11/20/24: Ryan Presses Israeli Journo On Endless War, The Real Reason Kamala Lost To Trump

the question of how this war has been handled. It is my view that the Biden administration's humanitarianism constantly pressuring the Israelis to slow down, has hurt everybody, mostly Palestinian civilians. Definitely, the hostages in the dungeons in Gaza, and Israeli soldiers have died because for periods of four months or more the Israeli army had to stop in Gaza because they couldn't go into Rafa. Things like that. There is a way to prosecute this war, and to do it slowly

is the worst possible way. Israel has escalation dominance visa of Iran, and the only way to avoid a destructive Worren Lebanon I argued ten months ago is to have an exchange with Iran. So what does that put me? I'm very hawkish in that sense, but I don't think I'm actually on the right.

the looting zone. The United Nations yesterday said that Kogat urged a last minute shift in the route that these one hundred and nine AID trucks took and it put them right into the sites of the hijackers. So there are a lot of suggestions both in Israeli media and from Gozans that there's some collaboration going on between between Israel and these and these gangs, these well organized gangs are now hijacking trucks.

Israeli protection. And when they then say to them, well why doesn't the Israeli army accompany the convoys, they then say, well, they can't accompany the convoys because that'll make the convoys a target of the other side. There is no force, no criminal gang, no clan, no family, no These are all these terms used to describe a real social reality on the ground in Gaza. There is no force big enough to take ninety seven trucks out of the hands of the UN except Framas in the certain areas where

the Israelis aren't operating. So the very idea that ninety seven of these trucks are lost, the UN says something about it doesn't say who it is, doesn't say who it suspects it is, doesn't say if these items have shown up on the black market in Gaza being sold by certain parties or other parts. It's all very, very strangely vague. And then there's this argument that in fact it's not Tramas. It can't be anyone but Tramas Ramas is still sufficiently strong in Gaza to not allow anyone

else to come in. The irony is that a few months back, I think probably five months ago something like that, the Israeli Army tried to build out a separate a distribution system, working with these clans, which are just an important social structure in Gazan society, that also sometimes built out organized crime syndicates, and the two AID convoys that

worked with the Israeli Army. Publicly, this is known, and this is something that nobody has hidden were intercepted and massacred by Rama's forces, and so Israel hasn't actually trusted the clans to be capable of actually doing the distribution and holding their own in Gaza. There is no one in Gaza who could have taken those trucks except Tramas.

Therefore my conclusion, I have not heard evidence. I've seen a lot of this desperate speculation hoping to avoid the very idea that Hamas might be the bad guys in any scenario, But I haven't actually seen any evidence that suggests that anyone else even remotely has the capability, and so, falling back on these conspiracies of the Israelis, the Israelis would love the AID to get distributed in ways that

totally bypass Hamas. It would get a lot of pressure off of them, and nobody quite knows how because Ramas is sufficiently strong to continue disrupting the AID.

and that seems to me a dishonest argument. There has been a lot of destruction, but Hamas has reconstituted itself in like northern Gaza for example, and is still there. It's still you know, in dealing with infrastructure and all of those sort of a vacuum obviously, so who else

would fill it but Hamas does? This is this part of your argument as to why the humanitarianism, as you put it, of the Biden administration is insufficient and has been cruel, as you put it earlier, to the people of the Palestinians, the people of Gaza, because it sort of drags the conflict out longer than otherwise it could have been.

higher cost and for much lower return. And so right now there isn't a real ceasefire negotiation process that the Israelis are interested in. Krisbelah took such a blow that Krisbelah is interested in. Kasbela's patrons in Iran feel like they're on their back feet and they're interested in so there's a real likelihood, and every one of the parties wants it, but they're trying to shape how it looks and how they defined the story of it for a ceasefire.

