Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, frankly, I think that what Israel’s doing wrong is if I were Israel, again, America’s interests are not coincident with Israel’s interests. If I were an Israeli leader, I would’ve swiveled up and I would’ve knocked the bleep out of Hezbollah early. What does that mean mean? What does that mean? So I would have Yoav Galant, who is the defense minister of Israel, was encouraging Netanyahu, who’s the prime minister and the war cabinet, including Benny Gantz. People talk about the Netanyahu government. That’s not what’s in place right now. There’s a unity war government in place that includes the political opposition. The reason I point that out is because there are a lot of people politically who will suggest that the actions Israel is currently taking are somehow the manifestation of a right-wing government. Israel currently does not have a quote, right-wing government, they have unity government that includes the opposition. In any case, Yoav Galant was urging in the very early days of the war that Israel should turn North and instead of hitting Hamas, they should actually take the opportunity to knock Hezbollah out because Hezbollah is significantly more dangerous to the existence of the state of Israel than Hamas. I actually agree with that. As far as what Israel has been doing wrong in the actual war, I mean, I think that, again, from an American perspective, I think that Israel is doing pretty well from an Israeli perspective via Israeli. I would actually want Israel to be less loose about sending its soldiers in on the ground level. So Israel’s attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and the cost of that has been the high. … on the ground level. So Israel’s attempting to minimize civilian casualties, and the cost of that has been the highest military death toll that Israel has had since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I mean, I personally know, through one degree of separation, three separate people who have been killed in Gaza, and that’s because they’re going in door to door, it’s because they’re attempting to minimize civilian casualties and they’re losing a lot of guys in this particular war. The problem that Israel has had historically speaking is that Israel got very complacent about its own security situation. They believed the technology was going to somehow correct for the hatred on the other side of the wall. That, okay, so our people have to live underground for two weeks at a time while some rockets fall, but at least it’s not a war. And that complacence bred what happened on October 7th. So to me, what Israel did wrong was years and years and years of complacence and belief in an Oslo System that is at root a failure because you cannot make a peace agreement with people who do not want to make peace with you. So that’s what I think Israel is doing wrong. I have a feeling that there’s going to be wide divergence on this point. Maybe. So in terms of broadly speaking, I generally oppose settlement expansion is a thing that Israel does incorrectly that I think is kind of provocative to at least all the Palestinians in the West Bank, and it probably energizes hatred in the Gaza Strip for them as well. In terms of conducting warfare, the one thing that I always say to everybody, especially Americans, is you can’t evaluate things from an American perspective. It’s very stupid. It happened a lot with Ukraine where people are like, “Oh, well, they work with the Nazis?” and “Weren’t the Soviets the good guys?” And it’s like, well, in other parts of the world, it’s not quite as simple. And I think the same is true for Israel-Palestine, that a lot of Americans will analyze the conflict as just being one between only Israel and Palestine, which it’s not, it’s a conflict between Israel and then Palestine, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. Right now, it is. However, one area where I’ll break with, Ben, is I think that minimizing civilian casualties and everything is very, very, very important I think on the Israeli side. I don’t think it’s important so that the US will stay with them because I think the US is probably going to stick with Israel as long as they’re not doing anything crazy, and I don’t even think it matters for the international community. It definitely doesn’t matter for the UN because Jesus Christ. However, I think it’s really, really, really important that… I think that in the Middle East, broadly speaking, I think that leadership, especially in the Gulf, has gotten over the Palestinian issue. I think that leadership is kind of like they don’t care as much anymore, but the populations still care quite a bit. And I think that the main issue that Israel could run into is if the civilian death toll does climb too high, and if they start to hit this 40, 50, 60,000 number of civilian casualties, they run the risk of the civilian populations in the surrounding Middle Eastern states becoming so antagonistic towards Israel that they start to take steps back towards normalization in the region. So for instance, I know that Bahrain, I think, already pulled out their ambassador to Israel. My guess is going to be it’s temporary. I know that on the public speaking side, you’ve got a lot of people condemning Israel for the attacks. And on the private side, you’ve got people telling Israel, “Please kill all of Hamas because this is untenable and nobody wants to work in this situation.” I don’t know if this ended up being true or not. I’m guessing it didn’t, but I saw on a couple of Twitter accounts, it was leaked that potentially, Saudi Arabia was considering installing a government in the West Bank that they would run. No, I mean, I think Israel would love nothing better than that, but that is [inaudible 01:01:21].…

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