Daryl Cooper (6:33)

On a very granular, intimate level.

Max Blumenthal (6:36)

And he negotiates his own release through the Giladshali prisoner swap in which one Israeli soldier had been taken from a tank in a tunnel operation, very daring operation demonstrating the growing capacity of these resistance groups in Gaza was exchanged.

Scott Horton (6:54)

I'm sorry, let me, let me go ahead and break in here, Max, because your audio's kind of gone to hell on us, so I'm hoping it's just going to reset if I blab for a minute here. Talking with Max Blumenthal from the Gray Zone about the lead up to the October 7th attack a couple of years ago. Give me a sound Check here, bud.

Max Blumenthal (7:14)

1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Scott Horton (7:17)

Sound great, go ahead.

Max Blumenthal (7:20)

Sinwar takes the lead, takes the leadership of Hamas in Gaza. And my understanding from Palestinian sources was he was going to prioritize resistance. The Israeli media, on the other hand, believed Sinwar was going to be willing to be domesticated. Netanyahu begins a process of attempting to transform Hamas into a kind of Islamicized Palestinian Authority. And after a series of conflicts in which Hamas, I wouldn't say got the upper hand, but managed to give Israel a bloody nose. And Netanyahu, demonstrating his overall tendency to avoid being drawn into a long term conflict, thought that they had actually managed to kind of neutralize resistance by sending in Money for, like, electricity infrastructure through Qatar, that Gaza would just basically agree to be under siege indefinitely. And they would give work permits for some members of its population who are, you know, older, outside the Hamas fray, that older people would get to go to Jerusalem. They, they. This was conflict management, Netanyahu style. And it had worked for him in the west bank with the Palestinian Authority.

Scott Horton (8:42)

In fact, let me. Let me break in here, Max, just because we have this short clip that I want to show. It's really important, Chris, if you can play that clip of Netanyahu being interrogated by the Shin Bet real quick here.

Daryl Cooper (8:59)

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. Town. The public blames Netanyahu for October.

Scott Horton (9:29)

So this is important because this is something that Netanyahu was reported to have said to members of his own Likud Party. And there were three separate sources for this. They still denied that he had ever said that. Well, there he is on video using the same phrase. And in the previous quote, he was saying, anyone who wants to deny the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas in the Gaza Strip. And then ending with, but we control the height of the flame. So there he is using the same phrase again on video while being interrogated by the national police, Max.

Max Blumenthal (10:04)

And so Netanyahu undergoes his own travails. Starting around 2018. I worked on a documentary inside Israel with my wife Anya Parampil, called Prime Minister or Crime Minister, about the protests against Netanyahu as he started to face major corruption trials, embezzling money that was supposed to be, for example, Holocaust reparations to buy German submarines. And, you know, the money was siphoned off. Honestly, the corruption was out in the open, but pales in comparison to the corruption we see in the U.S. nevertheless, he goes to trial and then he starts to initiate judicial reform. And the dynamics of internal Israeli politics really start to shape the reality that would emerge on October 7th. Massive protests became sort of a culture war over judicial reform, which would have given control of the Supreme Court to Likud. And the Supreme Court was the last bastion of sort of the enlightened middle class Ashkenazi elite, who may have been somewhat genocidal towards Palestinians, but still wanted, you know, the veneer of a democratic process. Netanyahu wanted to establish a one man, one basically a one party state around himself. And the protests in the street became so intense that Netanyahu was fighting for his political life. He was facing in the protests large numbers of Israeli reservists, including air force reservists, who declared that they would no longer report for duty. And this continued all the way up to October 7th. So you had like part of the Israeli military, the most elite part, the air force, the baby killers who do most of the bombing of Gaza, who come from, generally come from the Ashkenazi elite. They weren't, they weren't going to their training camps. Then you have the Trump administration and initiating the Abraham Accords, which was supposed to, intended to normalize relations between the wealthiest, ostensibly Arab states, Gulf monarchies who don't represent their own population, starting with the United Arab Emirates and Israel, to put the Palestinian struggle in the icebox forever, to basically go over the heads of the Palestinians, say Israel can make peace and the Palestinians can still be under siege and under occupation. And that was coming Saudi Arabia, if they had signed on, this would have been disastrous for the Palestinians and Egypt would have been next after already signing Camp David. And then there were plans to kill the leadership in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif, the chief of the Al Qassam Brigades, who by the way, many Israelis thought was dead, was dead before October 7 and who had presided over the advancement of the Al Qassam Brigades into a pretty powerful guerrilla force with its own sort of rocket division and some surprises that the Israelis weren't prepared for. On October 7, he had survived five assassination attempts. I had sort of witnessed one of them. I was in a, I was a neighborhood away from the Al Nasser neighborhood in Gaza City when Israel attempted to kill him with two 2000 pound bunker buster bombs. It was shocking. It was my first experience with the bombing in Gaza. He survived, was injured, was set, he's sort of maimed, his family was killed, he lived on. And Aharon Haliva, the military intelligence chief at the time of October 7, has revealed this year that Israel was planning to assassinate him. And Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas. Sinwar, who had this understanding of Israeli society, of how Israeli intelligence functioned, who had negotiated with them at the highest levels, who spoke fluent Hebrew, who had seemed to have intelligence inside Israel, hatched a plan to preempt all this, to blow up the Abraham Accords. And the theory of change was the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, where for one Israeli soldier, you get 1100 Palestinians. And they thought, well, if we can get more than one, let's say, I don't know, 200 Israelis, many, we're going to go after their bases in the Gaza division on the Israeli frontier of Gaza and the Gaza envelope. We can get tens of thousands of Palestinians. We could even begin to negotiate terms to end the siege in exchange for all of these Jewish Israelis, because that's the only diplomatic line they had. Having been defined as a terrorist organization by the US and eu, they had no other means of obtaining leverage. The operation was, instead of going through a tunnel or a series of tunnels which Israel had been prepared for after suffering kind of a humiliating attack in 2014, through a tunnel that managed to tunnel directly into an Israeli military base next to a kibbutz. The operation was to go directly through the fence over land. That was something the Israelis did not seem to expect. And the plan was siloed within a very small coterie of Al Qassam leadership, through the Nuqba commandos who would be activated in the last days. Although they had been training fairly openly for this kind of attack, when it took place, the Gaza division was revealed as a lot of female spotters who were basically sent there because of full conscription. The Israeli military sees full conscription as a means of political indoctrination. And they were not up to the job, nor were the male supposed guards, who were easily routed. Close to 400 Israeli soldiers were killed on October 7th. And we can talk about the actual battle that took place. But the theory of change seemed to be sound on that day. For Sinwar, Israel was caught by surprise. Al Qassam lost fewer than they expected to, captured more than expected, 250 or so. And this could have guaranteed them the ability to negotiate massive emptying of Israeli occupation jails where several hundred Palestinian children had been jailed, along with many women. That's why Al Qassam kidnapped women, was to exchange for Palestinian women. So that was the theory of change. And. Absolutely, the Abraham Accords was disrupted and remains disrupted to this day. The activation of the reactivation of the Palestinian cause, which had been moribund, took place. And Israel was initially united, very united, but now the divisions have reemerged. But there, I think there are also some aspects of Israeli society that I don't think Sinwar and. And the leadership of Hamas anticipated, which has drawn out this conflict and left many of the captives, the Jewish Israeli captives in Gaza to languish and possibly die. I don't know if he anticipated that the leadership would be as ruthless as it is and be willing to see so many die, but that you can draw a direct line between which something we can talk about, the Hannibal directive on October 7th and the willingness to let the anywhere from 10 to 40 captives still in Gaza languish and die.