The problem that Israel has in Gaza, the security problem Israel has in Gaza, is very very simple. There is no other rest of Gaza other than Tramas. In other words, in Lebanon, there's a lot of other factions and groups and political organizations and even kind of militias. And there's the Lebanese Army which has refused to engage the Israelis because they know Israel' that were with Resbla and not

with Lebanon. All of that other rest of the polity that can step into fill the vacuum doesn't exist in Gaza. There is only Ramas. And Israel adopted a doctrine kind of learned from Afghanistan, the American mistake in Afghanistan. Part of the American mistake was something called the clear and whole doctrine, which is that they cleared a valley, they took the valley, they cleared the valley, and then they held it with a marine detachment or an army detachment,

so that the Taliban couldn't regroup there. What that ended up creating was many, many thousands of targets for the Gorillas all over Afghanistan. It ended up being a major source of pain and a major obstacle to the America achieving its goals in Afghanistan. So Israel has something that Israel has the opposite of that. In Gaza. Tramas is buried underground in five hundred kilometers of tunnels. It spent seventeen years building and it's the single biggest thing Palestinians

have ever built. And Tamas bent Gaza's entire economy to building these tunnels, and in thirteen months of war, not a single civilian has been documented being allowed into the tunnels for safety. And so Israel's goal is to get Ramas out of those tunnels, to engage them, and to destroy them. How do you do that. You take an area with Ramas and then you pull out, and Ramas

comes back, and then you take that area again. And so literally everywhere in Gaza you've seen three, four or five Israeli entries, and each time in Israeli pull out to kind of reverse the clear and hold problem. So right now, what we're talking about is a Gaza in which Ramas has sections of its organization still underground, sections of its organization that come up and taken take control.

No one else who can fill that gap. There's no serious organization with guns and popular support of any kind, even in small areas of Gaza, that can fill the gap. There is only Haramas. I haven't described to you the solution. I've just described you the problem that nobody has a solution for. Not Biden, not the left, not the right, not Nitagnallo, not progressives in America. Nobody quite knows what takes over Gaza after Hamas. And let me just say

one last sentence about that, because this is fundamental. If Ramas can't be removed from Gaza, nobody knows how to rebuild. Nobody knows how to push the ceasefire forward. You can't dump a hundred billion dollars on Gaza and actually have it rebuilt if Ramas is the one passing out the money. So Gaza is a huge problem, and Tramas is the name of that problem, and there's no perfect solution for it. What the Israelis are hoping for is a long degradation war.

It's going to be two years, three years, and eventually Ramas will slowly be degraded enough that other solutions can come to play.

First of all, that's not true. Ramas has always added massive other stipulations having to do with the West Bank, having to do with prisoners, including prisoners who are massive murderers in Israeli prisons and by the thousands. There's never been a Ramas statement that it said, just let's end it, just let's end the war. Go back to October sixth, nothing happened.

They might have said at some point, probably we know all this stuff from sort of unsubstantiated leaks that actual officials won't confirm. There has never been. I'm a huge critic of Nintagnelle. I think nintagne is fundamental strategy led to October seven, and I think he has led since October seven, fundamentally while politicking. He launched his political survival campaign on October eighth, and I feel betrayed by him

as my prime minister. But there has never been a Ramas deal for him to say no to on all the hostages. There's been a deal on thirty hostages in exchange for forty two days if you pull out of the Philadelphia Corridor. Big complicated question to get into it, if that's interesting. But this idea that there's an end to the war and all the hostages come back, there has never from Tramas been a deal like that on

the table. And even things that come even in the general ballpark of that have been Katari statements that nobody has ever been able to confirm. When Tramas had a working, functioning leadership, namely Sinoir, it would have been entirely possible to produce that Ramas statement. It no longer has. That is Mohammed Sinoir, his brother, the guy in charge. Nobody

quite knows. So there simply isn't such a deal on the table, and the idea that you would pull out and let Tramas come back in and just retake Guza now and by the way, have this war again in three years or five years and never rebuild Gus. I mean, truly, you can think the Israelis are monsters. It doesn't change the fundamental problem of Ramas. It really doesn't change it.

