6/23/26: Housing Affordability Crisis, Israel's Nuclear Blackmail Plot

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

Episode Summary: June 23, 2026

Main Topics: The US Housing Affordability Crisis | The US-Israel Relationship and “Nuclear Blackmail”
Special Guests: Brendan James, Noah Colwyn (Blowback Pod)
Podcast Hosts: Krystal Ball & Ryan Grim

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Overview

This episode dives deep into two critical themes:

1. A data-driven analysis of the acute housing affordability crisis in America—breaking down the explosive costs, examining the root causes, and proposing systemic remedies.
2. An in-depth interview with the Blowback podcast team on the complex and evolving US-Israel relationship, highlighting historical moments, current inflection points, and controversial issues like Israel’s nuclear deterrence.

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Section 1: The Housing Affordability Crisis

Why Homeownership Is Moving Out of Reach

Segment starts: [02:19]

Key Statistical Takeaways

• Homeownership costs have soared significantly since 2019:
  • Principal payments: Up 22% (2019–2025).
  • Interest: Up 35% (due to increased rates).
  • Property taxes: Up 31%.
  • Insurance: Up 72%.
  • Home maintenance: Up 85%.
  • Emergency repairs: Up 175%.
• Annual cost for basic homeownership: Rose from $20,000 (2019) to $28,500 (2025)—far outpacing overall inflation (26% CPI, same period).
• Market paralysis: Sales of previously owned homes stuck at ~4 million/year since 2023—lowest in decades—due in part to the “affordability trap.”
  • Large numbers of homes are effectively kept off the market (5–6 million estimated), further shrinking housing supply.

The Role of Financialization

Krystal Ball [05:07]:

"If you look at the things that outpace overall inflation, it's interest, it's insurance, and that's home maintenance and emergency repairs. What do those things have in common? Financialization."

• Private equity's new targets: Home repair, maintenance, AC/plumbing services—rolled up and standardized, leading to outsized profits and cost jumps for urgent repairs.
• Banks, insurance, and PE have become key drivers of higher costs across the entire housing ecosystem, not just labor/materials.

The Bigger Economic Picture

Ryan Grim [06:17]:

"When you have trillionaires—and he's the first one on paper, but probably not the only one... is it any surprise that all of these assets, including homes, become more and more and more expensive?"

• Asset Inflation: The emergence of (paper) trillionaires and asset hunger among the ultrarich means more money relentlessly chasing housing and other finite goods.
• Wealth inequality is now so entrenched that it’s driving prices and demand, stopping ordinary people from building wealth through homeownership.
• Prescription: Ryan notes only structural action, like a wealth tax, could change this trajectory.

Systemic Dysfunction & Policy Proposals

Krystal Ball [09:37]:

"Home ownership was the bedrock of wealth building over the postwar period. But now...the first time home buyer is some 36 to 40 years old and then the average home buyer is like in their 50s..."

• Demographic implications: Delayed/cancelled homeownership undermines generational wealth building and community stability.
• Proposed remedies: Targeted up-front funds, builder incentives for first homes, regulatory reform to limit private capital's speculative role in housing, and—at times—mandatory construction in high-cost areas.
• Critique of NIMBYism: While local concerns matter, Krystal argues that crisis-level unaffordability means prioritizing new housing supply is urgent; even the upper middle class is now priced out in many markets.

The Power Grid & Tech’s New Pressures

Ryan Grim [13:12]:

"Federal regulators on Thursday...ordered regional grid operators to help large energy users connect more quickly... for [AI] data centers... Oh, don’t worry, it’s not going to add to your costs. Okay, do you believe that?"

• Energy costs surge: AI-driven demand and regulatory privileging of big tech users is already raising residential electric rates, with little promise of relief or new generation capacity.
• Cautionary tale: Residents lose out (such as in Sterling, VA, where “temporary” data center generator noise became permanent and residents had “zero recourse”).

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Section 2: US-Israel “Special Relationship” and Nuclear Blackmail

Segment starts: [19:40]
Guests: Brendan James & Noah Colwyn (Blowback Podcast)

Framing the Current Moment

Ryan Grim:

"There's been a lot in the news lately and a lot that's quite relevant about our quote unquote, special relationship with the nation state of Israel..."

Trump, Netanyahu, and a Supposed “Split”

• Discussion opens with Trump’s typically boastful comments about his influence over Netanyahu and the supposed ability for the US to restrain Israel ([20:19]).
• Noah Colwyn casts doubt on the depth of the strategic ‘split’, suggesting we’re at an inflection point—but with historic precedent for the relationship healing after temporary ruptures.

Origins: Truman, Domestic Politics, and the Founding of the US-Israel Bond

Brendan James [23:07]:

"Harry Truman... was not so keen on there being a Jewish state in the Middle East. He opposed it. He told the Zionist lobby he opposed it. He told his own advisors he opposed it."

• Context: Truman’s decision to recognize Israel in 1948 was a domestic political calculation to shore up the New Deal coalition—against the strong advice of his foreign policy establishment (esp. George Marshall).
• Left/Progressive roots: Initially, Zionism was widely seen in the US as a left-liberal cause—a twist given the current political alignments.

Shifting Political & Strategic Context ([28:23])

• How US support shifted from ambivalence and even opposition to the hand-in-glove security alliance seen today.
• Eisenhower years: Early arms embargoes, Suez crisis, and major face-offs; AIPAC’s founding in response to the 1953 Qibya massacre.
• Reagan era: Intensification of AIPAC, proliferation of Israeli lobbying, recurring points of tension—Reagan not as pro-Israel in action as image suggests.
• George H.W. Bush: Notable for withholding loan guarantees to pressure Israel into negotiations—a level of hardball unimaginable in today’s climate.

