October 7th Foresight, Netanyahu’s Funding of Hamas, and the Settlers Murdering Palestinians

Did Netanyahu know October 7th was coming? Why did he fund Hamas? Who are the settlers killing Palestinians in the West Bank? A journalist based in Israel answers the questions American media ignore. (00:00) The Truth Behind October 7th (08:44) When Did Planning For October 7th Start? (30:51) Why Was the IDF Given a Stand-Down Order? (45:42) Why Did Netanyahu Send U. S. Funds to Hamas Before October 7th? (59:59) The Strange New World of West Bank Settlers Ari Flanzraich is a Canadian investigative journalist for major outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, the Observer, among others, using command of both languages to operate in Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements. He has posed as a Palestinian to meet with leaders of militant factions and arms dealers in the West Bank, bringing rare on-the-ground insight into the region. He spent his first several years in Israel living and working alongside illegal West Bankers and Gazans in Arab villages along the Green Line. Most recently, he served as an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. Paid partnerships with: Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker American Financing: NMLS 182334, http://nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.196% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Brooklyn Bedding: Get 30% off sitewide with promo code TUCKER at https://brooklynbedding.com TCN: NEW! Tucker Carlson Books presents Russell Brand’s ‘How to Become a Christian in 7 Days.’ Available only on https://tuckercarlsonbooks.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Tucker Carlson?

  How long have you lived in Israel?

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Been there for about 10 years.

• 0:36Tucker Carlson?

  10 years. So we're just talking off camera and I'm, first of all, thank you for doing this.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 0:44Tucker Carlson?

  It's impossible to really understand anything from the United States because the filters and the propaganda are just so restrictive. But it seems obvious that October 7th is the beginning of a global reshuffling, certainly of the Middle East. We haven't spent enough time thinking through what that was. What was that?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I think to properly understand October the 7th, you have to, you have to put together kind of a timeline. I think what's been lacking here, you know, I talked to a lot of Palestinians and they tell me a lot about how they portray the war as something that sort of began after October the 7th, which is another problem we can get to at some point. The Israelis chalk it up to, you know, the act of a rabid anti-Semite. I have no doubt that he was, he was quite possibly an anti-Semite.

• 1:37Tucker Carlson?

  You're speaking of?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yahya Sinwar.

• 1:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  The leader of Hamas, who's now dead.

• 1:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  But it doesn't mean that there wasn't a logic. It doesn't mean that this happened when it happened and how it happened for a second.

• 1:49Tucker Carlson?

  So just to be clear about what you're saying. So from the Palestinian perspective, everything we're seeing now is a result of the events after October 7th. And from the Israeli perspective, October 7th happened just because their hatred unreasonably.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Well, I guess what I often find is when I speak to Palestinians, and they're not wrong to say that the backdrop of all this is that there's been an occupation for a very long time. You know, we've been occupied since 48, which I understand, but it still doesn't explain the specifics of October the 7th.

• 2:14Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  It explains why at some point something like that could or quite possibly should have happened.

• 2:18Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  And so that's, that's been something I focused on a lot. And I think if you want to put together a proper answer, you have to put together a timeline. You have to go back. You have to trace basically the existence and the trajectory of Hamas from their rise to power. But the real breaking point, I'll say, is 2021.

• 2:38Tucker Carlson?

  What happened in 2021?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Three things happened in 2021. 2021, you have tensions at Al-Aqsa Mosque. You have famously all the tensions that went on in Sheikh Jarrah, where there were settlers taking Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. That caused a lot of tension.

• 2:57Tucker Carlson?

  What happened at the Al-Aqsa complex?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  There are all kinds of clashes between Israeli border police and Muslim worshippers. And this went on for some time. It was also, it was May. It was May. And what happened was that three things happened. Hamas fired rockets into Israel, killing about 14 Israelis.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Riots broke out in the middle of Israel, across the country, actually, internal riots between Arab Israelis and Israeli Jews. And suddenly, the West Bank woke up from a very long slumber. Suddenly, you had, for the first time in a very long time, militants who are firing at IDF troops. I remember seeing videos of, I think it must have been hundreds of Palestinian men marching towards the borders. Did I think they were going to enter? No. But I remember calling my father. I remember calling him and saying, this video I'm seeing, this doesn't look good. This is an indication of something. And in the Israeli media, if you look back at the reports, the Israelis perceived this to be an indication that we have a big threat from within. This contributed also to the rise of the right in the years

• 4:07Speaker 02

  that followed. So the first order of business was, we have Arab Israelis, and they're, they're a problem. We have 2 million Palestinians within our borders. And the next thing that happened, and you saw the-

• 4:16Tucker Carlson?

  Borders of Israel.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, within the 48 borders.

• 4:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Between the sea and the green line.

• 4:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  And then you had, over the next year or two, you might remember, increased operations by the IDF. Suddenly, in Nablus, which used to be called the terror capital of Palestine, suddenly there was a new militia that formed, called Lion's Den. Suddenly, in Jenin, the refugee camps in the north of the West Bank, there are armed men doing military marches with M16s and masks on. And that was the second order of business. And the last thing that the Israelis believed was that Hamas firing some sort of like water pipe rockets into Israel was an indication of something to come, something much bigger to come.

• 4:59Tucker Carlson?

  So what was this? I mean, as you said, you could trace this all the way back to the British mandate era or whatever. You could trace it far back as you wanted, but you think this really began with clashes between both Israeli citizens, Arabs and Jews within Israel and in 2021. So how did that lead to?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Not exactly. What I think is that, and this is why you have to go a little further back, sorry, this is a bit of a... I think that the internal riots were absolutely meaningless. I think what happened in the West Bank was somewhat meaningful, and I can explain later why I don't think it had any end to it, why it wasn't going to come to any significant end. But what happened in 2021, why Hamas fired rockets? No one bothered to ask, why are they suddenly firing rockets? Hamas came to power in 2007? I think it was 2007. They come to power, and this is a group that overthrew the PA.

• 5:58Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  They tossed Palestinian Authority. They tossed them off rooftops, took control of Gaza. And they came, why would people have wanted them? Or why did they think that the Palestinians deserved them rather than the PA? They were saying, we're a resistance group. We're Palestinians. We were exiled in 48, and the whole purpose of our existence, in one way or another, is to get back. And so unlike the PA, we're not going to sit and make peace with the Jews. We're not going to sort of like coordinate with them. We're not going to arrest people at their behest. We're going to fight. And that's what they did from 2007 to 2014. I think you have three to four ground invasions, if I'm not mistaken.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  And so they were doing kinda, they were fulfilling their promise. They didn't win, they didn't liberate Palestine. But what did happen is that Hamas didn't have a lot of political tension because they were either fighting, being bombed, or people were cleaning up the rebel. But in 2014, just bear with me a moment, in 2014, suddenly silence falls upon Gaza. I think this was a silence that, I don't know if Hamas even predicted that such a silence would ever come upon Gaza. The Israelis certainly wanted it. It's the last war, it's called Tsukitan in Hebrew, it's the last war. The Israelis, you know, bombed a bunch of tunnels, there were some ground operations, lots of strikes.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  And it was kind of this thing where they came and said, look, we sent them back. I think the quote from the general at the time was, "We sent them back 50 years, or 100 years, to the Stone Age, whatever it was." But that's a bit of a problem for Hamas. You're a group of gritty, sort of nitty gritty resistance fighters. You came to power, you fought some wars, didn't win, you didn't get totally beat. And now you're just bureaucrats. Now you have to go from grit to governance. And that's fine, maybe for a year, maybe for two, because the next big battle's coming. What happens three, four, or five years later?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  At some point, people are sitting there, they have a much lower quality of life than people in the West Bank. Palestinians in the West Bank, at the very least, can come into Israel for years and years and years. Half of them illegally, and work, make an Israeli salary, go back home. In Gaza, it's, you know, they didn't have a whole lot going for them, and I think at some point in time, maybe around 2018, it became clear that, I think people were kind of starting to ask the question, it's like, okay, if we picked you and you're supposed to fight, and now we're just eating shit here, we might as well get the PA back. And you say that you don't sit down with the Jews, and you don't recognize the Jews, and you're not going to make peace with them, but like, you talk to them on a weekly basis, you just have some Egyptian guy in the middle playing telephone tag.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  And I think that the leader of Hamas, I think Yahya Sinwar, I think he understood that, I think around 2018, he began to understand that like this is not a sustainable, this is not something sustainable. Can't keep going like this.

• 9:13Tucker Carlson?

  When do you think the planning for October 7th began? And what was the thinking?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Look, in terms of the planning, if you're talking about the concrete steps, look, I'm not an intelligence analyst. From what we know, I think from what was released, we understand that sometime in October 2022, it might have, the real planning could have been underway. The conceptual planning for something of this sort, I think, had been working within Sinwar since he was probably a teenager. I mean, there's a famous quote, I think he did the interview in Hebrew, which is like all the more eerie, it's crazy interview. And he's sitting on a plastic chair outside and they asked him something about, you know, do you want to, do you want to kill us? Do you want war with us? And he goes, listen, right now, you're strong.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  You've got nuclear bombs. I can't, I can't, I can't touch you. But in 20, maybe 15 years, you're going to be weak inside. And that's when I'm going to strike you.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  And in 2018, Yahya Sinwar gave an interview. It's crazy because, you know, I think we were just talking about this before we started. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, he put out a piece called Sinwar's March of Folly. I think it came out in the summer, August, September. And he ventured an argument as to why Sinwar could have done something so stupid. And I'm bracketing morals here. I'm not talking about whether he was good or bad. I'm just talking about, you know, conceptually speaking.

• 10:47Tucker Carlson?

  Like the pure analysis of it, yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And he had this line, I read this, I must have read this piece four to five times and to this day, I can't understand what he meant. He said something to the effect of, Yahya Sinwar fell prey to Muslim Brotherhood supremacy, conspiracism, and he lacked reasoning capabilities.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Something out of like a first year philosophy paper.

• 11:14Tucker Carlson?

  He wrote a couple of books in prison, didn't he? In the decades he spent in prison?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  He wrote one book.

• 11:19Tucker Carlson?

  One book, a novel?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, something of the road. I forget the name.

• 11:22Tucker Carlson?

  The Carnation and the Eagle or something.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he was reading quite a bit. He'd have people, he'd read a lot, sort of like old.

• 11:29Tucker Carlson?

  Right, so he's not an illiterate savage, whatever you think. I'm not endorsing.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  He could be a savage.

• 11:35Tucker Carlson?

  But he wasn't an illiterate savage.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  He was definitely literate.

• 11:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  He definitely had reasoning capabilities.

• 11:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  You can use reasoning capabilities to do very, very bad things.

• 11:43Tucker Carlson?

  People do.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 11:45Tucker Carlson?

  He did.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  He did. But again, that's not the point.

• 11:49Tucker Carlson?

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• 14:52Tucker Carlson?

  So Goldberg's analysis, which is to say, again, Goldberg is not even like a real person. He's like a symbol of the American ruling class's conversations with itself. But he's reporting back to his masters. There's no reason behind this. He's just...

• 15:08Speaker 02

  I don't know if he was reporting back to his masters. Like, I don't know Jeffrey Goldberg. I don't know who he reports to, if he reports to anyone.

• 15:13Tucker Carlson?