So if you can't, if you don't have a solution to how to install something after Tramas or how to remove Ramas sufficiently degrede it sufficiently to put something else in. It doesn't really matter what the Israelis do. There is no day after until that can happen.

divided Gaza then is less of a threat to Israel and that you just live to fight another day endlessly rather than kind of settle on a long term solution of coexistence. Is that what you see actually happening, put aside what people want, It just feels like that's where it's going.

like those tunnels. The viet Cong built quite a few tunnels. I don't think it's twenty percent of what Ramas built in Gaza in a much smaller area. And so Ramas produced a situation in which getting it out requires essentially this kind of war. I don't mean to suggest that every single Israeli airstrike is legitimate. I'm just saying there isn't fundamentally a different kind of war if you actually want to remove Kramas from Gaza, and Ramas made sure

of it. And then there's the deeper point, which is the educational, religious sort of narrative point. Ramas tells Gosins that they are not suffering for nothing. They are suffering because they are the vanguard of a great Islamic restoration after centuries of weakness, and the great war against the Jews is that fundamental war for the restoration of all Islam. To a lot of Gazins who hate Ramas, there's also

a deep appreciation of that story of dignity. And so when you actually start to map out what it would mean to remove Kramas from Gaza, it turns out to be this immense military problem, an immense cultural problem, an immense religious problem, a problem that Jews can't do. Jews are not going to go into Gaza and talk to Gosins about their religion. But that's also fundamental to removing Kramas from Gaza. And so there has to be in Gaza a much larger sense of the scale of the

problem and of the desperate need for the problem. If Ramas remains in Gaza, Gaza will remain destroyed no matter what Israel truly. I mean, if the Israeli Prime Minister becomes the head of the most far left progressive party in the Israeli Kannesse, there is nothing you can do for Gaza as long as Kramas rules it, and so how does that day after? Look, what is the role of the Arab States, What is the role of the Muslim world, What is the role of building out a

Gaza that's different. Lebanon has a much better future ahead of it because even though it's been taken over by Chris Balad in the name of Iran, if Israel can sufficiently weaken Chris Balad, there is the rest of Lebanon that can come in and fill the gap. Who is that in Gaza? How do you build that in Gaza? And that's we're talking here about the best case scenario that everyone actually wants that. I hope everyone wants that. I hope it isn't just you know, in the West

moralizing and in the Muslim world just hating Jews. I hope it's actually about Gaza. And we can put together some kind of an international coalition that frankly moves in and massively, seriously builds and deradicalizes Gaza, and then there's a real powerful argument for the Israelis getting out as

fast as possible. But until there's even that awareness, you're just asking the Israelis to hand Gaza back to Hamas and that's just something that the Israeli public won't allowed to happen, never mind the politicians well in control.

deeper ideological questions that we were just talking about. Here, let's roll this clip.

radical Islamist terrorist group. This is just the latest front of this war that's been waged for a very long time between these radical ismist terrorist groups that have been waging it militarily and ideologically. This is in our best interests, as well as all freedom loving countries and civilization to take on what is the greatest short and long term threat to freedom. He's afraid of being called an islamophobe, and it's the same reason why he is not taking seriously the need to defeat Hamas.

And obviously this comes we're talking about this clip as Bernie Sanders is pushing to pushing two block US arm sales to Israel, And so I guess my question is, with this perspective that there's a deep ideological route to what we see in Gosen sort of Hamas filling this leadership vacuum, infrastructure vacuum over and over again. Is the response to that further military action if I mean, I understand obviously why that's an option, but is that ultimately

is it worth? Is it continuously justified? If the root problem is a deep ideological is a deep ideological commitment conviction that is worsened by the military action? In some ways, that's obviously arguable, but how do you see that sort of dynamic between one and the other.

the kind of ideological movements of Ramas. You also get in the Shia sphere, this Iranian regime, this ideology that says that Islam has been weak for a long time, and this is something that really becomes a problem Muslim theologians talk about because of Western imperially some of the

nineteenth century. But this ideology then says, well, if Islam is to wake up, the first obstacle it has to overcome in order to show that it is returning into history as a powerful agent in history and therefore redeeming Islam and therefore redeeming ultimately the world. Is overcoming the Jews, is overcoming the smallest, weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back, the Iranian regime. This is my message to Bernie Sanders. Doesn't fit in a little quip, you know, it doesn't

