B (6:51)

Dan Sinore, good to see you.

A (6:53)

Good to be with you, Sam.

B (6:54)

We're doing a simulcast here, which I've been on your podcast. You've never been on mine, so apologies to your listeners. But I think we need to start this simulcast with you giving a potted bio. How do you explain yourself? How do you have strong opinions on the topics we're about to touch?

A (7:10)

I spent a number of years in and out of US Government foreign policy positions, and I've spent a lot of time in the Middle east in those positions and also a lot of time in Israel studying and writing about Isra, written a couple books about Israel. And since October 7, my podcast has been all but exclusively focused on what has been happening in Israel, the Middle east, and in the West's reaction to events of October 7th. So in a nutshell, that's how I found my voice.

B (7:40)

Yeah. Well, I'll just tell my listeners that that podcast is call me back. And I have found it indispensable these last two years. It's really just been fantastic. So thanks for doing it and I highly recommend that people listen to you directly over there.

A (7:55)

Thank you. Well, I think most of my listeners are already listeners of yours, but if they're not, they should be and should be subscribers, because your voice, while you come in and out of this issue, I think a number of the issues you address on your podcast are actually like the surround sound of what has been going on in the issue that I've been covering. So your voice and your clarity have been extremely important and I'm glad we're able to have this conversation.

B (8:20)

Yeah. Well, so Dan, there's a lot we could talk about. I don't really have much of an agenda. Except that there are two things that I feel like we really should touch in addition to anything else we might touch. One is I want to learn from you just the state of the landscape out there. I mean, just how I want to get your impression as to how bad things are on at least two fronts. I mean, the anti Semitism globally and specifically the degree to which Israel has lost this information war with the entire world and the consequences of all that. So I just want to learn from you in this conversation. But also I think it might be interesting to explore how we come to these topics from different angles, because I think you are much more comfortable in just arguing for and in defense of Jewish identity. And that's not really how I come to these same problems and seem to make the same noises. I'm much more in the business of getting out of the business of identity. So we can talk about that. But beyond those two fronts, I want to talk about anything that interests you.

A (9:31)

Yeah, well, let me start with. And I'll respond to both of those questions. But I guess last time we spoke, Sam, at least on a podcast, was a year ago, which was on the one year anniversary of October 7th. And I remember in that conversation you and I had, I asked you what surprised you most in the year since October 7, 2023, and you said the explosion of anti Semitism is what surprised you the most. And I guess my question now on the second anniversary of October 7th, what, if anything, has surprised you in this second year of the war, the second year since October 7th, what surprised you in year October 7th, 24 to 25?

B (10:17)

I think, unfortunately I have the same answer. It's just, I mean, now I am even further surprised about the size and depth of the crater. It's a bigger problem than I imagined. And it's a bigger problem than I imagined a year ago. It seems to be getting worse, not better. And I keep finding new details that shock me. So you and I are talking in the immediate aftermath of this. The murders of Jews in Manchester, on Yom Kippur. And that's horrible enough, but then to know that there were celebrations in the streets of London in the immediate aftermath, you know, just unabashed celebrations of the murder of Jews in the uk. It's shocking. And our tacit toleration of it is shocking. I mean, just the fact that we have backed ourselves into a corner, we now is not everybody. Obviously there are people who would resist this as stridently as they can at this point. But left of center, where I spend most of my time, intellectually and politically, there's so much moral confusion about what is rational to want and to do in the current circumstance. And it just seems, especially in Western Europe, the writing is on the wall. It is totally rational to worry that Western Europe is completely unraveling culturally in a way that not just Jews, but really anyone who cares about the defense of open societies needs to worry about. And I don't often find myself agreeing with President Trump, as you know, but when he stands up in front of the UN in addition to anything else he might have said, which I would find indefensible, when he tells them that your societies are going to hell. And what he means is, you have completely failed in this project to integrate the millions of Muslims you've brought into your society. And you have ghettos filled with religious maniacs who have no inclination to assimilate into your culture. In fact, they're explicit in wanting to overthrow your culture and replace it with their own. The situation is totally untenable, and it is as bad as Trump or J.D. vance or anyone else who I would otherwise not want to be aligned with say it is.

A (12:41)

Yeah, I guess I'm surprised by what happened, and I shouldn't be in the uk I mean, because it is a natural extension. It's like a logical extension of what we had been witnessing during the first year after October 7th and then well into the second year. The Chief Rabbi of the uk, Mervis, Rabbi Mervis, put out this statement after the Manchester attack, saying something along the lines of, we're shocked by what happened, and yet we all knew this day would come. When I read that line, it was like. Right. Like we knew this day would come, which is if we spend two years, as you said, tolerating this rhetoric in the media and social media and college campuses that Israel is a genocidal state and Israel's an apartheid state, and you're just indoctrinating lots of people, young people especially, but not only young people across Europe and elsewhere, that this is a genocide and that these people, these Jews living in your midst, living in your society, are supporting this country and have a love for this country, Israel, then they are complicit in the genocide. Then why wouldn't people start trying to kill the supporters of the genocide? I mean, I hate to talk in such clinical terms, but it's actually quite logical that this would happen.

B (13:59)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, the problem goes back much further than October 7th, and again, it escapes the frame of antisemitism or hatred of Israel. And it Just, again, my focus is more on the defense of open society. So when I think of the Manchester attack, I think of the previous Manchester attack at the Ariana Grande concert that killed, I think, 22 people. And that had nothing to do with Israel or Jews, but it was the same genius of jihadism being expressed there. And I think of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and the Bataclan massacre. All of these moments where the stark fact that Western Europe has imported a death cult into its midst and has failed to acknowledge the gravity of this fact has just bent over backwards in the most masochistic way to imagine that something more benign is happening. Where on any given day you can see people with placards saying, behead those who insult the prophet. I mean, it's just the character of these protests, the density of these protests, the fact that you can get this number of people in the streets who are clearly calling for Sharia law, and in this case, the UK just can't figure out what to do about it. And this is of a piece with the grooming gang scandal that no one wanted to talk about for more than a decade because no one wanted to be called racist. As though that made any sense. It's just the masochism and delusion has now been turned up to 11. And honestly, I don't know what the next step is. I mean, my concern has always been that if left of center or centrist or even just normal conservatives can't get their arms around this problem, fascists will. I mean, I think if we see a rise of the real right wing in Europe, it will be because of this. And that's not to be hoped for. But this is David Frum's line which distills it. If liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will. But honestly, this is even a deeper problem than the problem of unregulated immigration. It's the fact that ideas spread and become contagious. This recent jihadist was a British citizen, Right? He was an immigrant, but he was not an immigrant yesterday. He was somebody who grew up in the uk.

A (16:27)

Yeah, but if you look at. I don't know if you've been following this, the Facebook. There were like Facebook posts of his father that have just been being examined in the British press.

B (16:35)

No, I haven't seen that.

A (16:36)

Where he was celebrating on October 7. He was celebrating the massacre of October 7. So this is the home. This is where, you know, this is where this young man was being. This is the water he was swimming in, you know, and so, I mean, this was not something that, oh, the war got really bad, the quote, unquote genocide. These were the ideas that were being incubated with these people in the days after October 7th. I would also just add to that. I do think we're going to see a big right wing swing in European politics from the UK through France through, you know, Germany through elsewhere for the reasons we're talking about here. But what's so incredible to me is I think these politicians in Europe, Starmer, Macron, they knew they had this problem that you're describing and they have wanted to try to keep the temperature from spiraling out of control, just keep it at a relative level from spiraling. So it was a completely unraveling society. And the approach they took was we can kind of feed the beast by criticizing Israel, by attacking Israel, by criticizing the Jews. I mean, I was just in France a few weeks ago and I was meeting with leaders of the Jewish community and they said Macron after October 7th was fantastic. They said, first of all, he was one of the first leaders in the west to travel to Israel. He lured Israel to show solidarity with Israel. And he even was proposing a response to October 7th that is actually unimaginable now, which is, he said, we need an international, a global response to October 7th like we did to ISIS. We need to treat Hamas like ISIS. And then there was this 50 nation plus coalition that responded that took on ISIS. We need to do the same thing to Hamas. That's what he was talking. I mean, just imagine that now it's like it really is unimaginable. And that's how he was talking. And then a couple weeks later after that, there was a solidarity. The Jewish community in France held this solidarity march or solidarity event similar to the one in November of 23 that was held in Washington where in the US something like 300,000 plus people came to the mall. And so France had its own version of that and they just assumed Macron would participate. And then he was a no show. And they were like, wait a minute, how did he swing from showing up in Israel talking about this robust response and then just a couple weeks later, nowhere to be found. And when leaders in the Jewish community went to his advisors, he said, well, we need to show some balance. We're concerned about showing balance. Now what balance is he's talking about? The balance he was talking about was not between Israel and Hamas. The balance he was talking about was the seven and a half plus million Muslims that live in France and that represent something like 10% of France's population.