Persistent Patterns: Domestic Lobby vs. Empire vs. “Nuclear Blackmail”

Brendan James [35:36]:

"I’m skeptical about the thesis that Israel is a mere appendage of US foreign policy... There’s too much spying, sabotage, stealing of state secrets, and flat-out disobedience for that..."

• Israeli independence: The relationship can't be reduced to Israel as simply a US proxy; Israel often pursues its own interests at odds with US officials.
• The Israel Lobby: Impossible to ignore, but overstating its power is risky—so is understating. US domestic politics (especially Congress) remain a major force behind steadfast US support.
• Nuclear blackmail: Israel’s undeclared but widely understood nuclear arsenal acts as a powerful bargaining chip (“That’s pretty scary for an empire that is declining...”).

Noah Colwyn [39:11]:

• Draws a parallel to apartheid South Africa’s use of strategic ambiguity with nuclear weapons. Argues Israeli nuclear threats would be believed by world leaders.
• Mentions the Israel lobby’s unique blurred conflation of political and communal identities among American Jews (“its civil rights are now bound up with this political position”).

USS Liberty Incident ([42:00])

• 1967: Israeli attack on a US surveillance ship during Six Day War killed dozens; still a source of bitterness in the Navy/NSA.
• Evidence points overwhelmingly to deliberate attack, but official channels long refused to confront this, illustrating the extremes of US accommodation to Israel despite direct harm to its own servicemembers.

Noah Colwyn:

"The Liberty is just like a perfect example... of how, again, like in part of why it’s had such staying power... is because it has come to represent the just sort of baffling human cost imposed by the US’s strategic alignment with Israel." ([44:18])

Ideological Parallels: “Settler Kinship” Mythos ([46:17])

Brendan James:

• Recounts how Israeli and US leaders (LBJ included) once openly embraced a settler colonial kinship narrative—comparing Israel’s military actions to American westward expansion and indigenous displacement.
• These narratives changed over time; today, some argue Israel is the “decolonial” party.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Krystal Ball [13:12]:

  "I'm sorry, when you have people pulling two, $300,000 a year and they can't even buy a home in a high cost of living area, we're cooked as an overall society."

• Ryan Grim [16:44]:

  "At the end of the day they're gonna get the preferential treatment, the rates, and yeah, if we're ever in a power generation crisis, we all know which way it's gonna go."

• Brendan James [35:36]:

  "You can't get rid of those nukes...they might be told the next day by some fanatical Israeli minister, well, you know, if we have to do it, we can set off a tactical nuke."

• Noah Colwyn [41:59]:

  "...the pro Israel lobby has more or less also taken the place of identifying with the position of the Jew organized Jewish community in the United States. And the political power of that just shouldn't be taken lightly..."

• Brendan James [46:17]:

  "The arguments change very drastically and sometimes to a comic level of contradiction. But the ultimate case remains the same..."

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Section Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:19] Housing Crisis: The numbers behind the affordability collapse
• [05:07] Financialization, private equity and "doom loop" economics
• [06:17] The rise of “trillionaires” and the structural drivers of asset inflation
• [09:37] How the wealth-building model for young Americans has collapsed
• [13:12] Energy, AI, and why infrastructure can’t keep up
• [15:53] Real-world harms of data center expansion (Sterling, VA)
• [19:40] The roots and tensions in the US-Israel relationship
• [23:07] How and why Truman flip-flopped on Israel’s creation
• [28:35] Key historical turning points: Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush Sr.
• [35:36] Is the US-Israel relationship about empire, the lobby, or blackmail?
• [42:00] USS Liberty: The deliberate attack that’s “never supposed to be discussed”
• [46:17] Ideology, settlers, and mutable narratives

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Conclusion

This episode of Breaking Points is a data-rich, frank, and historically grounded deep-dive into two of America's most urgent yet structurally entrenched problems—housing unaffordability and the complicated, sometimes dangerous, US-Israel relationship. Both segments center the dangers of concentrated power (whether financial or geopolitical) and the cyclical self-reinforcement of elite interests at the expense of average citizens or even the very functioning of democracy.

For listeners looking for both sharp analysis and the big picture, this episode delivers compelling numbers, clear history, pointed critiques, and a few ominous warnings.

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For more:

• Data and further discussion on US housing: [02:19]–[17:08]
• Full Blowback interview on Israel/US: [19:40]–[49:40]
• Blowback premium: blowback.show

Transcript

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[Ryan Grim]

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[Brendan James]

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[Noah Colwyn]

It's the rage bait.

[Ryan Grim]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Brendan James]

We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News reporting for America.

[Noah Colwyn]

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[Krystal Ball]

guys, Sager and Krystal here.

[Ryan Grim]

Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.

[Krystal Ball]

This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not anywhere else.

[Ryan Grim]

So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.