Scott Horton (18:01)

All right, yes, well, and we definitely are going to be getting to the Hannibal directive here in a minute. Speaking of galad Shalit and all of that as well. So I just wanted to add, I think you're absolutely right about the way you describe the politics and the lead up to the thing. And I just wanted to add the point about Netanyahu speech to the United Nations General assembly on Sept. On Sept. 22 of 2023, where he held up his map of the new Middle east which was mocking Shimon Peres and saying he got the new Middle east, that is an alliance with all the Saudi, pardon me, the Sunni allies, Sunni kingdoms, without having to deal with the Palestinians and was essentially saying, haha, I win, you lose, you get nothing. Not citizenship, not independence, just lay down and die because no one's coming for you. That was his great victory speech that he was kind of rubbing their nose in it on September 22nd. And so then this happened October 7th, happened two weeks later of them saying no, no thank you. Right. In fact they're going to call his bluff and say, you know, essentially make their last ditch chance to revive the controversy. As you just said, this moribund issue that had taken a back seat during Ukraine and all this stuff was now a controversy again. I think, you know, is a great way to describe it there. I think that's exactly right.

Max Blumenthal (19:21)

Remember what Jake Sullivan said? Do you remember that?

Scott Horton (19:26)

Go ahead.

Max Blumenthal (19:27)

I think was at the Atlantic Council, was it? Or Aspen Institute. Jake Sullivan said this is we have guaranteed the quietest Middle east in a generation.

Scott Horton (19:35)

It was a new article he just written in for Foreign affairs. And then so the print version went out like that, but then the online version got a bunch of edits after October 7th. Now I have a question here, but I want to make sure that Darrell has a chance to get in here real quick if you need to. Darryl.

Daryl Cooper (19:54)

The question I want to ask him first is probably going to be a detailed answer. So you go ahead.

Scott Horton (19:59)

All right, well, so I was just going to say like can we talk about so what actually did happen on October 7, especially in regard to the killing of civilians. And then we can talk, you know, and we have a lot of in depth detail to discuss about exactly what did not happen there on October 7th. But can you give us your best estimation of what did take place? Because it wasn't just some kidnapping and prisoner exchange.

Max Blumenthal (20:24)

Well, one thing that happened was between the road on the road between Kibbutz Bari and Raim, where there were two military bases that Al Qassam intended to attack. They were focused on the military bases and the Kibbutzim to gather captives, knowing that the kibbutzim were would be poorly defended after the military bases were essentially knocked out, that there was this Nova electronic music festival which had been moved to that area something like 48 hours before. And you know, this is one of the more macabre aspects of Israeli society. I actually have a video online on YouTube that I filmed from a classical music concert that was held with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra on the Gaza border to basically blast Beethoven into Gaza. I have a chapter about it in Goliath as well. In order to basically confront the savages who are held in this gigantic open air prison camp with the civilization of Israel and convince them to release Gilad Shalit. And Shalit's parents, who are dual French Israeli citizens, were on stage at this concert. And you know, I interviewed people there who had come from the kibbutz community in the southern envelope as well as Tel Aviv and heard them refer to the Gaza people as animals and so forth. Of course they weren't going to release Shalit unless there was a prisoner exchange. But I thought this is such a weird thing to do right on the border. And you could see like these teeming refugee camps of deeply impoverished people on the other side. And I'm watching Beethoven. The Nova electronic music festival was the same thing. And on the, on the way, as an Israeli police investigation con concluded, on the way between these two military bases, Hamas commandos were confronted with all of these ravers, many of them on MDMA and other drugs and they just, they could be captured. But by that point in the day, it was not just Hamas on that road. The, the fence from Gaza had opened and there were three waves. So after the initial Al Qassam attack, which began at 6:30 and which did a lot of damage at Israeli military bases, took out a lot of Israeli soldiers. Idan Alexander, for example, was pulled out of a tank inside out, literally inside Gaza. There were these second waves that included civilians, militants from other factions that were less controlled and common rabble, including common criminals. And you could actually see people who are like low level militants who were not part of the initial attack throwing some of these ravers on motorbikes and taking them into Gaza. Often they had family members in Israeli prisons and they thought, oh, we can grab an Israeli, we'll be able to make a prisoner exchange. So chaos erupted at the Nova electronic music festival. And there's no denying that the Palestinian militants committed atrocities like shooting civilians. I mean it's on camera people who tried to get away, they were under orders that if someone tried to get away, you would shoot them. People were shot sometimes in their safe rooms. But by the time the second and third wave came through the border wall, the Israeli military had Apache helicopters in the air. And the Apache helicopters were ordered to carry out the Hannibal Directive named for the Carthaginian general who took poison rather than be captured by the enemy. The purpose of this is used to be a secret order I wrote about in 2014 when it was first exposed Israel killed Hadar golden, who was taken captive by Al Qassam militants when he was attacking in Rafah during a ceasefire in August. On August 1, 2014, that was the first time the Hannibal Directive was openly exposed. The idea is you kill Israelis who are captured or about to be captured in order to deny leverage to the other side. Because much more painful than killing your own people is actually negotiating for the release by releasing the so called terrorists. And so a mass Hannibal was enacted. According to Colonel Noff Erez on the record, he said mass Hannibal, this meant Apache helicopters given orders to fire on pretty much everything that moved on the ground, especially vehicles heading towards Gaza. You know, I was one of the first in English to report on this, quoting testimonies by Apache helicopter pilots in Israeli media who were saying, you know, there was almost no intelligence to help make fateful decisions. They have that they emptied the belly of the helicopter in minutes and returned to the air again and again. They didn't know if they were firing on so called terrorists or Israeli civilians. One of them said, I choose targets just arbitrarily, where I tell myself that the chance that I am shooting here on hostages as well is low. Well, it turned out it was much higher than they thought. Yediot Aranot reported months after I was viciously attacked in publications like haaretz as an 10-7-denier, that that 74 vehicles were destroyed by Israeli Apache helicopters through the Hannibal Directive. And Haaretz then also confirmed my or corroborated my reporting, reporting that the Hannibal Directive was given and anything that was moving towards the Gaza border was a target. Free fire orders were given. If you look at the images, if you're watching this now, just Google, you know, vehicles. Nova ELECTRONIC Music Festival There is a pile of scorched cars that were totally torched. I mean, not just a pile, but it looks like a vast parking lot, like outside an NFL stadium on Sunday. Except the cars are all burned and piled atop one another. Those were cars that were destroyed with Hellfire missiles and with cannons from Apache helicopters. They were not destroyed with the small arms that Hamas possesses. So we're talking about possibly hundreds of Israeli civilians who were killed in the mass Hannibal directive along with the something like 350 to 400 Israeli soldiers who were killed in combat, who were combatants. And the incentive for Al Qassam to just randomly kill Israeli civilians was low because they're worth much more alive, which is why so many of them were returned alive. And the majority of those who were not returned alive as Haaretz again the Israeli media reported, were killed in Israeli airstrikes inside Gaza. Noam Calderon, who was the niece of one of the captives in Gaza, Ofer Calderon actually went on Israeli media and accused Netanyahu of enacting a Hannibal directive against the so called hostages in Gaza to eliminate them, to deny Hamas political collateral. I mean, you can go talk to the self identified hostage families in Israel, the ones who have been pushing for a ceasefire for a long time, and they'll make similar comments. They believe that the messianic sort of fascistic leadership in Netanyahu's coalition sees the hostages as an impediment to total victory and actually wants them dead. So 25 to 40 have been killed inside Gaza, including apparently the Bibas family. The most, one of the, like the, the, the literal poster children of the Israeli government's propaganda campaign because two small children were taken into Gaza with their mother and father because the mother begged their captors to let her take the children with her. And so they did and they were killed in an airstrike, according to their father, Yarden Bebus, while he was in captivity. Now he was under duress in the video where he said that. But since getting out, the Beba's family has been very quiet and they have considered lawsuits against the government of Netanyahu for exploiting them. So the Hannibal directive continues to this day. To this day. The Families the Hostages and Missing Persons Forum, which is the main forum for organizing for getting the captives out of Gaza for a deal, has said that Netanyahu's Gaza City operation, where he sent the military to destroy Gaza City and force its population south on in a bid for total victory, is a death sentence for the Israeli captives in Gaza. So the Hannibal directive continues.

