I think they do too.
[01:04:25]  And because Gantz would be a better, probably a better manager, definitely a more malleable manager.
[01:04:30]  I mean, Netanyahu is like I was saying earlier, he's John Wick 4.
[01:04:35]  You know, he's John Wick having been through all the other John Wicks.
[01:04:38]  But I mean, even I are body count.
[01:04:40]  No, but John Wick is the, people love John Wick.
[01:04:42]  But he's like a bad John Wick.
[01:04:44]  He's like an evil John Wick.
[01:04:47]  I can't think of a.
[01:04:48]  Yeah, I just, I don't understand.
[01:04:50]  I don't know what his plan is or his exit strategy.
[01:04:54]  And I don't know what, I mean, and this is my question for you guys.

=== Israel's Political Crisis (15:36) ===

[01:04:58]  Like, what does Israel, both domestically and, you know, internationally, what do they gain by invading Lebanon?
[01:05:06]  That is a very good question.
[01:05:08]  I don't get it.
[01:05:09]  Gain is a tough thing to quantify.
[01:05:13]  I think they just have to.
[01:05:16]  I think one of the things is that Hezbollah is provoking, and I don't say that in a way where I'm mad at Hezbollah or anything, but they're provoking these sort of border skirmishes because I think that Hezbollah probably does want Israel in there because I think Hezbollah is certainly not going to go.
[01:05:37]  I don't think.
[01:05:37]  I don't want to make any predictions here, but I don't think that Hezbollah, it would not be in Hezbollah's probably best interest to do a ground invasion of Israel.
[01:05:44]  No, they always want to have a defensive position.
[01:05:46]  Exactly.
[01:05:46]  But they've already taken out so much of Israeli infrastructure in the north very, very slowly and softly with not a lot of fanfare.
[01:05:54]  Exactly.
[01:05:55]  So, yeah, I actually don't, I don't think that Hezbollah is trying to provoke a ground invasion.
[01:06:00]  I think that they are trying to prevent one.
[01:06:02]  And I think that they're trying to prevent it by showing their strength.
[01:06:06]  Yeah.
[01:06:06]  And they were, you know, they, for a long time, have been a defensive organization.
[01:06:12]  Their raison d'être is to prevent Israeli ground incursions into Lebanon.
[01:06:19]  Now, they are taking on a more offensive posture.
[01:06:21]  I was going to say they've gone on quite a few offensive operations.
[01:06:24]  Yeah, I mean, and that is still in the context of a solidarity front with Gaza.
[01:06:32]  But they are reading the same news that we are, right?
[01:06:37]  So at a certain point, they may see that a ground invasion is inevitable and decide then to change their posture to anticipate that.
[01:06:48]  In terms of what Israel wants out of a ground invasion, it is a one, a short-term political victory to make up for presumptive defeat in Gaza.
[01:06:59]  Two, in any scenario in which the strategy of armed struggle is vindicated, Hezbollah is the clear threat of a future attack in their mind.
[01:07:08]  And they have let that stockpile get really big since 2006.
[01:07:13]  Hezbollah has a huge arsenal.
[01:07:15]  And so, yeah, it's a hugely risky play to engage, especially a war-weary Israel to engage Hezbollah now.
[01:07:24]  But I think from their calculus, it's only going to get trickier because while the world has turned against them now, they have the active military support of the United States in an ongoing war.
[01:07:36]  And who knows when, like, Israel may be in a better position to drag the United States into a conflict with Hezbollah than they will be in the future.
[01:07:46]  And especially an incredibly pliant Joe Biden who is giving Israel what they want for now, for the kind of geostrategic interests of the United States, but also for ideological reasons and kind of like temperamental reasons, is extremely hesitant around using actual levers of hard power to constrain Israel.
[01:08:12]  So it took so much for us to get to the place where we're at now where there's a Security Council resolution.
[01:08:20]  And even then, like that's not going to compel any action without the U.S. doing more serious stuff.
[01:08:25]  But there's a Security Council resolution.
[01:08:27]  He's flirting with stopping the arms transfers and stuff like that.
[01:08:33]  And we are so close to this shit spinning out of control from the perspective of the Americans.
[01:08:39]  But Joe Biden knows that that is a bell that can't be unrung.
[01:08:44]  Once you use those levers of hard power against Israel, then that is what people are going to, you can't walk it back.
[01:08:51]  That's what people are going to demand then politically.
[01:08:54]  And they know that.
[01:08:55]  And they don't want to fuck that up.
[01:08:57]  They don't want to fuck up that relationship.
[01:09:01]  And so the Israelis are, you know, they have a long leash.