[Krystal Ball]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see [e-mail] turning now to housing. So this really caught my eye. I wanted to break all these numbers down with all of you guys, just put it up here on the screen. The Wall Street Journal did an excellent job here where they collated a bunch of data which shows home ownership costs from 2019 to 2025. So let's go through it. So in terms of the amount of principal costs that people are now paying from 2019 to 2025, people are now paying about 22% more in their principal payments than they were back in 2019. And remember, this is just 2025 data. It doesn't even include 2026, which has already gone higher 22% more when it comes to principal. Now let's look at interest. Whenever it comes to interest, people are paying 35% more interest largely because of the increase in overall interest rates. Now all of that makes sense and it's still not that crazy. Property taxes have gone up by 31%. Makes sense whenever you factor in the principal payment and some increase overall in city services. But this is where things start to become actually insane. Insurance, home insurance costs up 72% from 2019 to 2025. Home maintenance is up by 85%. And then the worst number of them all, emergency repairs up 175%. So they say that a home buyer in 2019 could expect to spend about $20,000 a year on basic homeownership expenses by 2025. That annual bill is now 28,500, which has massively outstripped overall inflation, which which is pegged at 26% during that same time period just from the consumer price index by 2025. Homeowners who wish that they could sell and move elsewhere are also staying put, turned off by the cost of purchasing. Today. This is one of the foremost problems in the so called affordability trap. What we also see here is that sales of previously owned homes have held around 4 million a year since 2023, which is the lowest level in decades, down from the pre pandemic norm of between five million and a million five a year. So if you do the math, that's Almost, that's almost 5 or 6 million houses that have been kept off of the market largely because of these exact traps. From the overall monthly insurance payments, taxes, interest and principal, you're now sitting roughly around $2,000 a month, which if you do the math, 24,000. But then you look at the overall household income, especially if you look at overall household after tax income, you're sitting around 50%. This makes it impossible, especially with the average home rate, the one that really Struck me is actually the HOA fee. I don't know what the hell is going on. I don't live in an HOA. But the average, the median HOA fee in 2021 was 500 bucks. The median HOA fee in 2025 is $757. So that's like a gigantic increase actually, just from 2024 to 2025. But my main takeaway from this is about financialization. So a friend of mine was taking a look at this data and what he pointed out, shout out to was if you look at the things that outpace overall inflation, it's interest, it's insurance, and that's home maintenance and emergency repairs. What do those things have in common? Financialization, the insurance industry. The interest obviously is the banks. But in home maintenance and emergency repairs, that's not just labor costs. It's because in the last six years, private equity specifically has been rolling up local repair businesses, plumbing, ac, many of these especially emergency repairs. And they've realized that because people are in dire straits and they'll have to pay anything if they standardize, roll them up, give them back end software and all of that, they can squeeze enormous profits out of these homeowners. And that's why the emergency repair number is up so high. But finance is the bedrock of all of these overall cost increases that you can see. Yeah.

[Ryan Grim]

So let me zoom out and make a bigger picture point and shout out to Gary's Economics, who put it in these terms in a recent video about Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire. When you have trillionaires, and he's the first one on paper, but probably not the only one. It's just now that SpaceX IPO, which actually SpaceX not doing that well today, but that's a story for another day, might cover that tomorrow. In any case, with the Space X ipo, we now officially know that he is a trillionaire. You have all of these billionaires. You look at the way that these mostly men's wealth skyrocketed over the past several years, it is astronomical. Just think about the fact that we had in, you know, Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign. What was his constant refrain? The millionaires and the billionaires. You're talking about millionaires at this point, it's quaint. It's quaint to think about millionaires. Now we're talking about the billionaires and the trillionaires. And that's just over the course of a decade that that shift has happened. Well, when you are someone who has that amount of wealth and literally incomprehensible amount of money. A billion dollars is an incomprehensible amount of money. A trillion dollars is beyond the comprehension of any human being. What do you do? And this goes to your point Sagar, you buy up assets. So is it any surprise then that all of these assets, including homes, become more and more and more expensive? That they find more and more ways to financialize every aspect of this? Why? Because it is money in search of assets and we have money consolidated in the hands of a very few number of people. You know, when you have a little more money in the pot in your pocket, you're not going up and going out and buying all these things. You're, you know, you're able to indulge, maybe you go on vacation, you have, you're able to buy steak, right? The average person, it's much more hand in mouth. So you're not out there looking to buy up the entire world. The more wealth inequality that we have, the more that you have trillionaires and hundred billionaires that are dominating the entire economy of the entire globe, the more they are going to bid up the price of assets. It is inevitable when you think about the way those dynamics work. So that is a part of the underlying story of why these costs keep going up and up and up and there is no relief in sight. If you want relief, you have to tax these people. That's what you have to do. You have to do a wealth tax. You have to take some of the wealth. You cannot allow there to be these trillionaires and multi, multi, multibillionaires controlling everything and buying everything up. If you are a person who would like to aspire, excuse me, one day to be able to, I don't know, own a home or own really anything, if you are that person, then you should be in favor of reining in the wealth and power of these oligarchs. So I think that is a very critical piece of this that also oftentimes goes overlooked intentionally. You know, and that's not to say that like the sort of abundance agenda of deregulation and yimbyism, that's not to say that stuff doesn't matter, but the overarching structure here of these increasing numbers of trillionaires and billionaires buying up everything is going to make it so that we never get out of this doom loop until we check their wealth and power.

[Krystal Ball]

There's a demand side and a supply side. That's the thing. We have to look at both. Let's put D3 up here on the screen. Just because I want to go through even some more of those math. And when you do, it's crazy. Like this is where they say that Morgan Stanley is predicting that home buyers will face a harsh reset. And mostly they say what it points is to this conclusion is that the base case projects mortgage payments will have to decline about 24% of household income to 21% in the coming decade as rates have to moderate over the long term. But that will still leave affordability well above the 15% average that prevailed in the years after the 2007-2009 financial cris. The squeeze will reshape ownership and rental dynamics and will make it so that aspiring owners will continue to emprise more and more of the overall US population. In terms of the reset. What they say is that it will reset the way specifically that wealth is built in the long term, specifically probably for people who are our age in more in the millennial demographic because home ownership was the bedrock of wealth building over the post war period. But now when the first time home buyer is some 36 to 40 years old and then the average home buyer is like in their 50s, then you have different situations where having that lack of asset which will appreciate over time just scrambles the entire way that you think about your future. Not to mention whenever it comes to your community. So I think that that data is really, really important actually just about home buying and the way that assets will move in the future. But I also think that whenever it comes to the housing front, it shows how the current way that. I mean I really struggle with this. I believe in some localism, I really do. Especially when it comes to data centers. You know, NIMBYs definitely have a point in their ability, but.