Scott Horton (29:55)

All right, a couple things there. Well, how about just as far as the mass Hannibal is your information that they just kind of made that up on the fly? I mean the idea of the Hannibal directive was invented after Galad Shalit and the idea was if a couple of Hamas Qasim Brigade terrorist types grab a soldier, you kill them all and that's too bad. But at least he's a combatant. That's something. I don't know. But was it the case that that day they sort of just panicked and ordered Hannibal Directive? Even if you're talking about a little old lady who'd been kidnapped from the kibbutz, not a soldier wearing olive green at all.

Max Blumenthal (30:40)

The reason that the Hannibal Directive was established was the 1985 Jibril Agreement, named for the head of PFLPGC, PFLP General Command in Lebanon, which had captured three Israeli soldiers. And they negotiated a deal to trade them for 1500, sorry, 1150 Palestinian prisoners, which was naturally, this is 1985, and this is considered a terrible deal that Israel had to bite the bullet on. And so in 1986, the Israeli army high command con conceived of the Hannibal Directive. They named it the Hannibal Directive. And the idea was, we will kill these Israeli soldiers if they get captured, because we can't make another deal like this. We need to be holding as many Palestinians in jails as possible. So. And it was secret. And it was revealed after Israel killed its own soldier. I believe he was a Colonel Hadar golden in Rafa on August 1, 2014, which is known, which was known to the local population there as Black Friday. And I visited Rafa about two weeks after Black Friday, about two weeks after that took place, and saw the horror that Israel inflicted on that whole area in order to kill its own soldiers.

Daryl Cooper (32:09)

This is hard, I think, for a lot of us who don't live in the region to even wrap our heads around. But, you know, as you show in your documentary, Max, this. The stuff you're saying is this has been reported in Israeli media. I mean, not just Haaretz, but, you know, others as well. I mean, is it similar to Overheat? Like, I guess my question is, like, how do the Israeli people feel about the government killing Israeli civilians and doing nothing for two years to actively try and rescue hostages, putting them in actual danger and actually denying offers that would lead to the release of the hostages because, you know, they. They want to continue and finish this war, I guess. Where's the opposition? I mean, do they just say, aha, that's liberal media, like we do over here, or how do they process that?

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Max Blumenthal (34:04)

It's very paradoxical. It's difficult to understand, but because if you look at the polls, for example, a Penn State poll of Jewish Israeli attitudes taken earlier this year, close to 70% support attacking Gaza to the point where civilians are killed. They essentially support a genocidal policy. But at the same time, a majority of Israelis now favor a ceasefire in order to get the captives out of Gaza. And the rallies, the protests that have been held in major Israeli cities are massive. Trump tweeted an image of one of those bring them home protests just a few days ago after he called for Israel to stop bombing Gaza. But Israel continues to bomb Gaza anyway and has just rejected one of many deals going all the way back to, at the very least, May 2024. I mean, they've been just shattering deal after deal. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who you know, mocked as Smircula, every lie went through him under Biden. I jousted with him starting on October 8th. Now that he's out of the administration, he's telling the trut, which is that Netanyahu constantly moved the goalposts on every ceasefire deal in order to prevent a ceasefire. Because why he has these fanatics in his coalition. Itamar Ben gvir, the security minister, who is a follower of the genocidal Meyer Kahanna, as part of the Temple Movement, which is an End Times apocalyptic movement that aims to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque and replace it with with the Third Temple. Bezalel Smotryk, the finance minister, is more or less from the same camp. Orit Strzok, the what is she, the minister of Settlement? They come up with these phony titles for them. She is a fanatical settler. They have all come out and said that the issue is not the hostages. The issue is total victory and the hostages are not the most important thing. And this is offensive to many Israelis who may hate Palestinians who all served in the military and participated in the occupation in one way or another. Because Jewish Israeli society is a very small, tight knit society. And the one unifying factor is the military. And there needs to be a sense there that if they all agree to join the military and be conscripted, that everything will be done for them if they're captured and that they will hold together and you know, one family will know another person through two other families or have known someone who is in that unit. So it's just fracturing Israeli society to see this messianic element which is dominating, increasingly dominating Israeli politics, get its way and just essentially formalize the Hannibal Directive as a kind of open, permanent policy. And this is a. I don't know what to call it. It's sort of a continuation of the dynamic that I described in the earlier part of our conversation about the factors that led up to October 7, the kind of Israeli intra Jewish culture war over judicial reform. Now it's kind of a culture war over the so called hostages and whether they should be rescued or whether just ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Gaza needs to occur. And on one side you have like the more secular urban public, the Ashkenazi, what's known as the Ashkenazi elite and some other sectors from the working class, including Russians and Mizrahi Jews who are not as messianic. And then you have the religious nationalist camp. And the religious nationalist camp has participated heavily in the Gaza fighting. This is like their war that they really claimed. It's why you see so many images out of Gaza that have promoted anti Semitic attitudes around the world of soldiers erecting gigantic menorahs on Hanukkah in destroyed neighborhoods, dancing with Torah scrolls in destroyed homes and so on, putting religious symbols up over destroyed homes. And they want something back for this. They did a lot of dying. The Netsa Yehuda Battalion is an Orthodox battalion that commits some of the worst war crimes. They were actually initially sanctioned under Tony Blinken's order and then Netanyahu got mad and Tony Blinken remediated them like two weeks later. They've lost many soldiers. And what do they want? They want Gaza City ethnically cleansed and they want the north ethnically cleansed and they want to start re establishing Jewish settlements there. That's what they expect. So the war is actually happening. The civil war is. There's sort of a political civil war that's erupted again in Israeli society as it becomes clear what the agenda is. This wasn't as clear and there was much more unity in the months after October 7th and a desire across all of Israeli society for revenge. You had a poll. I think Time magazine, Time might have taken this poll. It was a poll that was reported in early 2024 that about 90% of Jewish Israelis felt that the Israeli army had not used enough ammunition or munitions on Gaza. But, you know, the question of Jewish life is paramount here, and that's what this conflict is about. And. And by the way, that's what Yahya Sinwar understood about Israeli societies. The only way to get them to move is to put Jewish life at the center of the question because they do not care about Palestinian lives.

Scott Horton (40:11)

Yeah. Now, so speaking of that, your great documentary, Atrocity Inc. Is so important in a way. It's very specific about the events of October 7th, but also it's a timeless story of pretended victimhood by governments who want to launch horrible wars. And, you know, the cliche is Belgian babies on bayonets from the war propaganda that helped get us into World War I. And so you really do a great job of going through the wilder claims of what happened on October 7th and debunk them. And it's important. You already mentioned this, but it's important to emphasize, as you're saying there, that, yeah, they did kill civilians there, and that's not in question. They committed atrocities, and the people who did are as guilty of that as they are, and damn them for it. But the point here is how much the Israelis made up above and beyond that and the difference it makes. Right. Because what actually did happen on October 7th was X bad, but what they said was much, much worse. And I believe you make the case in your documentary that it was the propaganda version of October 7, not the reality that ended up forming the basis for that genocide that you're describing and for the basis for that attitude that you're describing among Israeli Jews that these people are all beyond redemption and must be destroyed or else they'll never have security because of the atrocities of October 7th.

