Tucker Carlson dissects October 7th as a calculated Sinwar strategy to force indefinite occupation, fueled by intelligence failures and alleged US-Qatari suitcase funding that kept Hamas dependent. He argues Netanyahu prioritizes an "image of victory" over regime change in Iran, while settler violence and demographic imbalances threaten Israel's long-term viability against a 50-50 Jewish-Palestinian reality. Ultimately, the analysis suggests a future of fragmented control where rendering territories uninhabitable replaces permanent occupation, leaving Israel isolated despite domestic normalcy and reliance on Trump's aggressive diplomacy. [Automatically generated summary]
I think to properly understand October the 7th, you have to put together kind of a timeline.
I think what's been lacking here, you know, I talk to a lot of Palestinians and they tell me a lot about how they portray the war as something that sort of began after October the 7th, which is another problem we can get to at some point.
The Israelis chalk it up to, you know, the act of a rabid anti Semite.
I have no doubt that he was quite possibly an anti Semite.
So, just to be clear about what you're saying so, from the Palestinian perspective, everything we're seeing now is a result of the events after October 7th.
And from the Israeli perspective, October 7th happened just because they're hated unreasonably.
Well, I guess what I often find is when I speak to Palestinians, and they're not wrong to say that the backdrop of all this is that there has been an occupation for a very long time.
You know, we've been occupied since 48, which I understand.
But it still doesn't explain the specifics of October the 7th.
And then you had over the next year or two, you might remember increased operations by the IDF.
Suddenly, in Nablus, which used to be called the terror capital of Palestine, suddenly there was a new militia that formed.
It's called Lion's Den.
Suddenly, in Jenin, the refugee camps in the north of the West Bank.
There are armed men doing military marches with M16s and masks on.
And that was the second order of business.
And the last thing that the Israelis believed was that Hamas firing some sort of like water pipe rockets into Israel was an indication of something to come, something much bigger to come.
They tossed them off rooftops, took control of Gaza.
And they came.
Why would people have wanted them?
Or why do they think that the Palestinians deserve them rather than the PA?
They were saying, We're a resistance group.
We're Palestinians.
We were exiled in 48.
And the whole purpose of our existence, in one way or another, is to get back.
And so, unlike the PA, we're not going to sit and make peace with the Jews.
We're not going to sort of like coordinate with them.
We're not going to arrest people at their behest.
We're going to fight.
And that's what they did from 2007 to 2014.
I think you have three to four ground invasions.
If I'm not mistaken.
And so they were doing kind of, they were fulfilling their promise.
They didn't win, they didn't liberate Palestine.
But what did happen is that Hamas didn't have a lot of political tension because they were either fighting, being bombed, or people were cleaning up the rebel.
But in 2014, just bear with me a moment, in 2014, suddenly silence falls upon Gaza.
I think this was a silence that, I don't know if Hamas even predicted this to silence, whatever.
Come upon Gaza.
The Israelis certainly wanted it.
It's the last war.
It's called Suketan in Hebrew.
It's the last war.
The Israelis, you know, bombed a bunch of tunnels.
There were some ground operations, lots of strikes.
And it was kind of this thing where they came and said, Look, we sent them back.
I think the quote from the general at the time was, We sent them back 50 years or 100 years to the Stone Age, whatever it was.
But that's a bit of a problem for Hamas.
You're a group of gritty, sort of nitty gritty resistance fighters.
You came to power.
You fought some wars, didn't win, but you didn't get totally beat.
And now you're just bureaucrats.
Now you have to go from grit to governance.
And that's fine, maybe for a year, maybe for two, because the next big battle is coming.
What happens three, four, five years later?
At some point, people are sitting there.
They have a much lower quality of life than people in the West Bank.
Palestinians in the West Bank, at the very least, can come into Israel for years and years and years, half of them illegally, and work, make an Israeli salary, go back home.
In Gaza, you know, they didn't have a whole lot going for them.
And I think at some point in time, maybe around 2018, it became clear that I think people were kind of starting to ask the question is like, what, okay, if we picked you and you're supposed to fight and now we're just eating shit here, we might as well get the PA back.
And you say that you don't sit down with the Jews and you don't recognize the Jews and you're not going to make peace with them.
But like you talk to them on a weekly basis, you just have some Egyptian guy in the middle playing telephone tag.
And I think that the leader of Hamas, I think Yahya Sinwar, I think he understood that.
I think around 2018, he began to understand that like this is not a sustainable, this is not something sustainable.
Look, in terms of the planning, if you're talking about the concrete steps, look, I'm not an intelligence analyst.
From what we know, I think from what was released, we understand that sometime in October 2022, it might have, the real planning could have been underway.
The conceptual planning for something of this sort, I think, had been working within Sinwar since he was probably a teenager.
I mean, there's a famous quote.
I think he did the interview in Hebrew, which is like all the more eerie.
