American Thought Leaders - Victor Davis Hanson: The Real Story Behind the Hamas Terror Attack on Israel

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2"We had a situation in a time of peace where a thousand people were mutilated and butchered before the IDF responded. And yet, that ignited these people on the campus to root for the people who were murdering and beheading.”To make sense of the realities of the Israel–Hamas war, I sit down with classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, bestselling author of a number of books including “The Dying Citizen” and the upcoming book “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.”Did Hamas miscalculate Israel’s response? Will Hezbollah intervene? What is Iran’s play now? And what do many in the West misunderstand about Israel and Hamas?"A lot of people apply rules to the Jewish state they would never apply to any other ally. And that explains the schizophrenia that we have," Mr. Hanson says.

We had a situation in a time of peace where a thousand people were mutilated and butchered and yet that ignited these people on the campus to root for the people who were murdering and beheading. There is only one solution! It's the final revolution! To make sense of the realities of the Israel-Hamas war, I sit down with classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, bestselling author of The Dying Citizen and of the upcoming book The End of Everything.

A lot of people apply rules to the Jewish state they would never apply to any other colony. Did Hamas miscalculate Israel's response? Will Hezbollah intervene? What is Iran's play? And what do many in the West misunderstand about Israel and Hamas? Why don't you just read what they write, rather than to project what you think they should write?

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year. And Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver. With one short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your IRA or 401k. American Hartford Gold is one of the highest rated firms in the country, with an A-plus rating with a Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients.

If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377, that's 855-862-3377, or American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Victor Davis Hanson, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me on. Victor, I want to do kind of a primer here on what's happening in the Middle East right now, what's happening with the Israel-Hamas war, how this all came to be, how you view this from your unique military history lens here. Well, it was multifaceted. So there was social, economic, military military precursors I guess you would call them

long-term factors and there was short-term long-term Israel had reached a zenith as far as its own history in terms of affluence leisure anybody who'd gone to Haifa would be astounded to buy it compared to American City I was just there and it made San Francisco look pathetic in comparison it really did it was clean it was crime-free it was prosperous people are walking out at midnight beautiful harbor and so they had the Accords with the Saudis the resurrected Abramss accord they were exuberant you would meet israelis in government and commerce and they would say the last two years we have 20 000 gazans working for us we haven't had any trouble uh when they get injured we take them

to a hospital we're teaching them methods of sophisticated agriculture, we're going to be friends with the Saudis, the Iran deal fell through as we knew it would. And that gave them certain assumptions that were impossible given where their neighborhood. So if they have a political disagreement in the fashion that we do, and perhaps maybe Netanyahu is as controversial as say trump so we're going through this political civil war almost but we're safe we have canada and mexico and we're away and they had the same type of dispute over the supreme court where we had a million people in the street protesting the netanyahu government. They had people that were

not signing up or not reporting for their IDF reservist call. That's an extravagance that Western societies can afford, but not them. But they had lulled them into that sin. So I think that created a sense of unpreparedness that was known to Hamas. Iran, after the Biden administration came in and stopped all the sanctions, and they had $50 to $70 billion in additional oil revenues. We were giving them sanction relief. Obama had done that. Trump had stopped it. But they did not quite. They knew abstractly how much wherewithal Hamas was getting

in terms of money, rockets, weapons, and maybe Hezbollah, but they didn't conceptualize that as threats to the IDF in a way that they had not during the Yom Kippur War either. So it was the same mentality, and that gave an opening for Hamas. And so that was one thing. The second was I think when Hamas went in there they thought we're going to attack at a time of peace when they think they are playing us off against the Palestinian Authority and that they think we want to be Singapore and they

think they believe our rhetoric and they're completely unaware and then short-term we're going to go through the gate that the wall whatever it's not much of a wall if you look at it compared to what you think a wall is or the new Trump wall in comparison we're going to what you think a wall is or the new trump wall in comparison we're going to do it at a holiday we're going to do it at time of early in the morning when they're not expecting it and we're going to be brutal in a way that no one's ever imagined before we're going to decapitate we're going to desecrate we're going to mutilate we're going to torture we're in we're going to engage in things that unspeakable necrophilia rape except we're going to take hostages we're not just going to take hostages we're going to take young