Max Blumenthal (41:44)

That's right. I mean, as I said, people's human rights were vile. Jewish Israelis who lived in the kibbutzim had their human rights violated. Many of them on October 7th. You know, I. I feel sorry for some of the civilians here. That's not enough. For Israel's propaganda, though. That wasn't enough. What actually happened, what was documented, what we could see, was not enough. Had it been enough, this secret October 7th snuff film would have been presented to the public. But instead, what Israel would do was they would invite some of the most submental members of Our media commentariat like Chris Cuomo or Dr. Phil to watch this and then tell them to come out and tell the world about all the horrible things you saw. But they wouldn't let us see it because we would analyze it and we would be able to see where the Hannibal Directive was enacted. For example, in Kibbutz Berry, where Israeli tanks opened fire on homes filled with Jewish Israeli civilians. And they've acknowledged this, the homes were destroyed by tank fire, by helicopter fire. Sometimes the homes contained Hamas militants and that's why they, they were shelled, but they also contained Jewish Israeli civilians. So we weren't allowed to see that film. What? And then what we were treated to, I mean, and this took place like moments after the details of the attack began to emerge, was the sort of Kuwaiti incubators baby Kuwaiti incubator babies propaganda that worked so successfully during the run up to the first Gulf War, which is just imaginary fantasy atrocity porn marketed by Benjamin Netanyahu's office personally through his assistant Tal Heinrich and other figures to US Media and then delivered to the American public on primetime by Sarah Seidner on CNN, that 40 babies had been beheaded by Hamas, that they had found 40 beheaded babies. This was the most notorious false report. And it read the chyron On CNN read 40 beheaded babies. And from there it just kept building babies baked in an oven. Which echoes stories of the Holocaust by Elie Beer, who was the head of a so called rescue organization, United Hatzalah, at a fundraiser at the Republican Jewish Coalition annual gathering at Sheldon Adelson's casino in Vegas. Totally false story. We heard about babies killed, babies who were hung on laundry lines. Completely fake. Only one baby was killed on October 7th. Her name was Myla Cohen, Mila Cohen. She was shot by accident through a safe room door. She was 13 months old. We heard then in November as the propaganda about beheaded babies started to collapse and became a source of anger and even sort of ridicule, the Israeli UN delegation recruiting Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, the neoliberal lean in pro war feminists to promote the campaign that Hamas committed mass rape. And since then no survivor has been produced, no forensic evidence has been produced. Israel has blocked a UN actual fact finding commission of inquiry from entering to investigate this. And numerous figures who are seminal in pushing this narrative, like Rami Davidian, who claimed to have rescued scores of people from the Nova Electronic Music Festival and appeared in Sheryl Sandberg's fake documentary Screams without Silence, claiming he found naked women strapped to trees in the Gaza Envelope has been exposed by Israeli media as a titanic fraudster who invented every single story he told in order to rake in thousands and thousands of dollars on speaking tours and become a national hero. And we dismantled the New York Times front page Screams Before Screams Without Words piece at the Gray zone to the point where the New York Times underwent a staff wide crisis and its editor in chief, whose father was an Israel lobbyist or on the board of an Israel lobby organization which ironically attacks the New York Times frequently. Camera started to call in all the Muslim staffers to be interrogated for potentially leaking that the New York Times had canceled its planned podcast on the Screams Without Words front page article because we had done so much damage to it and the staff was now in open revolt. So the, the rape narrative, by the way, rested mainly on one image. And it was of a woman who was being taken out of an Israeli military base. Who was a spotter, a young woman named Naama Levi. And she was being, she was handcuffed with zip ties and being taken into a jeep to be taken into Gaza as a captive. She was a prisoner of war and she was an active combatant. She wasn't just some innocent girl girl. And there was blood and dirt all over the back of her pants. And so Israel's propaganda brigade said that that was proof that she had been raped. Naama Levy is out. She appeared at the UN in September and she never said a word about being sexually abused. In fact, she said that the blood was because she had been roughed up when she was zip tied. And I think there may have been some combat around her and she fell on the ground and, and got mud on her back. So the exhibit A was totally demolished. And so too is exhibit A in the New York Times article, Screams Before Silence. They talked about a girl in a black dress who they said had been viciously sexually assaulted by Hamas militants in her car. And photo was taken of her showing that her legs were spread and, you know, it looked horrible. Her name was Gal Abdush. Her own family came out and condemned the New York Times for misleading them, thinking that they would write about just simply the fact that she was killed on her way from fleeing the Nova Electronic Music Festival and that she had not been sexually assaulted. Other members of her family came out and condemned the New York Times and yet they refused to retract this article. And, and what's worse, it looks as though her car was actually targeted with an Israeli Hellfire missile and that she was a victim of the Hannibal Directive because she was riding on A road near the Gaza envelope where this free fire order was given. So the more you look into the propaganda, the more you see the projection. And the projection extends into Israel's torture prisons like Stateman, where Palestinian prisoners have actually been filmed being anally raped by Israeli soldiers using electric rods. Soldiers from shadowy force that specializes in torture. When this video appeared, some of those soldiers were indicted. And after they were indicted, national pro rape riots erupted in Israel where military bases were stormed by Israeli military veterans and religious nationalists demanding that their prosecution be canceled. One of the soldiers who did the sexual assault on camera was brought On Israel's Channel 14 other networks as a hero and took off his mask and became sort of a national folk hero. So every accusation is a confession. And where has this been covered in US Media? Where's the front page New York Times coverage of this?

Daryl Cooper (50:07)

I was really shocked by the. There was a, There was a clip you played from some Israeli talk show where there was one of the pundits on there talking about this incident in the prison where the Palestinians were gang raped and just openly defending it. I mean, saying that this is a great revenge and we should take it and so forth. I remember years ago, this must have been 15 years ago. 10, 15 years ago at this point, I was watching, I was watching CNN when I was in a hotel somewhere, and they were talking about Anders Breivik, the mass murderer in Norway, and how he had filed a complaint from his prison, which, you know, Norway doesn't have a lot of mass murders like that. So they don't really have a legal code or a prison system that's quite meant for those people. It's very rehabilitative oriented. And so it's sort of something that an American prisoner would think was kind of a resort. And so the news story that they were talking about was that he had filed a complaint that his PlayStation in his cell or his room wasn't being fixed and he had like put in multiple and so forth. And you know, fine. Anybody who watches that is going to be like, oh man, like, you know, that's ridiculous, obviously. But then this nice liberal, you know, lady anchor on there says with this, with this bit of a smirk on her face, and she's an American. And she said, yeah, you know what they need to do? They need to send him over here to one of our prisons. And what she's saying is, send him over here where he can be raped and maybe killed. Like that's what she's saying. And the thing is, like, if she had said we should Send him over here to be raped and killed. She would have been fired. She has to at least put it in a kind of code, kind of make it an implication, sort of like, because people wouldn't be ready for that. And it was shocking to me that, you know, you watch Israeli media and there is no code. I mean, they're not code talking at all. They should be raped. This should be done to them. No, they should not be punished. And, you know, I guess so. I went to Israel for the first time in 2009 for my job. And I went there probably a dozen times over the next 10 years. Years, usually for weeks, once for two months. So I spent a lot of time over there, got to know a lot of people. And I noticed over the course of that period of time, a lot of the people. People that I knew consistently, and these are a lot of Ministry of Defense guys and stuff that I was working with at the time, that they were. They were sort of their. Their way of thinking about the whole situation, their hearts were hardening. Like, each time I would go back, they were getting more radical. Each time I would go back to the point where, you know, you. The last time I went there was 2019. It was already getting really bad. But when you see stuff like that on Israeli media, when you see prominent government officials, I mean, just openly talking about genocide and ethnic cleansing, when you see the. Just the countless snuff films that are being put out that were. I don't know if these are still being put out. I think they maybe, maybe got it under control a bit. But being put out by Israeli soldiers themselves on Telegram and these other places, just. Just advertising and celebrating their own atrocities. The. The TikTok videos and Instagram videos of just Israeli civilians making fun of the starving Palestinians and all this kind of thing, what's going, you know, the thing like Israel today, despite the horror of October 7th, is probably in less danger than it's been, certainly than it was from 1948 up until about 2005, 2006. And so what is this, like, sort of panicky, increasingly just irrational and sadistic tendency coming from.