It's a crazy interview.
And he's sitting on a plastic chair outside.
And they asked him something about, you know, do you want to kill us?
Do you want war with us?
And he goes, listen, right now, you're strong.
You've got nuclear bombs.
I can't, I can't, I can't touch you.
But in 20, maybe 15 years, you're going to be weak inside.
And that's when I'm going to strike you.
And in 2018, Yahya Sinwar gave an interview.
It's crazy because, you know, I think we were just talking about this before we started.
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic put out a piece called Sinwar's March of Folly.
So, I don't know if he was reporting to anyone, but he certainly believes, I would assume he believes, he wrote a whole essay on it, that this was all just rabid anti Semitism and a failed.
And the worst part about the piece is that he already determines the success.
He claims it's his march of folly, meaning he failed.
Not only was he stupid and did he have no logic whatsoever, but he failed.
And with him, all of his buddies, Hezbollah, Iran, they all failed.
In 2018, and this is a very important quote, there was an Italian journalist who's since left journalism, which is crazy to me, but she went out with a bang.
Francesca Baddi or something.
She did an interview with Yehia Sinwar in Gaza in 2018.
The interview was later published by YNET in a Hebrew paper.
And it's a fascinating bit.
This was, again, if we talk about the silence that came upon Gaza in 2014, this is at the height of the silence.
Which is, he didn't want them to take over Gaza, but I think he understood that if there were to be another war, it would be a disastrous war and that it would force Israel into a corner where they would have two options either we destroy this entire place andor we occupy Gaza.
But the problem is that the Israelis already occupied Gaza, they already tried it and they left, and they left for very good reasons.
It was economically taxing.
It was unsustainable.
Israeli soldiers could die.
There were RPG attacks on settlements.
And I think he understood that he would, in the next war, if there were to be a next war, put the Israelis in a position where they would be forced to grope around in the gray for a very, very long time, even if it would appear otherwise from inside, even if it could be sold to the population otherwise.
And along these lines, there is another quote, if you don't mind.
About a year.
Before October the 7th, don't quote me on this, but I think a year before October the 7th, Sinwar did a speech and he convened the leaders of his factions and various imams in Gaza.
And it's like, it's a pretty boring speech and he has no rhythm and he's screaming way too loud.
But there's one point that tons of people have cropped and isolated on Instagram.
And he has this line and he says, Wallah araha ra'ilain.
He goes by God.
I see it with the sight of my eyes.
A regional, religious war that will burn with it the green and the dry.
So you, it sounds like you think that in planning the attacks of October 7th, he saw the long game and understood that it would be hard for Israel to, to deal with those consequences over time.
I think, to put it a little more specifically, I think, I think Sinuat understood that the status quo that fell into place after 2014, this long silence, that it was poison for the Palestinian cause.
The notion of Palestinian resistance.
But if your cause is that Palestinians should just live, go to work, bring their bread home, then it's certainly antithetical to that.
I think he understood that this was poison.
And that if he continued on this way, what will the next generation say when they didn't grow up with any wars?
How long can you go on putting on marches for martyr children with cardboard tanks and fake RPGs?
How long can you go on convening your imams to talk about the day after?
Who's going to be the next imam of Al-Aqsa after we liberate Palestine?
How long can you go on with the, with the foaming platitudes?
It can't go on.
And the longer you let it go on, the weaker you get.
And I think he understood that one thing was certain.
You know, when you shake a snow globe, you can shake a shake a shake.
The flakes fly everywhere.
And the one thing of which you can be certain is that the flakes won't fall in the same place.
That's the one thing you can know.
And I think he understood that an attack like this, it's like it's the 9 11 of this conflict.
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So, I want to hear where you think that's going and why it is as dark as it's been in almost 80 years.
But back to October 7th itself.
Yeah, sure.
So, that was, you said you thought it was probably in the planning phases for at least a year.
It would have had to have been just given its scale, I would think.
I mean, there are people who probably know this better than I, but there was a document that circulated within Israeli intelligence called Death in the Jericho Wall.
There was an intelligence analyst, I believe she was a female, who sort of saw what was happening in Gaza, that there were certain military drills, certain speeches, and there was an indication that they were planning something really serious.
And the story goes that her higher ups, I think Roland Bergman reported on this, if I'm not mistaken.
The story goes that her higher ups basically said, like, yeah, yeah.
That's cute, but no, we don't.
It's like inadmissible trash.
You had also soldiers at the observation posts along the border who I don't know when exactly, I don't know if this was in the weeks or the months leading up to October the 7th, but that were reporting to their higher ups that like there are some strange little movements.
But what's strange to me is that I think it was in the week or two after Tzachia Negbi, who was like the equivalent to the head of Homeland Security, I guess, or the National Security Council, something like that in Israel, he came out and admitted that I think three to four hours before the attack, there, you know, certain intelligence officials and I think the general, like they convened.