  In the media ecosystem in the United States, that's considered like the highest level of think piece.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  So I don't know if he was reporting to anyone, but I... He certainly believes, I would assume he believes, if he wrote a whole essay on it, that this was all just, uh... rabid antisemitism and a failed... And the worst part about the piece is that he already determines the success. He claims it's his march of folly, meaning he failed. Not only was he stupid and he had... Did he have no logic whatsoever? But he failed.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  And with him, all of his buddies, Hezbollah, Iran, they all failed. And it's over, it sucks. You had a good, you tried, you failed.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  In 2018, and this is a very important quote, there was an Italian journalist who's since left journalism, which is crazy to me, but she went out with a bang, Francesca Barri or something. She did an interview with Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, 2018. The interview was later published by Wynet, in a Hebrew paper. And it's a fascinating bit. This was, again, if we talk about the silence that came upon Gaza in 2014, this is at the height of the silence, 2018.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Not a lot of people remember the wars that happened four years ago. And people are starting to feel a little antsy, a little jittery. Israel's super happy, because they're like, if we just keep feeding them, this will be great. We can ride this way forever.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  And she asked him this question about the next war.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  And it's crazy that Jeffrey Goldberg didn't quote Sinwar once in his entire piece.

• 16:52Tucker Carlson?

  Seriously?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  As far, I might be wrong, but I believe that he didn't quote Sinwar once in his whole piece. And there's a plethora of quotes. And they're all very, very useful in trying to understand what the hell happened. And he says, he says something to the effect of, and I quote,

• 17:09Speaker 02

  "The next war, or in the next war, victory for Netanyahu, for Netanyahu, will be worse than defeat." This is a guy who apparently already knew that Netanyahu would still be in power.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Why, you might ask? Because the next war is the fourth war,

• 17:31Speaker 02

  which cannot be, and cannot end like the third, which ended like the second, and which ended like the first.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  And his closing line is, "They should take over Gaza." It's a quote. Who? That's Yahya Sinwar.

• 17:47Tucker Carlson?

  Who should take over Gaza?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Israelis.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  The next war is the fourth that can't end like the third, which ended like the second and the first.

• 17:56Tucker Carlson?

  So for those who aren't steeped in this, why would the head of Hamas want the Israelis to take over Gaza?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I don't know at that point if he wanted the Israelis to take over Gaza, but I think he was pointing something... I think he was pointing to something that's quite theoretically elaborate, like a very, very high-level understanding of how history functions.

• 18:20Tucker Carlson?

  Sounds that way.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Which is...

• 18:27Speaker 02

  He didn't want them to take over Gaza, but I think he understood that if there were to be another war, that it would be a disastrous war and that it would force Israel into a corner where they would have two options. Either we destroy this entire place and/or we occupy Gaza. But the problem is that the Israelis already occupied Gaza. They already tried it and they left, and they left for very good reasons. It was economically taxing. It was unsustainable. Israeli soldiers could die. There were RPG attacks on settlements. And I think he understood that he would, in the next war, if there were to be a next war, put the Israelis in a position where they would be forced to grope around in the gray

• 19:12Speaker 02

  for a very, very long time, even if it would appear otherwise from inside, even if it could be sold to the population otherwise. And along these lines, there is another quote, if you don't mind. About a year before October the 7th... Don't quote me on this, but I think a year before October the 7th, Sinwar did a speech and he convened the leaders of his factions and various imams in Gaza. And it's a pretty boring speech and he has no rhythm and he's screaming way too loud. But there's one point that tons of people have cropped and isolated on Instagram.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And he has this line. And he says,

• 19:57Speaker 02

  "He goes by God. I see it with the sight of my eyes."

• 20:08Speaker 02

  "A regional, religious war that will burn with it the green and the dry."

• 20:18Tucker Carlson?

  You mean the one we're in right now?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the one that will go on for a very, very long time, even if it appears to have ended.

• 20:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. So, it sounds like you think that in planning the attacks of October 7th, he saw the long game and understood that it would be hard for Israel to to deal with those consequences over time.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  I think, to put it a little more specifically, I think I think Sinewat understood that the status quo that fell into place after 2014, this long silence, that it was poison for the Palestinian cause. The notion of Palestinian resistance. If your cause is that Palestinians should just live, go to work, bring their bread home, then it's certainly antithetical to that. I think he understood that this was poison. And that if he continued on this way, what will the next generation say when they didn't grow up with any wars? How long can you go on putting on marches for martyr children with cardboard tanks and fake RPGs? How long can you go on convening your imams to talk about the day after?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Who's going to be the next Imam of Al-Aqsa after we liberate Palestine? How long can you go on with the foaming platitudes? It can't go on. And the longer you let it go on, the weaker you get.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  And I think he understood that one thing was certain. You know when you shake a snow globe? You can shake it, shake it, shake it, the flakes fly everywhere. And the one thing of which you can be certain is that the flakes won't fall in the same place. That's the one thing you can know.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  And I think he understood that an attack like this, it's the 9/11 of this conflict.

• 22:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  That whatever was before...

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Won't be after, and that's why you call it a bloodbath. You rinse the slate clean.

• 22:13Tucker Carlson?

  And it's having or likely to have similar effects to the effects of nine eleven in the US. It draws the country into all kinds of unanticipated conflicts that weaken the country and cause internal division within the country.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:27Tucker Carlson?

  That'd be my guess. So to that extent, it's successful. It is strategic and it's effective.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  In the short term, it's been successful, certainly. And I think in the long term, I think everyone, especially Israelis, have to wait. You know, there's a status quo that dies. And there's this notion in Israel now that status quo died and we, and we immediately established a new one. Meaning they broke the last status quo where we had peace and they had, we had these little boxing rounds every two years with Hamas or whatever. But now we're strong. Now we do whatever we want. We bombed them, we bombed them, we bombed in Lebanon, we bombed Iran. We're in control. But this, but you don't decide when a new status quo comes into birth.

• 23:07Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  That's history. There's, there are millions of variables that come into that decision. Gaza's not even be rebuilt. Currently Hamas has control of, I think, forty six, forty eight percent of Gaza. So Israelis are groping around. I think they're entering into probably what will be in retrospect, the darkest and most fraught period since the establishment of the state. They're groping around in the gray.

• 23:32Tucker Carlson?

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• 25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 25:02Tucker Carlson?

  So that was, you said you thought it was probably in the planning phases for at least a year, it would have had to have been, just given its scale, I would think.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  I think if you also look in October 2022, this is what the Israelis said, I think they found some kind of binder on the border.

• 25:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  October 2022 on it. But that was the year in which Hamas repaired their relations with the Shia axis.

• 25:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  That's the year in which suddenly you had, I think, Hania going to Moscow.

• 25:27Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  They repaired relations with Syria. And that was kind of, I think, the key into getting them back into the fold with people like Nasrallah.

• 25:35Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Suddenly you have Islamic Jihad and Hamas are meeting with Nasrallah on a regular basis. I think they were invited to Iran also at a certain point. And I think so, those are some pretty serious indications.

• 25:45Tucker Carlson?

  But I mean, Israeli intelligence being as effective as it is, clearly must have picked up signals this was going on.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  That's already been released.

• 25:57Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. So explain, if you would.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  I mean, there are people who probably know this better than I, but there was a document that circulated within Israeli intelligence called, I think, Jericho Wall. There was an intelligence analyst, I believe she was a female, who sort of saw what was happening in Gaza, that there were certain military drills, certain speeches, and there was an indication that they were planning something really serious. And the story goes that her higher-ups, I think Roland Bergman reported on this, if I'm not mistaken, the story goes that her higher-ups basically said like, "Yeah, yeah, that's cute, but no." We don't, it's like inadmissible trash. You had also soldiers at the observation posts along the border,

• 26:41Speaker 02

  who, I don't know when exactly, I don't know if this was in the weeks or the months leading up to October the 7th, but that were reporting to their higher ups that like there was some strange little movements?

• 26:54Tucker Carlson?

  It commences and much has been written about and even more speculated about a so-called stand down order or the Israeli government response to it. What, what's your belief about what happened?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Are you asking whether or not I think the Israeli higher ups wanted this to get out of control?

• 27:14Tucker Carlson?

  No, I'm asking like what did happen? What do you think actually happened? And why, why from an outsider perspective, it seems like the response was inadequate?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  It was certainly inadequate.

• 27:28Tucker Carlson?

  Right, why?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Look, I don't know, but what's strange to me is that I think it was in the week or two after Tsachi Yenigbi, who was like the equivalent to the head of homeland security, I guess, or the national security council, something like that in Israel. He came out and admitted that I think three to four hours before the attack, there, you know, certain intelligence officials and I think the general, like they convened, there was a discussion. It's not like they woke up at 6:30 a.m.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  So there was certainly something that happened among the highest echelons. One question I've had is why?

• 28:03Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, do we know what they talked about?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  No, but there's a quote that circulated in Israeli media that apparently the general at the time got out of bed and his wife was sort of like, what, what's going on? And he just apparently turned around and said Gaza is going to be destroyed. That's a quote that circulated around Israeli media. I don't know at what time this happens, could have been at, you know, 6:29, I doubt it though, because apparently the people were convened before. I don't know.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  I know what I saw on October the 7th, I know where I was.

• 28:35Tucker Carlson?

  So what did you see and what's your conclusion?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  One thing I'll say is that three weeks before October the 7th, I met with a journalist, he's a British journalist. And we'd been, he'd come like a year and a half before. And he was starting out fresh. I don't think he knew Israel-Palestine super well. So, and I wanted to become a mainstream journalist at the time, so I thought he could help me scratch each other's backs. And we would talk a lot about what was going on. And for about a year and a half, I was telling him that something's gonna happen. Like, there's something weird that's going on. And he'd listen to me and he'd help me out. And about three weeks before October the 7th, we met for a beer in Jerusalem. And that was the same day in which the Palestinians, I believe it was three weeks before, were doing these marches of return. You know, when they flood the borders, they throw incendiary balloons, burn some fields,

• 29:26Speaker 02

  and wait for the Israelis to come back and be like, okay, what will it take you? What's your price? What will it take you to shut the fuck up? And he asked me, he's like, why do you think this is happening? And I remember distinctly looking at him and saying, I don't know. Because after 2021 or 2022, I believe, Bennett, Naftali Bennett, lifted the permit, what do you call it, the permit ceiling, as it were, or like the quota? It's like some 20, 22,000 Gazans receives permits to come to Israel? After years of them not having any. And so usually, they would do these sorts of antics to get something. We want construction materials, we want work permits, we want something.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  But there was nothing really to ask for. And so he, when we said goodbye that day, I remember, I'll never forget this, he looked at me and he said, you know, all right, I think you're a really smart guy. And I appreciate you taught me a lot. But I just think you've misunderstood this place. I think you're a bit apocalyptic. I looked at him and I said, Tom, I think you've spent a little too much time with Israelis. And so if I could have come to those conclusions with the limited amount of information I had... I'm sure there are many people within the intelligence establishment that had some idea. Do I think that Bibi allowed 3,000 or 2,000 Hamas militants to enter the country and kill people?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  I'm a little doubtful, but I don't know.

• 30:59Tucker Carlson?

  From an American perspective, or the perspective of anyone who's visited that border, which I have, pretty secure border, looks like the southern border. So like, how did that hap— Does anyone— let me rephrase. Has there been what you consider an honest and reliable accounting of how it happened? Like, how did these guys get in here?

• 31:23Speaker 02

  I think it's known— what do you mean by how? I think physically speaking, people know how they got in. And the border was largely—I mean, you know, people were in their bunks, sleeping. It was also a Jewish holiday. There was no increased level of alertness, as far as I've heard. You certainly didn't have drones or anything in the air, which could have solved this entire problem in about like 15 minutes. If you have enough guys, enough RPGs, enough explosives, you break through concrete.

• 31:47Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know that. But you just imagine that the border with Gaza, when there are, you know, credible intelligence reports, something weird's going on, maybe we don't know what it is, but they would be on, you know, sufficient alert to have stopped this at the line.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Why something didn't happen between that meeting, which I've heard was between certain members of intelligence at maybe 3:00 in the morning? Why there weren't drones that were put in the air?

• 32:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Or a helicopter, or heightened alertness, like significantly heightened alertness? I don't know. But what I have learned over many, many years in Israel is that you would be surprised by what people can get away with. I know people in the West Bank who have fake Israeli IDs, who slip in illegally and stolen Israeli cars to smoke hash with their friends on the other side and then go back.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  You'd be surprised.