B (19:23)

I think it's 8%.

A (19:24)

Yeah, yeah, 8%. So it's just this idea that, oh, we'll pull back on support for Israel, we'll pull back on showing solidarity with Israel. No, we'll actually go farther than that. We'll participate in calling what Israel's doing a genocide, and we'll cut off arms supplies to Israel, and we'll go ahead and recognize a Palestinian state with no conditions or calls on anything for Hamas. So there was this hope, I think, that they could just continue to pander to their local population and that would kind of keep things quiet. And of course, the opposite happens, right? It's not like this. The people who are on the front lines of these attacks against the Jews are gonna. Are gonna be mollified by these foreign policy positions that their leaders are taking.

B (20:08)

This is what is often referred to as feeding the crocodile. Right, right. In the. In the hopes that it's not gonna eat you. But.

A (20:15)

Well, here's my question, though, is then, so what happens now? I mean, so I clearly, Starmer in the UK is rattled, and I've got to believe Macron is rattled, because he knows that this kind of thing could have easily happened in France. These things like this, as you just said, have happened in France. So what do they do now? I mean, because to truly deal with the issue means to confront big political constituencies in their own governing coalitions.

B (20:41)

Well, what's amazing is it's not that big. I mean, so we just said that France is 8% Muslim, the UK is 6% Muslim, last I looked. So the depth of this problem, the fact that you can get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets exerting what seems scarcely tolerable pressure on the political system and the need to pander to it, all of this mayhem is the result of 6% of the population making itself noisy. Can you imagine what it would look like with 30% of the population? I mean, it's completely untenable to not confront it at this stage. Right? I mean, honestly, there's no. And this is going to sound like bigotry to anyone who's not actually doing the moral algebra here. I mean, so first, everything I'm saying is addressing the consequences of certain deeply held ideas. Right? This is nothing. I'm not talking in principle about any race or ethnicity or. I mean, the color of a person's skin is completely irrelevant for this conversation. But left of center, all of this gets coded as xenophobia and racism and white supremacy. The moment you begin making noises like this, but you have to think about Islam as a set of ideas that is analogous to any other set of ideas like communism. So to criticize communists, to worry about having more communists in your country, to not want more of them, to want to be able to point out that certain fundamental ideas within communism are inimical to how you want to organize your own society, that conversation can be had without any sense that you are expressing bigotry toward people based on their indelible characteristics acquired at birth. The same attitude has to be taken when discussing the differences between our religions, especially religions that are religions of conversion, that are aggressively missionary faiths that are spreading in 100 countries. So Christianity and Islam are unlike Judaism in this regard. When you're talking about Jews and Judaism, you are almost by definition, because Judaism is not a missionary faith and because there are only 15 million Jews, and virtually all of them are Jews by virtue of being born to a woman who was herself born to a woman who was herself born to a woman who was Jewish. When you're talking about Jews, you are talking, at least implicitly, about an ethnicity and a race. And it's not to say people don't convert to Judaism, but it's just not that common. And the Jews don't make it easy, et cetera.

A (23:11)

And they don't seek it out.

B (23:13)

They don't seek it out. Right. And so there's a big difference here. And that's why you can't just swap the terms antisemitism and Islamophobia into various sentences and pretend that they're functioning the same way. There's no such thing as Islamophobia. There's such a thing as racism. There's such a thing as xenophobia. There's such a thing. But Islamophobia is a word that has been made up to prevent criticism of Islam and to conflate it with bigotry. So any secularist who wants to argue against creeping Islamic theocracy or to even just argue for the human rights of women and girls in the context of Islamic theocracy, that person gets painted as a bigot and as Islamophobe, and it's just not true. It's just a rhetorical trick that has been foisted on the left half of our society, and everyone left of center has been taken in by it. And that's why they're uniquely unfit to even participate in this conversation at the moment. Unfortunately, as you go right of center, you begin to meet people who are rather eager to have this conversation for some bad reasons, right? Then you begin to meet real racists and xenophobes and white supremacists and Christian identitarian lunatics and proper Nazis. And then the guilt by association police come out of the woodwork and you get defenestrated for having talked to somebody who talked to someone who was himself untouchable. And so there's a problem here in just how we talk about this, which is to say that there's a reason, for instance, why I haven't had Tommy Robinson on my podcast. It's not because Tommy Robinson is wrong about most of what he says. He's absolutely not wrong about most of what he says. But he's just rough enough around the edges and just has enough of a colorful history that I'm uncomfortable being directly associated with him. And frankly, I'm right to be uncomfortable, given the consequences of being associated with him. But I can talk to Douglas Murray, and yet Douglas Murray, for many people left of center is considered beyond the pale because he'll talk to Tommy Robinson without hesitation. Right. So the landscape here is a mess, but what is real is that we have to deal with the reality of religious fanaticism and its consequen. And the problem here is especially acute in the Muslim community, wherever it has anything like influence. Right. The more influence it gets, even at the 6% level, you start hearing demands for not just Sharia law being observed by Muslims, but everyone outside of the community bending the knee to their religious strictures. None of us can draw a cartoon or even a representation of the Prophet Muhammad for fear of spending the rest of our lives being hunted by religious maniacs. And that is a cost to free speech globally that has been imposed and just accepted by everyone. And it's totally untenable.

A (26:08)

I get into these debates with liberal friends of mine when we talk about what, for instance, the Trump administration, what it's doing on US College campuses or what it's doing on a range of these issues, some of which you cite there. And they say he's. We agree with you that anti Semitism's a big problem in this case on college campuses, but his response is overshoots or he doesn't really care about the issue.

B (26:32)

Yeah, it's a. It's being used as a pretext to.

A (26:34)

He doesn't really care about the issues. What he really wants to do is wreck the universities. And so they'll say it's not really about the problem. And these are some friends of mine who have influence at universities or on trust, they're trustees of universities. And I say, look, we could get into that debate. That's a fair debate to have, but it doesn't excuse you, in the case of people involved with universities, from dealing with the problem. You may say he's overshooting in his response to the problem, but there's still this thing called the problem, and it's a really big problem. And just too many people are just uncomfortable with dealing with the problem. And it's Starmer and Macron and it's leaders of universities here. So Trump is an incredible foil, but there's still this thing that's the problem.

B (27:16)

Yeah. And I'm very sympathetic with any kind of skepticism around the nobility of Trump's actual motives here. I mean, so I do think that people who claim he's using it as a pretext to turn the ratchet of authoritarianism more. I think there's something to that. And yet, for whatever reason, I mean, his motives can be quite mixed. I'm sure they are quite mixed. For whatever reason, I have to admit that Trump is the greatest friend to the Jews and to Israel in particular, than any president we've seen for quite some time. And certainly than we could have expected President Kamala Harris to be. Right. And I say that you can imagine how much it pains me to have to admit this publicly, given what I think about Trump, but it's just manifestly so. Now, again, I do think he's an unreliable ally. I think he's the reason why he's aligned with Israel now to the degree and the Jews now to the degree that he is, is somewhat inscrutable. And it could be some combination of how he's grifting among the relatively secular despots in the Middle east and other concerns that have no real ethical moorings, but are just, for whatever contingent reason, align now with a very strong defense of Israel. But, I mean, unfortunately, the Jews in Israel have to take whatever help they can get from this quarter. And this is, you know, there's every reason to worry that a President Harris would have not had her head screwed on straight around any of these issues. And we would be seeing some woke pablum tumbling out of her mouth at every opportunity, confusing this. And we would see arms embargoes to Israel. And, you know, she had looked at the maps and they shouldn't have gone into Rafah and all the, all the rest of the. This is among a handful of issues that if the Democrats can't see daylight on in the next 12 months, I worry that the advantage of Trump and Trumpism, whatever that future holds is going to be, is only going to increase in our domestic politics.