[01:09:08]  And they know that.
[01:09:10]  That all being said, I think it's incredibly foolish for Israel to invade Lebanon.
[01:09:19]  I think that it will, the first several weeks of that war will probably be like nothing we've ever seen.
[01:09:28]  And definitely nothing Israel has ever seen.
[01:09:31]  Because they don't, Israel, their entire military strategy is around air supremacy.
[01:09:40]  And they just don't, I mean, they might have it, but they have it in a much smaller way against Hezbollah than they have against any army that they've ever faced.
[01:09:51]  So I think, and like you were saying already, you know, Hezbollah is very directedly targeting their missile defense systems to, I don't have the capability to like assess the status of Israeli missile defense system, but clearly it's a sign, you know?
[01:10:09]  At the very least, it is a sign that, look, we know how to get our drones in here and this is the way that this is going to be straying.
[01:10:18]  Yeah, I mean, I guess my view on Hezbollah, I don't, I wouldn't, yeah, I guess I would walk back what I said earlier about them wanting an invasion, but I would say that if you, if I was Hezbollah, which I'm not, but if I was, it would be the most advantageous set of circumstances that I could think of in order to yourself have a victory over Israel, right?
[01:10:42]  Because Israel's operation, I think, would necessarily have to be somewhat limited, right?
[01:10:47]  In order to just as small as an incursion as possible, in order to have a resettlement of some of the people who lived around that border.
[01:10:56]  Again, tens of thousands of people.
[01:10:58]  It's not a small number of people around that border area.
[01:11:02]  And that is a crisis for a country as small as Israel.
[01:11:06]  I do think, though, that kind of everybody is probably pretty cognizant of the circumstances here in which there's going to be a lot of body bags coming home from that.
[01:11:16]  Hezbollah has been fighting consistently in different wars than the ones they had previously fought in for the past 10 years and are really well supplied and have a pretty big infrastructure in Lebanon.
[01:11:36]  And so I just, I don't see a way out of this, though, for Israel besides making some kind of incursion into Lebanon.
[01:11:46]  Now, I started, it's funny, since we started talking about doing this episode, I've seen more and more stuff because as Gaza is coming to a something, you know, theoretically, an end that they said, like as the war is coming towards some kind of somewhat towards the finish line there.
[01:12:09]  You know, part of this is that like Netanyahu kind of needs to keep a crisis going.
[01:12:14]  Not that there wouldn't be a crisis in Gaza, but like a real like national security, you know, everything is at stake here, crisis going, because his, his, not only political career, but like possibly his freedom is at stake in some way.
[01:12:27]  Like, you know, I don't know how big a possibility it is that he'd be jailed now after this, but like, I don't think he's fully rescued his reputation here.
[01:12:37]  And not just Netanyahu, right?
[01:12:38]  Gantz needs a win too.
[01:12:39]  Yes.
[01:12:39]  Because he needs to justify what the fuck he was doing in the war.
[01:12:44]  He came from the opposition to come join the war cabinet.
[01:12:48]  Like he did with coronavirus.
[01:12:50]  He loves joining a cabinet.
[01:12:51]  He's like, oh, you guys, is it wrong?
[01:12:53]  What about the more extra?
[01:12:54]  I mean, it seems, I hate, I hate using this because it's already such a right-wing extreme government.
[01:13:00]  The Israeli jihadists.
[01:13:01]  But what about the more extreme elements in the government?
[01:13:05]  What about Ben-Gavir and all these guys?
[01:13:06]  Like, how do you politically placate them as well?
[01:13:10]  Because that's when I think of the potential for civil war in Israel, I think about those guys and the way more, I mean, jihadist isn't the right word, but the religious extremists.
[01:13:26]  And the ones that may have a different set of, I mean, I don't know, concerns.
[01:13:34]  Well, I mean, the direction that things are going seems to be that Netanyahu may be willing to abandon them and basically say, you know, okay, call my bluff.
[01:13:47]  Because if they actually, so they are threatening to break up the government at risk of walking.
[01:13:55]  Like, you know, they're demanding X, Y, and Z, mostly just that the war continues.
[01:14:01]  I mean, they want to resettle Gaza, but I don't think anyone seriously thinks that's going to happen.
[01:14:05]  But they're demanding that the war continue.
[01:14:07]  And if Netanyahu ends the war, then they will walk from the government.
[01:14:13]  I don't know if they would actually do that, but my understanding is that if they did do that, they would be out of power.
[01:14:19]  Yeah, they would just be done.
[01:14:22]  And it might not even kill Netanyahu if he's able to form a new government with Lapid.
[01:14:26]  And I don't know what is happening behind the scenes.