fit in a sound bite. We don't need American missiles in Gaza. That's not the kind of war. Gaza is the American arsenal. The American help is about Iran. And if Bernie Sanders can't explain to us why Iran wants to destroy Israel in the first place, why does Iran care about Israel? Why is Iran spending a double digit percentage of its GDP so far, with sanctions, with wars, with the billions it doesn't have invested in all these proxies, especially Chrisbella the Jewel in its crown. Why is it

trying to destroy Israel? It has no border with Israel, has no interest in it. And the answer is it takes these ideas of Islamic restorationism and it's the Jews being the first thing Islam has to overcome absolutely seriously. And if we don't take it seriously, we're gonna be surprised when they carry out in October seven. By the way,

we know. We know because Chris Blah has announced and Ramas has talked about that Risbulah was planning in October seven that was much larger, and are very angry at Sinoir for ruining the surprise, so to speak. So we face enemies who will come at us no matter what. And if America chooses to then disarm us, the war is still gonna come. It's just gonna be worse because we're not gonna have precise weapons. We're gonna have blunt weapons.

We can build ourselves. Well, that's my message there. You have to have that understanding of what the enemy actually wants when you're planning about when you're planning that to face them down, to have that conflict.

And what they would point to is that immediately after Ozlo's signed, you more settlements are built, more settlements are built, more, more settlements are built.

state solution. And so I don't think you need the ideological stuff and the Ottoman Empire talk when you can actually say, like, no, the idea here was that there's a faction within the Israeli political system that opposed the creation of a Palestinian state and had the power to put obstacles in the way of the creation of that state, and is now since the election, talking about simply annexing the West Bank, you fully, and even talking further about

you know, southern Lebanon being northern Israel, and on and on. But so can't you talk, can't you consider this in a much more kind of a simple way than needing to go back to the clash of civilization stuff.

If you go to its mosques, you will hear those speeches. That's the first thing. The second thing is, I'll tell you why what you call class of clash of civilizations, which is it's such a Western discourse. That's not how Muslims think of it. It's not how Jews think of it. It's not how Middle Easterners think of it. But the reason that these religious ideas matter is that I'll give you an example. You were talking about the Palestinian argument,

and it's not an argument made by Hamas. It's an argument made by Palestinian diaspora elites who are trying to explain away everything that Hamas has done for thirty years to Westerners. But the argument that Israel never intended for Oslo to ever actually work out for the Palestinians. And Robbin is assassinated in nineteen ninety five by an Israeli Jew opposed to the peace process, and that actually puts

the left raised. The left was about to lose that election because people were really afraid that Yes, Sarah Fat, this arch terrorist to it hijacked airplanes and launched terror attacks that massacred kids was now going to take over the West Bank, and Robbin's assassination increased the Left's standing in the polls, and they were set to win the

next election. And the next election because the assassination comes in ninety six and Ramas launches a series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem in the week leading up to the election that tilt the election by the narrowest margin in the history of an Israeli election. I think thirty thousand votes to Nitagnelle. That's Nataiell's first victory is a function of Rama's terror attacks. Barak comes back, the Labor Party comes back. He's already talking about a Palestinian in state.

He's a Camp David with Bill Clinton. They're negotiating shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount. There's a ninety five percent of the West Bank kind of Palestinian state. And that's when one hundred and forty suicide bombings over the next three years, the second in de foughta begin and not only Famas also.

In Israel, every government in the history of Israel, there's never been a majority party, has been a coalition, and therefore the Israeli government always works across purposes because different ideological groups are by the way, the Italian government, we're seeing this now if you're following Italian politics, the Polish government, and we re see this in these kinds of parliamentary systems.

We had a government, the last government that it's Agnao ousted actually had the left wing minister of housing and a excuse me, a right wing minister of housing and a left wing minister of transportation, which means that the right wing minister of housing was encouraging the building of more settlement homes and the left wing minister of transportation was refusing to pave roads to those settlement homes. The

Israeli government is multiple forces operating in different directions. If the argument is if there's an Israeli right winger in the room. Then the israel doesn't mean it. Then you're missing the fact that there was a culture war, the defining political civil war of the nineties and even after the nineties. The withdrawal from Gaza was also part of this in two thousand and five, was about getting out and creating space to the Palestinians and separating and not

having an occupation anymore. And it failed miserably in rivers of blood, and it failed miserably in rivers of blood because of these religious ideas on the other side. So at some point you're going to have to deal with these religious ideas on the other side. On October seven, again, let's imagine the Israelis are the worst people in the world.