A (29:22)

Yeah, I would say, I think on this issue, on the issue of Israel and the Middle East, Trump has been, regardless of what you think of him, on any other issue, I think on this issue, he's been remarkably consistent through both terms of his presidency, which I think has surprised many people for all the reasons you're saying that he can flip on a dime. It's all situational, it's all transactional, it's all relationships. But for whatever reason, if you go back to his first term, from the Abraham Accords, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, taking out Suleimani in Iran and pulling out of the Iran deal and launching a maximum pressure campaign on Iran, then in his second term, we're less than a year in, but I mean, clearly just standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel. And the most remarkable, if you were to. I guess the other. If you were to say to me what has surprised me Most about the second year, the second anniversary of October 7, the other development I'd point to is, and this comes back to what I'm talking about with Trump, was the Israeli US Operation against Iran. I'm actually blown away by that. This was an issue that had consumed Israeli and American policymakers for decades, for decades in the US in, you know, administrations of both parties, it was a perplexing problem because they could see the direction of travel. If you think about the four biggest threats to the United States internationally, China, I mean, no particular order, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, those were the four biggest. Now, three of those four have nuclear weapons. Iran was the only one that didn't, and it certainly wanted them and was on a path to getting them. And in the US Policymakers were stuck. I mean, I can talk about what each party's approach was, but basically it was obvious that there was no diplomacy to be done. And the only way to really stop Iran's nuclear program was through some targeted military operation. And it just seemed unimaginable that the US under any administration, would do the kind of operation, participate in the kind of operation that we saw in June of this year in Iran, partly because the US had been, through both administrations of both parties, been gradually pulling away from the Middle East. So the idea that the US Would then get involved in a major military operation, albeit targeted, was unimaginable.

B (31:49)

And then from Israel's perspective, the thing that made it imaginable was that the Israelis demonstrated the helplessness of the air defenses of Iran.

A (31:58)

Right.

B (31:58)

I mean, Israel really just unwrapped the box and said, look, this is not what it seemed. Right, Right.

A (32:06)

The message they sent was the Ayatollah has no clothes. As someone used that line on my podcast that, like they're naked.

B (32:11)

Right.

A (32:12)

I also think that from an Israeli standpoint, Israeli policymakers were uncomfortable. They were stuck on what to do about Iran because of the existence of Hezbollah. That Hezbollah sitting on Israel's northern border with, you know, 150 to 200,000 rockets, in some cases a very sophisticated arsenal staring down at Israel. Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, were for years were just like, what if that arsenal is activated? Like an industrial scale, mass scale, just, you know, you could literally take out Tel Aviv. You could take out, you know, electrical facilities. It could take out, it could hit Dimona where the. I mean, you can just. Where the nuclear facilities. I mean, you could just imagine what it would look like to really. We'll talk about an existential threat to Israel that was an existential threat breathing down Israel's throat. And they also had a real army.

B (33:03)

Someone analogous to the situation in Korea where you have just endless artillery aimed at Seoul from the North. I mean, the reason why we haven't been able to take out North Korea's nuclear arsenal is not just that they already have nukes, it's that they have all of this artillery aimed at South Korea. And if South Korea magically did what Israel did with a bunch of beepers and some other maneuvers just nullified that whole threat, things possibly would change.

A (33:34)

Yeah. So Israel couldn't imagine, many Israeli policymakers couldn't imagine dealing with Iran until that happened or until Hezbollah was wiped out. The arsenal was wiped out, that capability was removed. And that then opened possibilities for dealing with Iran because Iran didn't have that response capability if Israel struck. And when you think like Israel taking out Hezbollah, Sam wouldn't have happened without October 7. So you just think about Sinwar on October 6, Yehje Sinwar sitting there enthusiastically plotting what was gonna happen the next day, which in many respects was extraordinarily successful from his perspective. But I don't think he anticipated that within two years of this strike, the entire geopolitics of the Middle east would be completely reshaped, leaving Israel as the hegemon in the region. And it took October 7th for Israel to deal with Hezbollah in the north. It took Israel taking out Hezbollah in the north to be prepared or willing to consider a military operation against Iran in so doing, as you said revealed how excellent Israel's capabilities were in Iran and. Or how vulnerable and how weak and overstated Iran's defensive capabilities were, which paved the way for the US to get involved. And then within no time, we have, like, in the blink of an eye, historical blink of an eye, we have the region reshaped. That to me, if I were to say, like, what has surprised me the most in the last year, it is, I couldn't have imagined that we would be here. It's not to say that Israeli society isn't still shattered. It's not to say that there are things about this war that are still horrifying on so many levels. But the geopolitics of the Middle east have been reshaped. And it's obviously a huge advantage to Israel and it's a huge advantage to.

B (35:20)

The US it seems reasonable to worry that we don't actually know what was accomplished in Iran against Iran with those strikes. What's your sense of any kind of consensus out there among people who think they know what was adequately bombed and how far back the program was set and all of that?

A (35:42)

So it's a debate that's within a. Within a range. Like when I talk to different experts, both Israeli experts, American experts, some in Europe, some with the iaea, it's so you hear kind of like a range. It's either, you know, to use Trump's language and the people around demolished, you know, like just obliterated. I think that was the word he used, obliterated. So that's on one extreme. The more cautious and conservative end of it is severely set back. And what I mean by severely set back is, you know, a couple years. Well, given how close Iran seemed to be to at least being able to activate a race to the bomb before the June operation. June operation of this year. Two years is a long time. If that's the best it is. You take the most cautious estimate, that's two years is a long time. And what it doesn't account for is Israel still has, and the US to the extent it wants to use it, has still to this day, total air superiority over Iran. In other words, it has. I mean, I just heard from an Israeli official a week ago who told was describing to me the dynamic while the US And Israel were coordinating over the operations in June of this year. And it got to the point that there were military officials from CENTCOM telling the Israelis, hey, by the way, can you take out this? And by the way, while you're there, can you take out that? And they were like, you know, they wanted to just make sure Iran was totally exposed for a while. And the Israelis were saying to the Americans, don't worry, like we don't have to do this all in one shot. We are going to be in control here for a while. So at least of the air. So I think that the nuclear program, again, most conservative estimate is a couple of years set back. I think it's probably longer. I think it's worse for the Iranians than that. But even if you take that, plus continued US And Israeli access to Iranian skies whenever it wants, combined with Iran losing its proxies like Hezbollah and satellite states like Syria, I mean, that's another thing. Syria, the Assad regime was in power for 53 years. I mean, again, December of 24, in a matter of two weeks, they're gone and suddenly Bashar Assad is in Russia and the whole thing comes tumbling down. So I just think they are so isolated. The real question is the Iranian people and whether or not we're going to see some kind of revolution from below that will change the regime. That I don't know. And those things are obviously, as we know from history, extremely hard to predict. But I think by any measure, what the US And Israel did was pretty masterful. And I try not to overstate it. And again, I couldn't have imagined this, this is where we would be. Let's take a break to hear a word from our sponsor. Time is not on the side of Holocaust survivors. Every day their numbers grow smaller and many of those who remain face loneliness, poverty and the painful return of antisemitism they once fought to escape. For decades, UJA Federation of New York has provided life affirming care to survivors in New York and Israel. With 53% of survivors living in or near poverty, UJA is stepping in with food, emergency aid, home care, and with something just as vital, connection and dignity in their final years. We can't turn back time, but we can help survivors live the time they have left to stand with them. Visit uja.org or follow the link in the show notes to support UJA today.

B (39:04)

Well, let's talk about Gaza for a moment. And we're now having this conversation in the kind of hiatus between Trump proposing a peace plan and the wait for Hamas's response to that proposal. And the proposal does have more the character of an ultimatum, which I think is only appropriate given the circumstances. But I think Hamas is, we're recording this on a Friday. I think Hamas has been given until Sunday to respond to this. What's your view of the plan itself? And how do you interpret. This is a point that several people have made before me, but how do you interpret the curious silence among all those people who just wanted to stop this war at any cost and now that there's ceasefire now crap, now that there's a ceasefire plan on the table, you don't really see the Mark Ruffalo's of the world leaping in front of their webcams to demand that Hamas accept this deal. And many of these people are at pains to say that they're not supporters of Hamas, they're just supporters of the Palestinian people, the beleaguered Palestinian people who are pure victims here. Surely they would want Hamas to accept this ceasefire deal and stop the killing. Where are all these voices?