[01:14:29]  I don't know what the Americans are promising him.
[01:14:31]  I know that a lot of forces are leaning on him to take the deal.
[01:14:34]  And probably the way to do that would be to give him some off-ramps politically if he abandons the right, because that's the fracture that is really pushing him or pulling him away from the deal.
[01:14:47]  Right now, it seems like what he's trying to do is hold his house together by like, okay, so there's this crazy thing happening in the ceasefire negotiations right now, where there is a written agreement.
[01:15:00]  It has been transmitted to Hamas by the war cabinet.
[01:15:05]  We don't know like the full details of it, but it is the three-phase proposal that Hamas introduced back in February.
[01:15:15]  And what Netanyahu, so what the Americans are saying about the deal and are like, this is their big PR campaign is like, this is a ceasefire deal.
[01:15:24]  Hamas, like, you need to accept it because it's a ceasefire deal.
[01:15:27]  And Netanyahu is saying, he's screaming from, you know, from, you know, at the top of his lungs, he's saying, like, I don't want to honor this agreement.
[01:15:38]  Like, I only want to do the first phase of this so that we can get some of the hostages back and then keep the war going.
[01:15:46]  And I don't know if that is his intention or if that is him signaling to the right wing of his coalition.
[01:15:55]  But what's clear is that it is true that if you don't have guarantees, why would Hamas take Israel at its word when Netanyahu is out there saying, I'm not going to honor this,
[01:16:09]  and the United States is like doing this stupid PR thing where they're not actually making any public assurances or guarantees or addressing the fact that Israel is denying that there are these binding obligations under this and that they're going to follow them.
[01:16:27]  So if you're Hamas and you're looking at Netanyahu saying, I only want to honor the beginning of this deal and not the rest of it.
[01:16:33]  And America is not acknowledging that and not saying, no, we will do X, Y, and Z if you don't move past the beginning of this deal, it's not really in Hamas's interest to accept it.
[01:16:44]  Because, I mean, if Hamas was really losing on the battlefield and a 45-day ceasefire or whatever, you know, the phase one of it is was critical to them to be able to regroup and figure out their battle strategy or whatever, maybe it's worth it.
[01:17:06]  But they don't have that many hostages left, right?
[01:17:08]  They already traded back 100 in November, and a lot of them are dying.
[01:17:13]  Well, but it's more of a political weapon.
[01:17:15]  I mean, or like both domestically and in the U.S., the issue of the hostages is like an incredible political weapon and discursive weapon.
[01:17:23]  Yeah, so if you're Hamas, you're like, okay, this war, this ends by us trading these hostages for our prisoners and for the war to end.
[01:17:34]  And if they are not in a tough, if they are still doing okay on the battlefield, the longer that they wait, the more political pressure there is from the international community on Israel, the more people are demanding that the war ends.
[01:17:50]  And also the political pressure to bring the hostages home goes up as well.
[01:17:54]  So it's a very dark calculation, but it is the case that, and this is the strategy, you know, as you're saying, right, this is this kind of like protracted fight, wait until the pressure is too much and Israel starts to crumble under the weight of all these contradictions and the weight of all of these forces.
[01:18:15]  If Hamas is saying we're actually doing okay on the battlefield, then it's not really in their interest to take a deal that's only going to be this political lifeline to Netanyahu and it doesn't give them that much strategic advantage.
[01:18:29]  So they really need the whole thing.
[01:18:31]  They really need the whole thing.
[01:18:33]  And the U.S. is saying to the public, this is the whole thing.
[01:18:37]  These are interdependent phases.
[01:18:39]  Like, you know, the ceasefire will continue so long as there's negotiations.
[01:18:43]  But they need hard guarantees because there's no reason to take the U.S.'s word on anything.
[01:18:47]  Yeah, because Israel is just saying we're going to do a la carte, first part, forget the second parts of it, second and third parts.
[01:18:52]  That's what Netanyahu is saying publicly.
[01:18:54]  Because if he doesn't say that, right, for example, imagine what he's not saying publicly.
[01:18:59]  If he doesn't say that, then he runs the risk of the right wing of his cabinet.
[01:19:08]  I mean, it's funny.
[01:19:09]  I think of the two right-wing guys in his cabinet.
[01:19:12]  Because they're also, it wasn't, no, I don't think they were sanctioned, but like people connected to them were sanctioned by the U.S. Remember when Biden did like six sanctions, and I think they only actually ended up doing three, maybe against like some really crazy Israelis or whatever.
[01:19:29]  Meanwhile, it's, it's perfectly legal to have, um, I don't know about perfectly legal, but there are like, uh, 5013Cs that like you can fund these people with, um, in America.