• 32:34Tucker Carlson?

  So the myth of Israeli government efficiency is a myth?

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't— yeah.

• 32:42Tucker Carlson?

  So it's not, um, it's the security, security is not as competent as people imagine it is.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  When it wants to be competent, it's very competent. I mean, if you ask yourself, for example, in Lebanon and Iran right now, how is it that they have thousands upon thousands of targets that are readily available?

• 32:58Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  It's because they wanted to have them. They set their sights on Iran and Lebanon and they neglected Gaza.

• 33:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, and that's the central question is why? And, um, so, once it's in progress, there is a stand down order. What was that?

• 33:19Tucker Carlson?

  Why did they do that?

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Well, you can't flood the area with IDF because, look, you're talking about a lot of troops, especially for the holidays, or maybe in the north, it might be two, three hours away.

• 33:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  So I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect that they would have flooded the whole place with troops. It's harder, people have to get their guns and get equipment. It's logistical mayhem. There were soldiers in the first two weeks of the war that didn't even have helmets. Jewish communities that were sending like basic equipment because there were, there were massive shortages. The real question in my opinion is why, if there was some kind of indication around 3 a.m., why the air force wasn't involved? Why helicopters, drones, or fighter jets weren't involved? Because that doesn't take a whole lot of time, as far as I'm concerned.

• 34:01Tucker Carlson?

  And we don't know the answer.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  No, I mean, no, I don't expect to know the answer, at least for a very, very long time.

• 34:09Tucker Carlson?

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• 34:53Tucker Carlson?

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• 35:11Speaker 05

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• 35:41Speaker 06

  It's so weird. This app shows that my credit score is pretty good, but I couldn't get the car loan.

• 35:46Speaker 07

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• 35:48Speaker 06

  No, it's some other company.

• 35:50Speaker 07

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• 35:58Speaker 06

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• 36:07Tucker Carlson?

  Visit myfico.com or download the MyFico app to get started today. Once that happened, once those attacks happened, was it always inevitable, the response? Was Gaza always going to get leveled once that happened?

• 36:21Speaker 02

  If that operation, if that attack were to be successful, and I think if we follow Sinwar's thread, I think it's fair to assume that he knew. Well, what do you mean by that this war will take with it or burn with it all the green and all the dry?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  It's called scorched earth.

• 36:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, I think there was an assumption that something of this nature would happen. The exact extent, no one can predict.

• 36:46Tucker Carlson?

  Right, of course not.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:48Tucker Carlson?

  But that there would be massive change, potentially even of borders, long term.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Potentially. In Gaza, certainly. I think the talk of border changes, for example, in Syria and Lebanon, I think it's a bit overblown. I think it's a bit overblown.

• 37:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I have no idea. We'll see. But, you know, things change. I just have to pause and ask, what, at this stage, you know, years later, what is the plan for Gaza, do you think? The Netanyahu government's plan for Gaza, he's got all these people living there. He said on television this morning, we're gonna go with the Trump plan to move them all out of Gaza.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Highly doubt that that's gonna happen.

• 37:32Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I kind of doubt that, too.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  I think, I think there's this myth that certainly, you know, circulates in the Arab world, but definitely here in America, too, that there's a whole lot more strategy, that there's a whole lot more foresight in Israel.

• 37:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, that's, but people definitely believe that this is part of a plan in Greater Israel. This is, this is a strategy.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  I think, I think you're overestimating the foresight.

• 37:57Tucker Carlson?

  I wouldn't be surprised if I am.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Not you specifically, but I don't think there's a massive plan in Gaza. There are certainly plans that have been thrown around, but right now, as far as you can see, and this is precisely what's in water.

• 38:09Tucker Carlson?

  So I know that the Israelis had zero, this is a fact, they had zero plan, at least communicated to the United States, for what would happen after the Ayatollah was killed in Iran. They didn't have a government in waiting or any kind of-

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Because it doesn't matter to them.

• 38:22Tucker Carlson?

  Right, well, clearly.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  What matters to Israel, what's useful for Bibi Netanyahu specifically, is simply chaos. And the more definition that is given to the chaos, the more he has to account for the shape that it's taken.

• 38:33Tucker Carlson?

  Right, smart. That's right. The difference between Iran and Gaza, though, is Gaza is like on your border. So would they want, would he want chaos in Gaza?

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at the border right now, I mean, you have, you have a ton of buffer. It's not really bordering Israel anymore.

• 38:53Tucker Carlson?

  True.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  And so in that sense, I think, and there's not a ton of chaos, meaning Hamas is, I don't know if they're in shambles. I think there are a lot of tunnels that are still left, for example. They have light weapons, they have AK-47s, they have like tiny rockets they can sometimes send in. They're collecting taxes, apparently. So they're functioning. Are they a threat to Israel at this moment in time? No. And that since Bibi did the minimum he would have to do, and still stopping short of actually determining a reality, because then he would have to explain to the Israelis, why did I do X and not Y?

• 39:31Tucker Carlson?

  So you don't think that there, anybody has a clear picture of where Gaza is in 10 years?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  In 10 years? No. But I do think that Bibi and the administration and the IDF alongside probably have an idea where Gaza, what they will do in Gaza if X happens with Iran, if Y happens with Lebanon.

• 39:54Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Bibi, Bibi's playing sort of musical wars. Why does he have a war? Why, why did they time Lebanon right now? It's a failsafe for Iran. If Trump decides to pull out of Iran, if Iran doesn't go the way Bibi needs, then he always has Lebanon. And if all of that doesn't go the way he needs, he could go back into Gaza.

• 40:15Tucker Carlson?

  So you're suggesting that he has to have a war?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  At least until he gets elected next? I think so.

• 40:22Tucker Carlson?

  You really think that's the motive?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  I think there are many motives. I think this is certainly, the timing of a lot of things. The thing, the strange thing about Bibi is that, look, on the one hand, there's a national interest that lines up with a personal interest. It's not just that Bibi is doing something that is, has no, that wouldn't in any way benefit the national security of the country. I believe that for, as far as Israel's concerned, striking it on is, is quite possibly a great idea. You have one of the largest proxy networks in the history of the, of the Middle East.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  That's bent on doing something to Israel, destroying them forever. I don't know if that was exactly the case. You have a massive paramilitary group on your border with Lebanon. Those are valid, relatively objective strategic goals. But if you could tinker with them, if you can time them and modulate them to serve your personal motives, well, it's a win-win.

• 41:22Tucker Carlson?

  So have you heard anybody articulate plans for, just to be totally clear on this, for moving the more than one, probably fewer than two million people in Gaza anywhere?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  No, but I have something else that I don't think has ever been released, actually. I was working with the Washington Post as of, until they fired their whole foreign desk, as you saw. And we were doing a lot of interviews on the day after, specifically reconstruction, and trying to follow the money. Because that's what Gaza is about right now. It's all about money. And it's not just American money or Israeli money. It's the Gulf countries. It's Egypt. The PA wants to get their finger in there as well. And I confirm this with two, actually quite possibly three sources, if I'm not mistaken. But, and this might not end up being the case, but I understood that the center that was put together by the American Army in Kiryat Ghat

• 42:20Speaker 02

  to map out or sort of strategize about Gaza and assist the Israelis, that they were making calls, that their lawyers were making calls to certain organizations to look into the status of private property in Gaza. Basically, the thing, among many things, I heard that the plan was, like, have you ever seen the flyers that the Israelis drop in Gaza or the evacuation notices?

• 42:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  And they're usually divided into sort of blocks. You have numbered blocks and those are private properties, right? Now, if you have an entire swath of territory, entire neighborhoods that are upside down or backwards, that no longer follow the logic of a grid, you can't expect that some Qatari or Saudi or whatever company is going to come in and rebuild Gaza identically to the way it was before.

• 43:05Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  So I heard that the plan was to have to sort of like rotate, like take a population from an area, move them away, build a massive complex, as it were, it could be condominiums, could be apartments, I don't know what, and then move them back and continue doing this rotation for however long it takes. What does that mean? It means that you are fundamentally altering the, um, the, the urban planning with the demography of and private property of Gaza. If you had, if you have a building on, on a swath of land, on a plot of land that used to have five to seven bits of private property, you have to reconfigure and you have to suspend that private property and create a new precedent.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  I was told by someone very, very high up in the P A that this was intended, that there was going to be a suspension of private property for a period of maybe seven years. Now, what does that mean? It quite possibly, and this is the most cynical possible conclusion you could draw. It could mean that, it could mean basically that, look, in the West Bank, it's, it's sometimes Israel struggles to take certain parts of swaths of land or to build actual settlements. Sometimes they'll have caravans in certain areas, but not houses. And the reason is that to some degree, Israel's still beholden to Ottoman and Jordanian legal precedent. And they can wiggle around, you can maneuver.

• 44:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  But it's, it can't be nullified. It's very hard.

• 44:36Tucker Carlson?

  She is in East Jerusalem.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 44:38Tucker Carlson?

  All the time.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  So what happens? I'll pose you the question, I guess. What happens in Gaza if you suspend all of private property and you're going to say in seven years, we're going to revisit it, or it will be reconfigured by legal experts who by then will have disappeared? You break a massive precedent.

• 44:53Tucker Carlson?

  It's just a reset.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. Um, it's a golden opportunity. Will that happen? I don't know. But based on everything I've heard, it is within the realm of possibility. And it makes logical sense as well.

• 45:06Tucker Carlson?

  So it's a, yeah. Did people in Israel take the Trump administration's plan for redevelopment with casinos and beachfront condos? They take that seriously?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Uh, like citizens in Israel, people.

• 45:21Tucker Carlson?

  You think the government did?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 45:23Tucker Carlson?

  Did you?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:28Tucker Carlson?

  That's not gonna happen.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  I highly doubt it.

• 45:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  It's still run by a militant group. There's still some, there's hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that have been dealt with by the IDF, which they also lied about. I spoke to a general, his name is Itzhak Brek. Have you heard of him?

• 45:45Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  It's strange because he's not, I think his English is a little bad. And so we don't hear from him a lot in the West. But he was a guy who went on three months before October the 7th and said, quote, "There will be a massacre here." This is a guy who was a general, reserve general, who also audited, he was tasked with, I think for many, many years, auditing troops. He worked for the IDF audit, meaning he would go between fronts, between units, and assess troop readiness, routines, equipment. He knew the IDF inside and out, and he worked under several generals leading up to October the 7th. And for years, he was screaming that we are, we're not really ready for anything. And we're cutting our ground troops because we want to be a compact, technologically adept army.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  But we're basically rendering ourselves naked on the ground. And he went down to the Gaza border and he sees that basically the soldiers treated like summer camp. You have girls and, you know, doing TikTok videos. It's like summer camp. It reached a point, again, back to the status quo, where Israelis genuinely believed that the conflict was kind of over. This is just, it's gonna be this way. There's gonna be a big wall, they're gonna be there, we're gonna be here. And Itzhak Brek, I sat with him a lot about a year ago, and he was telling me that he was getting calls from a lot of soldiers who work in the tunnel units. And I spoke to several soldiers who either worked in the tunnels or were guarding, tasked

• 47:13Speaker 02

  with guarding them, supervising the work, that there was tons left, tons left. He said, this general said, 75%. I don't know if that's definitely true. But I heard from a lot of soldiers that the material used to totally destroy tunnels is very expensive and perhaps in short supply. And so a lot of what was happening was sort of sealing the tunnels. You pour concrete inside, and it just takes probably some dudes, however, for many days later to come and undo the concrete, break the concrete. And I also heard from soldiers that Hamas was repairing tunnels during the war.

• 47:52Speaker 05

  In the midst of fighting, there were tunnels that were being, or shafts that were being repaired.

• 47:56Tucker Carlson?

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• 49:02Speaker 05

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• 49:32Speaker 03

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• 50:01Tucker Carlson?