Max Blumenthal (53:58)

I mean, it comes from the heart of a settler colonial society that hasn't consolidated its control over the land and still faces resistance. And the sense is, if we give a single inch, we will be exterminated. And the narrative of the Holocaust has been drilled into the minds of Jewish Israelis over generations, primarily those generations that did not experience the Holocaust. Netanyahu is the ultimate promoter of this mentality that, first of all, the Holocaust means the lesson of the Holocaust means never again only to Jews and that if we relent and if we make peace, it will happen again to us. Netanyahu has even blamed Palestinians for the Holocaust, blaming the Mufti, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who is actually one of 13 figures on the Arab Hire Committee and wasn't actually in charge of the Palestinian cause at the time, who had issued some statements of support for Nazi Germany at the time because of his hatred of the British colonists, has had blamed him directly for the Holocaust. Basically, Netanyahu places blame for the Holocaust on Palestinians almost alone because Germany, what have they done? They give Israel 48% of its offensive weapons. In Israel in the springtime, there's this very intense period of indoctrination that starts with the Passover tale. And each generation they've risen up to destroy us. The Persians in Purim tried to destroy us. So it's Purim, the Purim celebration, Memorial Day, where they observe the dead who have died, fallen to defend them against the Arab Holocaust armies. And then, oh, and the Egyptians, by the way, are responsible in the Passover tale for the genocide of Jews or the Hebrews. And then finally Independence Day where they're supposedly granted independence and it's this great release. After all these attempts to destroy everyone, they are released. But they have to live behind these walls and everyone has to be conscripted into the military and they have to maintain constant guard and be totally ruthless towards the natives in order to prevent that all from happening again. And you know, anyone who's watching this, if you want to really understand the psychosis that has gripped Israeli youth and the Zionist world, watch a film called Defamation, which is free online by an Israeli filmmaker named Yoav Shamir, who got access inside access to the ADL showing how they cook statistics on antisemitism to frighten people and raise money. And then he goes on one of these March of the Living trips with Israeli youth who are on their way into army service and they're taken to Auschwitz and just basically treated to psychological warfare through counselors who are intelligence figures who had been in the military to instill in them a sense that they have to be more hard line towards the Palestinians. And the Ministry of Education in Israel actually tracks the attitudes of Jewish Israeli youth on these tours and has found that they become more supportive of the military and more sort of patriotic and more hostile to Palestinians after the March of the Living tours. So the whole lesson of the Holocaust is I understand it, of the Jewish genocide and the genocide so many groups suffered in Europe has been turned on its head to justify another, not just justify another genocide, but to mobilize the population of Israel to carry that out. And their. Their concept of safety is not the same as ours. Their concept of safety is not the same as the people in Gaza or people in Lebanon. It's a very colonial idea of safety or security that was spelled out by Ehud Barak, the most decorated figure in the Israeli military's history, former defense minister and prime minister, who said, what Zionism means is that we live in a villa in the jungle. So to the extent that they're threatened at all and that one person could be taken captive by Palestinian militants, they're in the jungle. And they must live in a completely European atmosphere of total security in order for them to actually call it a day, which means they'll never enjoy security and they'll constantly be at war. And then finally, and this is one of the other lessons of October 7, because Israel has been. I don't think any of us expected Israel to still be pushing ahead with this genocidal rampage in Gaza two years after. Israel cannot be at peace for political reasons. Not just Netanyahu, but just Israel, because it will lose its value to the US as an attack dog in the region. It will lose its value as a strategic asset to US Empire if it's at peace. Like, oh, no, we don't actually want to take out Iran. We don't actually want to, you know, we're not going to fight Hezbollah. We have a Hudna. We're not going to sell you. We're not actually going to keep selling weapons. Actually, our military industry is going to be reduced. Well, then we'll reduce aid to you, and you don't really matter anymore, and you're just going to shrink away into the region. So Israel, for the rest of our lives will be engaged in this kind of war as it expands its secret nuclear facility at Dimona outside the purview of the iaea, as it has been doing for the last two months, in very aggressive fashion as it ramps up the Sampson option.

Daryl Cooper (60:08)

One of the things. I'm sorry, Scott, real quick. You know, one of the things you notice when you talk to Zionists, and it's actually a mentality that. That leaks over into people who don't even think about politics or religion very much, who are Jewish very often. You know, my wife's Armenian. And if you go to one of her family events and you start saying great, nice things about the Turks, you're going to get an earful, you know.

Max Blumenthal (60:35)

Yeah.

Daryl Cooper (60:36)

But if. When you talk to Zionists about the Holocaust, the Holocaust was not something the Germans did to them. The Holocaust was just the most recent battle, most recent attack in the world's eternal war against the Jewish people. It's always been like that. They all hate us, even people who we think are our friends. Now, when push comes to shove, if they're not necessarily shoving us in the ovens, they'll be looking away and making excuses for it. That's how it's all. So it's like it was the culmination of the world's eternal war against the Jewish people. And it really places them in a really tight siege mentality to a degree that, I mean, even the Palestinians don't have, because at least the Palestinians only fear the Israelis and their military allies like the United States. It's not something that they think that if Palestinians established a community in Beijing, that the Chinese people would carry on this war against them or something. It's very, very tough to claw your way out of something like that when it's that deeply baked into the culture. There's. Yeah. So anyway, go ahead, Scott. Sorry.

Scott Horton (61:48)

Well, Listen, back in 2010, I remember interviewing Max on the show on the Scott Horton show and from Israel, where he was over there riding Goliath, and he said to me, oh, man, it's worse than I thought. It's just the political spectrum here is from Dick Cheney to Adolf Hitler. It is just something really to behold. And I think I put Goliath down. I'm afraid to admit I didn't finish that book because I was just. It's so gross, the whole damn story of the thing. But listen, we got to take care of a couple things. First of all, we got almost 10,000 people watching right now on, I guess, x and on YouTube, so that's pretty good. So everybody please like and subscribe and share and all those stuff things. And also check out expatmoney summit.com provoked. That is the expat money Summit put on by Miguel Thorup. And he's a really nice guy, really great guy. I met him before and he knows the rules about virtually every country in the world, about what it takes to get dual citizenship or residency, how to obtain property there, how to protect your assets by diversifying your holdings. And the whole thing is free. And yes, they do have some upsells, but even the free part is really good. If you're interested in this stuff, the focus this year's on Latin America, and you'll definitely Pick up a lot. So if you have some wealth and you're interested in trying to hang on to it somehow, this may be one of those ways. So check out expatmoneysummit.com provoked and in here, this stuff's selling really good. Scott Horton show coffee from Moon Dose Artisan Coffee. Get it? Starbucks supports the war party in Israel. Well, moondo's Artisan Coffee hates that stuff. And it's really good for if you need to get up in the morning or drive home drunk from wherever you're at, just go to Scott Horton.org coffee and you'll get the good stuff. It's half Ethiopian, half Sumatra blend, and it's really dang good. I drink it all the time and then also buy all my books and donate to the institute. Okay, so now, yes, the movie defamation is just fantastic. And the way I would sum it up is it's an Israeli Jew goes out in search of antisemitism and he can't find any. And the most horribly anti Semitic person in the entire movie is his old grandma, who says she's an OG Zionist from the 30s. And let me tell you about these Jews, all right? And he's like, grandma, please. Everybody else is nice in the whole movie, but you get the idea that in Israeli society, it's essentially like America was in 2002 all the time, right? That level of hype and hysteria that it's showa this and show of that. You're in danger. Every non Jew in the world wakes up with only one thing on their mind. How to kill all the Jews. And they just tell them that all day, every day. No wonder they're crazy and no wonder they're genocidal. Seriously, if they're, you know, literally in that fever pitch and they're never allowed to chill out. It reminds me of stories of like a guy gets home from Iraq War two and he can't settle down because every lump on the side of the road might be an ied. And so his. His adrenaline is just constantly on high and he's got that ptsd. I mean, that's what it sounds like. And that movie is just fantastic. But then also, I wanted to ask you this, because this all leads into the same thing too, is that the attack of October 7th and including. And especially the atrocities, and including. And especially the embellished atrocities has served the interests of the Israeli state so profoundly that many. And there is some very sound reason to believe this, by the way. Too many evidences that point to this, but has led many to conclude that at least perhaps the Israeli government let the October 7th attack happen. We know that they knew the attack plan. We know that they had all the warning from those female border guards that you talked about that said, man, these exercises look different, like they're really getting ready for something. And it seems like all these warnings were ignored. Now, I have simpler explanations, such as security is a government program and therefore they suck at it and they benefit from sucking at it kind of no matter what. And I could see also how if Netanyahu has decreed that I control the height of the flame, then that means any information coming up the chain of command that tells him he's stupid and wrong and putting everyone in danger might get quashed and might not make it up the chain of command, because the bosses really don't want to hear this right now. So I'm not making excuses for them, but I'm saying there are simpler explanations for their failure. But I wonder what you think about that. And. And of all the various journalism, including your own original reporting about how much they knew and whether you think they turned a deliberate blind eye to allow this attack to happen so that they could get away with all the horrors they've been getting away with here.