kids two three four we're going to take elderly women and we're going to do two things by that we're going to be so pre-civilization although we're going to be so pre-civilizational that we're going to shock them into terror. We've got to do something. We have to talk. They're just completely out of control. I know that this sounds unrealistic, but that was the mentality. And the other presumption was we're going to be so depraved in our violence that we're going to make the argument that only people

who are being exploited would ever reach that level of barbarity as in you made us do it and third they have a whole expatriate community of middle east people throughout europe the united states and especially they understood the new DEI campus and they thought, we can do all of this and we won't get any global disdain anymore because the universities, the institutions of Western society are pretty much controlled by the pro-Palestinian left. And they were right in all those assumptions. They only made one mistake. They miscalculated the Israeli response.

They looked at the first four days of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but they didn't look at the next 15. Had they done that, they would have realized that the response was going to be medieval in their term. And that's what we're watching today. They're going to be medieval in their term and that's what we're watching today they're going to be destroyed I think that Israel Israel's political parties have

coalesced temporarily people from all across the spectrum are united and they have come to the idea that there's no two-state solution you cannot make peace with people who do these things and I think Hamas overestimated their ability to shock the Israelis or scare them or terrify them or win the approval of the world. That's what they were thinking. But I think there's still a lot of people in the world who are going to give Israel a green light.

And this is the first time in our lifetimes, when I'm 70 years old, that I don't see any restraint on Israel. I don't see a Western diplomat, a Macron or a Schultz, calling them up and saying, listen, you've had five days of barbarity. We're going to cut your aid off. Or Joe Biden saying, you do this and do this. I don't see that happening. And that applies to Hezbollah and Iran as well. Well, I mean, it's interesting that you say that because, I mean, there's people, from what I'm hearing, you know, rebelling even in the U.S. government because of the, you know, U.S. response being so, let's call it pro-Israel. Yes. Right. At the same time, I've read some compelling analysis talking about how essentially the U.S.'s empowerment of Iran, which you discussed somewhat earlier, may have played a significant role in this just simply because of Iran basically feeling like they're kind of unchecked and yes and they had the

financial wherewithal when sanctions were relief and disposable income to arm Hamas and Hezbollah to levels that no one had ever imagined would be possible so they were riding high Iran at this juncture said we have new allies. We have the Chinese and we're selling drones to the Russians in the Ukrainian war. The Obama idea of a Shia crescent of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza is actuated. It's there now. We have in the US government, we have Robert Malley, who's one of us, basically they would say. And we have people in the Department of Defense that he's helped insert there. And we have a non-campos Mintos president that is probably being heavily influenced

by the Obamas, Ben Rhodes type of Iran deal, who was back in the news lately lecturing Israel. And so Iran got the idea because they didn't, Hamas and Hezbollah I think is your train of thought is they wouldn't do anything without the permission of Iran there and that's true. So they were the other player. But I think just as Hamas has misjudged the geostrategic landscape and then the mentality in Israel in particular, so Iran has. This is the first time since the Iranian revolution some 43 years ago that there's no restraint on a retaliation to Iran we have a huge force

that's assembling off the coast of the Middle East and if Hezbollah or Iran were to attack that Joe Biden would be led by events he couldn't stop the response from the indignant American people and that response would be existential to Iran and they know that I think it even applies to Hezbollah so they got themselves into a jam I think by the level of barbarity if they had gone in there and taken two hostages or five hostages we'd be back the same old you know wash rent spin cycle of the Middle East but they were so exuberant in their depravity and they exhilarated by it,

that it really changed the mentality of the players. And I think now, if Hezbollah says, if you go one more day and we're gonna send rockets, the Israelis' collective idea would be, what are you gonna do, rape our dead? You've already done that. What else could you do, behead babies? You've done that.

So do your worst and we'll do our best. And let's settle it. And that's a very dangerous attitude to have. And that's what the Israelis have right now. And I think that's why Hezbollah has not so far intervened. And it's kind of counterintuitive, isn it the status quo or the consensus is if they use an inordinate or what we call disproportionate use of force in gaza that will infuriate hezbollah and then they will intervene with their huge rocket force but classical strategy the tragic view says that they will not if they see Beirut ending up like Gaza City.