There was a discussion.
It's not like they woke up at 6 30 a.m.
So, there was certainly something that happened among the highest echelons.
No, but there's a quote that circulated in Israeli media that apparently the general at the time got out of bed and his wife was sort of like, What's going on?
And he just apparently turned around and said, Gaza's going to be destroyed.
That's a quote that circulated around Israeli media.
I don't know at what time this happens.
Could have been at 6 29.
I doubt it though, because apparently the people were convened before.
One thing I'll say is that three weeks before October the 7th, I met with a journalist.
He's a British journalist.
And he'd come like a year and a half before.
And he was starting out fresh.
I don't think he knew Israel Palestine super well.
And I wanted to become a mainstream journalist at the time.
So, I thought he could help me.
Scratch each other's backs.
And we would talk a lot about what was going on.
And for about a year and a half, I was telling him that something's going to happen.
Like there's something weird that's going on.
And he'd listen to me and he'd help me out.
And about three weeks before October the 7th, we met for a beer in Jerusalem.
And that was the same day in which the Palestinians, I believe it was three weeks before, were doing these marches of return.
You know, when they flood the borders, they throw incendiary balloons, burn some fields, and wait for the Israelis to come back and be like, okay, what will it take you?
What's your price?
What will it take you to shut the fuck up?
And he asked me, he's like, why do you think this is happening?
And I remember distinctly looking at him and saying, I don't know.
Because after 2021 or 2022, I believe, Bennett, Naftali Bennett, um, lifted the permit, uh, what do you call it?
The permit ceiling, as it were, like the quota.
It's like some 20, 22,000 Gazans receives permits to come to Israel.
Um, after years of them not having any.
Um, and so usually they would do these sorts of antics to get something.
We want construction materials.
We want work permits.
We want something, but there was nothing really to ask for.
So he, when we said goodbye that day, I remember, I'll never forget this.
He looked at me and he said, you know, Ari, I think you're a really smart guy.
And I appreciate you've taught me a lot.
But I just think you've misunderstood this place.
I think you're a bit apocalyptic.
I looked at him and I said, Tom, I think you've spent a little too much time with the Israelis.
And so if I could have come to those conclusions with the limited amount of information I had, I'm sure there were many people within the intelligence establishment that had some idea.
Do I think that Bibi allowed 3,000 or 2,000 Hamas?
From an American perspective or the perspective of anyone who's visited that border, which I have, pretty secure border looks like the southern border.
So, how did that happen?
Does anyone, let me rephrase, has there been what you consider an honest and reliable accounting of how it happened?
Why something didn't happen between that meeting, which I've heard was between certain members of intelligence at maybe three in the morning, why there weren't drones that were put in the air or a helicopter or heightened alertness, like significantly heightened alertness, I don't know.
But what I have learned over many, many years in Israel is that you would be surprised by what people can get away with.
I know people in the West Bank who have fake Israeli IDs who slip in illegally and stolen Israeli cars to smoke hash with their friends on the other side and then go back.
When it wants to be competent, it's very competent.
I mean, if you ask yourself, for example, in Lebanon and Iran right now, how is it that they have thousands upon thousands of targets that are readily available?
Well, you can't flood the area with IDF because, look, you're talking about a lot of troops, especially for the holidays or maybe in the north, it might be two, three hours away.
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Once that happened, once those attacks happened, was it always inevitable the response?
Was Gaza always going to get leveled once that happened?
I think there's this myth that certainly circulates in the Arab world, but definitely here in America too, that there's a whole lot more strategy, that there's a whole lot more foresight in Israel.
So I know that the Israelis had zero this is a fact, they had zero plan, at least communicated to the United States, for what would happen after the Ayatollah was killed in Iran.
They didn't have a government in waiting or any kind of.
And that's since BB did the minimum he would have to do and still stopping short of actually determining a reality because then he would have to explain to the Israelis, why did I do X and not Y?
But I do think that Bibi and the administration and the IDF alongside probably have an idea where Gaza will, what they will do in Gaza if X happens with Iran, if Y happens with Lebanon.
So, um, Have you heard anybody articulate plans for, just to be totally clear on this, for moving the more than one, probably fewer than two million people in Gaza anywhere?
No, but I have something else that I don't think has ever been released, actually.
I was working with the Washington Post as of until they fired their whole foreign desk, as you saw.
And we were doing a lot of interviews on the day after, specifically reconstruction and trying to follow the money.
Because that's what Gaza is about right now.
It's all about money.
And it's not just American money or Israeli money.
It's the Gulf countries, it's Egypt.
The PA wants to get their finger in there as well.
And I confirm this with two, actually, quite possibly three sources, if I'm not mistaken.
And this might not end up being the case, but I understood that the center that was put together by the American army in Kiryat Gat to map out or sort of strategize about Gaza and assist the Israelis.