[01:19:42]  But, uh, I think of them as- Special shout out to the Not on Our Dime Act in the state of New York, which is trying to target those charities and take away their tax exempt status.
[01:19:50]  Oh, yeah.
[01:19:51]  Yeah.
[01:19:51]  I was just reading about that.
[01:19:54]  They're kind of Netanyahu's Netanyahu, though, right?
[01:19:56]  Like if Netanyahu is the scapegoat for liberal Zionists or for really just Zionists who can sort of see things clearly and want the state of Israel to continue apace, if he's sort of the off-ramp of like, getting rid of him, lets us kind of renew a little bit, they're kind of his off-ramp for like, all right, I'm taking a new tact.
[01:20:15]  And like, actually, it's all good.
[01:20:17]  And so, yeah, I could imagine that behind the scenes here, there probably are some maybe some other negotiations going on that are sponsored by the U.S. within Israel trying to figure out a new political alignment here because it's obvious that he is driving that country into the ground.

=== Screams Without Words (03:42) ===

[01:20:34]  And it's funny because you hear people talk about it in this way, like liberal Zionists in America talk about how Netanyahu is this like unique evil that like I'm really unsure of what would be different in really any major way with any other major political figure in Israel in power in terms of like what's going on.
[01:20:57]  It's just because he's a recognizable personality and people like know him well.
[01:21:01]  Is it because he didn't like Obama?
[01:21:02]  No, I mean I think it's just like people, he's become a like character that people can easily identify as like I don't think I think you're totally right that it wouldn't be that different if it was like someone else.
[01:21:18]  But there's this like, I don't know, I think that he's, I don't know, I think that he himself, like his political character is like almost cartoonish.
[01:21:28]  Well, but I do think the one big difference is that like he has a vested interest in a crisis continuing as long as possible.
[01:21:35]  So like Netanyahu also has, beyond whatever like political principles are at play with him, he also has the principles of like Netanyahu because like he really does need to be in power.
[01:21:47]  And I think people recognize that to a certain extent and also are extremely averse to personal corruption.
[01:21:53]  Yeah.
[01:21:54]  And so that is definitely the motivating factor behind why Israelis hate Netanyahu so much.
[01:22:00]  Definitely not.
[01:22:01]  It's not about his hawkishness.
[01:22:04]  In fact, he may even be less hawkish than some of the other alternatives.
[01:22:16]  Well, so what's, I mean, this is like, what happens now?
[01:22:22]  You know, I mean, we are in, what, the seventh month of this war?
[01:22:26]  80th month of this war?
[01:22:29]  With an end in sight, but who knows?
[01:22:31]  It's like one of those optical illusions of like, what's not actually an end.
[01:22:36]  Yeah.
[01:22:38]  And, and, but no, no clear end in sight.
[01:22:41]  Yeah.
[01:22:42]  Certainly.
[01:22:43]  Yeah.
[01:22:43]  And, you know, it has become a pretty major issue in the U.S. You know, you were, you went down last Saturday to D.C. for that, that, uh, that emergency protest, but there is, despite, you know, the best efforts of such vaunted and hallowed institutions as the free press, Bill Ackman's Twitter account, and a network of shadowy dark money lobby-connected organizations on campuses.
[01:23:12]  I'm not doing a trope.
[01:23:14]  It's just, it's, well, no, that is a trope, but it's true.
[01:23:17]  Well, the truth is tropish.
[01:23:19]  What can you say?
[01:23:20]  But this is not a popular thing that's going on here.
[01:23:25]  Nobody likes it.
[01:23:27]  In fact, it seems like it's becoming less popular, which I'm actually surprised by.
[01:23:31]  I would have thought they would have found some like some way to hook people and to be like, but it's really hard to argue with a picture of a headless baby.
[01:23:39]  It's really social media.
[01:23:40]  You can't fight it.
[01:23:41]  The images coming out and everyone's seeing it.
[01:23:44]  It just, they can't fight it.
[01:23:46]  Yeah, they really, it's difficult for them.
[01:23:50]  And my prediction was that they were going to start showing Screams Without Words in more public places.
[01:23:55]  Like they were going to start screening it at like parks on movie nights or whatever.
[01:23:59]  Wait, did you just make up a movie out of the New York Times?
[01:24:03]  Yes.
[01:24:04]  I did.
[01:24:05]  I did.
[01:24:05]  I forgot that.
[01:24:06]  I always say, I've just started saying screams without words to describe everything like that.
[01:24:11]  You're talking about the secret, the secret movie they made, right?
[01:24:16]  Right, right, right.