And they know that that could happen very easily. And they really haven't recovered from the 2006 war with Israel. So it'll be very, anybody who predicts what's happened is usually wrong in the Middle East but my sense is that Iran and Hezbollah have found themselves in a position that initially they thought was so envious and so great and as they start to examine it in its fullness they might not find it so inviting I don't think the Russians would ever intervene on their part they're stuck in Ukraine I don't think the Russians would ever intervene on their part. They're stuck in Ukraine. I don't think the Chinese have any interest at all other than keeping the sea lanes open, avoiding a theater war, keep the oil flowing, and hurting the United States vicariously. Other than that, they're not going to intervene when they have a million Muslims in work camps

themselves. So I don't see where they're, as in Cold War proxy wars, I don't see where their patrons intervene. And I look at what they have, their wherewithal, and I'm not that impressed with it compared to the United States or Europe or even Israel. Well, you remind me of something. Back in 2016, one of Xi Jinping's top, top advisors said in a speech that a good plan for America would be to keepized. I'm reading in a little bit here. And we can do what we want to do. Thereby, America won't be focused on us. I think that's what the Chinese are looking at.

But I think the only thing that's holding them back, say, from attacking Taiwan, are the logistical problems of crossing the South China Sea to get to Taiwan, A, and then B, it didn't work out too well for the Russians so far in Ukraine. And they're worried about something like that. They're worried about the financial. But they do like the idea that the United States has exhausted artillery shell depots in Israel that sent them to Ukraine that were six years behind Javelin supply, that our fleet is shrinking, that we're $33 trillion in debt.

They like all that. And so they want all these pressure points. But they do not want to intervene and confront the United States, at least not yet. And I don't think the Russians will do it. And I don't think the iranians want to well when then what do you make of these well let's call it small-scale attacks from iran on u.s troops yes that's designed for two reasons one ultimately as hamasodes, people are going to say in the Shia world and to some extent

in the Sunni world, well, where were you? We took on the Jews. We took on the world. We were willing to behead Jews in Israel. And what did you do? You have all these rockets you talk about, but you didn't really start a war. And Iran, what did you do? You funded the whole thing.

It was your idea. It were your proxies and and iran says well we had some people attack in syria and we had some people attack the houthis sent some rockets and we told some people in you know lebanon to go that's what they're doing but notice that they're calibrated just enough to say they're doing things and to distract but not enough to earn a righteous response not yet at least and Hezbollah is the same way so they want to maintain their credentials as the on the tip of the spear of anti Western pro-palestinian Islamic feed days but not to the degree that they're going to get in trouble with Israel and the United States.

Because they're starting to see that when they look toward politics, they say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, there's a Democratic president and left-wing people. And if they're Not for us There's no opposition to them because we know that conservatives and Republicans are always against us and at least when they're a president We got a big we got the left in the street Anti-war, but if the left is ambiguous about the war the right is for the war are there support Deterrence we're not going to have that dynamic, let's say, during the Iraq war

with George W. Bush, with that huge anti-war movement. And so, and then they look at Europe, and the Europeans are terrified now of radical Islam. And they don't see, they don't see any, they're looking desperately for the campus, but the campus is starting to incur a big backlash and I think the university presidents the faculties the students have no idea what they have done with these demonstrations so I think

everybody is has been living in la-la land and riding high and now there's going to be some type of accounting. Well, okay, let's look at the domestic situation for a moment. I think I want to go back to the region. But, I mean, it is a fascinating situation. I've been saying that I think there may be some kind of silver lining in the horror that we've just witnessed, which is that there seems to be some sort of, at least some people have gotten some sort of clarity about these campus groups,

right, which tend to be, you know, extremely left-wing, right? But it seems odd on the face of it that Palestinian Islamist types or people supporting that would be on the same side as the far left. Trans, gay, far left. Right, right, and you have these perplexing groups like Queers for Palestine and so forth. It's perplexing because if anybody who was an American student went over to Gaza or the West Bank