Max Blumenthal (66:50)

Well, I regretfully have to bounce after this possibly disappointing response, which is that because I have other stuff I have to attend to, but I don't. I haven't found a smoking gun there. And, you know, wouldn't put that past Israel's political leadership, which, with Netanyahu on the ropes before October 7. However, Netanyahu was almost toppled after October 7 and was visibly afraid of what was going to happen to himself and that he was going to be ejected as Prime Minister after this, what's considered a massive failure. And he's still facing the very likely possibility of a withering series of testimonies before a government commission of inquiry about October 7, when he is no longer prime minister. Along with all his corruption trials, there were some. Ultimately, Netanyahu managed to secure his coalition and he made this amazing political comeback after October 7th. And there were a series of intelligence failures, which I can see how people would circumstantially put them together to weave this narrative that it was sort of a false flag or that they let it happen. But I don't believe that it is that, number one, it served the objectives of Israel long term to justify opening up a large part of your society to that level of violence, especially your military, there would be military whistleblowers who would have. I would Assume who would have come out and said, we let this happen. There was, there were numerous incidents leading up to October 7th that demonstrated the weakness of the Israeli military, especially in close quarters combat infantry situations. Without fire support, they're pretty weak. And we've even seen that in Gaza in any standoff. For example, the Battle of Shejah in 2014, the Israeli military got its ass kicked until they got massive fire support as they retreated. So it stood to reason that the Gaza division could get wasted if they were caught by surprise before the Apaches and the drones and the F16s and the tanks appeared. The Israeli military is not invincible. And the narrative of Israel letting this happen or engineering this, it reinforces the concept of Israeli invincibility and also fails to recognize the capacity of Al Qassam and the other resistance groups in Gaza, which are still, after two years fighting and carrying out operations under a complete siege. There were other Israeli objectives that I think October 7th served. And basically because of the siloed nature of the operation, the fact that Hezbollah was not able to know about it, nor were the Iranians, there was no coordination in the north. And Hezbollah, you could see Hassan Nasrallah was placed in a very difficult situation by this operation where he knew that he threatened Hezbollah's, that, this, that, that entering a conflict with Israel threatened Hezbollah's standing in Lebanese society where it had members of parliament, where it had to answer to other sects and other political parties in Lebanon at a time when the country's economy was tanking and was being worn down by US sanctions, and that Iran as well had had many domestic considerations and did not seek some kind of regional war with Israel. So the idea that they could have all attacked at once, while hypothetically could have actually done so much damage to Israel that Israel may have sued for peace with Hamas and maybe negotiated an end to the siege that they're like cities like Haifa would have been completely torched. Tel Aviv, I mean, we saw what Iran could do in its 12 day war, but that just wasn't something that Hezbollah and Iran were prepared to do. And they couldn't answer to their own societies if they had done it. So what we got was a massive humiliation of Israel and then Israel was able to turn that into, you know, bloody attack on southern Lebanon and Beirut that did serious damage to Hezbollah and an unprovoked assault on Iran that was the first of many attacks Netanyahu has managed to shore up coalition. But Israeli society has badly divided. Israel's economy is suffering and is depending heavily on us Aid and aid from Zionist tech billionaires in the US in the form of foreign direct investment. Its bonds have been downgraded twice. A large part of its population, not a large part, but a substantial part, has left. During the 12 day war with Iran, they were fleeing to Cyprus. So it's not exactly a positive development for Israel, but for Netanyahu, it has sort of consolidated him as the king of a, I would say, increasingly desperate Zionist project. And so I haven't seen enough evidence or outcome to convince me that this was a let it happen scenario. But, Scott, as you said, I mean, any scenario like October 7th, Israel is willing to accept in a state of permanent war because it sort of. It justifies the constant militarization and constant war in the persecution complex. So, you know, I'm open to being proven wrong.

Scott Horton (73:01)

Yep. All right, everybody, that is the great Max Blumenthal, editor in chief of the Gray Zone. Check out his extremely important documentary here on YouTube. It's at the Gray Zone YouTube channel. It's called Atrocity Inc. Where he walks you through each of these claims of the exaggerations of October 7th and shows you the truth about it all. So really great stuff, and thank you as always, for coming on the show. Max, good to see you.

Max Blumenthal (73:24)

Thanks a lot. Good to be with you both.

Scott Horton (73:27)

All right, Coop, what do you think, bud?

Daryl Cooper (73:31)

Man, I could have had him on here for three more hours. Honestly, like, you know, the rewatching that documentary today, there's so much in it that is. I mean, it's outraging and shocking, but it's almost. You. You almost don't know what to do with some of the information. You know, like, there's the one part where Max shows a clip from Israeli state television. So this is a state sponsored propaganda ad, and it's a children's choir singing a song where they're saying there will be nothing there and we will safely return to our homes within a year, we will annihilate everyone, and then we return to plow our fields. And I think a lot of Americans and people just in the west in general, you know, they can see that video and they. They almost assume that, okay, well, then there must be, you know, some like, ultra. Ultra version of Fox News, this one channel, you know, with certain just radical people over there that, you know, really kind of just go off the rails. And even Israelis think they're crazy. But that's not. It was like on channel 14. You know, this is like. This is like their. One of their main channels and the state television and it's really hard to wrap your head around just the difference in mentality, you know, where, you know, look, we have people in America, like, you go back to the My Lai massacre and you always had people on the right who, you know, would defend Lieutenant Cali, you know, like. And because there's always people who, when there's a war on, is like, oh, we should take the gloves off and go harder and, you know, be ruthless. And, you know, these are people, if you handed them a gun and put them in a room with one of the Vietnamese soldiers and said, have at it, they would piss their pants most of the time. But, like, they talk that way, but that's extremely rare. You would never have like a politician or a like high level media pundit going on and saying, well, you know, look, we're fighting a war over there. So, yeah, those are 500, you know, women and children who aren't going to be harboring any more Vietnamese militants. I mean, you just would never see that. And nobody could even really fathom seeing that over here. And so it actually aids the Zionist, like, cover for that, you know, because they'll just tell lies like these things aren't happening. And people just sort of accept that because it strikes them as too crazy that it would be happening, you know. And so Max does a great job of just providing. I mean, he just shows it to you. He shows it to you directly and explains what you're looking at. And it's, it's only, it's a short documentary. Everybody's got to go watch it. Atrocity Inc. It's excellent.