A (40:17)

Yeah, so I'll start by, by getting to something you, you asked at the beginning, just where are we now? Like sort of set the deck on where we are in the war. I think that the remaining hostages, 50 hostages in Gaza, were always going to be the hardest hostages to get back because they had. Hamas had a big pool to work from. And as the number got smaller and smaller, each of those hostages became more and more valuable to Hamas because that's ultimate. That's really ultimately their only leverage. And it was unlikely that Hamas. What's strange about these negotiations throughout the last couple of years is they all have this zero sum game quality to them, which is Israel wants all the hostages back, wants the war to end, and wants Hamas out of Gaza. Hamas wants to hang onto its only leverage, which are the hostages, and not disarm and stay in Gaza. And every negotiation is like, there's no way both sides can win. With the Abraham Accords negotiations, there was a way for Israel and the Emiratis to both win. These negotiations with Hamas have always been a zero sum game. So there has always been this element of who's fooling who here with the deal, like which which person thinks the deal is actually better for them than it looks on paper and therefore is willing to go for it. But that said, I do think Israel put enormous pressure on Hamas by this Gaza City operation, which was extremely controversial in Israel and extremely divisive within Israel for good reason. And yet Gaza City, this Gaza City operation, the Gaza City operation, is where it was Hamas's last. I mean, even people who were opposed to the operation would concede that it was where the hostages were being held and it was Hamas's last stronghold. It was where the leadership of Hamas was. It was their Berlin, it was their Moscow and they were terrified of losing it. And so when Israel went full steam ahead saying we're going into Gaza City, it was only then that Hamas really started to consider coming back to the table. And so I think, again, while this operation to Gaza City, whether Israel finishes it or not, I don't think they will because I think they're going to breach some sort of deal. The operation Gaza City clearly had a huge effect, and the real leverage we, the Arab world, has is pressuring Hamas. It looked like Israel was ready to do a deal. So I think that's where we are now as it relates to the deal. I think it's interesting for a few reasons. I think it is reset in many people's minds. Not the people you're referring to, Sam, that we'll get. We'll get to the Mark Ruffalo types. We'll use him as a category.

B (42:42)

He's. He's already a strong man. We can use him as the strawman.

A (42:46)

Okay, fine. I think it is reset in people's mind, the idea that Israel is at war with Hamas. And I think that is something we've lost in the last year. There's this sense that it's almost like Hamas didn't have agency, wasn't an actor in all of this. It was Israel at war with the Palestinian people, with the innocent Palestinian civilians. That's how every news story was framed, as though Hamas was not party to this. Or was Israel at war with international public opinion? I mean, so much, if you look, go back and look at all, so much of the commentary in the press coverage over the last year, it's all these governments are tired of Israel. They calling Israel, you know, a genocide state. They're taking Israel to the icj. They're recognizing a Palestinian state at the UN with no mention of Hamas or no conditions put upon Hamas. It was all about. It was Israel versus the Palestinians and Israel versus the world. And I think this peace plan reminded many people that Hamas is part of this equation.

B (43:41)

Hamas can stop the killing on any given day. They can just give back all the hostages and disarm, right?

A (43:47)

And that all this talk of, at the UN of a Palestinian state by no mention of Hamas in the recognition of Palestinian state, meaning conditions on Hamas, meaning a Palestinian state will not happen without Hamas disarming, leaving Gaza and returning the hostages. There was no talk of that. The uk, France, they put no conditions on Hamas's role in all of this. And so Hamas got to say, as they did, they expressed adulation for Keir Starmer and other European leaders for what they did at the UN because Hamas got to say, look, October 7th is the Palestinian Independence Day. We created the events that are leading to a Palestinian state. And so they, as Tal Becker said on my podcast, he said, so it had the effect of turning Hamas into the midwife of Palestinian statehood rather than the obstacle to Palestinian statehood. The message should have been, the world should have said to the Palestinian people, we are prepared to get behind a path to statehood for you when Hamas is out of the way. Now, it's your job to work with us to get Hamas out of the way, when in fact, what they did by imposing no conditions on Hamas is Hamas. It was like Hamas was delivering the Palestinians.

B (44:54)

Yeah, well, they rewarded Hamas for October 7th. I mean, it's like this is what you get when you commit atrocities against civilians. You get the state you've been asking for.

A (45:03)

Right. And so what I think was important about the Trump peace plan is it reset this as is a war between Israel and Hamas. And what reinforced that was all of the Arab governments getting behind the peace plan. So this is the first time I've seen since October 7th of 2023, it's the first time I've seen Israel, the US and virtually the entirety of the Arab world, and basically Turkey and much of Europe all on one page circling Hamas and saying, we can end this war. So, you know, then you're the only one that could be an obstacle to ending the war. Now, to your point about our Mark Ruffalo category, what was striking in the Trump peace plan is not only what was in it, but what was not in it. So there was nothing in it that talked about enabling settlements, Israeli settlements in Gaza. There was nothing in it about a permanent occupation blessing an Israeli permanent occupation of Gaza. There was nothing in it about greenlighting, annexation of any part of Gaza, Israeli annexation of Gaza or the West Bank. And there was nothing in it about allowing a permanent displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. Actually, it says specifically in there, and Israel signed on to this, that the Palestinians may have to leave. Some of them may have to leave sometime during the war and the rebuilding, but then they're guaranteed a place back in Gaza. So it's not just that the Mark Ruffalo types are given the opportunity to support an end to the war. I would argue they were given an opportunity to support the end of the war on the very terms that they said were very important to them. Because this peace plan, this peace plan isolated the right wing fringe within Israeli society and within the Israeli government. The Ben Veer and Smotrich types who were talking about annexation, talking about settlements, talking about permanent displacement of Gaza, of Gazan Palestinians, talking about permanent occupation of that was all, all but ruled out. And so I think Mark Ruffalo should see this as a massive win. And there's silence. And I think that tells you everything you need to know, that it was never about a ceasefire.

B (47:07)

Yeah, that's. I mean, that claim is going to be hard to parse, I think left of center, but it is. The silence is deafening. And the fact that, again, if anyone was going to say that they really don't support Hamas and they view the Palestinian people as fully divorceable from Hamas and its project, and that that's their concern. Just the suffering of, the unnecessary death and suffering of women and children in Gaza as a result of this war, if that really is the center of moral gravity for them, there should be no hesitation to be urging Hamas to accept this deal. The friction there is really telling, and it's hard to perform the psychic surgery on somebody who doesn't see it. But it's just. I mean, if you can't recognize that Hamas is the reason why there will be no peace on Monday if they don't accept this proposal, there's sort of no hope for you in this moment. It's really. It could not be clearer. But let's talk about some of the things that muddy the picture, because the moment you begin to make statements of the sort we've made over the last hour, explicitly or implicitly just defending Israel's right to defend itself, castigating Hamas as a death cult and a terrorist organization, and also castigating anyone who can't admit that what you immediately run into is the terrible optics of Netanyahu and his political career and his political imperatives and the imputed reasons why he is deciding to do what he decides to do as prime minister of Israel, is he prolonging the war to escape his own political entanglements, et cetera, I have never known. You're far closer than I am to the details of Israeli politics. I have never known how a perfectly unsullied prime minister would have waged the war differently here. It seems to me that you invent any prime minister. You want to invent the prime minister who would be acceptable to virtually everyone who hates Netanyahu. I mean, take somebody like Yuval Noah Harari, who, once you get him started, he can't stop telling you what's wrong with Netanyahu. But he obviously agrees about how untenable it is to live alongside Hamas. What is true there? What would be different, if anything, what is a reasonable concern about Netanyahu's conflicts of interest, if there is one, and specifically his alliance with the people on the far right that you mentioned, Smotrich and Ben gvir. So this marriage of necessity looks like a terrible Faustian bargain that was cut and did it have to be cut and can it be broken? And just what are your views of that morass that people plunge into the moment we start talking about this?

A (50:03)