and they got on a corner with a megaphone and they say, Hamas sucks, they'd be shot. Or if they had purple hair and they were trans with a ring in their nose, they would be shot. And then added to that, somebody leaves the Middle East on a student visa or a green card. And why are they leaving? They're leaving purportedly corruption, poverty, tyranny, autocracy. And they're going to where? The West, where they can be secure and prosperous and free. And no sooner do they get here are they're here in the university and what are they cheering those same governments which is hamas one election one time that is an apartheid society if you're not a arab muslim and a

secondary citizen if you're a woman in their charter, 1988 charter, it says your duty is to marry and have children, stay at home. And so they're cheering that. And so that doesn't resonate well with them. So I think the American people are looking at all this and they're saying, yes, we knew about affirmative action. Yes, we knew about woke. Yes, we knew about DEI, but we didn't really understand the mechanics of what it was producing. And we are creating monsters. We are creating people. The longer they're in college, the more degree, the more that they think they're educated,

the more callous and vicious and cruel they are. So we had a situation in a time of peace where a thousand people were mutilated and butchered before the IDF responded. And yet that ignited these people on the campus to root for the people who were murdering and beheading. Not saying the Israelis are committing genocide by retaliation. That hadn't happened yet. But their instinct and their training and their ideology was so perverted and out of mind that that was their natural Pavlovian response and we can't have that anymore. And we have to look at how to stop that. And I think people are going to say, Donald Trump did it when he came in.

I don't think a person is going to feel, an American voter is not going to feel after what they've witnessed, that they want somebody from Gaza or Palestine or Syria or Iraq, maybe even Egypt, coming to the United States on a green card and a visa. Because the time from which they arrive in the United States and they are thankful and gracious because of the security and freedom and prosperity they can experience to the time they're out in the street tearing down pictures of Jewish captives is about two weeks. And people know that. And the other thing I think is they're gonna say,

what created these very wealthy privileged kids to pour out at Harvard Yard or at UCLA and chant rivers to the sea, which is basically a euphemism for extinction. Maybe it's the fact that these global endowments now are 35 50 60 billion maybe there's so much money for the center for palestinian studies or the center for diversity equity or 88 90 diversity equity inclusion czars in each school at a universe so maybe we just better start looking at that

and things that have been floated, maybe we better get the federal government out of the student loan business. Let these huge endowments back their own loans. Maybe college was short from six to four. Maybe all these crazy studies majors would drop out. And maybe the moral hazard would be where it always should be with the university.

And maybe we should tax their endowment income because they're not nonpartisan. They're indoctrination. So if Stanford has a $40 billion roughly endowment and they're getting $3 billion and they spend $6 billion, maybe that $3 billion they're going to have to spend two billion in income tax because they're not a non-profit as we define it, not after what's been going on at my campus. And maybe people are going to say, we have to take a look at tenure. These professors that say that Jews are pigs or excrement or we need to follow Jewish children around or at my university, all you Jews go over there and take your property with you

in my class so you know what apartheid's like. And maybe we just have to say, maybe you need a five year contract. Here's what you're gonna do. Here's the things you have to write. Here's what your teaching evaluations, here's what your peer evaluations.

And if you don't fulfill it, you're gone. Just like a plumber or electrician. So I think there's a lot of, if you would have a conservative house senate and president that would be enacted i'm pretty sure that people feel that the old arguments for the university were twofold we're creating a highly intelligent highly educated 50 of the population which is necessary for democracy. We're staffing the FBI, the civil service, with educated people with BAs.

And more importantly, we have disinterested research. Our PhDs, our technology people, our law degrees, our business, and they are the elite of the world. And that makes us the most competitive and prosperous society, thanks to the MBA program at Stanford or the law school at Yale or the political science department at Princeton. And now people are looking at this and they're saying,

No, the COVID thing showed us how warped science is on the campus. No, the climate change showed us that if you dare speak out and challenge a vaccine or climate change showed us that if you dare speak out and challenge a vaccine or climate change, anything, that you're going to be shouted down. And when we look at the students, they don't know anything. They can't—if you gave them a map of the Middle East, they wouldn't know the difference between Amman and Tel Aviv.