  There was a big debate in this country about whether or not the Israeli government sent money, not its own money, but the money of the United States in Qatar to Hamas. Whether Netanyahu did that, and then it seemed to have been confirmed. Will you tell us what you know about that and what the motive was?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  What are we talking about the money that came in before October the 7th?

• 50:24Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, before October the 7th.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Oh, the suitcases of cash.

• 50:27Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I know that there was tons of cash. I don't actually have the numbers. I forget.

• 50:33Tucker Carlson?

  What was the thinking? I mean, I think it's confirmed now. That was considered very controversial.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  There are pictures of the suitcases and of the money going into Gaza. Yeah, it's definitely confirmed.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  The thinking was, we keep them happy and fat and they don't bother us.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Which is again, the logic of the marches of return. We're going to come, we're going to make some noise until these Israelis come and say, what's your price? What will it take to get you to shut up? More money, more work permits, construction materials? It was part of maintaining a status quo. And someone probably soon would realize that if I get too fat, if we get too fat, we won't be able to move anymore.

• 51:12Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  I think it's that simple.

• 51:16Tucker Carlson?

  So from thousands of miles away, it seems like, but Israel seems like a pretty tough project to keep going over generations because of the numbers, just tiny country surrounded by people who don't like it or recognize its legitimacy, some of whom are motivated to do harm. So that's like, that's not a good ratio over time. Like, it's hard to maintain that. It's like... From the Israeli perspective, do people think, ever think of that?

• 51:47Speaker 02

  No, but I think there's about, there may be two or three ways of looking at this. On the one hand, there's a demographic perspective where-

• 51:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, the numbers.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  That's one perspective. And if you look at the numbers, so like, how many Jews are there in Israel? I think there's seven-

• 52:01Tucker Carlson?

  Seven, something like that.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Seven million, something like that. You have 2 million Palestinians-

• 52:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Who have citizenship. But I think the proper calculation is, within the area under control, under Israeli control, what's the population divide? And at that point, you have 50/50. If you take west, the West Bank, where there are also Jews living, but also Gaza, because these are all areas that are, that impinge upon Israel, and which are under Israeli control tacitly, or actually, you have 7 million Palestinians, 2 in Israel, 3 in the West Bank, 2 in Gaza, so 7. You have 7 million Jews.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  It's halved right now. It's split, half-half. Demographically speaking, that is a problem. Do I think that will be what brings Israel to its knees, if it is ever brought to its knees? No.

• 52:50Tucker Carlson?

  I was thinking more the macro-demographic problem-

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Of the Arab world?

• 52:54Tucker Carlson?

  The Muslim world, almost 2 billion. So, when I hear Netanyahu say, "We're fighting a 7-front war," or whatever number of fronts, it was 7 fronts recently-

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:06Tucker Carlson?

  I think, you don't have the economy, you don't have the manpower, and you no longer have the goodwill to sustain that for very long at all. Like, ultimately, if you have enough enemies, and there's too few of you and enough of them, you're gonna lose.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  People have been saying that for a long time.

• 53:22Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it hasn't even been there 80 years, so...

• 53:26Speaker 02

  I think they bet on a few things. They have nuclear weapons, they have a great intelligence agency, and they bet on the incompetence of the Muslim countries around them.

• 53:34Tucker Carlson?

  For sure, for sure. I, but there's also a sense in which you can't fight everybody. And so, I don't see, when I talk to Israelis and just when I watch, I don't see any long-term strategy that rests on real alliances. Like, you have to have, this is true not just for Israel, but for each one of us as a person in this world, you have to have more powerful friends than you do enemies, or else ultimately, you get destroyed. And I don't see that realization at all. It seems almost arranged. I guess we have, who cares if you have nuclear weapons? So does everyone else? Like, so what?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Everyone else doesn't have nuclear weapons, but I mean-

• 54:11Tucker Carlson?

  A lot of people have nuclear weapons, including in your region.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  That's true. But I think right now you have this logic being pushed around by Bibi, which is, you know, peace through strength. I think the Israelis have this sense that if we push long enough, let's say we do manage to change the regime in Iran, not topple it, but change it. We can have an arrangement. The Gulf countries, because they've felt very exposed right now, maybe there'll be tension, there'll be tension with the United States. Maybe this will also bring other Gulf countries closer to us. There are already ties or relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. They exchange intelligence, among other things, but maybe this will bring them closer.

• 54:46Tucker Carlson?

  I think they have pretty, yeah, well, the Saudis have been pushing for this war.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Exactly, and in Lebanon-

• 54:53Tucker Carlson?

  They're on the same side as Israel, basically, on this question.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  And in Lebanon, what was the aim when Israel went into Lebanon in the eighties? The aim was, we want to change the demography, we're going to change the government, we're going to put the Christians in power and make peace.

• 55:06Tucker Carlson?

  The opposite happened.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  The opposite happened, and what are they doing now?

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I believe that in some dim recess, it might not actually be an active strategy, but I do believe that in some dim recess, Israel would like civil war in Lebanon, because between you and me, if I'm being totally honest, the only way to deal with Hezbollah, Hezbollah is not just a paramilitary group. They are a demog, they are demographically entrenched in the country. They are self Lebanon, and they are the Shiite population that was also oppressed for a very long time.

• 55:35Tucker Carlson?

  And there are a lot of Shiites in Beirut now. It's not just the south, yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so I think there is a desire for potentially civil war in Lebanon.

• 55:44Tucker Carlson?

  For sure, and that, I mean, you've seen this, well, you saw it in Syria, you know, you've seen it in a lot, the same strategy. I'm just saying, and I'm not attaching values to any of this, like what's right or wrong, or even what's good for the United States, or any of that. I just think, as a general principle, that's, that's day trading, that's like a short term. Strategy that doesn't work long term, but maybe people think it does work long term. Like you can do that forever. I don't think you can.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  No, probably not. I think they're hoping that either this all turns out exactly the way they want it, which is highly unlikely, or that you have enough chaos. There's a desire for chaos.

• 56:20Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  That every, that all these places should be at least uncertain. If we can't determine what the best, the best possible reality for us, then the very least, the reality should be indeterminate. It should be in flux.

• 56:32Tucker Carlson?

  Right. No, I get it. I totally get it. And again, I'm not even judging this or that's wrong. I'm not, this is not a lecture. I just mean like as a, as a kind of almost a physics principle in the end, or over time, chaos is bad for you. It's bad for everybody. It's bad to have chaos nearby you. It's bad to have your neighbor get divorced. That actually increases the chances you get divorced. There's a way in which chaos is a virus and it, it hurts you in the end, even though you think you can control it. You can. That, I, I think that's a pretty stable principle of history.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  I think the big weak point of Israel, I think sometimes when you look strategically or at the surrounding countries,

• 57:15Speaker 02

  there's another point here, which is Israel on the interior, Israel psychologically.

• 57:21Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Israeli psyche.

• 57:22Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  I think that, that is the actual weak point. If anything, brings Israel to its knees, which doesn't mean it will be exterminated or extinguished, that it will die as a state. But the thing that will fundamentally shatter the foundation, either to end the country or to start a fresh status quo for the country, it will be internal.

• 57:46Tucker Carlson?

  I believe that.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  And if you want to understand that dynamic, I think you have to look to the West Bank.

• 57:51Tucker Carlson?

  Well, kind of say, this is so often overlooked.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:55Tucker Carlson?

  The, one of the only like real genocides in history was the Romans in 70 AD in Jerusalem. And one of the reasons that they were able, that siege was successful is because of the almost unbelievably barbaric fighting between Jewish factions within.

• 58:11Tucker Carlson?

  Jerusalem, like the Romans got through because the defenders were fighting each other. I just think that's also another principle. It's like if you destroy, if you don't have a unified country, you're much weaker than you think you are, I guess.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, yes and no. Sometimes I do think about that. On the other hand, Israelis do at least until now, they've shown a pretty serious ability to just put all of their problems aside.

• 58:31Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  I mean, if you look at Bibi's opposition, Yer Lapid, he was asked, I think, two weeks ago about Greater Israel. And he couldn't even, he couldn't even reject that as a political position.

• 58:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  He talked about scraping away at Lebanon, which is fine if you're Bibi, or if you want to be with Bibi, that's the doctrine. But you have this thing within the Israeli opposition that Bibi has put them in a corner that over the course of the war, they have had no choice but to parrot his speech.

• 59:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  To use his language. And he buried them in so doing.

• 59:07Tucker Carlson?

  No, that, that's certainly what it seems like looking from the outside. Can I ask though, but the, I mean, again, this is an outsider's perspective, non Hebrew speaking perspective, but it seems like the core division is religious, non religious? Or it has been, is that still true? Where is that? The idea that, you know, a certain percentage of the country doesn't serve, doesn't participate meaningfully in the economy. And there's deep resentment toward them by people who do. That has been true for a while. Is that still true? Is it more true, less true?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  I think it's where it was a year ago, probably where it was two years ago. Tensions, they rise and they fall. I'm also not like the greatest expert on, on that, but I think.

• 59:43Tucker Carlson?

  But you live there, or does that seem like a, like a crisis in the country?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  I don't think it's reached the point of a crisis. It could, it could. But again, I don't think, if you'd permit me to go back to something else, I think there, you were mentioning the Romans.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  And it reminds of exile. And I think what you see in the West Bank, if you're talking about long term, in the darkest depths of the Israeli psyche, what is going to affect the longevity of the country? It's the, the interplay, the psychological interplay between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

• 1:00:18Tucker Carlson?

  In the West Bank?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  It manifests itself most in the West Bank because in Tel Aviv, you know, you have like a bunch of schmucky lifestyle yabbis in Tel Aviv who just want to forget. Tel Aviv is the subconscious of the subconscious of Israel.

• 1:00:31Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  But the West Bank is where the, the complexes, at the bottom of the Israeli psyche, it's where they play out.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  And so at the end of the day, you have a strange problem, which is that the Israelis come back, the Jews come back after 2,000 to 3,000 years as, you know, they were exiles. We don't have to debate when exactly how many years. But what happens is you have people who have a kind of, not a native right, but a kind of native claim, who come back in colonial costume. There's a reason why the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jews is different than that between the Palestinians and the British and the Ottomans. Because Ottomans never came and said, like, this is our homeland, we're coming back now, it's all ours. Nor did the British. That's what the Israelis did, that's what the Jews did. And again, I don't want to debate sort of like what is right or what is claim.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  I think by and large, it's fair to say that the Jews have some kind of relationship with the land, meaning there are many Palestinian villages that have, that you could trace their names back to Jewish ancient settlements. Doesn't mean that an Israeli or a Jew can come and take it? No. But what it does mean is that you can't understand the conflict between the Israelis or the Jews and the Palestinians without realizing that this is a struggle for nativity. And that in some way, they are the mirror images of each other. And in many ways, the Palestinians are the new Jews. And neither one really wants to admit it, especially the Israelis. And so in the West Bank, I've been in the West Bank a lot the last few months.

• 1:02:03Tucker Carlson?

  The new Jews in what sense? The people who have the moral authority of victimhood? Like, the world looks at them and says, we feel sorry for you, you've been mistreated?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Not about that. It's a tale of exile and nostalgia.

• 1:02:13Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  The difference is that the Palestinians are exiled on their own land, which also makes it very hard for the Israelis to deal with this problem. For them, it's a problem. We have people, and I always, I always say to Jews, to Israelis in Israel, I'm like, look, if you guys, if, if, if, if the Jews came back after 2,000 to 3,000 years and didn't forget that there were periods of forgetting, why do you think that the Palestinians won't do the same? And they're right on the borders, they can see it. Couldn't see Israel from Europe, but you can see it from Gaza, you can see it from the West Bank.

• 1:02:47Tucker Carlson?

  What do they say when you say that?