That they were making calls, that their lawyers were making calls to certain organizations to look into the status of private property in Gaza.
Basically, the thing, among many things, I heard that the plan was, like, have you ever seen the flyers that the Israelis drop in Gaza or the evacuation notices?
You have numbered blocks and those are private properties, right?
Now, if you have an entire swath of territory, entire neighborhoods that are upside down or backwards that no longer follow the logic of a grid, um, you can't expect that some Qatari or Saudi or whatever company is going to come in and rebuild Gaza identically to the way it was before.
So I heard that the plan was to have, To sort of like rotate, take a population from an area, move them away, build a massive complex, as it were.
Could be condominiums, could be apartments, I don't know what.
Um, and then move them back and continue doing this rotation for however long it takes.
What does that mean?
It means that you are fundamentally altering the, um, the, the urban planning and with the demography, uh, of, and private property of Gaza.
If you had, if you have a building on, on a swath of land, on a plot of land that used to have five to seven bits of private property, You have to reconfigure and you have to suspend that private property and create a new precedent.
I was told by someone very, very high up in the PA that this was intended, that there was going to be a suspension of private property for a period of maybe seven years.
Now, what does that mean?
It quite possibly, and this is the most cynical possible conclusion you could draw, it could mean that.
It could mean basically that Israel, look, in the West Bank, it's, it's sometimes Israel struggles to take certain parts of swaths of land or to build actual settlements.
Sometimes they'll have caravans in certain areas, but not houses.
And the reason is that to some degree, Israel's still beholden to Ottoman and Jordanian legal precedent.
Um, it's strange because he's not, I think his English is a little bad.
And so we don't hear from him a lot in the West, but he was a guy who went on three months before October the 7th and said, quote, there will be a massacre here.
This is a guy who was a general reserve general who also audited.
He was tasked with, I think, for many, many years auditing troops.
He worked for the IDF audit, meaning he would go between fronts, between units, and assess troop readiness, routines, equipment.
He knew the IDF inside and out, and he worked under several generals leading up to October the 7th.
And for years, he was screaming that we are not really ready for anything.
And we're cutting our ground troops because we want to be a compact, technologically adept army.
But we're basically rendering ourselves naked on the ground.
And he went down to the Gaza border and he sees that basically the soldiers treat it like summer camp.
You have girls and, you know, doing TikTok videos.
It's like summer camp.
It reached a point again, back to the status quo, where Israelis genuinely believed that the conflict was kind of over.
This is just, it's going to be this way.
There's going to be a big wall.
They're going to be there.
We're going to be here.
And I sat with him a lot about a year ago.
And he was telling me that he was getting calls from a lot of soldiers who work in the tunnel units.
And I spoke to several soldiers who either worked in the tunnels or were guarding, tasked with guarding them, supervising the work, that there was tons left.
Tons left.
He said, this general said 75%.
I don't know if that's definitely true.
But I heard from a lot of soldiers that the material used to totally destroy tunnels is very expensive and perhaps in short supply.
And so a lot of what was happening was sort of sealing the tunnels.
You pour concrete inside.
And it just takes probably some dudes, however many days later, to come and undo the concrete, break the concrete.
And I also heard from soldiers that Hamas was repairing tunnels during the war.
In the midst of fighting, there were tunnels that were being, or shafts that were being repaired.
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There was a big debate in this country about whether or not the Israeli government sent money, not its own money, but the money of the United States and Qatar to Hamas, whether Netanyahu did that.
And then it seemed to have been confirmed.
Will you tell us what you know about that and what the motive was?
So, from thousands of miles away, it seems like Israel seems like a pretty tough project to keep going over generations because of the numbers, just tiny countries surrounded by people who don't like it or recognize its legitimacy, some of whom are motivated to do harm.
So, that's like.
That's not a good ratio over time.
It's hard to maintain that.
It's like, in the Israeli perspective, do people ever think of that?
And if you look at the numbers, so like how many Jews are there in Israel?
I think there's seven, seven, something like that.
You have two million Palestinians who have citizenship.
I think the proper calculation is within the area under control, under Israeli control, what's the population divide?
And at that point, you have 50-50.
If you take West, the West Bank, where there are also Jews living, but also Gaza, because these are all areas that are, that impinge upon Israel and which are under Israeli control tacitly or, or actually, you have seven million Palestinians, two in Israel, three in the West Bank, two in Gaza.
So seven, you have seven million Jews.
It's halved right now.
It's split half-half.
Demographically speaking, that is a problem.
Do I think that will be what brings Israel to its knees if it is ever brought to its knees?
I was thinking more of the macro demographic problem of the Arab world, the Muslim world, almost 2 billion.
So when I hear Netanyahu say we're fighting a seven-front war, whatever number of fronts it was, seven fronts recently, I think you don't have the economy, you don't have the manpower, and you no longer have the goodwill.
To sustain that for very long at all.