And yet they're spouting and spousing these ideas. So they're failing at what they said was the price of these extremism. Well, yes, you don't like what we're doing, and you don't like the free speech area, and you don't like all these crazy ideas, but we help you because we turn out educated people, and we turn out professions that make, you know, and that's not true. So I think the people are going to say, you broke the bargain. So we're going to say you broke the bargain so we're going to we're going to call you on it well so that's interesting and basically you're saying that this is exposed the fact that a lot of these universities are basically creating activists instead of scholars or like a scab we

all knew there was a putrid wound but it was scabbed over this gaza thing tore it off and they came out in their arrogance and when you i mean americans had no problem with one side saying support israel and the others don't but when you start saying from the river to the sea or you start talking about genocide or you start tearing down things or cooper union Union, you're like, you know, that picture of those students in the library locked and people on the glass. It was like a scene out of the Walking Dead, you know, like a set they were trying to get in. It was scary. And we haven't quite seen that yet since the 1960s or 70s. And I think it it's gonna get worse as this war goes on and I think they have no idea that what the public thinks of them if you look at

polls most people have had a radical shift they don't believe that higher education is a necessity anymore and the faculty right below use car salesmen as far as professions you have admiration for. So they're committing collective suicide. You know, Victor, I just want to divert a little bit here because I can't help you. You mentioned the term genocide is thrown around, that what Israel is doing right now in Gaza's genocide, you know, this words, you know, we keep hearing this words, you know, have meaning that this word has been adulterated heavily, right? And I mean, people are, there was black genocide was being thrown around, genocide against

women. I remember reading pieces like this is like, does that word for us even have meaning? And in situations where painstakingly for example the State Department decides that for example the Chinese regime is actually committing actual real genocide against a group of people the Uighurs but that all seems to have lost meaning somehow yeah I think genocides is from greek word genos it means a tribe or a group of people and it's the suffix is killing wipe out you're wiping out so we've seen that we've seen it before with the effort of the turkish government to try to destroy armen as a people. We've seen it, as you said, with the Uyghur.

And we've seen it, of course, with the Holocaust. It's a massive effort to kill thousands of people. But when they use that term for the Middle East, then you think Israel is engaged in a systematic effort to wipe out the Palestinian people, and you say to yourself, well, 21% of Israel is engaged in a systematic effort to wipe out the Palestinian people. And you say to yourself, well, 21% of Israel is Palestinian. And they have the highest standard of living outside the Persian Gulf. And they have more rights of voting.

They have political parties. They form the opposition in a way that's impossible in Gaza, impossible in Syria, impossible anywhere else in the Arab world. That's not fitting the definition of genocide. And when you look at the conduct of war, if Israel wanted to conduct genocide, they wouldn't be phoning people or dropping leaflets to get away. And the people who would be subject to genocide would not be forcibly taking their own people and putting them in front.

For example, do people really who use that word think that in the Polish ghetto that Jews that were militant and resisting the Gestapo took other Jews and put them in front of them, assured that the Gestapo wouldn't shoot them? Or did the Armenians who were fleeing the Turkish people, the militant Armenians that wanted to fight back, did they take other Armenian children and put them in and think, now the Turkish people won't kill?

Of course not. So that doesn't happen what the Israelis are doing. They don't fit any imaginable definition of a genocidal power. It's very funny too, there's a big debate going on, as you know, at UCLA. There's a chant, Israel, Israel, you can't hide. We caught you in genocide genocide but the thing that I was curious about is you have all these pro-palestinian and Middle East immigrants and students and leftists and they're all saying we caught you in genocide which is false but they themselves have been advocating for genocide because they have a phrase, Palestine will be free from the river, the Jordan River to the sea, the Mediterranean.

Well, that just assumes the complete liquidation of Jews in Israel. And then they're saying, we caught you in genocide because you had the audacity to go back and hit us in Gaza City after we murdered a thousand of your people. And we're calling our parents up and saying, hey, I killed 10 Jews, Allah Akbar, come on, great. And so it's surreal. It's la la la. And people and they think this is going to give them empathy. And only a society that was completely morally bankrupt would give them empathy. So there's something very sick going on there

of this cult of hatred. Hamas has been autonomous. Gaza has been autonomous from 2005. And basically we were forgetting the Israelis under Sharon said, you export greenhouse industries for Europe, you're all getting out. It's not worth fighting with Gaza. It's yours.