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  They just go silent. They don't want, they don't want to understand. There's a point. The problem in Israel is that, you know, I used to have a lot of, I used to have some Israeli sort of religious friends who would come to my dorm when I'd have my Arab friends with me and we'd have some really nice conversations. They even befriended each other. But at some point, my Israeli friends stopped speaking to them. Because there's a point in any Israeli dialogue, there's a point at which an Israeli has to make a decision. Left or right? Am I going, if I go down this path and really try to understand the other side, I risk exposing certain things with the grounds of my own identity here, but the foundations of the country that, that risk my identity.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  And the other option is, I'm just gonna stop it here, turn around and forget this happened. And so, in the West Bank right now, there's some very, very weird trends. You have, you know, the number of outposts in the, in the West Bank has increased, I don't know about, I don't know about how, the hundreds of outposts, every, almost every other hill in the West Bank has a shack on it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, the scale is insane. And I visit some of these outposts and what you see is a, is a, is a little bit of a strange thing. You have something called the hilltop youth. Have you heard of this?

• 1:04:11Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  So this is like the third mutation of settlers. The first settlers were kind of like kibbutznik people, right?

• 1:04:18Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  What's their goal? The call, the goal of the kibbutznik is, I need to revive some kind of relationship with the land. The first generation settlers were not going down the hill and like pug roaming people. They had their hill, they had their barbed wire, they had their shacks.

• 1:04:32Tucker Carlson?

  Self-improvement seemed like one of the main goals of the first, of the kibbutz generation. Yeah, we're gonna like improve ourselves by, you know, making it green and growing things.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  I think a lot of it also had to do with the exile thing, that we, we haven't been here. It's like a prisoner who comes home after 30 years, walks into the kitchen, sees his wife and kid and says like, hey honey, how you doing? Sits down as if nothing happened. That was the desire, you know, but there's 30 years to make up for. In this case, you have two, 3,000 years to make up for. And so, part of the kibbutznik ideologically was like, we have to revive some sort of connection with the land. But my point is that the third mutation of the settlers, which is now the hilltop youth.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  They're strange. I mean, they now wear Palestinian koffees. Palestinian headdress that Arab cops used to wear. They're wearing those things.

• 1:05:21Tucker Carlson?

  Black ones?

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  The white and black with the Palestinian ones. Which is kind of strange, because if you even dressed up for Halloween like that in Tel Aviv, people would say things. People are very sensitive. It's a symbol of terrorism in Israel. And you have the settlers running around, throwing stones, wearing the very thing that once frightened them as children. And you have another trend, which is now they want donkeys, or there's a lot of shepherding, but with machine guns. Or you have, you know, settler sheik, which are like young outpost women, who are what they call Israelite fashion. Do you see where I'm going?

• 1:05:55Tucker Carlson?

  Be more specific. For those of us who live in the United States, what's Israelite fashion?

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  You know, it's kind of like, in Hebrew, they use words like sort of villagi, Israelite, or pastoral.

• 1:06:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Which is also the word in Hebrew used to describe the vibe you get in areas that used to have Palestinian villages that are now either forests or towns. Lots of wild, natural shrubbery and foliage. The point being is that what you see in the West Bank now is an attempt to double down on nativity.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  And so, I was in a Palestinian village, it's called Turmaz Aya. It gets attacked quite a bit. I don't know if you saw, there was a report, maybe six months ago, if I'm not mistaken, of like three to four thousand olive trees that were cut down the West Bank. It was a big story. And I was there when this happened, that weekend, by chance. And I remember sitting with one of these Palestinian guys. And we were attacked by settlers once, and they went back. They burned about four houses down right in front of me. I saw, they stabbed a bunch of sheep. It's the first time I ever saw this with my eyes. I saw videos all the time, but I actually saw the smoke billowing out of the houses. And the guy said something pretty interesting. He looked at me and he was very calm, and he said, you know, they wanted all at once.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  So what do you mean? He goes, he goes, you know, they kind of want to be like us. You know, they want, they want shepherd, but they also have to have machine guns. And they want, they want the olive trees, but they don't see that we, we pave our roads around the olive trees. They want all at once, they want to slice the mountain, get the barbed wire on, you put your houses there. They want, they want to compensate for 3,000 years. They want to get back to some point where they were 3,000 years, but they want it all at once, they want it now. And they don't want anyone to be there to disturb them. And so it, it puts the settlement movement into a strangely, I'd call it an autoimmune position, sort of autoimmune.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Because these people are simply taking hill after hill after hill, hoping that there will come a day, one fine morning, where they wake up and it's empty and they have quiet. But even when that happens, they don't have enough people to populate it. People don't want to live in the West Bank.

• 1:08:11Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  The average Israeli does not want to be sitting on a hilltop surrounded by Palestinians. The average Israeli wants to, you know, sit in Tel Aviv, blacks, maybe smoke a joint, make money, buy a house in Greece.

• 1:08:28Tucker Carlson?

  The kaffiyah is very confusing to me. Settlers dressing as Palestinians. So is the message, were the real Palestinians?

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  I think what's going on is subconscious. I don't think they're actually conscious of it. Because I went to a settlement, I went to a fresh outpost a few weeks ago. I'm surprised they let me in. Someone pulled a gun on me when I went in and then they realized I, you know, my name's Ari Chaim Flanzerich and they're like, oh, you're, you're all right, come in. We got to talking and this guy's wife is one of these settler chic influencers. And I wanted to talk to her about the fashion. I wanted to hear like, how do you explain this so that I could then put it into a piece? And her husband is also sort of this lumberjacky guy. He's got blue eyes, dirty blonde hair. He's like towing the, the fields, which I'm pretty sure belonged to people just down the hill. And

• 1:09:16Tucker Carlson?

  Where are they from originally?

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  One of them is actually from the West Bank, was born in another settlement in the West Bank. And I believe she is from somewhere inside Israel, maybe Jerusalem, but I might be wrong. Times Israel did a piece on her, actually, like a week before I was there. And they got real weird with me, real weird. They asked like, what do you want? I was like, I'm just here to talk about fashion. And then her husband gave her a look. She walked off, went completely silent, and he sat down with me alongside the guy who pulled his gun on me. And the guy's kind of looking at me like, who are you? What do you want? I was like, I'm a journalist. He said, can I see your work? I said, yeah, I write about like, security matters. This is for a magazine piece. Long story short, they kicked me out. They said, you should probably get out of here. And when I went outside to smoke a cigarette before leaving,

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  the guy who pulled his gun on me is just sitting there. And I said, can I ask you a question? He goes, yeah. I said, why can't we have a conversation? Jew to Jew?

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Because I told them, like, I'm wondering about this nativity thing and this, the coffee is. And the guy looked at me and he was kind of, he knew something was off because he's like, it's not that many people who do that. And I was like, the fact that you know it, that you're aware of it, probably means that. I struck, I triggered him a little bit. And when we're outside smoking the cigarette, I asked him, why can't we talk? He goes, you know, it could have gone a lot worse for you today. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, you know what I mean? I said, are you threatening me? He said, no, but there are people who would do a serious number on you. And I said, even, even to a fellow Jew? And he said, it's beyond ideology. He said, this is beyond ideology.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  I spent the whole car ride home thinking about what he could have possibly meant by that.

• 1:10:55Tucker Carlson?

  What is it about, then?

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  When he said, this is beyond ideology, and I already laid out sort of like the nativity dynamics, but within the settlement movement, what could he possibly mean by, this is beyond ideology?

• 1:11:09Tucker Carlson?

  I haven't, are these religious people?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  That's another question about settlers in the West Bank. They're not entirely religious. You know, you have a lot of religious, there are religious people. There's also a lot of people who aren't that devout or pious, that religious, the religion in certain cases becomes a kind of aesthetic thing, or a vehicle for sort of nationalistic ends.

• 1:11:30Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  I mean, the settlement that I was in with this sort of, the settler fashionista, a week after she had a DJ at the outpost, it's an outpost, there's two people living there, it's a shack, a DJ and a bunch of women dressed in Israelite clothing, doing a meditative and like, like trans disco kind of like party.

• 1:11:54Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was kind of strange.

• 1:11:56Tucker Carlson?

  So I'm having trouble fitting this into a category. So the two motives that you always hear here in the US, or when I've been in Israel, are either these are, you know, religious people who are sort of acting out some kind of millennialist vision, or there are people who want cheaper housing and housing in Israel.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Those are two separate categories of settler.

• 1:12:15Tucker Carlson?

  Right, but you're describing a third category that's kind of like cosplay, kind of like, like what are you describing? What, why are they doing this?

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  What I'm describing is a part of the broader category of settlers who are there to, at the forefront, who are forwarding, who are pushing the settlement.

• 1:12:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Forward, as opposed to the people who want cheap housing, who just literally go into Tel Aviv, you know.

• 1:12:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I got it, I've seen that, yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Where it all comes from, I don't know, but I think that.

• 1:12:45Tucker Carlson?

  Because it's a big commitment to move to a hilltop surrounded by concertina wire. Like, you don't do that by accident.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  But if you're 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, if you're in your early twenties, you want to be king of the hill? Want to play cowboy?

• 1:12:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, so is that what you think it is?

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  I think in many cases, again, like the hilltop youth, I found them once, you know, these snot-nosed, beady eyes, like kids with their heads shaved, driving a stolen Palestinian car on the Sabbath, telling me to get the fuck out or I'm gonna get beat. Like, it's fucking weird. It's weird.

• 1:13:18Tucker Carlson?

  Where, where, where are the Israeli authorities? Sometimes absent, sometimes present. And even when they're present, they can be quite absent. If I'm running Israel, I'm paying a very, I'm paying close attention to these people because they could be a threat to me. You know, armed people who are increasingly radical and nobody's kind of controlling their behavior, they could form a militia and overthrow my government. That would be my thought if I were Netanyahu. I'd be worried about them.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  I've thought about that quite a few times. I mean, it's, there's a few things going on here, right? In the security establishment in Israel, there are a lot of voices who are very concerned. And this is just what you hear publicly. You can imagine that behind closed doors, there's a lot more talk. They are concerned. Bibi, in order for his coalition, also has to keep serving them whatever they want. The real problem in the West Bank is that you have these guys who are armed and that, you know, you had Abraham on the other day, and he said that I believe that at some point or another, the settlements will be collapsed. I would agree with him. But the question is not whether or not they'll be collapsed. The question is, what is going to have to happen for that to happen?

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  What will have, what will happen on the way before you reach that point where the settlements are collapsed? Will it be some sort of civil chaos? Will it be a third Intifada? There's a lot of talk in Israel about a third Intifada. But my sense is that what happens next is not something that follows the sequence of Intifada, but, you know, kind of like what happened in Gaza, this shattering of the status quo. I think there will come a point where something analogous, logically speaking, happens in the West Bank. Will it look like Gaza? Not at all. But will it be equally as cataclysmic, maybe? Quite possibly. That's my sense.

• 1:15:09Tucker Carlson?

  But I mean, there's, it's a different dynamic in the West Bank. I mean, isn't it? I mean, first of all, it's richer than Gaza ever was. It's more kind of established series of towns.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Which is why, oh, in terms of the settlements, you mean?

• 1:15:26Tucker Carlson?

  No, no, no, no, the Palestinian population in the West Bank. I mean, it's not, I don't know, it's just harder to imagine something like that happening there.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Because I don't think, as I said, I don't think what happens there is going to look like or be like what happened in Gaza. But I think, if you permit me a few minutes, you know, the, there's a reason why October the 7th came from Gaza and not from the West Bank. I spent, I spent last summer, I was in the Jenin refugee camp, if you've heard of it.