Like ultimately, if you have enough enemies and there's too few of you and enough of them, you're going to lose.
I believe that in some dim recess, it might not actually be an active strategy, but I do believe that in some dim recess, Israel would like civil war in Lebanon.
Because between you and me, if I'm being totally honest, the only way to deal with Hezbollah, Hezbollah is not just a paramilitary group.
They are demographically entrenched in the country.
They are South Lebanon and they are the Shiite population that was also oppressed for a very long time.
I think the big weak point of Israel, I think sometimes when you look strategically around the surrounding countries, there's another point here, which is Israel on the interior, Israel psychologically, the Israeli psyche.
If anything brings Israel to its knees, which doesn't mean it will be exterminated or extinguished, that it will die as a state.
But the thing that will fundamentally shatter the foundation, either to end the country or to start a fresh status quo for the country, um, it will be internal.
Well, kind of to say, this is so often overlooked.
Yeah.
The only real genocides in history was the Romans in 70 AD in Jerusalem.
And one of the reasons that they were able, that siege was successful, is because of the almost unbelievably barbaric fighting between Jewish factions within Jerusalem.
Like the Romans got through because the defenders were fighting each other.
I just think that's also another principle.
It's like if you destroy, if you don't have a unified country, you're much weaker than you think you are, I guess.
Um, he talked about scraping away at Lebanon, which is fine if you're Bibi or if you want to be with Bibi, that's the doctrine.
Um, but you have this thing within the Israeli opposition that Bibi has put them in a corner that over the course of the war, they have had no choice but to parrot his speech, to use his language.
No, that's certainly what it seems like looking from the outside.
Can I ask though about the, I mean, again, this is an outsider's perspective, non Hebrew speaking perspective, but it seems like the core division is religious, non religious.
Or it has been.
Is that still true?
Where is that?
The idea that, you know, a certain percentage of the country doesn't serve, doesn't participate meaningfully in the economy, and there's deep resentment toward them by people who do.
But again, I don't think if you'd permit me to go back to something else, I think you were mentioning the Romans, and it reminds of exile.
And I think what you see in the West Bank, if you're talking about long term, In the darkest depths of the Israeli psyche, what is going to affect the longevity of the country?
It's the interplay, the psychological interplay between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
It manifests itself most in the West Bank because in Tel Aviv, you know, you have like a bunch of schmucky lifestyle yuppies in Tel Aviv who just want to forget.
Tel Aviv is the subconscious of the subconscious of Israel.
But the West Bank is where the complexes at the bottom of the Israeli psyche play out.
And so.
At the end of the day, you have a strange problem, which is that the Israelis come back, the Jews come back after two to three thousand years as, you know, they were exiles.
We don't have to debate when exactly how many years.
Um, but what happens is you have people who have a kind of, not a native right, but a kind of native claim, who come back in colonial costume.
There's a reason why the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jews is different than that between the Palestinians and the British and the Ottomans.
Because Ottomans never came and said, like, this is our homeland.
We're coming back now.
It's all ours.
Nor did the British.
That's what the Israelis did.
That's what the Jews did.
Um, and again, I don't want to debate sort of like what is right or what is claim.
I think by and large, it's fair to say that the Jews have some kind of relationship with the land, meaning there are many Palestinian villages that have, that you could trace their names back to Jewish ancient settlements.
Does it mean that an Israeli or a Jew can come and take it?
But what it does mean is that you can't understand the conflict between the Israelis or the Jews and the Palestinians without realizing that this is a struggle for nativity.
And that in some way they are the mirror images of each other.
And in many ways the Palestinians are the new Jews.
And neither one really wants to admit it, especially the Israelis.
And so in the West Bank, I've been in the West Bank a lot the last year.
The difference is that the Palestinians are exiled on their own land, which also makes it very hard for the Israelis to deal with this problem.
For them, it's a problem.
We have people, and I always say to Jews, to Israelis in Israel, I'm like, Look, if you guys, if the Jews came back after 2,000 to 3,000 years and didn't forget that there were periods of forgetting, why do you think that the Palestinians won't do the same?
And they're right on the borders.
They can see it.
Couldn't see Israel from Europe, but you can see it from Gaza.
The problem in Israel is that, you know, I used to have a lot of, I used to have some Israeli sort of religious friends who would come to my dorm when I'd have my Arab friends with me and we'd have some really nice conversations.
They even befriended each other.
But at some point, my Israeli friends stopped speaking to them because there's a point in any Israeli dialogue.
There's a point at which an Israeli has to make a decision left to right.
Am I going?
If I go down this path and really try to understand the other side, I risk exposing certain things with the grounds of my own identity here, but the foundations of the country that, that risk my identity.
And the other option is, I'm just going to stop it here, turn around and forget this happened.
And so in the West Bank right now, there's some very, very weird trends.
You have, you know, the number of outposts in the West Bank has increased.