Take it. You've tried it with Egypt. You've tried it. We tried it. You're on your own. And they elected, as happens in the middle east the government one election one time and they got hamas and yes there are a lot of innocent gossens but the 1988 charter predated that election and in the charter it says that they're not interested in negotiations they're

interested in jihad to destroy is. And they voted for it. And yes, it is corrupt. And yes, it's true, as a recent article, I think this week in Foreign Affairs pointed out, that the popularity of Hamas has declined. was corrupt, it didn't give services, or was it not sufficiently killing Jews? My point is this, is that when they went into Israel, this unpopular supposedly hated government, which we're told if Israel bombs Hamas sites in Gaza you're going to alienate them and make them like Hamas if they don't like them now if they don't like them so much why did hundreds follow through the hole in the fence kind of like irregulars that followed the Gestapo in Eastern Europe

and they tagged along to rape and to loot and to take captives. And why when they brought captives in the streets of Gaza, why couldn't you just find one Gazan who intervened and said, don't desecrate that Israeli corpse. That poor woman is bleeding from her genital area. Do not spit at her. Not one. Not one, not one. And so the argument that there's a captive Gazan population that is furious at Hamas and you're only going to drive them close to Hamas when they otherwise would reject

them, I don't see any evidence for it. I see a lot of evidence that say, I like Hamas now because they finally went and did something, and that do something is killing Jews on the the offensive and they were giddy about it and the people who support them in the west were giddy about it again it took them a nanosecond to go yes fly the flags you're killing jews finally now we can accept your corruption and your bribery and the miserable conditions because it was all worth it because you alone went into israel and killed a thousand jews that's the mentality i think it's hard for a lot of people to imagine that a a population of people could think this way an entire population of people

could think this way well if you i think a public it, but there's a Western conceit that we project in a very paternalistic way what they should think and how they should. And why don't you just read what they write rather than to project what you think they should write? So we have a 1988 Hamas chart. They've altered it a little bit for political reasons but it's all there and then we have the the rannings of the people in gutter who say you know what you stupid western i'm paraphrasing but you thought you were going to get singapore we're

not interested in singapore we're interested in killing them and pushing them into the and that's what we teach our children from an early age so when you bring a little jewish kid as a captive that's four or five they're going to get other children to sort of insult them why he's a captive and that's ingrained deeply into it and so the western mind says money coming from the gulf money coming from the UN, restored money from the United States, EU money, hundreds of billions of dollars in this small little enclave. It's going to be like Singapore. It has a beautiful beach. Hyatt, Regency, they're all going to be here. Western, they can export fruit and vegetables in the winter to Europe. They're not interested in that. They're interested in destroying Israel, period.

And you can argue why they became that way. There were mistakes made, but ultimately they have never had anybody in the West say, I will support you only if you have regular elections and you stop this hatred of Jewish people. And then if you do that, we're willing to help you. And we never had any conditions on them. Donald Trump came in and said, you support terrorists, we're not giving you the 700 million. And there was an outrage that he was cruel but notice another thing is that I'm not necessarily happy about this fact but Donald Trump came in and he looked at what we're talking about

and he said this man Soleimani is not only killing people in Iraq and subsidizing the strategies of Hamas. He's killing Americans. They did during the Iraq War. He's got to go. And he took him out and they said, you can't do that. And then he said, ISIS is an abomination. We're not going to put one troop on the ground to kill them, but we're going to bomb the proverbial SHIT out of them.

And then he said, there's no reason that we'd give any money to people who support terrorism. The 700 million is gone. And then he said, for all practical purposes, they started these wars and they lost the Golan Heights and they used it to shoot down on civilians. And it's been Israeli since 1967 and it's not going to go back. And then they said Jerusalem is the historical home of the Jews. It's Israel's capital. There's east and west. And each juncture he did that. They said, our foreign policy establishment, the best and the brightest, the most sophisticated, the Robert Malley's of the world, the Jake Sullivan's, the Anthony Blinken's, the