• 1:15:54Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  And I sat with the, who was then the leader of Islamic Jihad. He was the Emir, the prince of Islamic Jihad. And I sat with a few other guys from the various other factions. And what I understood was that the resistance in the West Bank, basically, there's a thread going all the way back to 48. You're exiled and you want to get back and you want to fight. And then there is serious amounts of terrorist attacks. And then eventually there's a political process. And you'd assume that any resistance movements or any kind of, you know, terrorist operator, whatever you want to call it, that they would eventually want to yield some kind of political outcome, but Oslo eventually fails. You have the first Intifada, you have the second, and the second Intifada is basically

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  a lashing out, meaning the threat has reached its end. And the West Bank at that point was faced with, the factions in the West Bank were faced with sort of two options. Either we pause and take a breath and figure out what the fuck we're doing here, or we're just going to keep shooting aimlessly, just like shooting, to make it look, to make it look like we're doing something. We're going to do military marches, we're going to act really cool. But the guys are just like hood boys. They're just putting on headbands and like with a Marlboro red in their mouths and just shooting, usually not even to hit. The aim is usually just to die. The logic of the camps, the logic of the resistance in the West Bank is completely backwards, which means I don't think there's going to be like an October 7th in the West Bank.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  But when I was in these villages that were getting attacked by the settlers, there's one line that kept coming up. And I'm talking about a line I was hearing from your average Palestinian farmer or peasant, which was, "There will come a day. There will come a day when we are pushed a little too far." And at that point, the question is, how many minutes does it take for a bunch of people to run up to a hill and maybe overwhelm the settlement? An old man told me that we're gonna chew them like dogs.

• 1:17:55Tucker Carlson?

  I would think that's coming. I mean, based on the behavior you're describing.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  It's quite possible. I wouldn't discount it.

• 1:18:04Tucker Carlson?

  What do you make the two most, in the US, the two most famous cabinet ministers and then Netanyahu government are Smotrich and Ben Gavir? Are they powerful figures in Israel? How are they regarded? What's their motive, strategy, plan?

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  I don't think that they're close to as popular as they were. I think Bibi's popularity has increased, actually, over the course of the war because Israelis have a very short memory, especially when it comes to warfare.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  But I don't really know what to say about Smotrich and Ben Gavir. It's not really my specialty.

• 1:18:44Tucker Carlson?

  I guess it just seems unimaginably radical from an American. If you think of Israel, the post-67 Israel that most Americans, you know, learned about, visited, all of a sudden you have these guys, these two Ashkenazi guys, sound really, really radical. Or it seems like a departure from anything Americans have ever heard an Israeli government official say.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  I think what you're hearing is what you often hear behind closed doors all over Israel, what you can hear at a cafe in Tel Aviv. Meaning the notion of, "Yeah, maybe they could go somewhere."

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  The Palestinians, "Maybe they just like, they could be gone." The question of, those are questions that come up, you hear it regularly. These aren't like completely insane conversations to hear. You can hear it from like a hippie at a cafe in Tel Aviv, smoking a joint. The change is that suddenly you're hearing it more and more on TV. I remember I heard one news commentator, a news anchor, ask about transfer.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  And I was like, this is a bit insane. Like, imagine if someone on CNN came on and sort of talking about transferring another, an entire other population who aren't illegal.

• 1:20:00Tucker Carlson?

  Right, people who were born there, been there for thousands of years.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  Maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, I don't know. But it doesn't matter, they were there when, when, when Israelis came.

• 1:20:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter how long they've been there for.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 1:20:16Tucker Carlson?

  What about, I mean, it used to be in my living memory, there was a significant population of Israelis who, who had totally different views, they're like, no, that's wrong, human rights are a thing, you can't do that. How big is that? I think is the kind of Israeli I remember from 25 years ago, there were a bunch of people like that, how many are left?

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  I think the left is dead. The left is dead, the Israeli left is dead. And the question as to why they died is because they spent, I think, a bit too much time beating the horse of Oslo dead. Oslo obviously failed and the left was unwilling to concede that fact, which meant that for many, many years, I think unto this day, the left never reevaluated, they never came with another proposal or another plan or another way of thinking about the conflict. They kept beating the, the horse of Oslo dead. Meanwhile, the Israeli right continues to churn out active propositions. We're going to reform the judiciary. We want to take the West Bank, very concrete things, a right winger in Israel will tell

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  you what they want. A left winger in Israel will tell you how they feel.

• 1:21:30Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  And, uh, yeah. I think that's, I think that's the long and short of it.

• 1:21:36Tucker Carlson?

  That's good explanation. What, do Israelis have a sense of what the rest of the world thinks of Israel?

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they have a sense. The question is, is how deeply do they think about the sense? And how much merit are they willing to give?

• 1:21:51Tucker Carlson?

  Do they care?

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  I think they don't care. No one likes to be hated. I don't think anyone likes to be hated.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  But I think the more you feel like you're hated, the more you want to hate everyone else or just completely discount them. The more you want to dig your heels in and double down.

• 1:22:10Tucker Carlson?

  Huh, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm often attacked for hating Israel. I don't hate Israel at all. I feel sorry for Israel. I think they're in trouble. They don't seem to agree, but I think they are. But whatever my views, I mean, a lot of people hate Israel, like around the world. I hear it a lot when I travel. I feel like the moderate one. And I think that's a big change. And I always wondered, do the Israelis know that? Do they care?

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  I think the Israelis are probably the most hated people in the world right now.

• 1:22:42Tucker Carlson?

  That's my impression.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Full stop.

• 1:22:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  One of the greatest things I ever did was not get Israeli passport. And I feel bad for friends who have them. I would be scared. I'm going to be totally honest. I would be scared right now. I'm sometimes scared to even say I'm Jewish. I'm lucky enough that I have Arabic. And if I'm in Europe, I just tell people I'm Palestinian, which some people might not like, but I think I put in the time to warrant it.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Sometimes I'm scared to say that I'm Jewish. And I'm, I would definitely be scared to have an Israeli passport.

• 1:23:12Tucker Carlson?

  I think that's totally fair. That's fair. And I'm not, I'm the last person to whine about antisemitism, but I think Israel is literally hated. So I agree with you completely. I just, I just, again, just once more, just want to be clear. You don't think Israelis have the sense that that's a bad thing? And we should be worried about it? Or that we played any role in that at all?

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  I think the Israelis, there are Israelis who, you have a small liberal population of Israelis, many of whom I hear talking about the fact that they don't see a future for themselves in the country anymore. Right? A lot. This is about two to three years in the making, even from the judicial reform. I had a lot of people telling me, left-leaning decent Israelis, who are like, I...

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  I don't know if I can have more kids here. Or I don't want my kids to be in the army. Or I don't want my kids to have to deal with whatever the consequences of the judicial reform and now this entire war. The rest of the Israeli population, I think by and large are bent on. They've all doubled down.

• 1:24:16Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  I think a lot of people.

• 1:24:18Tucker Carlson?

  So Bibi reflects the population he represents, you think?

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  I don't think a lot of people have problems with anything that Bibi represents. I think people have problems with the fact that he might have a corruption case, which I think is.

• 1:24:33Tucker Carlson?

  Right, right, right. But you're never at dinner and people say, man, I can't believe all those kids who were killed in Gaza. That's bad. I'm sorry we did that.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  I don't hear it a lot, but what you can say, no, you might hear it sort of, it might be a symbolic gesture, like a virtue signal. But it's immediately followed with, you know, that's what you gotta do. I mean, they came to kill us or they're anti Semites.

• 1:24:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Where do Israelis think antisemitism comes from? I often hear invoked so and so's an anti Semite, you're anti Semite. How do they define it and where do they think its root is?

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  I think the root is age old as far as Israelis are concerned. People hate us because people have always hated Jews. You hear this a lot in synagogues also across North America. You have a message being pushed constantly that people just hate us. And I think there are a lot of people who just hate Jews. And there's a lot of people who are waiting for an excuse to hate Jews. But specifically.

• 1:25:33Tucker Carlson?

  But why do they hate Jews?

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  But the question is, is there a distinction between those people and Palestinians? Are the Palestinians fundamentally anti Semitic? You can spare me quotes from like an Imam here or an Imam there, or the fact that they conflate Jew and Israeli. By and large, are these, is this a people who has premised its existence on killing Jews as Jews? And I do not think that that's the case.

• 1:26:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. I mean, I, um, I wouldn't know. But I just think that there are a lot of antisemitic people and they hate Jews. I agree with that. And I think it's wrong. That's what I think. Um, but I also think it's worth at, like, what is that? Is it a spiritual thing? I mean, we say, well, it's always existed. I believe that, but what's its, I mean, what's its cause?

• 1:26:28Tucker Carlson?

  And I've never heard one person ask that question. And I think I believe in asking or trying to understand the, the cause of everything. You can't often, but it's, it's always worth doing. I wanted to know why Al Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11. I thought it was horrible. I had a friend killed, but I still want to know why. And I never hear anybody ask that question.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  You haven't heard anyone ask about the, the sort of like the, the bottom root of antisemitism?

• 1:26:55Tucker Carlson?

  Never, not one time. Other than to say,

• 1:26:59Tucker Carlson?

  and by the way, I'd be willing to believe, I'd be willing to believe that it's spiritual in nature.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  What does spiritual mean?

• 1:27:07Tucker Carlson?

  That there's, you know, a belief among Jews and some Christians that Jews are distinct among peoples because God made them distinct and that there is a spiritual reaction. That is a religious belief that some people have, many people have. And I'd be willing to believe, I don't know if it's true, that there, this is like a reaction against that from evil. So that's one explanation, but I never even hear anybody ask the question. Like, what's, what I hear instead is people say, it's just, it's always been there. It always will be there. What does that mean? I guess that's what I'm asking.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  within the European context, and look, I'm not an expert on antisemitism.

• 1:27:53Tucker Carlson?

  I'm not.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Within the European context, you have a people who are also forced into the margins of society. They're easily scapegoated. They are, they also maintain a certain level of distinction from the rest of society. And those are people that are very easy to hate. But I can't, I can't give you an historiography of antisemitism. I can tell you why I think it's on the rise right now.

• 1:28:15Tucker Carlson?

  Why is it on the rise right now?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  We have a bit of an issue, right? I mean, you have Israel doing what Israel does is getting record amounts of attention. There's record amounts of sympathy with the Palestinian cause. I mean, there are many people, if you had asked them 20, 30, 40 years ago, if they understood what actually was the fate of the Palestinian people, they wouldn't have understood, they wouldn't have known. You know, there's a famous quote by Ben-Gurion, who, following 48, you know, there were 600, some 600 villages that were destroyed.

• 1:28:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I knew that.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  And I remember, there's a, there's a, somewhere in the archives, there's a quote which says, you know, "People are soon going to come visit this country, and we don't want them to see, have superfluous thoughts." He uses the word "superfluous," meaning you gotta clean up the mess. Either like destroy them or plant trees, put parks in their place, which is why you have many parks all over Israel. And people didn't really underst-

• 1:29:13Tucker Carlson?

  I didn't know that. How did I not know that? So parks you see in Israel are often on the physical spot of a former Palestinian village?

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  In many cases, yes. In many cases, yes, which is also bound up with the JNF, the Jewish National Fund.

• 1:29:29Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  And so I remember hearing from someone in Toronto that I think the government was going to start sanctioning the JNF, and people were really up in arms about this. And I said, sort of, "At the end of the day, you have to decide what your relationship with Israel is. You can't, it's hard to have, it's hard to expect people from without to understand why at a synagogue you also have an Israeli flag there if you don't also want to bear the brunt of what's happening in Israel, take some responsibility." And I'm saying, from without, you can't expect people to understand that. I think there's a sense within the Jewish-American community specifically, but also in Israel, people expect everyone else to understand them from within.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  It's why it should be very obvious, why Israelis believe it should be obvious what we're doing. All this should be obvious. And the fact that you're asking questions is itself potentially an indication that you are against us, that you just want our demise. When I ask people questions in Israel, the first thing is like, "Why are you asking?" If I want to interview someone as a journalist in Israel, I have to be very careful with the language I use. If I use the word "West Bank, Sder Jodeh, and Samaria", within a certain demographic, you're axed. It's over.