=== Secret Movie Screening (09:20) ===

[01:24:17]  They were screening in the 47-minute secret movie that they made.
[01:24:19]  I bet it's called like 47 minutes.
[01:24:21]  It's got a period at the end of it.
[01:24:24]  But yeah, you're right.
[01:24:27]  Not Screams Without Words, which is also not having another bad month for that article.
[01:24:33]  But none of their shit's working, right?
[01:24:35]  They're trying to do this.
[01:24:37]  They're on their third aborted, like trying to meet to Hamas movement.
[01:24:42]  It's just not, it's more unpopular than ever, Israel.
[01:24:47]  But Biden is now, it's kind of coming down to the wire for him.
[01:24:51]  And we're getting closer and closer to the election.
[01:24:54]  I have no idea how much this will affect him.
[01:25:00]  I'll be real.
[01:25:02]  I could not think of something besides Joe Biden personally writing me a substantial personal check that would make me vote for him for president.
[01:25:11]  But I do think this will affect the election in some ways, regardless of whether how many people actually don't vote for Joe Biden because of this.
[01:25:19]  But it's just like, it's one of those things where it'll be easy for Trump to hammer him on because Trump takes every position at all times on things, even though he's like insanely pro-Israel.
[01:25:27]  His fucking son-in-law is fucking Jared Kushner.
[01:25:33]  He'll somehow be able to use this to bash Biden.
[01:25:38]  I think that we're at a point now where like the U.S. is kind of in a fucking real bind with this shit.
[01:25:43]  And I'm really curious as to what you might think that the U.S.'s next moves with this will be.
[01:25:49]  So I think my guess is that the U.S. will continue to try and use both a carrot and a stick approach to Netanyahu himself to pressure him into doing what they want to do.
[01:26:05]  Because while they have the coup option, and I think that there's like one understanding of the Gantz thing, like his departure from the government and, you know, move to being an opposition candidate as U.S. inspired.
[01:26:21]  So there is like, okay, we're going to depose Netanyahu and install some other leader.
[01:26:26]  That takes a long time.
[01:26:27]  And it's going to take basically until the election because it just takes a while for even if you have someone leaving the government, then there's attempts.
[01:26:36]  I don't know a ton about Israeli politics, but my understanding is that there can be some attempts to reform the government.
[01:26:41]  And then if there's elections, it takes several months to set them up.
[01:26:45]  So if that is the case and you have like a lame duck Netanyahu who's, you know, like that's not a good situation for the United States to be able to do that.
[01:26:53]  The least lame duck of all.
[01:26:55]  Right.
[01:26:56]  So lame duck with a bunch of guns shooting at us.
[01:26:58]  I like it.
[01:26:59]  So if the Americans want to wrap this up in any kind of short order, and I do still, despite what they are doing publicly, again, for the reasons I've outlined, I think it's in their interest to do so and we'll continue to try and do so.
[01:27:16]  They need to compel Netanyahu himself to do this.
[01:27:20]  And so I think they will continue to use the carrot and the stick approach and the stick being escalating their what they will allow diplomatically.
[01:27:30]  So, you know, the UN Security Council resolution is one example of it.
[01:27:35]  The Gantt's kind of slow-motion coup is another thing of saying, like, if you don't do what we want, then we will facilitate your ouster, even if it is on a longer timeline than we want.
[01:27:48]  And then there's Karrots, right?
[01:27:50]  You know, try and give him an exit route.
[01:27:53]  Try to wean him off of the right wing of his coalition.
[01:27:57]  Foster some connection with the centrist such that he can stay in power if he plays his cards right.
[01:28:04]  And also signal to him that you won't be a priah for us, right?
[01:28:07]  I think that's what the Congress.
[01:28:08]  Resettle him in Miami.
[01:28:09]  Yeah.
[01:28:10]  I think that that's what the invitation to speak at Congress is about.
[01:28:14]  Yeah.
[01:28:15]  Is about saying, like, look, if you do what we want you to do, then, you know, yeah, sure, there may be an ICC warrant out for your arrest and you can't go to Europe, but you will always be welcome in the red, white, and blue, right?
[01:28:29]  I don't know what happens if it fuck if it fails.
[01:28:33]  Like, I don't know what happens if something happens with Egypt.
[01:28:39]  I don't know what happens if, as it looks like things are marching towards the Israelis start a war against Lebanon at the end of the summer or in the beginning of the fall and try and drag the United States into it.
[01:28:52]  I have no fucking idea.
[01:28:53]  I'm terrified.
[01:28:54]  I mean, that's the thing is, like, that's one thing we've talked about, you know, how it's always people's interest to do it or not to do it.