So I don't think Netanyahu is without conflicts of interest. I just think that the press and the general kind of conversation tends to focus on the wrong ones. So there's this conventional wisdom out there that Netanyahu has these legal problems. He's got these corruption cases, he's before the courts and has been for some time and will be for some time, and therefore he lives in fear of being a private citizen. Because if he's suddenly out of power and he's a private citizen, he loses all capacity to, you know, influence his own destiny and could wind up in jail as a previous Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has wound up in jail for corruption charges. A previous Israeli president has wound up in jail. So he, you know, the argument goes, by keeping his government intact, by staying in power, he heads that off. And the only way he stays in power is by maintaining his right wing flank, maintaining their loyalty to him. And the only way he does that is by continuing to fight the war. The reason I'm skeptical of that, and I'll get to where I do think he has an honest conflict of interest. The reason I'm skeptical of that frame is I think a, the legal cases are pretty weak. And I, you know, including many people in the Israeli legal system who are highly critical of Netanyahu, think that the cases are pretty weak. And the idea that even if, I mean, these legal proceedings have been going on for years, they will go on for years. He's not a young man. The idea that, you know, he's going to, and then whatever, if he's found guilty of any of them, he's going to appeal them. And that's going to. The idea that into his 80s, you know, which is what we'd be talking about, a judge is going to send Netanyahu to jail is, is just not believable. It's, it's preposterous. You know, that's how I see it. What I do think is he's worried about his legacy. October 7th happened on his watch. And he was both Israel's longest serving prime minister and has been and is and will be the prime minister on whose watch the worst attack on Jews in a single day since the Holocaust occurred. And he's accomplished a lot of good things. And even his critics will concede he accomplished a lot of good things at other times in his career. But the stainless steel is so powerful of October 7th having happened on his watch. And if you think about the bookends of his career, I mean, what was key to the launch of Netanyahu politically in Israel, The Netanyahu name, it was the heroism of the Yoni Netanyahu story, the Yonatan Netanyahu story, which was Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, who was the very elite unit in the IDF and was the only. He led the operation in Entebbe to rescue Israeli hostages. And his operation and his military genius helped bring Israeli hostages home. And he lost his life. And soon after the Netanyahu story, the Yoni Netanyahu story became such a larger than life story in Israeli culture and in Israeli political discourse. And Benjamin Netanyahu, I mean he obviously had skills of his own, but that was such an essential part to his own political rise. And the idea, if you think about that as like the beginning of Netanyahu's career, that it would end with Israeli hostages, over 250 Israeli hostages being taken into the dungeons of Gaza after he served for prime minister for in and out close to a couple decades. That from his perspective, if you want to get inside his head, and I hate trying to get inside politicians heads, but that that's not where his story could end, that he couldn't just kind of the way Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War. Although people forget, Golda Meir ran for reelection after the Yom Kippur War, got reelected and then soon after left. But her premiership for some time in Israeli history was considered a complete failure because the Yom Kippur War happened on her watch. I think it was, it's an unfair reading, but. But for a long time in Israeli history that that was the conventional wisdom and Netanyahu was not going to let that happen. So it was more about his legacy than anything. But here's the problem. If you ascribe ulterior motives to Netanyahu or any politician in these situations, dealing with these very difficult decisions, there's this argument and you hear it in Israeli discourse. Netanyahu, he's just prolonging the war for his own reasons, whatever they are. But for his conflicts, we wouldn't be in this war so long. Okay. In order to evaluate that idea, you have to say, does the prolonging of the war, has that accomplished anything? Like, could you make the argument? It may not have been his sole reason for doing it, but you have to just analytically say, what has Israel at war for two years accomplished? Now, I don't want to go through every stage of the war here because obviously it'll take us the whole conversation and there's a lot of errors made along the way. But I do question whether or not, like we talked earlier about the reshaping of the Middle east, would that have happened had Israel wound down this war a while ago? Would Israel have taken out Hezbollah if it were in a ceasefire with Hamas that many, many in Israel and many outside of Israel wanted Israel to take, would Israel have at that time also gone in and taken out Hezbollah? Probably not. And as we said earlier, had they not taken out Hezbollah, it's unlikely they would have taken out Iran. I mean, at each step. And then there's the whole question of was Hamas ever really serious about these negotiations? Some in the Israeli decision making loop say they weren't, but those who said that Hamas wasn't serious said the only thing that Hamas would respond to was sustained military pressure. And so that's what Israel decided to do. So I'm not saying he doesn't have other motives, I'm just. But, but I. What I don't accept is, therefore, the policy was a complete failure. I don't think you can say the policy was complete. In fact, I could make the argument that a lot of the policy, not all, but a lot of the policy, was a huge success. And Israel has really, in terms of, in terms of transforming its circumst circumstances and its geopolitical position in the region, it has. It's been a huge success. So, so then does he get credit for that? And if he does, then him being in power, was that a good thing? I mean, I, I just think even like his management and working with the US and working with President Trump, I think he's got flaws, Prime Minister Netanyahu, but I can't think of another Israeli leader that would have been able to work with the US the way he did, especially over the last few months. So I wish it were that simple. It's just not that simple.

B (56:36)

What do you think the biggest mistake has been? If you could change one decision or unring one bell over the last two years in Israel's response to October 7th something they did that they shouldn't have done or something they failed to do that they should have done. What comes to mind, that's the biggest mistake.

A (56:56)

On the raw military execution of the war, I would say two things. One, I think, and again, obvious caveat that this is hindsight, but we're engaging in the hindsight business right now. I think they should have gone into Rafah much earlier and they should have gone into Gaza City much earlier. Those were the two areas that Hamas completely freaked out about when Israel went in. And those were two important power centers for Hamas, we now know. And had Israel gone in strong in those areas early on, as opposed to what it initially did was sort of work north and then come south, it could have shortened the war. I mean, this big jam that Israel got in with the US in the spring of 2024, kind of February, March, April, actually, should they go into Rafah? Can they go into Rafah? Will the Biden administration let them go into Rafah? The reality is, had Israel gone into Rafah, gone in early, it would have shortened the war. It would have actually helped the US because by Israel going into Rafah as late as it did, it mean that going into Rafah, you know, bled into the summer or the politics of the summer of 2024. All the things the Biden administration was concerned about, about the, you know, the war being on the front pages and on television screens and TikTok screens into the, you know, spring and summer of 2024, that all could have been accelerated. That could have all been done much earlier. So Gaza City and Rafah, militarily going in there sooner probably would have made a lot of sense. I understand now, I know the arguments against it. But we now know where Hamas was feeling most vulnerable. And two, on the military side is the, and we can come back to this is the complete ineffectiveness and at times just unbelievable incompetence in Israel telling its story globally, in Israel failing to explain what it was doing militarily. So there's been over 900 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, 2023. Now over 300 of those were on October 7. So then you think about 5, 600 plus soldiers killed since October 7 fighting this war. We never hear about those soldiers. In other words, we hear about in the press when Palestinians die or when there's some human catastrophe in Gaza that's a result of the war. But there are Israeli soldiers dying almost every week, every couple weeks. And if you think about it, I worked for the Pentagon during the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004, I was in Iraq. We would brief. I would do briefings with the military spokesman. We would brief whenever an American soldier, whenever there was a. We would make sure people knew, not just the American knew that the world knew that American had fallen in battle. And if you follow the press here, you would think Israeli soldiers are never falling in battle. Now, part of that is there's not a appetite for covering Israelis falling. But also Israel should make more of an effort to not just announce today three soldiers, but really go out and really tell that story. Why is that so important? Because why are Israeli soldiers dying? Because if Israel really was a genocidal state, those 500 plus, 600 plus soldiers who've been killed since October 7th, not a single one of them would have had to be killed.

B (60:10)

Israel could have bombed the place.

A (60:12)

Right. And so Israel's choosing to fight this war in a way that put its soldiers at risk and it doesn't tell that story. And then also, then you forget that it's an actual war. It's not just that. Comes back to my point that like that Hamas is removed from the story. When you hear Israeli soldiers are fighting, you're like, oh, wow, this is a war between two entities.

B (60:35)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dan, I know I never do this, but we have breaking news on this podcast highly relevant to our conversation. Hamas says it agrees to release all the hostages in Gaza. Wow, that's a New York Times headline.

A (60:50)

Yeah, I'm looking right now. Do you want me to.

B (60:54)

I would like. First of all, how surprised are you? If true, how much were you not expecting that response?

A (61:01)

Yeah, so I, I should say it says here Hamas admits response to Trump's Gaza efforts, says it's ready to enter talks, finalizing deal. Statement from terror group. I'm reading from the Times of Israel here. Statement from terror group welcomes US Effort, but also includes some caveats that may hold up efforts to reach an agreement. Okay, so that I don't mean to be.

B (61:22)

Yeah, well, that's what I would say, Debbie Downer here.

A (61:24)

But knowing what their caveats are, because there has been a pattern in the past where Hamas gets the headline pop of agreeing to a deal and then in the fine print says with some changes to the deal. And then once the US And Israel examine the changes to the deal, they're like complete non starters. So I don't know what they're. I guess we don't know yet what the.

B (61:48)

It'll be interesting because they certainly have gotten the headline, at least according to the New York Times. Hamas agrees to release all hostages in Gaza full stop. So I'll be interested to see what the fine print is there.

A (62:00)

I mean, it may be that, look, if I were to be a pessimist, I would say that they are trying to flip the script because right now the script has flipped in the direction that's oppositional to them, that the whole world is waiting on them. And so this could then be, no, we agreed to it. Now we're just waiting for Israel to accept our changes. So it's an attempt to flip the script back onto Israel. Or it could be that they are accepting the deal and the changes are actually manageable for the US And Israel. I mean, it sounds like we don't know what those are, what those conditions are, but knowing those is key to addressing this.