Scott Horton (76:11)

Yeah. And you know, his previous documentary, Killing Gaza, is also really fantastic. And it's him and Dan Cohen, a couple of nice Jewish boys show up at the tail end of the, the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014. And nobody is mad at them for being Jews at all. They're just walking around everywhere, sticking their camera in everybody's face and nobody says anything about, oh, Muhammad mandated my holy war. They all say the same thing, this dirt is my dirt and I'm keeping it and you can't stop me. And you could translate into any language in this world. That's exactly what a man would say if someone's trying to take his land away. And, you know, it's really great and very eye opening context, you know, to take a look at that thing. Blumenthal and Cohen go to Gaza, are welcomed with open arms.

Daryl Cooper (76:59)

You know, I'm glad you brought up near the beginning when we were talking about what actually happened on October 7th that. And Max said this as well, that of course there were, like, there were atrocities that were. That happened. And that's not hard to believe, right? I mean, you. You have a. Just an undisciplined force. This isn't like a regular military force where you have disciplined troops and chains of command, you know. Exactly. And especially when you have waves of people who are coming in who aren't even part of the assault force, they're just kind of coming to join the party afterwards.

Max Blumenthal (77:30)

Right.

Daryl Cooper (77:30)

It's not hard to believe that those things happen when you have, you know, if you look at what was going on in Sarajevo or Beirut, you know, just things can degenerate to a point where violence becomes extremely casual. And, you know, because the other side is so dehumanized. And so that's not hard to imagine. But. But it's what Max said, though, you know, he pointed out that, you know, the actual videos, which, if you watch them, it's horrifying, right? Like, if you watch, like, I. I made the mistake. I don't like watching this stuff, but every once in a while it pops up and, you know, in my feed somewhere and I see it. But there was. I want to say it was the. The supermarket mass shooting up in Buffalo, New York, or I think it was in Buffalo where that guy went into a black neighbor shot and he, like, had a body cam or like a webcam on or whatever. And you watch it and it's not beheading people, it's not raping people, it's not throwing babies in ovens, it's just him shooting people. And you. The next week of your life is ruined if you watch it. I mean, it's just horrible. Even though you see people get shot in movies and stuff, like, it's just different. It hits different. So it's not surprising to me that when people like Chris Cuomo are brought into, you know, a secret room and shown select footage from the worst of the worst, like, most shocking videos and stuff, that they walked away from it extremely shaken, and they just come out and say, it was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. You know, there were people in there who were celebrating as this was going on, and they're shooting, shooting people. And so every other story becomes believable to them because that. Just seeing that is so shocking and it's so, you know, it's so traumatizing. But the, the fact that the Israelis felt the need to tell lies about what happened, that they had to know were going to be debunked like next week. You know, that kind of reflects like a larger trend that you're seeing that. Honestly, I think it's pretty worrying that. Say what you want about the Israelis, they've always been ruthless toward the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors, but they, at least they thought things through. You know, they considered how this was going to play out over the next five or 10 years and you know, they adjusted their approach based on the need to manage their relations with the rest of the world and their own internal politics and all that. All that just seems to be completely out the window, dude. I mean, they're pretty much just like, we're just gonna react, we're just gonna do the thing and then five years from now, 10 years from now, like, whatever, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, we're just gonna do the thing. And that kind of, you know, just impulsiveness and short sightedness, it really starts to make you worry that they could, they could do things that are extremely dangerous, not just for themselves and the Palestinians, but for the rest of the region and for other people as well.

Scott Horton (80:34)

Yeah, well, so let me ask you, what do you think of Trump's peace proposal and the Hamas reaction and Netanyahu's continued bombing campaign and the rest of the developments over the past few days here?

Daryl Cooper (80:48)

I mean, I think, like most people, I believe, I don't think that, I don't think the Israelis are going to let it happen, whatever they say. I mean, and it seems to, you know, that's what we said as soon as it came out and events since then seem to back that up. And so from that standpoint, I mean, Hamas did the right thing by coming out and saying, all right, we accept, we'll release all the hostages. Because even if they didn't want to do that, they knew that the Israelis were going to do something to sabotage the deal and that's what they've done. I mean, look, the idea that, I mean, all of the, all of the deals, the quote unquote deals that I've seen come out, including the most recent one, when you really get down to them, are essentially just throw down your weapons and let us come in and do whatever we want to you. And that's not something that is, it's just, it's never, it's never going to work. You know, they, the people in Gaza have proven over decades and decades that they are not going to be cowed by simple suffering. You know, that you can't make life hard enough on them that they just give up. You know, if this was the Middle Ages, you could go in and just kill all of them. You can't get away with that anymore. And so short of that, I mean, these people are not going to give up their claims. And, you know, it seems that the Israeli society, Max, was talking about how a lot of people, not like a huge percentage of the population, but it is like a part of the population that is middle and upper middle class, educated, like economically significant people, are leaving the country. They're going, taking that job that their cousins had waiting for them in London or New York that they said no to last year, but now they're going. And it's not just because things are dangerous and because Iranian missiles were fallen. It's because, you know, these people watch world media and they don't, you know, you get to a point where, you know, they don't want to live in a pariah state and be. They don't want to not be able to travel on a cruise to Greece without being harassed because they're coming from a country that's committing a genocide. They don't like it. And because these are, you know, there are moderate people there, but those people are the ones who are leaving, you know. And so what's left behind is more and more of the distilled essence of this craziness. And as that starts to snowball, because that's what'll happen is it'll start to snowball, some start to leave and now it gets a little crazier. So more leave and now it's really crazier and a whole bunch more leave. And pretty soon you've just got this real hardcore bunch, a bunch of people who are like the settlers in the west bank who just are full on messianic just where. Yeah, so I, I don't know, man. Like, I think that the, you know, that the Israelis, in their behavior right now, it almost seems to reflect an understanding that the Palestinians are not going to simply give up just because you made them, made their lives difficult, you know, enough. And so they're.

Scott Horton (84:00)

They're to take them, right?

Daryl Cooper (84:03)

What's that?

Scott Horton (84:05)

I said they couldn't find another country to take them. They kept trying to get Tunisia or Ethiopia, Sudan or Indonesia or somebody and.

Daryl Cooper (84:11)