• 1:30:46Tucker Carlson?

  Seriously?

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  I tend to say "we" and not "you", because if I say "you", they're like, "What do you mean 'you'? I thought we're all in this together." I'm like, "No, I'm not an Israeli citizen", and even that is a bit sensitive.

• 1:30:57Tucker Carlson?

  You're describing narcissism. The belief that other people should just understand what I'm feeling. And a healthy person understands that each one of us is sort of locked away in our own private dramas, and that's why we communicate, and I need to understand you. It's very important to understand you, and I want you to understand me, but it's not natural. Right? That's the basis of a relationship.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  It's an isolated and solipsistic society.

• 1:31:22Tucker Carlson?

  Solipsistic is a better word, that's exactly right.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  In many ways, yeah. There's something... In many cases, I find this thing a bit delusional about the mentality. It's just the fact that, for example, Arabic isn't spoken in the country.

• 1:31:38Tucker Carlson?

  It used to be.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  I mean, those were because they were Arab Jews who came from Arabic countries, but the...

• 1:31:43Tucker Carlson?

  But I think there were also Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Arabic. I think that was more common. I'm just, I think that was my impression.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  Not a whole lot. Maybe if they were there, for example, before the establishment of the state. But as of the establishment of the state, you didn't have people really learning Arabic.

• 1:31:57Tucker Carlson?

  The changes that have taken place are, maybe it's just a change in my perception, but I just remember a country that was much more open to the world, but, you know, a lot has happened in that time. By the way, I should ask you, since you live there in Israel, how much damage has been done during this war? We get no sense of it at all, or I don't trust anything I see on the internet. But do you get a sense it's a country at war, they're... Rubble, you know, rubble on the street in Tel Aviv or?

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  No, no. In fact, I think the last round during June, for example, you know, I'm based in Jaffa at the moment.

• 1:32:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  There were massive strikes in a place called Batiam, just south of Jaffa, where you saw, I think there was a three-block radius of damage. Look, you do have damage relative to the stakes. Minimal damage within Israel right now.

• 1:32:48Tucker Carlson?

  Does life seem normal-ish?

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, ish.

• 1:32:53Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  The Jews like the ish.

• 1:32:56Tucker Carlson?

  That's true. I'm pro-ish myself. So you, it doesn't feel like a country under siege?

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  Under siege?

• 1:33:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  No, the war's being fought about 2,000 kilometers away.

• 1:33:07Tucker Carlson?

  Correct.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Certainly not besieged.

• 1:33:12Tucker Carlson?

  Is there a sense that there's a physical risk? Do people you know feel like, wow, we could get like hammered by missiles, drones?

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  No, I don't think there's like an apocalyptic

• 1:33:23Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Sense, but there is a sense, like, damage can be done. These are ballistic missiles. People can die, but if you're smart, if you take the necessary steps, if you go down to your shelter, you're probably going to be fine, like a 99% chance that you will be just fine.

• 1:33:39Tucker Carlson?

  Do you talk to people who have a sense of how this will be resolved? Do people expect it to end soon, the war with Iran?

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think people want it to go on. I think people want the job done. But what's a bit strange to me, what's a bit ironic here is that in America, it strikes me, the perception is more zero-sum. I mean, in America, I think there's a sense that if we went through all this and the regime doesn't fall, then this was for naught. We wasted our time. We jeopardized our, for the GOP, jeopardized our base or whatever else. You're a better expert in this than I am. Within Israel, though, it's not a zero-sum game. If Israel, if this war ends because Trump decides it has to end because of internal pressure, economic pressure, and the regime hasn't fallen, Bibi is none the worse for it.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  It's not the ideal outcome. It's not the best possible outcome, but it's something he can work with. It's a good enough show. It's what you call in Hebrew, an image of victory. It's the phrase that Netanyahu has been using since the beginning of the war. An image of victory.

• 1:34:49Tucker Carlson?

  Part of our problem in the US may be that we take our own rhetoric more seriously, or perhaps too seriously. And so, in order to justify this and the previous exchange in June, we had to endure like weeks of hearing that we were all about to be killed by Iran, by this regime. Which, you know, some people didn't believe, including me. But some people did believe, and we have a whole TV channel devoted to telling Americans their single biggest risk is Iran. So if that regime is still there, it's kind of hard to walk down from that, if you see what I mean.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  I think, I think in America, there's, the big problem is that Americans are fundamentally divorced from history. They forget that they're actually inside of history.

• 1:35:32Tucker Carlson?

  That's for sure. I think that's a, for a non-American, that's a perceptive observation.

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  And the Jews think that history is over.

• 1:35:41Tucker Carlson?

  Is over?

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Israel believes that sort of, you know, we got back to the land, we have our state, and it's kind of done now. History's over. I think that's the distinction between Israel and America. America forgets that they're at the center of history, and the Israelis believe that they're enjoying the aftermath of history, as if there can't be another exile, as if there can't be another catastrophe. And that's the shortsightedness.

• 1:36:06Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting. Where does, among, is there any discussion of like restoring the third temple? That would seem obvious, at least from my reading of

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:36:20Tucker Carlson?

  The Torah. No, that's not even

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  No, but I personally think, if you're gonna ask me, I personally think it would be great to build a third temple just on like another hill.

• 1:36:30Tucker Carlson?

  I don't think you can do it on another hill.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  I bet you could get a rabbinical precedent. You could definitely pay some guy off to let you

• 1:36:36Tucker Carlson?

  If you're gonna have a third temple, I'm strongly in favor of putting it on another hill, just because then you avoid global religious war.

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it would also be a shame to come back to the homeland after 3,000 years and leave potentially without having built something, you know, sweet.

• 1:36:51Tucker Carlson?

  But is, is there any effort to do that that you know of?

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:36:56Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  No, but there are a lot of people recently, it's funny, there's, you know, the Messiah patches that a lot of Israeli soldiers have.

• 1:37:03Tucker Carlson?

  I do, yes.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  There's now on the back of cars, there are these stickers now that are sort of like the image, it looks like a Greek or like a Roman temple, but it's a temple image.

• 1:37:11Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I've seen it.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Oh, you've seen the sticker?

• 1:37:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I have.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  So that's blown up as of the last year or two. Do I think it will actually happen?

• 1:37:18Tucker Carlson?

  No. But before the last year or two, or let's just say before October 7th, there was none of that that you saw.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  You had the guys trying to like secret in like red heifers every now and again. They're a serious minority in the country. And as Avram mentioned, you had people, there were attempts several times to.

• 1:37:36Tucker Carlson?

  Five, he said.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Five.

• 1:37:37Tucker Carlson?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I knew about one, I didn't know about five. But again, I think this is not, there's no state level or institutional policy that's working towards the construction of a third temple. I mean, look at the buildings in Tel Aviv. I don't think the Israelis right now are in a position to build a big, beautiful temple. The best buildings in Tel Aviv were built by Arabs in the Ottoman era.

• 1:37:59Tucker Carlson?

  I knew that. I knew that. There's been a, I think Israel's, you know, is an amazing society in some ways. They built a lot considering how young it is. Architecture has not been on the top of the, of the achievement list, I would say.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  That's why you put the city beside the sea.

• 1:38:14Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, no, it's, but it's still not. It's, yeah, so.

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  I share, I share your view of the local architecture. It's fascinating. So how has the country, just big picture, how has it changed? So in the seven and a half years you were there before, two and a half since.

• 1:38:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  October 7th, like what changes have you noticed to people's attitudes?

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  You know, there was, at the height of the war, I went to buy a new laptop from a kid. He was like 18, 19 years old. And he's a soldier, he works for the Navy. So he's like young, thin, he looks very, very young. I went and we started talking and I explained that I'm a journalist, that I do some work. And he said, listen, after October the 7th, we can't, can't trust the Arabs. I said, really? Like, like, none? He's like, none. I was like, I have a question, like, where do you travel within Israel? And he goes, you know, back in the day, my father would go to a place called Kalkili, which is on the other side of the Green Line. And he goes, but we with the family would go to a place called Kfar Kassim, which is on the Israeli side of the Green Line, but like right snug on the line.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  And he said, but ever since the war, I stopped going to Kfar Kassim. And I was like, do you go to another place called Tira, which is even closer to Tel Aviv? And he's like, no, I won't risk it. I don't even like going to Jaffa. And I told him, I said, like, what's going to be left to you if you keep operating this way? Like, you're king of the hill, as it were, you're the landlord, but you're scared. It's like owning a house and being scared to walk into four of the five rooms in the house. It's not a way to live, it's not the way to be a homeowner, right? You had this thing, Ben Gavir's big platform when he was running for elections was, we're going to be the landlords now. In Hebrew, balea bate, the landlords.

• 1:40:07Tucker Carlson?

  Actually?

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, that was.

• 1:40:09Tucker Carlson?

  How loud he said that?

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a platform. There were signs in the West Bank about that, we're the landlords now. Yeah, we're going to be the landlords. And the problem in Israel is that, especially in the West Bank, is that there's a lot of folks on lording over the land and not really dwelling.

• 1:40:26Tucker Carlson?

  Ben Gavir's election slogan was, we're going to be the landlords. So we're dealing with lack of self-awareness now to say something like that out loud.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  It's quite the opposite. He was very, very aware. It was very strategic and very tactical. Especially within the settlement population, of course. You're in a place where you don't feel like you're really the lord. You really, you don't feel, except for the gun, you don't feel like I'm really the king of the hill. There's a guy who's saying, I'm going to make you king, I'm going to put the crown on your head. It's tempting, especially to like naive, young, potentially troubled youth who are, you know, running around the hilltops.

• 1:41:01Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Tucker Carlson?

  How long can Israel go with all this territory that's not part of their country, but that they control?

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 1:41:12Tucker Carlson?

  With Gaza and the West Bank and now Southern Lebanon and parts of Syria, like, does that just go on forever? Do people envision a time where the official borders of Israel expand and like, this is our country?

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  No, I mean, look, if Israel can't manage Gaza, I don't think they can manage South Lebanon. I don't think that what's happening in South Lebanon is going to be permanent. There might be a post or two on the border, like you could potentially expect that. Are they going to take a large swathes of Lebanese territory? No, but what they will do is render them uninhabitable,

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  which is a kind of way of, you know, doing not this, but not that.

• 1:41:49Tucker Carlson?

  How do you do that?

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  It's the art of indecision, which is Bibi's art, you know? You don't occupy it, but you leave it unoccupiable.

• 1:41:55Tucker Carlson?

  Unoccupiable because it's just, there's nothing there?

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Well, that's what the Lebanese border is right now. In many cases, not across the border, but there are many spots on the border in which everything is completely erased. Those were also houses used in many cases by Hezbollah, so like, I kind of get that.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  In Syria as well, like, I don't think that's a permanent decision. I think it's leverage that could potentially be used against Jolani to come to some sort of agreement, which I think will eventually come.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  Not a peace deal, but something, an understanding.

• 1:42:22Tucker Carlson?

  Jolani being the new head of Syria?

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:42:25Tucker Carlson?

  Who a lot of people assumed was installed there with the agreement of Israel. I assume that. I still think it, but now they're against him? What is, what is the truth there?

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  Who said they're against him?

• 1:42:37Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know. I've heard recently that the Israelis are troubled with Jolani. I don't know if that's true or not.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  I don't know if they're, I mean, he's moved troops toward the Lebanese border, and there are rumors that he would be willing to fight Hezbollah. There's a common enemy. I think, I think the Israelis fear Jolani long-term.

• 1:42:59Speaker 02

  And they also used to have a very good understanding with Assad. The problem is that Assad was also embedded with Iran and Hezbollah. So there's a bit of a problem. I don't think Israelis ever had a problem with Assad. I think, as far as I know, before the civil war, there were also secret talks going on. The Israelis were also preparing to make some kind of agreement with Assad. In the short term, I think Jolani and the Israelis can work together relatively well because it'll take Jolani a very long time until he will be able to build, or as it were, cement the ground beneath him.