[Ryan Grim]

But extension facilities.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, or yeah, in your case, whatever you want, beautification, you know, zoning. I really do get it. Like I get it whenever it comes to what makes a community nice. However, are we not at a genuine crisis level? Like that's how I start to think. And that's when people start complaining about oh, like this is gonna overwhelm X services. I hear you. But then we need to make it so that you have the housing and you have the services. Like there needs to be. I just read that we spent $80 billion on the Iran war, which is great. 80 billion is what the Pentagon is asking for to reap coup costs of what the Iran wore. That is 80% of what we spent in 20 years just on the Afghan National Security Forces. 20 years in Afghanistan on the ANSF is what we just spent in three weeks in the war in Iran. That's insanity. So just to show you all in terms of like the cost that we're dealing with here, maybe some of it could go to like an overall homestead fund or builder incentives. You need funds up front, then you need tax incentives for the builders. You need to make it so that the market that is best served for the builder, they have an incentive to build first time starter home. You need to make it so that you keep the private capital people out of competing for said things. But I also think you honestly need a mechanism to make and genuinely force in some cases, especially in these high cost of living areas to be able to build more housing. And I hear 100% of the people who already live there. We're not saying you're gonna get screwed, we should make sure that there's services and all of that too. But I just, you know, increasingly all I hear from the homeownership class is like, oh, we can't have that, we can't have. And I'm like, I'm sorry, when you have people pulling two, $300,000 a year and they can't even buy a home in a high cost of living area, we're cooked as an overall society.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah. And so it's the housing costs, but it's all the other costs too. One of the things we focused on a lot is the electricity costs which have skyrocketed, which is also documented in that Wall Street Journal piece that we were talking about. And this again goes back to the oligarchs and their demands. That is the primary reason why electricity costs are going up and up and up. And I took notice of this recent development with federal energy regulators. Here's the headline here. Federal Regulators order Grid operators to Speed Power to Energy Hungry AI Data Centers. Federal regulators on Thursday, this is last week, ordered regional grid operators to help large energy users connect more quickly to the nation's inefficient and aging electric transmission system. A step phase that is needed to accommodate surging demand from power hungry artificial artificial intelligence data centers. Now they're claiming, oh, don't worry, it's not going to add to your costs. Okay, do you believe that? Do you believe that? And here's the other thing. It's not just about the cost. We just literally do not generate enough electricity to deal with the amount that these, you know, the operators that are the major AI tech companies that what they are pushing towards, we do not have that level of electricity generation. So if we're having to, if there are going to be blackouts, if we're going to have to ration electricity generation needs, who do you think is going to be prioritized in that situation? It reminds me very much of when we had the Flint water crisis and the Ford and NGM were like, hey, this new water is like corroding our parts. We, we can't do like you're destroying our business. The government was quick to, oh well, don't worry, we'll switch you back to the other, the other system. We got you. Meanwhile, people and their children were literally being lead poisoned every day and it took years before that was addressed. It's gonna be the same dynamic here, right. The people with the money and the power are going to get their needs met first. And so this to me is one emblem of the direction that the federal government and a lot of the state governments are going to go in as well, where they are being prioritized. Oh, you're a giant new data center and you need to be connected to the grid. Even though we, you know, this is going to spike energy rates and electricity rates for consumers across this entire region. Don't worry, we've got your back. We will fast track your ability to connect into the grid with no requirement that we're, you know, building out additional electricity generation needs. So it is this dynamic which will continue to make costs higher and higher and higher across the board.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. And I will just point to the story that I relayed last time, our last show about Sterling, Virginia where this exact situation happened. Those generators with the extreme wine which were overwhelming the noise in the neighborhood, they were told it would only be on temporarily. The generators have now been on for over a month, for over a year. So you could see and they have, these residents have no recourse, are sitting there with multi, like with loud, you know, hearing damage level noise perpetuating the entire neighborhood that for over a year with zero recourse. So whenever it comes to these promises from the electricities, from the electricity utilities, oh, it's not gonna increase. The truth is, you can see this is about priority and they need, look, they need these data centers to come online at the end of the day. That's the only thing powering the American

[Ryan Grim]

stock market, the whole, that entire economy.

[Krystal Ball]

So if that doesn't work out, it all goes bust. So it just makes it so that at the end of the day they're gonna get the preferential treatment, the rates and yeah, if we're ever in a power generation crisis, we all know which way it's gonna go, and you can only take it back one way, which is democracy. All right, so we have some great guests standing by the blowback pod to talk about their special relationship series on Israel and the United States. Let's get to it.

[Ryan Grim]

I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I

[Brendan James]

don't trust much of anything.

[Noah Colwyn]

It's the rage bait.

[Ryan Grim]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Brendan James]

We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the Facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News reporting for America.

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[Ryan Grim]

there's been a lot in the news lately and a lot that is quite relevant about our quote unquote, special relationship with the nation state of Israel. So, luckily for us, we are joined by two experts today. We've got Brendan James and Noah Colwyn, co host of the Blowback Pod. And they have just released right now for premium subscribers a special edition called no Daylight that looks at the historical trajectory of the US Israel relationship. It is fantastic. Everybody go and subscribe. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

[Krystal Ball]

Good to see you guys.

[Brendan James]

Thank you.