[01:29:00]  But the reality is of if it happens, it could be a genuinely really wide-ranging war involving a number of different groups and countries, including our own.
[01:29:11]  I was in a direct way, as opposed to some of the covert direct, but mostly technically indirect.
[01:29:17]  It wouldn't be a proxy war like we've seen on other continents or in other arenas.
[01:29:22]  Yeah, Hezbollah might add a few more Marines to their tally.
[01:29:26]  Yeah.
[01:29:28]  I was in Istanbul when the long-anticipated Iran response to the embassy strike.
[01:29:34]  It was actually my first night in Istanbul.
[01:29:37]  I got there.
[01:29:38]  I'm like, it was actually so funny.
[01:29:41]  I was meeting up with a friend who lives there, and he was taking me to a Passover Seder that a bunch of international journalists had set up.
[01:29:51]  And we're like sitting in whatever wine.
[01:29:55]  It's like going through the Seder and then immediately everyone is getting texts and is scrolling through Twitter because Iran has launched hundreds of drones at Israel.
[01:30:07]  And we're all like, oh, fuck.
[01:30:09]  Is this going to be it?
[01:30:11]  I mean, this is a direct engagement.
[01:30:13]  Are we about to be in the middle of a regional war that's starting now?
[01:30:19]  Of course, went to sleep, scared as fuck, woke up in the morning, saw the news, and was like, okay, it was a pretty, it's a pretty impressive measured response.
[01:30:29]  And looks like U.S. had Israel under control.
[01:30:32]  But yeah, I mean, there was a moment where I was just totally terrified, not just for my personal safety, because I was like, I'm supposed to get on a boat and go towards Gaza right now.
[01:30:41]  But also because, like, what the fuck?
[01:30:43]  You know, is Israel and Iran in a war together?
[01:30:46]  And the thing is that Iran would smoke Israel in a war.
[01:30:49]  Yeah.
[01:30:50]  Do you think so?
[01:30:50]  Yes.
[01:30:51]  Iran is a big country with a powerful military.
[01:30:53]  Israel is, Israel is an advanced military, but they are small.
[01:30:59]  I don't think that they have the manpower.
[01:31:01]  I think that they, I think that they, but I do think that it would drag the United States.
[01:31:07]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[01:31:08]  And so I'm not saying that they would, I'm not saying, I'm saying that they would get smoked if they were trying to fight Iran by themselves.
[01:31:12]  Yeah, well, I guess my thing is there was like they would definitely be some fleet stuff with the U.S.
[01:31:19]  Yeah.
[01:31:19]  I mean, I think both countries would have a little bit of a hard time actually fighting each other due to their being far from each other.
[01:31:27]  And like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what Syria and Iraq would do, but I mean, who knows?
[01:31:34]  But yeah, I don't know.
[01:31:36]  I mean, I have no idea.
[01:31:39]  Because now I'm like, God, it seems like everyone's military kind of fucking sucks.
[01:31:44]  Like, I mean, no disrespect, but I thought Russian Ukraini would be a lot, both of them would be a lot better than they are.
[01:31:50]  They're getting a little better now, but like, I have no idea.
[01:31:54]  But I think there would be a lot of fucking destruction.
[01:31:57]  I mean, I don't think that Israel could win.
[01:31:59]  What are they going to do?
[01:32:00]  Invade Iran?
[01:32:00]  Right, right.
[01:32:01]  Like, that's not going to happen, you know?
[01:32:04]  Get 500 of LA's most insane second generation diaspora of people to come back and start their own battalion that is made up of 90% lip filler.
[01:32:17]  No disrespect, though.
[01:32:19]  You look beautiful.
[01:32:20]  Man and women.
[01:32:22]  But yeah, I mean, it's just, it was, yeah, I didn't think that.
[01:32:27]  I thought that just judging from the response of like when the U.S. and Israel assassinated Soleimani, I just, I don't think that, like, when they launched those, those, like, the drone attack and stuff, I was like, this is going to be like, this is, this is going to be measured.
[01:32:44]  It's not going to be crazy.
[01:32:47]  And I think that Israel, I think, knows that like they might want to fight Hezbollah and Iran through Hezbollah, but like they can't.
[01:32:56]  They have the same shitty capability.
[01:32:57]  You know, like they, they can't fucking, it's far.
[01:32:59]  Yeah.
[01:32:59]  You know?
[01:33:01]  It's over a completely unfriendly territory.
[01:33:03]  I think that they, yes, I completely agree with you.
[01:33:06]  And I also think that Israel, if they do invade Lebanon, which it looks like they will, are going to try and do a relatively quick operation where they successfully push Hezbollah north, you know, eliminate the buffer zone that Hezbollah has created in northern Israel.