On October seven, Ramas didn't just massacre Israelis. It had built these tunnels for seven teen years, and it had built them for one tactical purpose, so that anyone coming for Ramas has to cut through cities to do so. October seven was two atrocities, not one. And the larger one wasn't committed against Israel, was committed against Gonza, and

it was Ramas's literal strategy. And so if you don't address why is Ramas willing to destroy Ganza, it's willing to destroy Gaza because it thinks that's so much more is at stake the redemption of Islam. Well, if you don't address that, if you don't deal with that, you're not going to fix the problem. You're not going to end the war.

make a terrible strategic mistake at that scale. As I was waiting to come on, I heard the commentary about the Iraq war and Trump talking about the that's a when you lead a country and you make a mistake at that scale, Let's imagine it's in good faith. Let's imagine you believed what you were saying. You you own it. You own that mistake. And this this leadership owns that mistake, and that most Israelis will tell you to the face,

and and and most Israeli still wanted gone. And I don't have it doesn't cost me anything to give that to you. I scream it in Hebrew. But the fundamental mistake they made was not believe in Ramas. And the great tragedy for Gaza is that the Israelis absolutely believe Ramas now. And so when Tramaz says we're going to destroy all of you and there'll be more October seventh, which it still says, the Israelis believe it. And what that is a disaster for Gaza and has to end or Gaza can't be rebuilt.

the end of the night there's still no food. And I don't know if you if if people can even hear this, but what he just took a little recording of what he hears constantly, and it's it's this. It's the it's a baby who's just hungry and tired but can't get fed and can't get can't get the sleep that that the baby needs. And I'm curious from the Israeli perspective, how like does any of this. Does any

of this penetrate. We're talking about two million human beings who are living through some of the most abject torture, you know, imaginable, and people who have absolutely you know, nothing to do with October seventh. Is any of this breaking through at all?

know and none of you care. And that's something you hear from a majority of Israeli Jews, certainly, and also I think quite a few Israeli Arabs, well, probably not a majority. There's a sense that some of the discourse around Palestinian suffering has simply been untrue. There's been too much talk of starvation when there hasn't been actual starvation. And that doesn't mean they're not suffering disastrously. Families are literally for thirteen months now, moving between tent encampments in

order to avoid air strikes. No summer camps, there's nothing for kids to do, there's no schools, there's no This is suffering at a serious and dramatic scale. But the invention around it of some kind of systemic system of atrocities that is purposeful, and it is not true, and is meant to satisfy and to catalyze a kind of moral religious feeling that simply has nothing to do with the reality and has a lot more to do with

Israel than with the suffering of the civilians. Because again, it's not the what about ist argument, it's the simple it's the selective outrage argument. You can't only think that way and only about these things. So, first of all, they are suffering, they're suffering disastrously. And so I want to say they're not suffering as much as you think, but I don't want that to mean they're suffering. At eight. I'm just arguing they're not suffering at thirteen, which is

just simply not happening. They're not dying on mass. There isn't mass starvation. There are major problems in some places, and those problems are a huge problem. I have been very I need to say that before saying I've been very critical of the Israeli government. I'd, by the way, think that there's such easy ways, easy, complicated, difficult, painful ways. But we could solve a lot of these problems. For example, if we have to move them out of harm's way,

we can move them into Israeli territory. There's a great fear in the Arab world that if you push them out of Gaza, it's the next knock bit, it's the next displacement. So just push them into the negative and then what are they arguing that we're moving them into Israel and not to There are solutions. There are Israeli Arabs who volunteered for the war effort. After October seven, Tamas kidnapped and killed fifty Israeli Arabs. A Muslim girl eighteen years old, Ayisha, who is We still don't know

where she is and what's going on with her. There was a coming together of Jews and Arabs, and Arab Israelis are Palestinian. They also their identity is this complicated intermingling of identities, but they include a layer that is absolutely Palestinian. And what if they ran some of that, some of that humanitarian aid on the Israeli SI out of a border for people displaced, and once you move them in, you can also check them, you can pull them out. And there are so many ways to solve it.