B (62:37)

It's very hard to imagine that they would release all the hostages and then continue to negotiate about any other matter. Right. I mean, because as you said, having the hostages is really their only leverage. So, yeah, I mean, I will believe it when I see it, but it would be amazing for them to just release the hostages and have it yet be undetermined whether they're going to have amnesty or hold some power in Gaza or disarm or.

A (63:04)

Right. Well, they're saying, based on these reports, I'm just skimming through, they're saying that they can't release all the hostages right away because the conditions are such, meaning the military devastation and the continued military pressure makes it hard to locate the hostages, manage the logistics of getting the hostages out, that they need more than the 48 to 72 hours that's in the proposed deal. So that's. That seems like where they're heading with this is Israel needs to stop its. I mean, in the past, the way this has worked, what they've always proposed, always wanted, and Israel actually has done it a couple times, is pause in fighting and then over time, release of some hostages. Yeah, and Trump had said he's had it with that, that the fighting stops and the hostages are released right away. And it seems like what Hamas is saying in so many words is, well, it's going to take us some time to find the hostages and manage the logistics, and we can only do that while there's no war fighting. So we want the pause in fighting, then we'll go find the hostages and then we'll deal with getting them back. Now, obviously the problem from Israel's perspective is whenever you pause in fighting, it gives Hamas time to try to regroup, reorganize, hide arms, military Capabilities. So again, not knowing exactly for how much time they're asking. I mean, that to me is a big question mark. They have been trying to get Israel to stop this operation in Gaza City, like intensely trying to stop it. It is what has, as I said earlier, completely freaked them out. And this could be another way to get at that. This stringing out of the hostages over time just became that Hamas's disarmament was a red line for the U.S. administration. And we'll see whether or not they address disarmament in their agreement to agree to the ceasefire. But getting all the hostages out at once was also like a key priority for the Trump administration and Israel. And if they're trying to undermine that, we can get some of them out, but not all of them out. Comes back to the point you just referred us back to, which is the hostages for Hamas is everything. Hamas needs, one of two things if they want to survive, either hostages or control of Gaza. And they don't have control of Gaza. Right now, Israel is in control of about 70% of Gaza. And as I said, the last holdout is Gaza City.

B (65:18)

How many living hostages do we think there are now? Around 20 or so.

A (65:23)

There are 48 hostages. And I hate speculating on this because who knows? But the estimate is, you know, according to public reports from Israel and the US is about 20 of them are alive. So let me ask you in terms of the, the story that I was talking about before, that Israel has failed to tell its story during this war. There's, there's a debate within Israel about whether or not it's even possible for Israel to tell its story. There are many Israelis, including those in government, who say, who are you kidding? No matter how we tell our story, we're not going to win anyone over. So the most important thing we can do is win the war. And when we win the war, if it takes one year or two years or three years or whatever it is, once the war is over and the violence, you know, the war fighting, the images of the war fighting winds down and it's off people's screens and off, it's not front of mind, you know, Israel will be under less pressure and it can get back to the business of repairing its, you know, reputation internationally. Where do you come down on that is just ignore the storytelling and try to win the war. Or actually Israel's made this self inflicted wound by not investing more in this.

B (66:33)

I think I have a somewhat paradoxical superposition of those two views, or as kind of a barbell strategy on the One hand, I think it's true that there's so much antisemitism and so much stigma associated with Israel itself as a country that in certain camps, and probably at the UN, the PR war is unwinnable, and that Israel should defend itself without apology and recognize that the only thing that its real enemies will respect is strength, if they're going to respect anything at all. Aspiring martyrs don't tend to respect even strength. But anyone else adjacent to them that's going to want to live in peace with a maximally strong Israel is going to respect only strength in the Muslim world. They're not going to respect empathy. They're not going to respect conforming to Western norms of human rights. They're going to respect just pure power from Israel. And this is true of the Gulf states, this is true of any of the combatants. So I think Israel should be unapologetic about defending itself and just morally clear that it has a right to defend itself, and that again, that it is fighting a death cult that is anathema to everything that the people who are crying out for the rights of the Palestinians ostensibly want. All the LGBTQ groups who are in support of the Palestinians, the fact that they can't understand what Hamas really is just sidelines them as actual conversants in any debate about the probity of this war. But on the other hand, I think Israel should have marshaled immense resources in fighting a war of ideas against all of its critics. But it should have emphasized the kinds of points that I want to emphasize in any conversation on this topic, which is Israel is fighting the same war for Western values and real humanitarian values and open societies and the rights of women and the rights of LGBTQ people and everyone else who we want to have rights, Israel's the only place in the Middle east where those rights are protected. And you just have to look at the differing culture between Gaza and Tel Aviv to understand that. And so Israel should have had Netanyahu, should have had an English language spokesman who could have spent endless hours on television having these debates. And I think they should have walked through every morally invidious disparity between the IDF and Hamas and between Israeli culture and Palestinian culture at every stage of this war. I mean, just the logic of human shields and the logic of targeting civilians and the fact that Israel simply doesn't do either of those things. And when civilians die in this war, it works in the Palestinian territories, it works completely against Israel's interests. So even if you were going to imagine them to be heartless Bastards who are only concerned about how they're perceived on the world stage. Well, still, even then, you have to know that Israel isn't trying to kill Palestinian children. That's just not the goal. Whereas, conversely, it really is the goal of its enemies. And people should have pointed out endlessly that the moral illusions that creep in here. So, for instance, when you see all the death and destruction in Gaza and decide on the basis of this horrible imagery that Israel is evil in prosecuting this war, you have to recognize what you're not seeing. And you're not seeing the equivalent number of dead bodies being pulled out of rubble in Tel Aviv because Israel has invested, not in terror tunnels all these years, it has invested in missile defense and in bomb shelters for its own civilians. Right? So it's not because of the restraint of Hamas and the Houthis and Hezbollah and Iran that there aren't an equivalent number of dead and injured children and women in the streets of Tel Aviv that was absolutely intended on their part to produce that kind of carnage. It's because Israel has defended itself. So when you hold up the images of Gaza and you say there's no equivalent death and destruction on the Israeli side, therefore Israel's in the wrong, you're rewarding Hamas for using its own non combatants as human shields and maximizing the death and destruction on its own side, and you're demeaning Israel for having successfully protected a civilian population. And someone needs to be able to walk through that time and again on television and online and do all the moral math when it's not being done on TikTok by all the agents, the apologists for Hamas, and the fact that Israel hasn't invested in that more intelligently is a real shortcoming. And that should have been done so.

A (71:30)

Beyond the anti Semitism that we were talking about earlier, beyond what's going on in Islamist communities in Europe that we talked about earlier and beyond Israel not explaining what you're talking about right here, beyond all of that, why do you think Hamas's story caught on? I mean, we talked about Israel's story, right? And Israel's version of events, which I agree with the version you just described, that Israel should have been communicating Hamas's story.

B (71:54)

Kalan, it's of a piece with every other variant of this that has nothing to do with Israel. I mean, why did Jean Le Carre and Jermaine Greer and the rest of the confused intelligentsia in 1989 Castigate Salman Rushdie for having the temerity to write critically about Islam? There's a direct threat to their own intellectual and artistic freedom. A fatwa hurled at a fellow novelist in this case and he immediately is forced into hiding. He's got translators being murdered as far away as Japan if memory serves. And you have liberal intellectuals blaming him for the fatwa you had a former US President Jimmy Carter publishes an op ed in the New York Times. He said something appropriately critical of the Iranian regime, but he also castigated Rushdie for having injured the Muslims the world over, whose sacred beliefs have really been trespassed against. It's completely insane. It's utterly masochistic. It's just again, you're feeding the crocodile. And it's directly at odds with the very principles you have to maintain to maintain your hard won freedoms in an open society. And for some reason left of center people can't see this. And I mean there's a few lenses thrown up over this which are genuinely confusing. One is the Palestinians are viewed as the people of color in the region being oppressed by white skinned colonialists. As though that made any sense in the current conflict. Introduce them to an Ethiopian Jew fighting for the idf. That would be, that would even be insufficient to make the point given the level of confusion left of center here. But it's mapping the African American experience onto the Middle east is to a first approximation what has confused everyone on a college campus in the US but it's beyond that. It's beyond anti Semitism and it's beyond an animus toward Israel as a state. It's a hatred of the West. It's the belief that everything that that happens on this front of a jihadist or Islamist flavor is the result of first Western aggression, Western misadventures, Western colonialism, Western greed for oil. It's all chickens coming home to roost. 9 11. Was that Charlie Hebdo? Was that. I mean you have absolute morons who are the darling of alternative media at least people like Glenn Greenwald, who is gets the scoop of the century handed to him by Edward Snowden and is the darling of every anti establishment person, left or right. Who does he blame on the day after the Charlie Hebdo massacre? He blames the cartoonists. This is the masochism and the self criticism. If you want to find the guru of all of this, it's still Noam Chomsky. There's nothing that has ever been done to America or to the west that America and the west has not earned through its own callousness and avarice and direct coercion of other beleaguered people who had all these awful things done to them first. And this comes back to a point which I've never heard better. I think I made this on your podcast last time around, but it's worth remembering. I've never heard this point made better than Paul Berman made it in his book Terror and Liberalism, specifically with respect to the perception of Israel, which is when they see, and this was, I think he was speaking specifically of the second intifada here. When you see people kind of an endless supply of suicide bombers, people doing the unthinkable and celebrating themselves for doing the unthinkable, right? You know, you have the families of religious maniacs who have just blown themselves up in pizza parlors targeting children and teenagers specifically, and that you see celebration in the streets over this. And you ask yourself the question, what could have caused a community to behave in ways that should be unimaginable, Right? And you think, well, people everywhere are the same. They all want the same things. They all have the same, you know, everyone just loves their kids precisely the way I love my kids. The only thing that explains this is how terribly they've been mistreated by the Israelis. Right. The onus is on the victims in this case because that's the only explanation that a rational secular person can understand because they simply don't understand the worldview of a jihadist or of a wider culture that shares the worldview of a jihadist. And that's the very steep hill Israel, in terms of the war of ideas. That's the very steep hill they've had to climb. And they have not been making the requisite efforts to climb it, in my view. And it really has to be done because again, this is a, a fight that every open society has to wage against this particular version of its antithesis, which is jihadism.