• 1:43:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  He can't solve problems with Israel right now. But in 20, 30 years, he might be able to.

• 1:43:35Tucker Carlson?

  What's the typical Israeli view of the United States?

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  I think Avram got it right. Like stupid Americans.

• 1:43:45Tucker Carlson?

  Stupid Americans.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  They sometimes want to live like you. You know, I think they want to speak English. They want a certain kind of American lifestyle. But they don't want to be, they think you're naive.

• 1:44:01Tucker Carlson?

  Is there affection or mostly contempt?

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  A lot of affection. From what I hear, a lot of affection. I mean, definitely over the last year or two, I think this has a lot to do with Bibi. There has been a kind of rhetoric of like, who's the United States to tell us what to do? They shouldn't be telling us what to do. And Israelis get frustrated when there's talk of that, like Bibi's going to bend to Trump. Or that America says, like Biden says, you can't do this. This is the red line. I think there's a deep frustration inside of Israel because they want to have their cake and eat it.

• 1:44:37Tucker Carlson?

  They want the money, but also total attitude.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  They want support, but also I think they want America to acknowledge that we're in a way doing your bidding. I think a lot of Israelis believe that we're doing your bidding. We're doing something good for you.

• 1:44:47Tucker Carlson?

  Doing the hard work that you won't do.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Tucker Carlson?

  They feel that way.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  I can't speak for the whole country.

• 1:44:54Tucker Carlson?

  But I mean, you hear that.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  I hear that, yeah.

• 1:44:56Tucker Carlson?

  What about Trump? What's the view of Trump?

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Love him.

• 1:45:00Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:45:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of Israelis love Trump. Again, I'm speaking from my experience.

• 1:45:05Tucker Carlson?

  What do they like about him?

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  They like that he's willing to take the gloves off for once. I think they saw Biden as a pussy.

• 1:45:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  As a feckless pussy who wasn't willing to make a decision, wasn't able to do what, for example, Bibi is willing to do, even though Bibi was also a pussy for a very long time. And so, yeah, I think it's refreshing to them. And I think they don't see, look, as Avram also said, Israelis don't have a very good understanding of what happens on the American interior of American culture. Most Israelis do not speak English. I think this is like a delusion people have because they go to Tel Aviv and people speak English. Outside of Tel Aviv, there's not a whole lot of English being spoken. And so, there is a sense in which all they see Trump as is what he has done for us, or the fact that he would be more willing to help us. And that's what matters.

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  If you're an Israeli, you care about Israel, just like you are an American and care about America.

• 1:46:02Tucker Carlson?

  That's right. That's always been my favorite thing about Israel, is their nationalism. What's the view of the Gulf states?

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  You have to be more specific.

• 1:46:12Tucker Carlson?

  What do they think of Dubai and Abu Dhabi UAE?

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  They love the UAE. They love the UAE. UAE also loves them, but I don't think the government is a big fan of Israel. I've heard from people, for example, that like Emirati diplomats are a bit shocked when they come to Israel, and they're also, in some cases, mistreated at the airports. I think they find Israeli society a bit shocking in its rudeness at times. I think they're not given the kind of respect that they're accustomed to having within Gulf countries that have pretty, you know, standard royal hierarchies and different manners.

• 1:46:50Tucker Carlson?

  Those are elaborately polite societies with all kinds of rituals around manners. Yeah, no, I think they are shocked.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So Israelis love the UAE, and there are very, very close relations between the UAE and Israel.

• 1:47:03Tucker Carlson?

  What do they think of the Saudis?

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  I don't know. Couldn't tell you.

• 1:47:07Tucker Carlson?

  Qatar?

• 1:47:11Speaker 02

  I couldn't really tell you, I think, you know, a lot of Israelis.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  I mean, they house Hamas, as far as a lot of Israelis are concerned. I don't hear people saying like Qatar, Qatar as a country is our enemy. I don't think Israelis think a whole lot about Qatar.

• 1:47:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  I just don't think they think about them a lot.

• 1:47:30Tucker Carlson?

  What do they think, so Israel has a lot of high-profile defenders in the United States. Are they well-known in Israel?

• 1:47:36Speaker 02

  Like who?

• 1:47:38Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I don't know, Ben Shapiro or?

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:47:40Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:47:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:47:42Tucker Carlson?

  Unknown. Mark Levin?

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:47:46Tucker Carlson?

  No one's ever heard of him?

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  I'm sure there's many people have heard of them. Are there, do you have like the average Israeli, average Israeli listening to Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro? Absolutely not. Because also Ben Shapiro is speaking in the name of, if anything, American Jewry.

• 1:48:00Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  His conversation is maybe about Israel, but it's between Western Jews or English-speaking Jews. It doesn't really impinge upon the Israelis.

• 1:48:09Tucker Carlson?

  To Israelis, what's their view of American Jews specifically?

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  I don't know if I could give you that in a sentence or two. I don't, there's all kinds of different relationships. I'm avoiding falling into like certain kinds of banalities or stereotypes.

• 1:48:25Tucker Carlson?

  Totally, totally. I just, of cour-, well, you can't generalize actually about most things.

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  You can.

• 1:48:29Tucker Carlson?

  But I'd say if there's like an overwhelming sense.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  And they're also mixed feelings.

• 1:48:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  They're mixed feelings. I have issues with, with American Jews, but they're also my people.

• 1:48:38Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  And this is, I think, the overarching sentiment. At the end of the day, there are many disagreements between the two peoples, but they are also a single people. It's just like you have disagreements with your family, I'm sure, but they're still your family. And that's, by and large, if I had to sum it up, that's the dynamic.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  But there is certainly a generational break right now. I think the younger generation of liberal Jews.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  I think they're beginning to see, and this isn't the majority of Jews right now. The majority of younger generation Jews, I think, are still following in the footsteps of their parents. But there is a significant population of young Jews who I think are looking at Israel and saying, "We don't like what you're doing, and it doesn't necessarily matter about your family."

• 1:49:23Tucker Carlson?

  What changed that view, do you think Gaza?

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the fact that it's also unpopular. If you're a liberal Jew in a liberal circle, you don't want to be the guy who's liberal on every single point but stops at Gaza. It's socially awkward. In many cases, it's a social decision. I don't think, I don't think it's a major theoretical decision.

• 1:49:45Tucker Carlson?

  Right, this is not a question of principle. It's just like it's becoming unacceptable to be pro-

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  It could be both, but also, you know, principles in America are a big part of society or social life.

• 1:49:54Tucker Carlson?

  They certainly are, right? That's true for any society, I think.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  Especially America.

• 1:50:00Tucker Carlson?

  You think so?

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  I think people like touting their, their morals quite a bit in America, yeah.

• 1:50:06Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've never sat with an Arab and he tells me like, you know, I believe in this and I believe in that, and I think like this is really wrong. I don't, I don't, I don't hear, I don't hear that. On like, on like the subway in Toronto, you can hear people talking through each other about their, their various moral beliefs that they've never had to act upon in their lives.

• 1:50:24Tucker Carlson?

  That is, that is a very wise observation. I've never sat with an Arab and he's like, I think this is wrong, getting in your-

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a bit, like, I'm sure the Arabs have moral opinions.

• 1:50:36Tucker Carlson?

  Of course they do, of course they do. It's not that they don't have standards, but they're not throwing them at you at dinner.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  They don't, but there's just not the foundations of their identity.

• 1:50:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Well, there is a certain self-righteousness in the West. It's not necessarily the same as righteousness. I mean, it's just-

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:50:51Tucker Carlson?

  There's a posturing that goes on. Here's my last question. How do you think, and it's impossible to know, but like in five years, what does the landscape look like is in the Middle East? Is the United States still as closely allied with Israel as it is today? Is Lebanon territorially intact? Is Israel safer? Have we gotten a seven-front war down to two fronts, say, or no fronts? Is Bibi still in power? Like what, current trends continue, what, what does it look like?

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  I think Bibi very well could be in power in five years. I think, I think he'll probably get elected in October. Yeah, I think he'll quite, I think it's highly likely that he'll get re-elected. And I think everything that's happening right now is in some way or another engineered for that to happen. Again, as we said, you know, the, the, the personal ambitions of Bibi happen to align with some of the strategic ambitions of the state. And if you can just modulate that- Then it's a perfect recipe to win elections. In terms of Lebanon, do I think the Israelis will be highly active deep inside Lebanon? No. And I think a lot of these, Bibi doesn't want a ton of war. I think after Bibi gets into, if he gets reelected, I think you'll see Lebanon sort

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

  of come to a close. Even Iran could come to a close. He'll wanna just sort of like bring in a new status quo that will be useful to him. And when he has to turn up the heat, he'll turn up the heat.

• 1:52:21Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think, again purely speculative, but if Donald Trump went to Bibi tomorrow and said, "We're shutting this down with Iran. It's terrible for markets. It's terrible for me, my political party."

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Tucker Carlson?

  Could he make Bibi stop?

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  I think he probably could, but Bibi would probably wanna find a kind of middle ground, meaning they had a ceasefire in Lebanon, but there were still Israeli strikes in Lebanon on an almost daily basis.

• 1:52:52Tucker Carlson?

  Right?

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Tucker Carlson?

  I think you could. You could call that the Israeli ceasefire.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. In Hebrew, you call the war between the wars.

• 1:52:58Tucker Carlson?

  The war between. So funny, when, you know, growing up here, we were taught that Israel had wars in 48, 56, 67, 73, 82, and then the Intifadas.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Tucker Carlson?

  That's the official like history of it, right?

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Tucker Carlson?

  And then you get older and you realize, nah, there was kind of a war continuously.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'd call it a war, but there is.

• 1:53:21Tucker Carlson?

  Fighting.

• 1:53:22Speaker 02

  There's fighting or there are strikes, like there's activity. I don't know if I'd call it a war. But I do think you could potentially see a situation, and it depends on the conditions of the end of the war. If there's an agreement, what the stakes are and the stakeholders, but there could be a situation. I can envisage a situation in which Israel, for example, is still striking, not necessarily on a daily basis, but that they operate in the skies of Tehran, that they strike as needed. And there's still a lot to be seen. I mean, I don't, I think there should be, there's probably gonna be some attempt to activate people to try to get protested up again. I wouldn't be entirely surprised.

• 1:54:06Tucker Carlson?

  In Iran.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I find it hard to believe that the Israelis put all this together without the hope or without some expectation that when things quiet down, things internally will begin to sort of move again.

• 1:54:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:23Speaker 02

  I don't know if you can expect people to go and protest while there are strikes. The strikes should, I think they would expect, lay the groundwork for something to happen.

• 1:54:33Tucker Carlson?

  Do you have any idea how the Israeli government winds up with so many agents of influence and just agents in all these hostile countries? How many, there's so many people in Iran working for Israel, same in Syria, same in Lebanon, like, how do they do that?

• 1:54:49Speaker 02

  People are easy to buy. People are easy to buy.

• 1:54:54Tucker Carlson?

  Apparently, they are.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I like to say that the best spies in the Arab world all work for the Mossad.

• 1:54:59Tucker Carlson?

  Apparently, they do.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  That's why they don't have good intelligence agencies.

• 1:55:02Tucker Carlson?

  How do they do that? I mean, it's just remarkable. I don't think the United States pulls that off.

• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  They could if they wanted to. I think the CIA is probably just lazy. The stakes aren't as high in many cases.

• 1:55:15Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  You find someone's weakness. If they're homosexual.

• 1:55:22Tucker Carlson?

  We only do that in the Senate here. We haven't bothered to do it in Iran, I guess.

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  That day might come. You never know.

• 1:55:30Tucker Carlson?

  All right. Thank you very much. That was interesting as hell.

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.