[01:33:26]  And, you know, maybe they draw in U.S. support for a quick operation and then, you know, and then they're done with it.
[01:33:33]  The problem, though, is that, you know, you start a war like that and things can escalate.

=== Hosier's Line-Up (07:04) ===

[01:33:38]  Yeah.
[01:33:38]  And it is really, really playing with fire.
[01:33:42]  And, you know, Israel's assessment of how things would go in Gaza are not like this.
[01:33:47]  So they may end up in some protracted conflict.
[01:33:50]  They may defer the need for a victory, not get the victory they're looking for in Hezbollah and need to expand.
[01:33:57]  Like, there's just, I mean, it's impossible to predict, but it's a very dangerous and messy situation.
[01:34:08]  Well, any last words?
[01:34:11]  Nope.
[01:34:11]  Thanks for having me.
[01:34:12]  Free time.
[01:34:12]  Thank you for coming on.
[01:34:14]  Yeah, thanks so much for this.
[01:34:15]  It's been great.
[01:34:16]  This has been Dylan Saba.
[01:34:18]  You can find his work at the motherfucking courthouse because he's a lawyer.
[01:34:22]  That's right.
[01:34:23]  An attorney.
[01:34:23]  An attorney.
[01:34:24]  And a barrister.
[01:34:26]  And a judge, but not of the law.
[01:34:40]  I just got Hozier stuck in my head.
[01:34:42]  Hosier?
[01:34:43]  Just immediately, I like, we like cut from a little, you know, behind the curtain.
[01:34:50]  We just did the intro, then we cut, and then immediately my brain went, take me to church with you, because now we're back in, and I've been saying this for a long time.
[01:35:02]  I just want to be clear, I've been saying this for a long time, but since we are back in the great years of 2012 to 2014, we need to, we need to welcome back Hosier.
[01:35:14]  Hosier works for us, Liz.
[01:35:16]  A lot of people don't understand this.
[01:35:18]  Hosier did not have a really successful career after taking me to church, I assume.
[01:35:22]  And a few years ago, when we started doing merch more seriously, we obviously looked on like sub-minimum wage kind of message boards to try to find someone who works for us in a leftist style manner.
[01:35:37]  And first person to respond on Facebook was a gentleman named Hosier.
[01:35:42]  And so Hosier lives in our new studio.
[01:35:44]  Yeah, we got a loft.
[01:35:45]  Well, he doesn't live in the loft, but he lives below the loft, which shelters him from the open roof floor plan that Liz designed here, which is where she just removed the roof to the studio because she thought it felt us, gave us better connection to God.
[01:35:57]  Yeah.
[01:35:57]  Or she calls it Yahweh.
[01:36:00]  And Hosier lives down there.
[01:36:02]  And the thing is, I don't hit him.
[01:36:04]  I want to make that very clear.
[01:36:05]  I never laid a motherfucking finger on Hosier.
[01:36:08]  Whatever they tell you in the future, I didn't touch him.
[01:36:12]  Liz beats him like you would never believe.
[01:36:15]  I walk in here, she has oranges.
[01:36:20]  Close the door.
[01:36:21]  I'm like, she'll be done in an hour.
[01:36:22]  Come back in, borrow soap.
[01:36:26]  Come back in.
[01:36:26]  She's doing mock executions to him.
[01:36:28]  Well, who's good cop back up now?
[01:36:30]  It's true, but you know what?
[01:36:31]  He works like a motherfucker.
[01:36:32]  He's great.
[01:36:32]  If only he put this much effort into his musical career.
[01:36:36]  Maybe he'd have more to talk about.
[01:36:37]  Poor Hosher.
[01:36:38]  Take me to church.
[01:36:40]  I think there's Hosher people are big Hosher fans.
[01:36:43]  Now?
[01:36:43]  I think that he's got a little stand army.
[01:36:45]  Really?
[01:36:47]  What other songs does he have?
[01:36:49]  I saw a huge line at some venue in the city a while back and then later found out it was for Hosher.
[01:36:54]  For Hosher?
[01:36:55]  Teenagers.
[01:36:55]  I'm going to be honest, I have no idea what genre or what area or time period that was.
[01:37:03]  What genre is Take Me to Church?
[01:37:05]  It's Take Me to Church.
[01:37:06]  It's a kind of band and I got to change.
[01:37:08]  It's like a big anthem.
[01:37:11]  It's car commercial music.
[01:37:12]  I'm sorry, right?
[01:37:13]  No.
[01:37:14]  That's not car commercial music.