A (76:54)

So I want to ask you if your view has changed on anything and we can talk a view on anything or any people have changed on my end too. But I want to ask you, I've been curious about this because I know we've talked before about your skepticism of organized religion, and yet I feel now that we are experiencing, in the US at least, and that I assume elsewhere in the west, some kind of and you know, it's hard to develop a full throated theory on what's going on, but it does feel like we're watching some kind of religious revival in this country. I mean, some of it was expressed we've seen in data about attendance at, you know, religious, you know, rituals, churches, synagogues. We've obviously saw the reaction to the murder assassination of Charlie Kirk. And I think for a lot of people, they, especially a lot of journalists, they're like, wait a minute, who are all these young people in mass numbers who are clearly, regardless of one thinks of the politics of Charlie Kirk, these are people who are engaging with religion, young people in a way that people didn't believe was happening or could happen. And I have other data points to point to where I mean, there's a whole slew of books coming out right now, from Ross Douthat's book to Jonathan Rauch's book, to Charles Murray has a book coming out. All these books speak to something going on with the pursuit of meaning and community in our society here as expressed through organized religion, which I suspect you had not anticipated.

B (78:19)

Well, I guess it's, I can't say it surprises me, but it does worry me. I mean, I don't think the only response to the fragmentation and superficiality and disorder of the present is to double down on Iron Age identitarianism. We don't have to be religious sectarians and fundamentalists and dogmatists of one flavor or another in order to respond to the unique challenges of the moment, the challenges thrown up by the Internet and social media and globalism and immigration and all of that. I think religious sectarianism is the wrong piece of software to use as a remedy here. In fact, it is in large part what ails us. So when I saw the response to the Charlie Kirk assassination at the memorial, some of it was beautiful and ennobling. I mean, I thought Erica Kirk's eulogy was amazing.

A (79:16)

And I mean, I think it'd be studied for years.

B (79:18)

And if I'm being honest, it is something that a devout attachment to Christianity gives you that many other things don't give you. And I mean, it's not that I can't reason my way into an analogous state of forgiveness, but in terms of an off the shelf belief system that gives you that access to that kind of emotional resilience. Christianity is one of those things. And I don't even think the analog exists quite in the same way in Judaism or any other religion. But of course, that's not the only thing you heard from the stage in that memorial. And much of what you heard from the mouths of people like J.D. vance or Stephen Miller or Jack Basobiec and others, Trump himself was the opposite point. And it was a kind of, in its purest form, it was a Christian identitarian, yearning for theocracy kind of message. And it's not one that I think should comfort anyone. And it shouldn't comfort Jews living in America either. Right. I mean, it is true that there's a history of support coming from the evangelical community and Christian fundamentalists in general. But as you know, some of that is eroding. I mean, there's kind of a new moment here in Christian circles where the Bible thumping is striking a different note with respect to support of Israel. It shouldn't comfort Jews, really, that the depth of support you had from the fundamentalist community is really attached to fairly horrifying biblical prophecy. When you ask Charlie Kirk why he supported Israel without qualification, his first answer was, because I believe in biblical prophecy. And when you actually connect all the dots there to the Book of Revelation, it's not a picture of real support for Jews. It's a picture of an end times expectation, wherein but for a remnant of, I think of 144,000 Jews, everyone's getting hurled into a lake of fire and it doesn't work out very well for the Jews and that's going to be fine. Right. So it's not a morally sane view of how the world should work, in my view. And what we want, what we should want is a view of politics and ethics that really can scale. Right? Like just what is it? What kind of society do we want to live in globally? What kind of civilization do we need to solve global problems? What sort of moral intuitions are viable and what are deeply at odds with the way in which we need to organize society? And yes, I think if you think you have a holy book that can't be criticized, and you are going to be so offended when somebody criticizes it that you're going to be thinking about whether or not you should kill them or whether your children should kill them, as is true in many fundamentalist communities, but it's especially true in Islam. This is a zero sum contest with basic secular, pluralistic, tolerant, liberal values. And the religious maniacs on the Christian side are imperfect allies in that war of ideas. Granted, in certain cases they're allies of necessity for Jews and for Israel. At least they have been. But we need better allies ultimately.

A (82:35)

Yeah, they've been pretty reliable allies, but I just radical.

B (82:41)

How reliable do you think J.D. vance is? So we have a passing of the torch at some point. Give me your. And perhaps we should close on this topic because we've been going almost two hours. But what's your level of comfort at the prospect of having the successor to maga, whatever it is, in the hands of JD Vance and the kinds of people who are in his ear around these issues.

A (83:02)

What worries me about some of the people in his ear is, in Vance's ear is they are. My real concern is they articulate a vision for America that has America completely withdrawn from the world and withdrawn from engagement in the world and withdrawn from leading in the world. That's what scares the hell out of me, is that you kind of just like, you know, pull up the bridges, you know, build the, you know, just be totally inwardly focused. And it's a foreign policy that is not about standing with our allies. And that's what we've seen from that crowd. That's what really worries me because that's a big directional change from where the Republican Party and the conservative movement has been for the last, you know, call it four plus decades, basically from the Reagan years, the Reagan revolution and on. There are obviously elements of it in previous decades, but the modern conservative movement really began with the Reagan revolution. And I. And that's what worries me. Now. I will tell you, when I think about that possibility, I think allies can still be an important part of the relationship, still be an important part of U.S. foreign policy. They just have to talk about their contributions to the US and their foreign policy in a different way, which is not how they're accustomed to operating. So there are some allies that are extremely capable allies. Obviously, Israel's foremost among them. India is a very capable ally. Poland is a very capable ally. And some of these countries, Korea, South Korea is a very capable ally. Some of these countries offer a lot to the US and so they're just going to have to talk a lot more about what they bring to the table rather than talking about shared values, shared history, you know, the Judeo Christian ethic that, you know, in the case of Israel in the US that binds our countries together, which is how many have spoken over the last number of years. I don't know if that'll carry the same currency. It will be much. I think we're going to be living through much more of a what have you done for me lately? Foreign policy? And that's obviously a very mixed blessing. So it's alarming to me on one hand. On the other hand, I think Israel, Israel in particular and the other countries I just mentioned have a good story to tell. And so in the case of Israel, I think the US gets a lot more from the relationship with Israel than it gives. As Alexander Haig famously said almost 40 years ago, Israel is that unsinkable battleship in the Middle of the sea, that we don't have to staff with American soldiers who are risking their lives. And so they're in the Middle east, so we don't have to be American. Israeli intelligence is in the Middle east, so we don't have to be. Israeli firepowers in the Middle east, so we don't have to be. Israeli cyber capabilities are in the Middle east, so we don't have to be. And obviously all that Israel does to help the US Economy on the tech side. So I just, I'm giving you a preview, I think, of how more and more countries are going to be talking about their relationships with the US if some of the folks you just mentioned wind up in a position of power, which is much different than how we've talked about foreign policy, even in the Trump era. It's in many ways different from how We've talked about U.S. foreign policy. I mean, obviously that's been changing in the Trump era, but it's a newer phenomenon and it can go into a more extreme direction. I'm more worried about that than I am about how they talk about religion, the terms you just described.