[Noah Colwyn]

Thanks for having us.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, of course. So let's go ahead and start by taking a listen to some of the things that President Trump has said lately about his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

[Brendan James]

And Bibi Netanyahu worked well with me, but he will tell you we're the ones with the guns, we're the ones with the whole deal, we're the ones with the B2 bombers, etc. If it weren't for Donald Trump, Israel would have been eviscerated. Your relationship with Netanyahu's, it's good, but we have to keep him a little bit sane.

[Krystal Ball]

Are you going to be able to

[Brendan James]

control Israel from attacking Lebanon?

[Noah Colwyn]

Yeah, I will be. I mean, I wonder.

[Brendan James]

They have a lot of respect for me and they do. As I say, Mr. Bibi Netanyahu happens to be a good man. Gets a little excited sometimes, but he happens to be a very good man. We've had an amazing partnership. He's been an amazing prime minister. We have a little dispute over Lebanon. I say you can do a little softer touch, Bibi. You don't have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it. That's from Hezbollah, but it's been an amazing partnership. But he will say we're the big partners partner and he's the very small partner.

[Noah Colwyn]

And that's true.

[Ryan Grim]

So, Noah, I'll start with you. What have you made of these comments from Trump? Also, more critically, the comments from JD Vance. Do you think this split with Israel is real?

[Noah Colwyn]

That's a great question. I think that this split is an inflection point. I don't necessarily know if I would say that it's real in the way that people necessarily like, at least popular sentiment, would like it to be, just generally because of the contempt towards Israel and the Netanyahu government. But I do believe that what this shows and what it indicates and what it surfaces, and this is actually part of the point of our miniseries, is that we're interested in examining, like, well, okay, how do these moments of daylight emerge when it's clear that the US And Israel have divergent interests, and how is it then that they get sutured back shut? And I would argue that at this time, when I say we're at an inflection point, we're at a moment where we're figuring out, okay, is this going to be one of those moments, as it has been for most of the past 80 years, where something gets stitched shut back together, or is this actually going to be part of a longer process initiated since October 7, 2023, where the US and Israel strategic Partnership is perhaps, you know, coming undone or at the very least, significantly changing in character from how it's been before? Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Brendan, let's talk here a little bit, zooming out how, as it pertains to your guys season going back from the beginning, I have alluded to this in the past about Truman's haberdashery partner and kind of the very strange circumstances in which the United States even became entwined with Israel. But why don't you take the audience through some of that?

[Brendan James]

Well, it's a fascinating thing. I think many people will be caught off guard if they listen, particularly if they're younger or they're unfamiliar with some of this history. Harry Truman, of course, was the president, the US President that recognized the state of Israel when it was founded in 48. But for several years before that, from 1945 onward, the beginning of his presidency, he was not so keen on there being a Jewish state in the Middle East. He opposed it. He told the Zionist lobby he opposed it. He told his own advisors he opposed it. He told the public he opposed it in one way or another. He thought it was an ethnostate, alternatively called it an ethnostate or a theocracy, neither of which were ideals that he felt were worthy of lending American support to. The problem was, is he had a sort of a showdown in his own cabinet between his foreign policy establishment, which at the very top was led by no less than George Marshall, a decorated general from World War II. None of them supported, virtually none of them supported, and certainly no one high up supported the foundation of a Jewish state. And they were even cold warriors, right wingers who said, we think this will drive the Arab states that have a lot of oil into the hands or Rather into the arms of the Soviet Union. There's no reason to do this. Everyone, including Truman, was much more sympathetic to the idea of a binational or federated state. That's what they were working in concert with the British Empire to bring about because a lot of this also meant the British were exiting the Middle East. However, his domestic advisors were very keen on him supporting a state of Israel, not only because of their own personal Zionism, which they had reached, some of them actually quite recently in their careers, but because it was a very easy way for him to hold together the New Deal coalition that he inherited from fdr. It was a purely domestic, purely political calculation that the ethnic makeup of the New Deal coalition, which included Jews in very important states and very important cities, that he had to win, that this was something that we need not worry about the consequences of overseas as long as it secures us the election and the sort of Democratic party's coalition that was so important. So you have Truman being the first guy who recognized Israel, who didn't even think it was a good idea, and who really didn't pay attention to much of the issue of Palestine after, except to express frustration with issues of refugees returning and indeed what you might call the right of return, that he was rather repulsed by Israel's conduct. However, it was at that point he had already given in to the political pressures and had recognized the state of Israel and couldn't really do much about it.

[Ryan Grim]

And at that point in the, you know, in terms of the political valence, Zionism was a cause more associated with the political left that has shifted over the years. Talk about how that political dynamic has shifted as the orientation towards Israel has shifted and become this security arrangement that we know today.

[Brendan James]

It's very fascinating again for people who think of reasonably now look around and think of Palestine as something that is a cause for the center left, left of center and, and all the way to the far left initially, because I should think it was a moment right after the Nazi Holocaust. There was also a rather typical American incuriosity with what was really going on in the ground in Palestine. A lot of progressives and liberals said this is restorative justice of some kind to the Jews of Europe. There's some tenuous biblical and ancient connection with this land. Why not allow this to happen? You must be an anti Semite, you must be some kind of sort of crank to not recognize the right the Jews have to their own state. We still hear some of this language, but it was coming from places like the Nation or the Pre Murdoch, New York Post and even Soviet agents inside of America, which is a whole other story about why the Soviet Union might want it to have had some of its inside guys softening Truman's Cold War coalition by appealing to some of its Jewish members of that coalition with the appeal of Zionism. But at any rate, it was viewed as a progressive cause. And as I mentioned earlier, it was cold warriors. A guy named Lloyd Henderson had Truman's ear, who was very conservative and right wing and felt that it was a really boneheaded move in the context of the Cold War and the standoff with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union itself opposed the creation of a Jewish state for many years until around 47, when to the surprise of everyone, it said we still would prefer a binational or federated state, but if that cannot be reached, we will sign on to the execution of a Jewish state as far as that can be attained in a just manner. And that was a huge surprise to everyone. The idea, I think, being that they really wanted to drive the British out of the Middle east and they saw the retreat of the British Empire as something more strategically worthy of their attention than necessarily the founding of the Jewish state in Palestine.