They came up and they couldn't take them. They shouldn't take them. You know, it's a, I mean, for one, like, look for, obviously those countries are poor countries, a lot of them, and they don't need several million impoverished refugees coming into their own country. There's that angle of it. But it's also that, you know, by not taking them, you're saying to the Israelis, you're saying to the world that, no, no, this is not going to happen. Like this idea that, like, you're going to move these people out and then over time, the Palestinian national idea is just going to be forgotten. That's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. We're not going to accept it under any circumstances and nobody should, you know. And so that's one of the things that, like, you know, people will point out, and we've talked about this, I think, before, compared it to the Evian conference back in the 30s, where, you know, they'll say, oh, look, the Egyptians, the Saudis, all these other Arabs, they sure don't want the Palestinians. And it's like, yeah, no country, you know, especially one that has problems of its own, wants millions of impoverished refugees who are hostile to their immediate neighbor. That's for sure true. But it's also just them not accepting the Israelis framing of the situation, you know, that this is a problem. It's that it's purely a humanitarian problem, you know, where there's these people who are suffering because they or some portion of their militant population just can't get, you know, live in peace with Israel. That, that's not the only issue. The issue. There's also a political issue here and they're not going to give that up. And, you know, the, the Arab countries, I mean, I mean, shameful. I mean, I couldn't imagine, honestly, like, I don't know how they look at themselves in the mirror, honestly, like with just the, the way they've behaved since October 7th, or not behaved, I guess, since October 7th. But it has at least, as Max pointed out, put a pin in the movement toward the Abraham Accords, which would have been the ultimate betrayal. And so, yeah, I don't know, man. Like, one of the, like when you, when you really are confronted with, you know, when you watched. I haven't seen any of the Gaza videos, but there are videos, I think they were in a Frontline documentary of the Sunni attack on an Alawite town in Syria. And there are people in there as they're shooting and humiliating the Alawites, making them crawl on all fours and stuff. And they're having, they're having a great time. They're shooting their guns in the air and hooting and hollering. And that's very, very jarring to watch when you're seeing this brutal violence carried out in, like, a party atmosphere, you know, and you know that. And so that's been one of, like, the main, like, propaganda tracks since October 7, is pointing out these people are having a good time. They killed all these people, and then they sat down and had a meal. But the thing is, and I'm not saying this is the same as killing people, but, man, you watch those TikTok videos, those Instagram videos, like, a lot of which he. He has in that documentary of, you know, Israelis and Zionists around the world just making fun of dead kids, making fun of starving children, laughing it up. And it's like, it's the same mentality, you know, And I don't know if, you know, this is something that developed in. In the Zionist mentality since they've been in Palestine, you know, since they've become a state and had to deal with all these things. But whatever the source of it, it's. It doesn't. It does not place. It doesn't allow for us to pretend that there is much, if any, moral gap between the Israelis and any of their enemies. You know, and the only thing. The only thing that allows people to kind of keep that illusion going in their minds is that it's simply more shocking to hear about somebody being stabbed to death than it is to hear about a fighter pilot dropping a bomb on a building. Like, that's it. Like, it's just. We're more used to watch that Joker scene from the Dark Knight. You know, it's like you're used to this happening. It's a thing that happens. You know, bombs are dropped on people and a bunch of people are killed. But stabbing somebody, that's just. That's extremely different. So, like, that's the only thing that, like, allows that illusion of a moral difference to continue. And, you know, I think it's changing. But again, given the siege mentality of the. Of the Israelis and given the, honestly, even more radical view of a lot of Zionists around the world who are not Israeli, a lot of times they're more ridiculous than the Israelis themselves, who. Who can actually. A lot of times they can actually talk to you about this stuff in ways that foreign Zionist diaspora Zionists can't. You know, you'd think that if. If pressure, More and more pressure is brought to bear on them, if their global image suffers enough, if they. If they get to the point where they're starting to lose their unconditional US Support and all that, that maybe, you know, they'll have to change. Maybe it'll be a South Africa situation where they'll have to, you know, just say, all right, we have no choice but to sort of. But I don't know about that.

Scott Horton (89:28)

Unfortunately, the.

Max Blumenthal (89:29)

Yeah, dar.

Scott Horton (89:29)

I think it's kind of built into the cult blueprint that. See, the whole world is turning against us, just like I said they would. Right. And it all just.

Daryl Cooper (89:38)

And all the. The cops were buzzing, you know, the Branch Davidian compound and, like, showing up with tanks and everything else. It's like, oh, that thing that, you know, I was only 90% sure that any of this was true, but now I'm 100% sure it's all true. So I guess here we are.

Scott Horton (89:54)

Yeah, man. All right, listen, let's talk about one positive thing, which is that the Russians said, hey, you know, we should save the New START Treaty, which is the last treaty controlling numbers and stockpiles and deployed in stockpiles of American and Russian strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. It's the only treaty left. All those Start one and Start two, or, sorry, yeah, those two and Salt one and this and that, all those are over. What we have is New Start, and it has expired or it's set to expire. And they were going to let it go, but the Russians are trying to save it. Trump had vowed to tear it up or at least allow it to expire if he had been reelected in 2020, which he wasn't. And Biden and Putin saved it at least, even though they did not save the INF Treaty, which was the All Important Intermediate Nuclear forces treaty of 1987. But anyway, Putin says, hey, let's save that treaty. And Trump said, okay, that sounds good. I think we should do that. And then the Russians said, oh, good, we're so happy to hear these positive statements from the Americans about how they want to save this treaty. So there's a story about that on antiwar.com today. And like, really, I'm sorry, but that's the only thing that matters in the whole world. And look, I know that, you know, having 1500-1700 deployed each, that's enough to do you. A thousand targets in each country is enough to destroy our societies completely. But, you know, we were at the point in the Cold War where we had 40,000. Sorry, we had 30,000 and they had 40,000, for a total of 70,000, mostly H bombs, which is enough to kill everybody over and over and over again and disrupt the weather patterns for a century and God knows what. So at least we're down from there. And I think we could be making progress toward many Fewer and fewer nuclear weapons, but at least it looks like Putin and Trump are trying to save this one. And, Daryl, I think that could be a stepping stone on the way towards normalization and getting back to getting along with the Russians that, look, here we are clinking glasses and signing treaties together, right?

Daryl Cooper (92:15)

I mean, you would hope for something like that. I know if I was a Russian, I would not forgive us for 100 years, probably. So, I don't know. I mean, it's really. It's really crazy how, like, you hear stuff like that. And that's just one of a hundred times where I said, how are the Russians, like, the. The only. Like the. The only adults in this bilateral relationship here? You know what I mean? Like, where, like, did you see that? I think it was recent. It might have just been reposted, and it was in the past, I'm not sure. But Putin was talking to somebody in Interview or something, and he's telling a story about one time when he was talking to Jacques Chirac, and he said, like, why are the Americans behaving so irrationally and just so, you know, belligerently or whatever. And then Jacques Chirac said, because they're uncultured people. And he said, those are his exact words. And, you know, whatever the reason, whether it's because we're uncultured or not, it really is true. Like what? Like, you know, tearing up the START treaty, the INF Treaty, it's like, what possible benefit did we get out of that? Like, there's no benefit whatsoever other than to be like, screw you. We do what we want. And it's just. It's very disheartening. And so, I don't know, I mean, you hope that it's like a first step on the way back to normalization, but I really think that, like, our leadership class is going to have to be swapped out before the Russians are really able to accept anything like that. You know, they. They have to be dealing with people that they don't know from experience, just actively hate them and want to destroy their country and really destroy their country. And, you know, as long as the people who are in charge now, and I don't mean Trump, because I don't think Trump does want to destroy Russia. But all of the other people that, you know, are just in the government from president to president, a lot of those people just have to be. They got to be swapped out. Like, it's one of the reasons that we have to at least say what you want about Trump's Gaza policy. Say what you want about a whole bunch. There's a million things to criticize about the way Trump has handled his administration so far, and the first one as well. But what it does do is gives us a window of opportunity to get some, some of those people out. Yeah, he's going to appoint his John Boltons and stuff, and they'll come and go. But at the GS15 kind of SDS, you know, appointment level, if we can just get some of these old, old heads, like, replaced with people who, who, who don't have these like, like ancestral hatreds that they're carrying into the American government, you know, that we need that window to extend as long as possible. And so we need to hope that Trump stays in office until the end of his term and that after that. I don't know whether it would be J.D. vance or whoever, but somebody who, regardless of their individual policies that we may love or hate, at least opens the door to swap out some of this establishment for another four or eight years, because that's what has to happen, Inshallah.

Scott Horton (95:17)

All right. Well, I'm Scott Horton. That is Scott Horton show. And you can find me@Scott Horton.org Scott HortonShaw Scott HortonShow.com Antiwar.com LibertarianInstitute.org Check out my books. Fool's Errand. Enough already. And provoked. And he is Martyrmaid. What's your web address again there, buddy?

Daryl Cooper (95:37)

Subscribe.myrmaid.com all right, very good.

Scott Horton (95:41)

And our regular show is live every Friday night at 8 Eastern. So we'll see you here then. Thanks.

Daryl Cooper (95:47)

And we promise we'll answer your questions then. It.