I don't know by how many, hundreds of outposts.
Almost every other hill in the West Bank has a shack on it.
The scale is insane.
And I visit some of these outposts, and what you see is a little bit of a strange thing.
Which is also the word in Hebrew used to describe the vibe you get in areas that used to have Palestinian villages that are now either forests or, or towns.
Um, lots of wild natural shrubbery and foliage.
The point being is that what you see in the West Bank now is an attempt to double down.
On nativity.
And so I was in a Palestinian village.
It's called Turmoz Aya.
It gets attacked quite a bit.
I don't know if you saw, there was a report maybe six months ago, if I'm not mistaken, of like three to 4,000 olive trees that were cut down.
And I was there when this happened that weekend by chance.
And I remember sitting with one of these Palestinian guys, and we were attacked by settlers once, and they went back.
They burned about four houses down right in front of me.
I saw it, they stabbed a bunch of sheep.
It's the first time I ever saw this with my eyes.
I saw videos all the time, but I actually saw the smoke building out of the houses.
And the guy said something pretty interesting.
He looked at me and he was very calm and he said, You know, they want it all at once.
I was like, What do you mean?
He goes, You know, they kind of want to be like us.
You know, they want to shepherd, but they also have to have machine guns.
And they want the olive trees, but they don't see that we pave our roads around the olive trees.
They want it all at once.
They want to slice the mountain, get the barbed wire on, you put your houses there.
They want to compensate for 3,000 years.
They want to get back to some point where they were 3,000 years, but they want it all at once.
They want it now, and they don't want anyone to be there to disturb them.
And so it puts the settlement movement into a strangely, I'd call it an autoimmune position, sort of autoimmune.
Because these people are simply taking hill after hill after hill, hoping that there will come a day, one fine morning, when they wake up and it's empty and they have quiet.
But even when that happens, they don't have enough people to populate it.
Cause I went to a settlement, I went to a fresh outpost a few weeks ago.
Um, I'm surprised they let me in.
Someone pulled a gun on me when I went in and then they realized I, you know, my name's Ari Chaim Flansreich and they're like, oh, you're, you're all right.
When he said this is beyond ideology, and I already laid out sort of like the nativity dynamics, but within the settlement movement, what could he possibly mean by this is beyond ideology?
That's another question about the settlers in the West Bank.
They're not entirely religious.
You know, you have a lot of religious people, there are religious people.
There's also a lot of people who aren't that devout or pious, that religious, the religion in certain cases becomes a kind of aesthetic thing or a vehicle for sort of nationalistic ends.
So I'm having trouble fitting this into a category.
So the two motives that you always hear here in the U.S. or when I've been in Israel are either these are, You know, religious people who are sort of acting out some kind of millennialist vision, or there are people who want cheaper housing and housing in Israel.
What I'm describing is a part of the broader category of settlers who are there to, at the forefront, who are forwarding the settlement, who are pushing the settlement forward, as opposed to the people who want cheap housing who just literally go into Tel Aviv.
I think in many cases, again, like the hilltop youth, I found them once, you know, these snot nosed, beady eyes, like kids with their heads shaved driving a stolen Palestinian car on the Sabbath.
Tell me to get the fuck out or I'm gonna get beat.
I mean, it's, there's a few things going on here, right?
In the security establishment in Israel, there are a lot of voices who are very concerned.
And this is just what you hear publicly.
You can imagine that.
Behind closed doors, there's a lot more talk.
They are concerned.
Bibi, in order for his coalition, also has to keep serving them whatever they want.
The real problem in the West Bank is that you have these guys who are armed, and that you had Avraham on the other day, and he said that I believe that at some point or another, the settlements will be collapsed.
I would agree with him.
But the question is not whether or not they'll be collapsed, the question is what is going to have to happen.
For that to happen, what will have, what will happen on the way before you reach that point where the settlements are collapsed?
Will it be some sort of civil chaos?
Will it be a third intifada?
There's a lot of talk in Israel about a third intifada.
But my sense is that what happens next is not something that follows the sequence of intifada, but you know, kind of like what happened in Gaza, this shattering of the status quo.
I think there will come a point where something analogous in law, like logically speaking, happens in the West Bank.
And I sat with the leader of Islamic Jihad, he was the emir, the prince of Islamic Jihad.
And I sat with a few other guys from the various other factions.
And what I understood was that the resistance in the West Bank.
Basically, there's a thread going all the way back to 48.
You're exiled and you want to get back and you want to fight.
And then there is serious amounts of terrorist attacks.
And then eventually there's a political process.
And you'd assume that any resistance movement or any kind of, you know, terrorist operator, whatever you want to call it, that they would eventually want to yield some kind of political outcome, but also eventually fails.
You have the first intifada, you have the second, and the second intifada is basically a lashing out, meaning the thread has reached its end.