This is a government that in many, many ways has been incompetent. I'll give you just the tiniest example. Soldiers veterans of the war. After one hundred and fifty days, they missed a school year, an entire college year. They just missed because they were off fighting a war. They come back and discover that they have back debt on the tuition payments for their dorms and something that government

was supposed to pay for but never did. This is a government that has proven incompetent for Israeli civil society. Sixty thousand Israelis were fled the North the bombardments of Risbela in the North over thirteen months that shattered and destroyed cities entire like twelve Kibusim and a third of two cities are literally demolished to the point where they have to be destroyed before being rebuilt. And this government hasn't properly followed these people and provided them education for

their kids and social support. We are facing a government that a lot of what you see in gods, a lot of the reasons they haven't filled in with. It's easy solutions, you know, I don't mean to excuse it. This doesn't excuse it. It's just a different kind of a crime is incompetence. It's just incapacity. So there are so many ways to deal with this better that I

desperately wish Israel was dealing with it better. At the same time, I share the general Israeli view that I don't entirely trust the world's moral emotions because give us a better way to fight this war.

And what you're asking, what the Jordanian Foreign Minister wishes, was that the Israeli public public debate had another story. The Israelis currently believe that if we pull out of the West Bank, it'll go the way Gaza went before. Five years before pulling out of Gaza, we pulled out of South Lebanon after eighteen years. That was basically our Afghanistan.

We moved in to take care of terrorists, and then we ended up getting stuck for eighteen years and bogged down and pulled out badly, and the bad guys took over when we left. That has turned into a disaster for us. Every single unilateral withdrawal turned into a disaster. And the attempt at a multilateral or bilateral piece ended in the Second Intifada with one hundred and forty suicide bombings.

So the Israeli public and I mean voting Israeli public that to this day wants a Palestinian state, genuinely believes that if we pull out of the West Bank for a Palestinian state, it'll end disastrously in rivers of blood and we're going to have to retake it. The West Bank is the highlands that overlook all of our major cities. The West Bank shrinks us down to nine miles wide in the middle. You know, people hear about this place

so much. I don't know if they understand just how tiny this little land in which Israelis and Palestinians live actually is. And so it feels existential the question of pulling out of the West Bank, and again to left wingers who want a Palestinian state, the right wingers there's even more so. And so the question of just found a Palestinian state in Godz of sure, why not? Is easy. If there wasn't a Hamance there, it would have happened, and it would never have not happened. In the West Bank,

it's a whole different question. I still think a two state pieces possible. Ironically, if we do something that the Jordanian Foreign minister mortally opposes and absolutely hates, which is a kind of confederation between that state of Palestine and Jordan. What if you know, three of the West Bank. The Israelis can't be in the valley nine miles wide, so we push in a quarter of the West Bank. That's

roughly what's going on in the Golan Heights. Israel doesn't control the Golan, it controls about a third of the Golan. To push back in sixty seven, the Syrian artillery out of range of the towns in the valley that they

were shelling freely throughout the fifties and sixties. So what if the Israelis push up the mountain range they actually hold the high ground with the Palestinian state, but then to three quarters of the West Bank plus Gaza, all within a Jordanian confederation that leaves the Palestinian Ordanian border wide open. They have an international border that Jordanians are now the custodians of the Holy Site in Jerusalem, that they actually care about Alexa. Very little would have to change.

The Palestine wouldn't be this tiny, little fractured state surrounded on all sides by this massively powerful Israel. As soon as you start seriously thinking about solutions, as soon as you solve the ideology problem that you don't want to deal with. And I understand why you don't want to deal with it does sound like an Israeli escape patch. Forgets that for a second, the Israeli scape patch, it might actually be the opp stickle to everything you might

be able to yourself become Prime Minister of Israel. This will still stand in your way, and it will stand in your way. If the Israelis are evil, this still stands in the way. And so if we can solve the fundamental ideological problem, it's unbelievably easy to imagine actual political solutions on the ground that solve everybody's security problems, policy problems. We spent thirty years trying to finiggle our trying to sort of wind our way through the technicalities

of the policy problems, because that's how diplomats think. And we never figured out reconciliation, and we never figured out narratives that actually allow the other side to come in. You want to know the big problem of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, There are wonderful polls of Israelis and Palestinians were some of the best poll people in the world.