[Krystal Ball]

Noah, in terms of what you guys cover on the podcast, why don't you lay out for us the key moments in the so called special relationship. How did it evolve to what it is from Truman's haberdashery partner to today?

[Noah Colwyn]

Truman's haberdashery partner, you know, his Jewish friend, somebody he would lean on considerably for personal advice and humor, was, you know, but a bit player, right in this larger story between the US and Zionism and then the US and Israel. Our show takes the big moments of these stories, or at least these moments when tension surfaces in very visible ways that are unique. We take them to be the founding of Israel, more or less, and, and the Truman White House's navigation of that process. We also look at the Eisenhower years, and the Eisenhower years, I think are very interesting and very understudied. In particular, we look at both the Suez crisis, but also something that happened in 1953, a few years earlier, a massacre in the west bank committed by Israeli forces led by none other than later Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. A massacre that was such a PR blow to Israel that it led to, you know, it was the. It tipped a relatively short series of dominoes that led to the creation of aipac, the most powerful and well known Israel lobby today. And then we also look at the Reagan years and we have a Bit of time we talk a little bit about how the US Israel relationship changed in the late 60s and 70s, but we really focus on the Reagan years because the Reagan years are also another underappreciated time of tension between the US And Israel. Ronald Reagan, elected as probably the most outwardly Zionist president in American history, until that point, pretty immediately is thrust into a series of political fights with pro Israel forces. This is the time when AIPAC and the pro Israel lobby is coming into its own, when Israeli influence networks in the United States are beginning to reach maturity and efficacy. A bunch of spy rings get broken up in this decade. A bunch of other organizations that are pro Israel, like the adf, get caught up in various political scandals. And the Reagan White House was in fights, you know, a self described very pro Israel White House was in, you know, they, they did battle with the Israel lobby, or what was called the AWACS fight, an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, essentially. And then we also had the time that. That time that Israel went and bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor. And Reagan wrote in his diary that he thought Armageddon was coming. And most infamously, and this is something that has very, you know, kind of jarring parallels of today, frankly, something that when Brennan and I conceived of this miniseries, we hadn't, you know, was not quite yet a fact on the ground, which was the brutal Israeli assault that has been unfolding in Lebanon in the last couple months. And how in Reagan's time, I mean, Israel committed atrocities and oversaw atrocities such as Sabre and Shatila. And in fact, the US was directly implicated in some of these atrocities as well. And we suffered for it too. The United States, you know, Marine. The Marine barracks bombing took place in this time. And, you know, Reagan calls begin telling him it's a damn holocaust. Like, like, cut it out. And it's, you know, I think it's kind of interesting and, and what we try to tell the story of there is how there was that great moment of tension, something that had never really happened before. And then it kind of did go back to business as usual, with a kind of big exception, or at least with like a sort of important coda, which is that under George H.W. bush, there was a sincere effort to try to get Israel to the negotiating table with the Palestinians. Like, say what one will about the premises of those negotiations, how strong a hand or how fair a hand the Palestinians would be dealt in them. But H.W. bush successfully held up loan guarantees that Israel was seeking in the early 90s as a method, as a method of coercing coercing them billions of dollars. And it would is like, you know, Israel was facing legitimate financial crisis in the US Use that as leverage to extract Democrat diplomatic concessions. Which, you know, I don't know about you guys, but I read the headlines today and that would seem like, you know, an idea coming from Mars.

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, I know. Yeah, it's nuts.

[Ryan Grim]

I turned off news altogether. I hate to say it, but I

[Brendan James]

don't trust much of anything.

[Noah Colwyn]

It's the rage bait.

[Ryan Grim]

It feels like it's trying to divide people.

[Brendan James]

We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts. Let's move forward from there. NBC News reporting for America.

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[Ryan Grim]

Brendan over the course of the podcast, you basically track these different instances where American presidents, at least momentarily put up some resistance and say you got to stop. They cut off some arms at certain points in time. And I believe it was begging that, you know, during the Reagan administration was like, no, they'll be back. Don't worry. Like, this will be a momentary bump and they'll be back. And that has been the correct analysis. So I wonder what you learned here about whether our relationship with Israel is driven primarily by the interests of empire, whether it is driven primarily by AIPAC and the very effective lobbying and the impact of money in politics here in the US or is it a combination of the two? Help us tease out what you learned about what drives, what is the engine that continues to drive this relationship?