B (86:03)

But what about people who are still in, to some degree, good standing in Trumpistan who are overtly anti Semitic? I mean, you have people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. And I mean, they're imagining that they know something about Israel having actually killed Charlie Kirk. And I mean, it's just.

A (86:19)

Or Epstein.

B (86:20)

Yeah, there's not even, it's beyond dog whistling. I mean, we're just dealing with Holocaust denial and frank antisemitism. And I mean, this is something that I think you could fault Trump for, as resolute as he seemed to be in standing with Israel and the Jews, he has never emphatically put real daylight between him and the real anti Semites right of center in our politics. I mean, he's the stand back and standby sort of guy for the proud boys. And Tucker Carlson, for all of the ways in which he's sort of crossed purposes with Trump, Trump has never said, Tucker's a moron and no one should listen to him. Right.

A (86:58)

He did once. He did once when Tucker crossed him on the Iran war. So Tucker was working aggressively to privately and publicly pressure Trump against US Involvement in Israel's war in Iran. And Trump finally said, you know, I mean, he, I don't know if you remember this. He went off on Tucker like he's, I define maga. He doesn't define maga. You know, he really, he said, I don't.

B (87:20)

He hasn't gone to war with him as an enemy. Right. Like he's still. And certainly J.D. vance is still cultivating Tucker as a necessary ally. And I don't know where Candace Owen stands here, but it's like these people are frankly crazy and sinister and it's not looking good for the Jews that millions and millions of people listen to them.

A (87:41)

Yeah, I'm worried about what you're describing with some of these characters. What I don't know, Sam, and I really don't know is in terms of the people who choose the Republican nominee for president, it's not clear to me how much Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson's views on Israel and the Jews carry that much weight. In other words, we sit there and we see these videos and these clips of them, we see how many views they got, we see the kind of engagement they get. But you know, I talked to a lot of Republican senators and a lot of Republican congressmen and Tucker attacks them all the time. Tucker attacks them, attacks Tom Cotton, attacks Lindsey Graham. I mean, talks attacks these different senators for being supportive of Israel or having a very activist supporting an activist, you know, a muscular foreign policy. And they just say it doesn't register. It's not like our phones are ringing off the hook from angry constituents whenever Tucker goes on a rant against us. I mean, this is what I hear from different politicians. When I talked to a friend of mine I was just talking to the other night who's a Republican pollster and he's working on campaigns in Minnesota, New Hampshire and South Carolina right now. And he's doing all sorts of polling in these Republican races among Republican primary voters. And he sometimes throws in questions about Israel and the views on Israel. And he says nothing has changed. He says the support for Israel among Republican primary voters has gone down a little bit. I mean, he'll also poll Democratic primary voters and it's plummeted among Republican primary voters. It's still basically the same. I mean, I can go on and on about how you don't see it penetrating Republican politics yet. There was a poll that the Washington Free Beacon just published that was done by Echelon Insights, which is a well respected Republican polling firm. And they found that they polled the viewers of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and a couple of other personalities. And while these personalities were very popular with these viewers, when they ask these viewers their views about Israel and the Middle east and whether or not it's changed, it's had very little effect. So again, I don't want to sound Pollyannish or like with my head in the sand, things can change. Things can change fast. But for some reason, the Tuckerism and Candace ism does not seem to be breaking through in numbers that are shaping our politics. And I don't know if that'll endure.

B (89:55)

All right, you said a name that I have to follow up on. You said Mamdani. You live in New York. What's your perception of, I mean, assuming he wins, which I think seems likely. How bad is that in your view?

A (90:07)

I think it's bad for two reasons, really bad. I say this as a New Yorker. Being mayor of the city is like running a country. It's after President United States, it's the, you know, it's the next most difficult job in the country in terms of, you look at the size of the budget, the city, it's bigger than most countries, the size of the police force. And we can go on and on. And I just think he's woefully, I mean, the idea like these, what I mean, it's a joke that he's going to run the city operationally and then ideologically, I worry that he's going to put the city through, through an ideological experiment that if he proceeds with it, maybe he won't, I just think will contribute to a sense of disorder that will drive so many people away, that can afford to go away, like we saw during COVID So you see a lot of people who contribute to the tax base of the city, you know, some of the more affluent people who are easy to demonize, but are New Yorkers, affluent New Yorkers. But they do contribute to the tax base. They do run businesses, they do, you know, invest here. And I think that there'll be a version of COVID I think you'll see some of that. And for those who can't afford to leave, I think the quality of life will be terrible if you're working. I'll give you a sense what I mean by the ideological experiment. When Mamdani was in the state assembly, which is like our state House of Representatives, there was a bill that would increase the penalty, criminal penalty against anyone convicted of a crime of violence against an employee of public transportation, subway workers, basically subway security and subway workers, and is the equivalent of like there being increased penalties for violence against cops. And Albany and specifically the state of assembly is a pretty left wing group. I mean, it's overwhelmingly run by, populated by very liberal Democrats. There were only two members of the assembly that voted against that bill. So for a very liberal bunch to overwhelmingly vote for a bill to Increase penalties, increase any criminal penalties shows you that it must be a pretty reasonable issue. There were only two members of the assembly that voted against it and one of them was Mamdani. I mean, just to give you. That's how strongly he feels about weakening the tools of law enforcement and security for everyday New Yorkers. And the people who are ultimately going to suffer are not the ones who can afford to move to Palm Beach. The ones who are ultimately going to suffer is that person who's working late night at a restaurant, has to take the subway home at 2am and is worried about some of the images that I see. I take the subway here. When I take the subway during the day, I'm sometimes shocked by what I see. I can't imagine what's happening in public transportation in the middle of the night. So I'm painting a picture of like this experiment he's going to put the city through if he goes through with it. And that's before we even get to.

B (92:40)

That's before, that's before globalized intifada.

A (92:42)

Yeah, yeah. Before we even get to. I mean, he's going to arrest the Prime Minister of Israel. He's going to, I do worry the security for Jews. I mean, just to look what happened in Manchester when we know what globalized the intifada looks like. And he is, he has trafficked in that kind of rhetoric and he has participated in those kinds of marches and protests. And is he then going to authorize the NYPD to, to confront that stuff? I have a hard time believing it. So that's what worries me. But the bigger picture for the country is I want the Democratic Party to be a healthy. I mean, I'm a conservative, so. But I want the Democratic Party to be a healthy, you know, alternative to the Republican Party. And I worry that he is. Now many Democrats are going to look at his rise, his, his ascendance in city politics. And I think he's going to be a national player overnight. And I think there's going to be a lot who want to follow his lead. They're going to say, well, you know, he did it, so I can. And so I just worry that that is where the Democratic Party is going to be going towards, you know, mamdaniism. Let's just say instead of, you know, the way of Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania or, you know, I don't agree with everything that Josh Shapiro stands for, but I, you know, he strikes me as someone who's trying to run his state in a kind of reasonable center left direction. And I, I think Mamdani's, you know, sort of spectacular, sensational profile and rise is going to be the model that, I mean, AOC was one, and then I think Mamdani is like the next one in terms of these young people have this extraordinary success with one point of view and obviously using a medium, social media, in a way that, you know, generates a lot of excitement. I just, I'm terrified that that's where more and more Democrats are going to see political success nationally.

B (94:21)

Yeah. All right. I share your terror.

A (94:23)

That's, that's my, that's my upbeat note on which I end on.

B (94:26)

Yeah, nice. Well, it's great to talk to you, Dan. Thank you for taking the time.

A (94:30)

It was a great conversation. Thanks, Sam. That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members only show, Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavael, Amit Segal and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling. To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arkmedia.org that's arkmedia.org call me back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. ARC Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti. Sound and video editing by Martin Juergo and Mariangelis Burgos. Our director of operations, Maya Rakoff. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. Across generations, Jews are searching for more ways to live Jewish lives. To celebrate, connect and belong, UJA Federation of New York is helping to meet that moment, investing in the next chapter of Jewish life. Through its new day school tuition fund, UGA is helping make Jewish education more affordable for New York families, an issue I'm especially passionate about. It's strengthening Jewish spaces, from JCCs and synagogues to college campuses so everyone has a place to learn, gather and speak proudly as Jews. When others try to silence Jewish voices, UJA helps them grow stronger with pride, visibility and connection. Because UJA Federation of New York believes Jewish life is strongest when we live it together, your support can make a real difference. Please visit uja.org or follow the link in the show notes to stand with UJA.