And there was a poll about six weeks ago in which that pulled both Israelis and Palestinians with an Israeli firm and a Palestinian firm, and they asked the same question, do you think the other side wants to exterminate us? And both sides responded ninety percent yes. I mean literally one side was eighty nine, the other side was ninety to both sides think the other side simply wants to destroy them. That's the problem, and that's what makes solutions impossible.

First has to come the reconciliation. Then the political solutions are easy, as for fighting forever. Look, we're speaking English. Every conversation in English about Israel is mediated through this sense that Jews are kind of like American Jews. We're not American Jews. I was to high school in Wisconsin. I apologize for the accent I was born.

There's still Jews living there that nobody will take in anywhere on Earth, including the United States in nineteen forty eight. They only start emptying out in forty eight, in May nineteen forty eight, and they are those dps are a quarter of the IDF in the forty eight war. We're the Jews who had nowhere else to go in the world. And we are the Jews or whom the experience of living on our sword. Your question to me is can you fight forever? The UAE wants to not fight, that's wonderful.

By the way, We've never fought with the UA, There's never been a war. The saudis wonderful. I'm a big fan of peace and normalization with everybody, but that they want it, and therefore it's possible Iran wants us destroyed. We are the Jews who came out of a history of the twentieth century in which the moment we stopped dying was when we could fight for ourselves. To the Israeli experience, everybody's living grandparents come from Iraq and Tunisia

and Poland and Germany and Yemen. We are the Jews or whom the privilege of fighting for ourselves, of being able to fight for ourselves, is what redemption feels like. And so it's a great question from a Western perspective, can't we end the war? That's not an option open to us. No Jew can live in Iraq, no Jew can live in Yemen. We are surrounded by societies with an ideological commitment to our destruction. I wish we weren't, but if they say it out loud, then if it

affects their policy. And if Yemen is a war with Israel really because of Palestinian rights, everything you know about the Huthis and the terrible civil war Yemen and the eighty five thousand children.

You need the more high ground if you're going to run a campaign based around democracy and morality, and it's reasonable for people to conclude that killing tens of thousands of women and children means you've seeded a.

or so. But to many voters, the time, energy, and money that politicians spend on foreign wars stands in as a proxy for their lack of concern for people here at home. At the same time, the four years of the Biden administration saw a disconcerting outbreak of violence around the world. Trump himself is a mercurial and unpredictable figure,

whereas Biden is even keeled, at least in public. Yet, Biden's four years were a bumpy ride of chaos, fueled significantly by the wars in Ukraine in the Middle East. Sharing the campaign stage down the stretch with Liz Cheney was a signal to voters that Democrats there was a signal to voters that Democrats felt the cost of those wars was worth it, and that would get more of

the same in a Harris administration. In the post mortem, so far, the Democratic Party's embrace of a more quote muscular foreign policy, as they like to call it, has almost entirely escaped notice, but it didn't escape the eye of voters. In mid October, as Kamala Harris began to do interviews with friendly audiences, she visited the breakfast studio of radio host Charlemagne the God, where she took questions

from callers. The first to come through was one of those questions that is often top of mind for voters, but dismissed in Washington as a naive misunderstanding of how the world truly works.

bombing of North Vietnam. Quote, mister President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now though, that down the road a piece of the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter. LBJ said that the American people would be

willing to bear the burden. He said, quote, I have not the slightest doubt, but whenever it is necessary to face, but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face.

The White House shot down the entire notion of greedflation, which has since confirmed as a driving factor in those price increases, and instead they outsourced the fight against inflation to a Republican FED chair who jacked up rates and with it the cost of mortgages and rent. Also, even James Carville says that maybe Bernie Sanders had a point.