Bookings Institute, if you do one of those things, you're going to blow up the Middle East. Nothing happened. What blew up the Middle East? Restoring the aid, lifting the sanctions on Iran, sending them, agreeing to pay them $1.2 billion for hostages each, telling Israel, you've got to do this you've got to do that intervening in israeli politics yeah that's that gave the impression that the united states was dissing itself and favoring them and that encouraged them to do what they did and you know it's a funny thing about the human mind deterrence or the ability to warn somebody that you're unpredictable, maybe slightly crazy, but warn somebody that we have the wherewithal, that if you're foolish enough

to start a war, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, you will lose. And we'll show you before you do it how you lose. That is a humane mentality and it saves lives appeasement or modification when you think I just don't want to be harsh I don't want to come across to to bellicose and weakness and guarantees war and human nature being what it is we damn the people who keep the peace like a Reagan and we worship the people like Jimmy Carter who caused wars and Joe Biden and Barack Obama and you know that as well as I do Jan about the Ukraine war there

was a reason why Russia went in during the Biden administration and previously during the Obama administration and a weakened Bush administration but when he went into Georgia but not during the Trump administration so what is the ground offensive mean because that's what's how you know as we're recording right now that's what's happening yes and you know of course there's all sorts of predictions but what would it what does that really mean this is this is a new thing yes well I'll go back and say anybody who thinks they know what's going to happen the next day in the Middle East is crazy. It's so volatile and unpredictable.

But I think the Israeli IDF is trying to prep the Hamas and Hezbollah and everybody into thinking that they're going to come one-dimensionally through block by block, Stalingrad-type fighting, Berlin, 1945, maybe a little bit of Fallujah and Mosul. And I think as we see when they go in, come back out, I think it's better to look at the Gaza Strip as a series of ink spots, that they're going to come in occupy an area blow up all the tunnels dispose of the hamas apparat and then move out or move somewhere else and their idea will be each little ink spot will be unpredictable they will have no idea from what

direction they might even come in from the west bank they may come from the who knows they may come from the ocean but each little ink spot will incrementally very slowly methodically insidiously will start to conglomerate and on any given day the hamas defenders will have no idea which neighborhood of gaza city is going to be targeted which tunnel which direction they're coming from i think that's much more likely and that will be a very long drawn out expensive but i think it will be much more sophisticated than everybody's suggesting a one-dimensional just go in and fight street to street it'll be uh you know irrespective at great cost of lives probably great cost of lives yes uh great cost of lives compared to ukraine no nowhere near that i mean

there's 800 000 dead missing wounded on both sides in ukraine And I could go on by that, but there's something also, I don't think this is extraneous to say this. If you came from Mars and you looked at Ukraine and Israel, you would say, it's very important, it's very bewildering rather that the Americans are telling the Ukrainians, you need all the weapons you can, and you must be disproportionate. We have to give you the edge in weapons. We're telling the Israelis, you must reply proportionally. Don't go do too much. Don't use your advantages to rub it in.

They're telling Mr. Zelensky, given that you're an extremist, it's okay to cancel elections and declare martial law. They're telling Mr. Netanyahu, you better be careful. We're watching every move. You have to have a coalition government. Do this, this, this. They're telling the Ukrainians, you've got to hit back.

You've got to be preemptive. You can take out the Black Sea Fleet. You can take out an oil depot. And you know what? If you have to take out a bridge or a strategic road, you don't have to call the locals that live in that area and say, we're going to bomb or send a rocket. There's such a thing as collateral damage. We tell the Israelis, you can't have any collateral damage. You can't do this. And I could go on and on and on, but it's schizophrenic. And I think the only explanation, it can't be that it's, well, Ukraine is existential because I think you would admit the radical Palestinians, what they did, even the Russians didn't do the Ukrainians. So I think it has to be frank about it and that is it's anti-semitic that a lot of people

apply rules to the jewish state they would never apply to any other ally and that explains the schizophrenia that we have i think by any uh report it seems like a lot of anti-Semitism has come out of the woodwork. Yes. And everywhere, frankly. That's just waiting latently, or is this a new thing? What's your view on this? Well, there's always been anti-Semitism. What's new about this is a couple of things.

