| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| There's a lot going on in the world right now, but if you're on social media, and of course you are, because it's really America's only remaining news source, you know, there's only one story going on, and it's Israel. | ||
| Everyone online is arguing about Israel. | ||
| And really, they fall into one of two camps, generally speaking. | ||
| So, probably the more aggressive side are the deranged Taliban-level ethno-narcissists who are telling you that any criticism of the secular government of Israel is tantamount to blood libel against the Jewish people. | ||
| And if you think that maybe it was not a great idea to arm Joseph Stalin, the greatest murderer in history, then you're a Holocaust denier. | ||
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unidentified
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Shut up. | |
| And then on the other side, a group every bit as obsessed with Jews are the people who hate Jews who are telling you that anyone who's Jewish is bad by virtue of being Jewish. | ||
| It's a blood thing. | ||
| Two things are interesting. | ||
| One, there are very few kind of conventional Christian voices saying, wait a second, this is a secular government, another country, and it has probably nothing to do with my religion or anybody's religion. | ||
| And we should never judge people on the basis of their immutable qualities because guilt and virtue are not passed down genetically. | ||
| But almost no one is saying that. | ||
| So you really have the ethno-narcissists and the anti-Semites, and they're at war with each other. | ||
| That's the online picture. | ||
| What's even more interesting and maybe even more distressing is that in the U.S. government, the conversation, while much more muted, is a mirror of this in that a lot of the conversation is about Israel. | ||
| Israel, a tiny country in the Middle East. | ||
| Not critical to our national security, by the way. | ||
| But the conversation, the bandwidth is consumed by questions of Israel. | ||
| So wherever you stand on Israel, whether you're on one of the two sides just described or neither one of them, you know in your gut that this is bad. | ||
| If a country like ours, supposedly the most powerful in the world, is devoting all of its time internally to conversations about Israel, it's probably not going in a good direction. | ||
| There's probably a lot being neglected in favor of this very specific boutique conversation about this tiny little country. | ||
| It's just not good for anybody, including Israel, by the way. | ||
| So what's the antidote to this? | ||
| How do you fix it? | ||
| Here are four things you can do to make the conversation about Israel and the relationship with Israel a lot healthier than it currently is. | ||
| Here are the four. | ||
| The first is get some global perspective on what we're talking about. | ||
| The United States is a nation of 350 million people. | ||
| It has some of the deepest natural resources in the world. | ||
| That would include energy and water, agricultural products. | ||
| The United States, however it's managed, is a powerhouse globally and always will be because its strength is inherent. | ||
| It's a huge, decisive country in the scope of world history. | ||
| The United States makes things happen. | ||
| Israel is not an insult, merely an observation. | ||
| By contrast, it is a tiny and inherently insignificant country, at least geopolitically, in that it has only 9 million people and no natural resources, no meaningful natural resources. | ||
| So it is insignificant. | ||
| It is also physically tiny. | ||
| It's about the size of New Jersey, famously, but it has a much smaller GDP than New Jersey. | ||
| It is a much smaller economy than the state of New Jersey. | ||
| It has an economy about the size of the state of Arizona and almost one half the economy of the state of Massachusetts or Illinois. | ||
| It just doesn't really matter, actually. | ||
| If you're looking at a map and thinking through, you know, where does power politics go, Israel's not even on the list. | ||
| Again, it's tiny. | ||
| It's got the population of Burundi. | ||
| It's got a smaller population than Belgium. | ||
| Like, what is this anyway? | ||
| And yet, despite its objective insignificance, it is the focus of the conversation, but it's also the focus of the spending. | ||
| So right now, as we speak tonight, there are two FAD missile batteries in Israel. | ||
| That's one quarter of the world's total supply of FAAD missile batteries. | ||
| The FAAD missile battery is an American-made, very high-tech missile battery that takes incoming missiles out of the sky. | ||
| And one quarter of the world's entire supply of these is in Israel right now, manned by U.S. troops, by Americans, in uniform or not. | ||
| They are American military personnel, and they are manning these batteries to protect Israel. | ||
| And that shouldn't surprise you because since October 7th, 2023, which is a little less than two years ago, the United States has spent at minimum $30 billion defending Israel. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| And for some perspective, the entire Israeli military budget before October 7th was about $25 billion. | ||
| So the United States has put at least $30 billion into defending Israel in less than two years. | ||
| Over the course of its existence, a little less than 80 years, the United States has put 300 billion, at least, those are just the onbooks numbers, into supporting Israel. | ||
| $300 billion. | ||
| Israel is by far, no one comes close, the largest recipient of U.S. aid over time and currently. | ||
| So anyone who says, oh, it's just a drop in the bucket, it's totally insignificant, is lying or doesn't know the numbers. | ||
| By the way, number two is Egypt. | ||
| So why are we spending so much money on Egypt? | ||
| Well, we're doing it at the request of Israel. | ||
| So you could probably add that to the tally. | ||
| It's not an attack. | ||
| It's merely perspective. | ||
| We are spending our time, our money, and we're taking enormous risks on behalf of a country that geopolitically is not significant at all. | ||
| The interesting thing is, most Americans have no idea that this is true. | ||
| They don't know how disproportionate our attention to Israel and our spending on Israel is relative to the rest of the world. | ||
| And if you want some sense of how disproportionate, India and China combined, neither of which is a strong ally at the moment, combined represent more than a third of the entire world's population. | ||
| Both are rivals economically, both are rivals militarily, at least potentially. | ||
| And our relationship with them has gotten worse or has at the very least languished because of our relationship with Israel, because of the bandwidth consumed by tending to it, and also because of some of the inevitable conflicts that have arisen because of our support for Israel, which is engaged in an extremely controversial, which is to say hated war in Gaza, which is not even really a war. |