And I wrote a widely read piece in twenty twenty two on how the phenomenon was destroying progressive institutions while a culture of fear and silence reigned, but it misses a key factor in order to fend off the rise of economic populism in the form of Bernie Sanders. In twenty sixteen, it was those same party leaders themselves who turned to identity politics, portraying themselves as the true champions of progressive values and deriding Sanders as a single issue candidate,

that issue being the economy. Here's Hillary Clinton going after Bernie Sanders.

that they have no intention of addressing people's needs. It's apparently easy to forget that the working class drift away from Democrats that was underway in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties was reversed in two thousand and eight by Barack Obama, who ran as an anti war candidate against a party shredded by its spearheading of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Eight years later, Trump bested Bush's brother and every other Republican contender this way.

a wonderful thing, A close quote. When you were asked what you meant by that, you said, for the war. For the war, he lied. He got us into the war with lies. Do you still believe President Bush should be I should have been in peace.

even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously it was a mistake. So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty.

distinct by political operatives. The jarring price swings at the grocery store and at the pump, combined with the out of control wars and the surge of migrants at the border, combined to produce a visceral sense that our leaders in Washington were sacrificing the needs of regular people here in

the United States. People's sense that the economy was being handled poorly by Biden was colored by the chaos overseas, and his rapt attention to Ukraine and Israel left little room for confidence that he cared what was going on back here. By pretending that the US could do it all, but then only delivering on the foreign wars, democrats set up ordinary people to view it as a zero sum competition.

When Harris says, quote, we can do it all, and we do, she is offering a version of conventional wisdom in Washington, which loves to point out whenever people raise complaints like this, that wars are paid for out of different accounts than schools, or that much of what we're sending to Ukraine is in the form of weapons, not cash, which means we then get to make new weapons and

every but he gets even richer. But even if that's true, most people don't consider themselves inside the we that's benefiting from all that. We just see money going towards war and our bills getting harder to pay. Think about how the overseas conflicts and the chaotic economy interacted.

Just as prices were rising and the COVID nineteen pandemic was easing, people were tentatively emerging from lockdown and crime surged, which, in many people's minds merged and was merged with and was blamed on the George Floyd protests from the year before, many of which had turned into riots. Now kids who'd spent more than a year out of school never recovered. Then, in February twenty twenty two, Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden assiduously

resisted a negotiated end to the conflict. In June, the conservative justice on the Supreme Court undid generations of precedent, overturned Roe v.

That too, had a foreign policy link. US foreign policy in general has produced an unstable hemisphere with heavy out migration flows to the United States. During his time in office, Biden titaned sanctions and penalties on Cuba and Venezuela, and intervened to fuel chaos in Haiti. The Three countries combined sent the bulk of migrants at key moments. Then came October seventh and the horrifying images it produced. Weeks of

a relentless and indiscriminate Israeli response turned into months. Bidens and his administration took a public posture that the US wanted to cease fire, yet the attack only ratcheted up as the death count reached shocking numbers, and US weapons and financing went.

a lunatic personally. But if your alternative is all of these wars breaking out around the world and no certainty about prices and the economy here at home, immigration and immigration, then you're like, you know what, I'll take that in hindsight. So I think the good news for Democrats is that if they want to make a comeback, just stop doing all the wars. That's a big that's a big step in the right direction.

the American people outside of Washington and New York. I think Joe Rogan recently was replaying this clip of Tucker Carlson confronting Mike Pence when Pence was running for president in the primary about how he sees all of this decay in America and wants to keep sending weapons and resources to Ukraine that could be spent on Americans, and Pence says almost exactly what you said at the last part. There, of course the opposite. He says, we can do it both.

Anyone who tells you we can't do it both, we can't be the policeman of the world and take care of our own people has a very small minded vision of the United States. But it's not a small minded vision of the United States. It's exactly what's happening. And Democrats are incapable of responding to what Trump taps into, which is telling people exactly that, saying we are not doing it both right now. We cannot have it all right now until we start cracking down on this adventurism

abroad and until we start treating immigration. It does have economic implications for people. We can debate what they are, but Democrats don't even talk about it, don't even talk about it in economic framing unless it's to say it's making us all better.