And the West Bank at that point was faced with the factions in the West Bank were faced with sort of two options.
Either we pause and take a breath and figure out what the fuck we're doing here, or we're just going to keep shooting aimlessly, just like shooting to make it look, to make it look like we're doing something.
They're just putting on headbands and like with a Marlboro red in their mouths and just shooting, usually not even to hit.
The aim is usually just to die.
The logic of the camps, the logic of the resistance in the West Bank is completely backwards, which means I don't think there's going to be like an October 7th in the West Bank.
But when I was in these villages that were getting attacked by the settlers, there's one line that kept coming up.
And I'm talking about a line I was hearing from your average Palestinian farmer or peasant, which was, There will come a day.
There will come a day when we are pushed a little too far.
And at that point, the question is, How many minutes does it take for a bunch of people to run up to a hill?
And maybe overwhelm the settlement.
An old man told me that we're going to chew them like dogs.
I don't think that they're close to as popular as they were.
I think Bibi's popularity has increased actually over the course of the war because Israelis have a very short memory, especially when it comes to warfare.
But I don't really know what to tell you about Smutrich and Benguer.
And the question as to why they died is because they spent, I think, a bit too much time beating the horse of Oslo dead.
Oslo obviously failed, and the left was unwilling to concede that fact, which meant that for many, many years, I think unto this day, the left never reevaluated, they never came with another. proposal or another plan or another way of thinking about the conflict.
They kept beating the horse of Oslo dead.
Meanwhile, the Israeli right continues to churn out active propositions.
You have a small liberal population of Israelis, many of whom I hear talking about the fact that they don't see a future for themselves in the country anymore.
This is about two to three years in the making, even from the judicial reform.
I had a lot of people telling me, left leaning, decent Israelis, who are like, I.
I don't know if I can have more kids here, or I don't want my kids to be in the army, or I don't want my kids to have to deal with whatever the consequences of the judicial reform and now this entire war.
The rest of the Israeli population, I think, by and large, are bent on.
That there's, you know, a belief among Jews and Some Christians that Jews are distinct among peoples because God made them distinct and that there is a spiritual reaction.
That is a religious belief that some people have, many people have.
And I'd be willing to believe, I don't know if it's true, that this is like a reaction against that from evil.
So that's one explanation, but I never even hear anybody ask the question.
Like, what I hear instead is people say, it's just, it's always been there, it always will be there.
There's record amounts of sympathy with the Palestinian cause.
I mean, there are many people, if you would have asked them 20, 30, 40 years ago, if they understood what actually was the fate of the Palestinian people, they wouldn't have understood.
They wouldn't have known.
You know, there's a famous quote by Ben Gurion, who following 48, you know, there were 600, some 600 villages that were destroyed.
And I remember there's a, somewhere in the archives, there's a quote which says, you know, people are soon going to come visit this country.
And we don't want them to see, have superfluous thoughts.
Use the word superfluous, meaning you got to clean up the mess, either like destroy them or plant trees, put parks in their place, which is why you have many parks all over Israel.
And so I remember hearing from someone in Toronto that I think the government was going to start sanctioning the JNF, and people were really up in arms about this.
And I said, sort of, at the end of the day, you have to decide what your relationship with Israel is.
You can't, it's hard to have, it's hard to expect people from without to understand why at a synagogue you also have an Israeli flag there if you don't also want to bear the brunt of what's happening in Israel, take some responsibility.
And I'm saying from without, you can't expect people to understand that.
I think there's a sense within the Jewish American community specifically, but also in Israel, people expect everyone else to understand them from within.
It's why it should be very obvious, why Israelis believe it should be obvious what we're doing.
All this should be obvious.
And the fact that you're asking questions is itself potentially an indication that you are against us, that you just want our demise.
When I ask people questions in Israel, the first thing is like, why are you, why are you asking?
If I want to interview someone as a journalist in Israel, I have to be very careful with the language I use.
If I use the word West Bank, Southern Judea and Samaria within a certain demographic, you're asked.
But what's a bit strange to me, what's a bit ironic here is that in America, it strikes me the perception is more zero sum.
I mean, in America, I think there's a sense that if we went through all this and the regime doesn't fall, then this was for naught.
We wasted our time and we jeopardized our, for the GOP, we jeopardized our base or whatever else.
You're better expert in this than I am.
Within Israel, though, it's not a zero sum game.
If Israel, if this war ends because Trump decides it has to end because of internal pressure, economic pressure, and the regime hasn't fallen, Bibi is none the worse for it.
It's not the ideal outcome.
It's not the best possible outcome, but it's something he can work with.
It's a good enough show.
It's what you call in Hebrew an image of victory.
It's the phrase that Netanyahu has been using since the beginning of the war an image of victory.
Part of our problem in the U.S. may be that we take our own rhetoric more seriously or Perhaps too seriously.