[01:37:15]  Yes, there was that whole time period from like 2012 to 2014 when everyone just made car commercial music.
[01:37:21]  Gospel pop.
[01:37:22]  Oh, it's gospel pop.
[01:37:24]  That's not a name.
[01:37:25]  Just because it has church in the name.
[01:37:27]  Take me to church.
[01:37:28]  Lotta band.
[01:37:29]  You know what?
[01:37:30]  Israel should make their own version of that.
[01:37:32]  They, what?
[01:37:33]  Wait, no, there's one good.
[01:37:35]  Take me to shoe.
[01:37:36]  I was thinking that earlier.
[01:37:38]  You know, it's funny.
[01:37:39]  When I was growing up, there was one Israeli punk band called Matsu Hashu.
[01:37:44]  No, no, he was a rapper.
[01:37:46]  What was this?
[01:37:46]  What were they called?
[01:37:47]  I want to say, it wasn't.
[01:37:48]  What was it?
[01:37:49]  They were called Useless ID, and they were just like one of the kind of like a no-effect style band.
[01:37:53]  Horrible.
[01:37:54]  But then I was like, grew up later, and I was like, that's crazy.
[01:37:56]  There's just like no music.
[01:37:59]  The one band I like is, I mean, Charlie McGeira, he's got some albums.
[01:38:03]  He killed himself.
[01:38:04]  Got some albums, but I think he mostly lived in Berlin.
[01:38:07]  And yeah, I got really not a lot of shit out of there.
[01:38:12]  Leonard Cohen, of course.
[01:38:14]  What did he go and sing in?
[01:38:16]  Yeah, sitting for the IDF and the Sinai.
[01:38:18]  But Madis Yahoo is, I believe, American.
[01:38:21]  He's not Israel.
[01:38:22]  He's just Jewish, Liz.
[01:38:25]  But he is not, as many people have discovered due to his political activism in the wake of October 7th.
[01:38:31]  He is no longer Orthodox and now resembles a mixture of both Cheech and Chong.
[01:38:38]  But it is an interesting look.
[01:38:41]  He looks 200 years old.
[01:38:43]  Okay.
[01:38:44]  Like, it is, whatever Dorian Gray shit happened to him after he cut off the motherfucking side locks, he is, he is a, God was like, you fucked up, bro.
[01:38:54]  You took that motherfucking kippah off.
[01:38:56]  I see the top of your head, and that hair is now white.
[01:38:59]  That's why I always wear mine.
[01:39:01]  Yeah.
[01:39:02]  You're not wearing them now.
[01:39:03]  I know, because around someone like you, Liz, a kippah is a target.
[01:39:07]  You could stop with the joke of me being anti-Semitic is not going to let me.
[01:39:13]  Liz views my Liz, when Liz sees me wearing the Yamaka, like, because I come into the year and I, I, I'm like, oh, I think I'm alone.
[01:39:20]  It's okay.
[01:39:21]  Can be, I can have my religious customs, but I walk into the fuck up.
[01:39:27]  Liz, Liz sees, I can see Liz forms a targeting reticles in both of her eyeballs down there.
[01:39:33]  Focus on me.
[01:39:34]  You can see him we're putting on the tefillin and he busts it off.
[01:39:37]  Yeah, Liz tried to garot me with the tefillin.
[01:39:40]  I don't know what that means.
[01:39:43]  You don't, and that's why it's so fucked up that you disrespect it like that.
[01:39:47]  Liz, Liz thinks, Liz, Liz thinks the mitzvah tank is something that they're gonna drown us in.
[01:39:53]  The mitzvah tank?
[01:39:55]  The mikvah.
[01:39:56]  Oh, the mikvah.
[01:39:57]  Who said it wrong now?
[01:39:58]  You're right.
[01:40:01]  It is a large truck that they drive around.
[01:40:05]  I've never actually seen them put it into use, but it's not a real tank.
[01:40:10]  Although I don't really know what version of tank they're talking about there.
[01:40:15]  Anyways, but Liz will never know.
[01:40:17]  I mean, I'm glad we have a tank if someone like you is around.
[01:40:20]  Okay.
[01:40:21]  I'm just kidding.
[01:40:22]  She loves Jewish people.
[01:40:25]  Except for me.
[01:40:27]  My name is Liz.
[01:40:28]  My name is Bryce.
[01:40:29]  Or was maybe after this.
[01:40:31]  R.I.P. to me.
[01:40:32]  And we have, of course, with us, formerly alive, now probably by the time you're hearing this, also deceased Young Chomsky, the producer of this podcast, which is called True Anon.
[01:40:41]  We'll see you next time.
[01:40:42]  Bye-bye.