[Brendan James]

Well, the first thing I would say, and we've had to discuss this in the different interviews we've done promoting the show, I personally, I don't even necessarily want to speak for Noah. And we don't tend to editorialize too much in the course of the miniseries itself or any of our seasons. I'm skeptical about the thesis that Israel is a mere appendage of US foreign policy, a mere proxy for US interests in the region and in the world. There's too much spying, there's too much sabotage, there's too much stealing of state secrets and there's too much just if this is to be a proxy or understood as one flat out disobedience that you just don't see in that type of relationship. And as Noah was alluding to earlier and as we cover in the first several episodes of the miniseries, for several decades, Israel and America did not have the special relationship. Eisenhower held up arms, embargoed arms. Truman, as we discussed, was not terribly sympathetic. In general, he recognized the state. That was obviously a huge move, but it wasn't this hand in glove idea that people have had, rightfully so, for the past few decades. So it wasn't serving our interest as some kind of attack dog or expeditionary force for many, many years. Once that became, I think, the case that Israel was selling to America, we will be your Cold War chess piece in the Middle East. A lot of people started to believe that genuinely it was a truly necessary relationship. And then in the 90s, there was an even greater emphasis. Once the Cold War was over, there was a greater emphasis on the Judeo Christian shared values and civilization. This was of course presaging the war on terror language in which Israel became once more this ally that we couldn't do without. I'm skeptical of all of that. And I think the left sometimes overestimates how in concert or symbiotic, supposedly in concert, Israel and America are. I would say that of course, the lobby is impossible to ignore. Overstating it is Something that'll lead you down some strange places, but so will understating it. And the nuclear blackmail, I think is sometimes under discussed. I mean, whether it be Reagan or H.W. bush, we may do a sequel to our series someday. We could talk about Clinton and, and Bush too, and Obama and of course Trump. Right now you can mouth off about Israel and get them to try to accept their place every now and again, but you can't get rid of those nukes. And I'm sure many, many people in the State Department, whether it was the Biden administration or Trump right now, they might like to read them their rights, but they might be told the next day by some fanatical Israeli minister, well, you know, that if we have to do it, we can set off a tactical nuke that's not nothing. So you have the domestic political pressure at home, where they own much of the Congress, to put it bluntly, and you have a nuclear option for them anytime they want to say, well, who are you to tell us what to do? That's pretty scary for an empire that is declining and that needs as many friends as it can get as it declines. So I think that at this point, it's really a relationship born out of weakness of the United States. We'll see how this goes with Trump.

[Noah Colwyn]

Trump.

[Brendan James]

Vance did his little kind of Zelensky style belittling of Israel the other day, but I mean, those are just words. We tried to cover these in the miniseries, these moments where H.W. bush withheld 10 billion, where Eisenhower slapped an arms embargo, where Reagan said, I'm suspending all support, you're committing a holocaust. However brief these moments were, it's more than we've seen from the Trump people at the moment.

[Ryan Grim]

And Noah, do you agree more or less with that assessment?

[Noah Colwyn]

Yeah, I think so. I think that the, the thing I would only even like somewhat add two points would be on the nuclear blackmail piece. There was once another country that had nuclear weapons and, you know, threatened to use them and also partnered with Israel and developing them, and that was South Africa. And South Africa for a long time benefited from using the same kind of strategic imposture, strategic ambiguity, not acknowledging his weapons and so forth. And it wasn't really, you know, in the end days of, of the South African apartheid regime in the final years there, in the context of their various border wars and in the fight in particular against the Cubans in Angola, there were discussions about using tactical nuclear weapons. And I think that, you know, there was a real fear that South Africa would do that and you know, the like, like it was taken as a credible threat is my point. And I believe that, that in the case of Israel, world leaders today similarly view Israeli threats, if they were ever to be made even, you know, behind closed doors, they would view them as credible considering that Israelis have done everything from like, you know, like the beeper bombings and I mean at this point, too many ridiculous and strange and blatant horrors to name. And then the other point. And so which is to say that I think that the nuclear blackmail with them is a lot more powerful of a force than it necessarily is with other states.

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That's really.

[Noah Colwyn]

And then, and then the, the other piece of it is that I think that the Israel lobby is, is a really. Fortunately, there's a lot of really good scholarship coming out about it right now. Somebody whom we interview for our show, Doug Ross, now has a terrific book out that, I'm sorry, that'll be out either later this year or next year about American Zionism that has a lot of good historical facts. I know that Eli Clifton, I forget his co author, but he's co author of a new book out about the Israel Lobby. And you know, to say nothing of the Walton Mearsheimer, but for all of that ink, the Israel Lobby remains kind of like a hazy and under theorized and underreported kind of, you know, set of institutions. And part of what that has enabled. Right. Is this like really sort of disastrous direct and persistent conflation with being pro Israel and being Jewish. And the pro Israel lobby has more or less also taken the place of identifying with the position of the Jew organized Jewish community in the United States. And the political power of that just shouldn't be taken lightly. Not simply on the level, not on the level of like, oh, Jews have a lot of power, but simply on the level that like this, you know, like an influential, respected and well established minority group in the United States, like its civil rights are now bound up with this political position. And I don't think that the process by which that has been made to happen is a small part at all. I think it's a very important and big part of how it is that the US and Israel have maintained whatever the relationship it is that they do have.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Last question from me, guys is about the USS Liberty. I know that you guys touch on it a little bit. Why don't you tell us a little bit how it factors into some of the analysis that you've laid out. Either of you can take that question, whoever wants to.

[Brendan James]

I see the Hot potato to Noah. Go ahead.