And so, in order to justify this and the previous exchange in June, we had to endure like weeks of hearing that we were all about to be killed by Iran, by this regime, which, you know, some people didn't believe, including me.
But some people did believe.
And we have a whole TV channel devoted to telling Americans their single biggest risk is Iran.
So, if that regime is still there, it's kind of hard to walk down from that, if you see what I mean.
Yeah, but it would also be a shame to come back to the homeland after 3,000 years and leave potentially without having built something, you know, sweet.
And he goes, You know, back in the day, my father would go to a place called Kalkili, which is on the other side of the Green Line.
And he goes, but we with the family would go to a place called Kefar Kasim, which is on the Israeli side of the Green Line, but like right snug on the line.
And he said, but ever since the war, I stopped going to Kefar Kasim.
And I was like, do you go to another place called Tira, which is even closer to Tel Aviv?
And he's like, no, I won't risk it.
I don't even like going to Jaffa.
And I told him, I said, like, what's going to be left you if you keep operating this way?
Like, you're king of the hill, as it were, you're the landlord, but you're scared.
It's like owning a house.
And being scared to walk into four out of the five rooms in the house.
It's not a way to live.
It's not the way to be a homeowner, right?
You had this thing, Benninger's big platform when he was running for elections was, We're going to be the landlords now.
I don't know if they're, I mean, he's moved troops toward the Lebanese border and there are rumors that he would be willing to fight Hezbollah.
There's a common enemy.
I think, I think the Israelis fear Jolani long-term and they also used to have a very good understanding with Assad.
The problem is that Assad was also embedded with Iran and Hezbollah.
So there's a bit of a problem.
I don't think the Israelis ever had a problem with Assad.
I think, as far as I know, before the Civil War, there were also secret talks going on.
The Israelis were also preparing to make some kind of agreement with Assad.
In the short term, I think Jolani and the Israelis can work together relatively well because it'll take Jolani a very long time until he will be able to build or, as it were, cement the ground beneath him.
They like that he's willing to take the gloves off for once.
I think they saw Biden as a pussy.
Yeah.
As a feckless pussy who wasn't willing to make a decision, wasn't able to do what, for example, Bibi is willing to do, even though Bibi was also a pussy for a very long time.
And so, yeah, I think it's refreshing to them.
And I think they don't see, look, as Avram also said, Israelis don't have a very good understanding of what happens on the American interior of American culture.
Most Israelis do not speak English.
I think this is like a delusion people have because they go to Tel Aviv and people speak English.
Outside of Tel Aviv, there's not a whole lot of English being spoken.
And so there is a sense in which all they see Trump as is what he has done for us, or the fact that he would be more willing to help us.
And that's what matters.
If you're an Israeli, you care about Israel just like you are an American and care about America.
The UAE also loves them, but I don't think the government is a big fan of Israel.
I've heard from people, for example, that like Emirati diplomats are a bit shocked when they come to Israel and they're also in some cases mistreated at the airports.
Um, I think they find Israeli society a bit shocking in its rudeness at times.
I think they're not given the kind of respect that they're accustomed to having within Gulf countries that have pretty, you know, Standard royal hierarchies and different manners.
At the end of the day, there are many disagreements between the two peoples, but they are also a single people.
It's just like you have disagreements with your family, I'm sure, but they're still your family.
And that's by and large, if I had to sum it up, that's the dynamic.
But there's certainly a generational break right now.
I think the younger generation of liberal Jews, I think they're beginning to see, and this isn't the majority of Jews right now.
The majority of younger generation Jews, I think, are still following in the footsteps of their parents.
But there is a significant population of young Jews who I think are looking at Israel and saying, We don't like what you're doing and it doesn't necessarily matter about your family.
I've never sat with an Arab and he tells me like, you know, I believe in this and I believe in that.
And I think like this is really wrong.
I don't, I don't, I don't hear, I don't hear that.
You know, like, on like the subway in Toronto, you can hear people talking through each other about their, their various moral beliefs that they've never had to act upon in their lives.
I think he probably could, but Bibi would probably want to find a kind of middle ground, meaning they had a ceasefire in Lebanon, but there were still Israeli strikes in Lebanon on an almost daily basis.
I don't know if I'd call it a war, but there is fighting, there's fighting, or there are strikes, like there's activity.
I don't know if I'd call it a war.
But I do think you could potentially see a situation, and it depends on the conditions of the end of the war.
If there's an agreement, what the stakes are, and the stakeholders, but there could be a situation.
I can envisage a situation in which Israel, for example, is still striking, not necessarily on a daily basis, but that they operate in the skies of Tehran, that they strike as needed.
And there's still a lot to be seen.
I mean, I don't, I think there should be, there's probably going to be some attempt.
To activate people to try to get protesters up again, I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
Yeah, I find it hard to believe that the Israelis put all this together without the hope or without some expectation that when things quiet down, things internally will begin to sort of move again.