[Noah Colwyn]

So the uss Liberty in 1967, during the, I guess, ongoing conflicts over the, what we call the Six Day War, there was an Israeli plane attack on a U.S. surveillance ship off the coast of Egypt. And the USS Liberty was the name of the ship. Dozens of sailors died. It was a rather surreal and startling attack. And for many years, what the attack was, its nature, its causes, what may have prompted it, were essentially, was essentially hushed up up. There were very little information was released about it. And it fostered a years long, a decades long resentment between higher echelons of the Navy and the nsa, because the NSA grew out of Naval Intelligence and the NSA and Israel. And also, which is also because Israel, you know, does like, Israel spies on us and we spy on everybody else. And that spying goes crossways a lot in addition to the intelligence sharing. So some rivalries there. But the US list Liberty kind of became this shorthand in the years since, right, for all of the ways in which the US would just like go to bat for Israel. Against all reason. Why, against all reason in this case, because there's persistent eyewitness testimony and subsequent testimony from senior naval officers who tried to pursue an investigation or at least a deeper establishment of the facts surrounding the bombing of the Liberty. They said that it was very clear that they were a US ship, that this wasn't a case of mistaken identity, as Israelis later claimed. And furthermore that part of what they were observing were Israeli actions and potentially an atrocity in Egypt, in the city of Alarish. And so I think that there is this, you know, a, the Liberty is just like a perfect example and of how, again, like in part of why it's had such staying power since it happened in 67, even during like pretty consistently pro Israel times in the us is because the liberty, you know, has come to represent like the just sort of baffling human cost imposed by the US's strategic alignment with Israel. And you know, there are scholars and journalists. Before we got talking on the show, you brought up James Scott, who is a very well respected and certainly, no, you know, certain, you know, anti Israel, you know, lefty, who has written about the liberty and has largely come down on the it was a deliberate strike attitude, as has James Bamford, who I would argue is, you know, one of the best chroniclers of the NSA of all time, a wonderful journalist, and he has also argued the same thing. And I think that there is just, you know, there's so much evidence that points to it and exists in these historical accounts that it's kind of hard to deny. But I think what's more important, at least, you know, 50 or 60 years on. Sorry, Jesus, 60 years on, is that it has this resonance because of what it represents in terms of, you know, Israeli actions and US Tolerance for it.

[Krystal Ball]

Totally agree.

[Ryan Grim]

Brennan, my last question for you, because I found this anecdote just so incredible, is you were mentioning how some of the rationales or some of the argument that was made on the Israeli side of why we should have this close relationship changed, and over the years, it became more sort of like ideological, shared Western values, et cetera. But I think some of our leaders, genuinely, they're true believers. I think Joe Biden is a true believer in that regard. And you talk also about how LBJ was a true believer and he would make all these comments about they're just like us in our founding, fighting the savages comments which later on, when it became less of a convenient narrative on both sides, were excised from his public comments. Talk a little bit about that, because I thought that was sort of an extraordinary admission both of the reality of our past and founding and also of what some of the real ideological ties might be between the Zionist project and the American one.

[Brendan James]

Yes, it certainly stands out, doesn't it, that comparison? It was, in fact, Brandeis who made those speeches as a Zionist in the early part of the 20th century that were later echoed by LBJ. And in the very good book Genesis by John Judas, which covers the Truman era and the founding of Israel. And for most of the book, Truman's opposition to it, he brings up this history of American Zionism. Yeah. Brandeis would make comparisons between the civilizing mission of the American settlers and the civilizing mission of the Zionist settlers. The Jewish settlers in the Middle east and the indigenous population of America that were, of course, exterminated and cheated were to be compared to the barbarians of the Arab population in Palestine. However, by the time even of the Second World War, which is a lot of stuff that wasn't that was still socially admissible that we wouldn't like now, even then, those lines were excised from his collected speeches that were released. Johnson, however, I think more in private, who was one of the first presidents to embrace Israel a lot more than it previously had been by a US President. He liked that the Israelis were fighters and that they were, you know, they reminded him of the shotgun over the mantelpiece that was there for every, you know, American pioneer. And it was just happening in the Middle east instead of in North America. So a lot of people correctly, I think, identify this as one of the easiest ways that Israel sold its kinship with America. And two Americans these days, maybe not so much, because even if it was out of style by the 1940s for some, probably isn't so much in style now. In fact, I guess I would close my answer by saying we've had an interesting switcheroo where now a lot of Israel pro Israel voices will say Israel, in fact is decolonial and Israel is the one who was. The Jews were colonized, in fact, by these Arabs and driven out and they're reclaiming their indigenous role in that land. So the arguments change very drastically and sometimes to a comic level of contradiction. But the ultimate case remains the same, which is that Jewish settlers should have the right to steal other people's land and do whatever they want to the people there. So whether it was LBJ back then or Brandeis back then or Chuck Schumer and the Atlantic magazine now, you have the same bottom line.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah, absolutely. Siri's fantastic. Noah, tell people where they can go in order to subscribe and get access to it.

[Noah Colwyn]

It sure. So this series is behind a paywall. It's for our premium subscribers only. You can sign up for $29 a year at Blowback show and with that, you get the ad free bingeable. You know, you can take every, every one of our past six seasons and you could listen to it right now, back to back, no ads. And it's 10 episodes. Well, thank you.

[Ryan Grim]

Yeah.

[Noah Colwyn]

And so if you go to Blowback show right now, hit the big button that says subscribe and you'll get immediate access to all that. And we're shaking up our merch and our digital presence a little bit later this year. So stay tuned. And as always, we have more shit to announce soon.

[Ryan Grim]

Excellent. Excited for the merch shakeup. Gentlemen, thank you so much. It was fantastic.

[Krystal Ball]

See you guys.

[Brendan James]

Thank you.

[Noah Colwyn]

Thank you.

[Ryan Grim]

All right, that does it for us today. We're going to be tracking the election results tonight very closely. Ryan is going to be in New York and he is going to join me tomorrow for a full breakdown of that as well as whatever additional news breaks, which we know there will be many things consequential between today and tomorrow. So we will see you then for that.

[Krystal Ball]

We'll see you all then. And I will be out for a little bit of a period of time on vacation. We're all going to be there's going to be a lot of different combinations here on Breaking Point, so don't freak out Everything's all good. We'll see you then.

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Welcome to the history books.

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This is an I Heart podcast.

[Ryan Grim]

Guaranteed human.