On the eve of World War II, when you had people in the United States, the American First People, Father Coughlin or Charles Lindbergh, and said, the Jews are going to get us in another war or the Rothschild octopus is behind this. It came from the right and it was in a very crude fashion. Rallies, you know, and it was easily spotted and it was dissected and the institutions at that time were still center left and they were on the vanguards to spot it and to call it out the New York Times the major newspapers, Edward R. Murrow, people like that. This time around, it's on the left, and the institutions are not watchdogs, they're promoting it. So the New York Times will print the false story about the hospital bombing or the Washington

Post. And more insidiously, it's coming from people under our new Obama-Biden, new progressive paradigm of DEI that has a binary that the whole world, but particularly the United States, is bifurcated into oppressors, victims, victimizers, subjects, colonialists, victimizers. Subjects colonialist or imperialist. And in that breakdown, Israel is now constructed as white, capitalist, successful, Western. And the Palestinians are the victims of non-white, poor, exploited, no nuance. And so all the people in the United States who feel that they're in the DEI industry, and that's why BLM has posters of gliders glorifying mass death, that's why we have Palestinian students resonating with their chants of, from the river to the sea,

that's why we have trans people subject transfer for cause I've seen that poster and they feel that they're exempt because as victims they are expressing anger at victimizers and they're not anti-semitic they are anti-semitic and it's very much it's much more difficult than calling out a Charles Lindbergh or a Father Koffer they're insidious because they say we're victims you know we're immune you cannot call me a racist because I'm black I'm Chicano I'm Asian I'm gay I'm trans you cannot do that I'm a, you can't do that.

And yet we just have to judge them by their words. I mean, even Charles Lindbergh didn't support students chasing Jews into a library and pounding on the window to get to them. Charles Lindbergh didn't openly side with people who were saying destroy the Jews. And so it's more insidious and it's more dangerous. The faculty is terrified. As I've used that metaphor before I think with us, the faculty is Dr. Frankenstein and they created a Frankensteinian monster with their admissions,

their immigration, their curriculum, their left-wing dogma, and that monster is now devouring them. So you can see these feeble presidents. What would it have to do to get a college president to say, on my campus, you're not going to separate students and you're fired immediately. On my campus, you're not gonna call Jews, pigs and excrement. On my campus, you're not gonna say go after Jewish children.

Because we all know if you substituted the word Jew and said trans or blacks, if you had a white professor, some crazy racist who said all the blacks are gonna get over there, he would be fired like that by a president. Screw due process. He wouldn't worry about it. But this game they play that we're sober and judicious, this is a complex matter, there's

all sorts of issues involved, we both saw that. That's all a disguise of anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism and fear of what they've created. The lunatics are running the asylum on campus and the administrators are terrified of them. Victor, as we finish, the question on a number of people's minds, and of course this is not something we can predict based on the whole you know the volatility you described but you

know there's a lot of factors that play there's a lot of instability and a lot of powerful players and so the term World War three has been coming up so you know as we finish, your thoughts? Well, I've been reading a lot of these articles called, you know, 1939 Redux, World War III. And of course, there's the added force multiplier when people write that we're going to be in World War III, that it's going to be nuclear because of Russia and China. Maybe some mystery about Iran's nuclear status and Israel's nuclear status and ours. I think there's a much greater likelihood of a nuclear escalation in Ukraine because that's a border right on Russia's border, and it has historical grievances against Ukraine

and vice versa. And the people who are writing these articles are not writing about, they dismiss it out of hand. There's no chance it's going to be a nuclear confrontation. I look at North Korea. I don't think North Korea is going to use nuclear weapons. So then I say China. But it seems that China is sending six warships, six warships.

Even in our bastardized state, the United States military could take them out in 10 seconds if it wanted to. So China's not, and has a huge fleet. If it really wanted World War III, it would send, you know, 100 ships. And then I look at their attitude about the Islamic world. China's got a million Uyghurs in camps. And then I look at their attitude about the Islamic world. China's got a million Uighurs in camps. Russia flattened Chechnya, a Muslim province. So I don't think there's any empathy for China, from China and Russia to intervene

against the United States. China wants the sea lanes open because 40% of its oil imports come from there they both only have a vague sense that whatever america's for they're against they like the idea there's tensions they want the united states to spend time capital labor munitions they like the idea that we're supplying israel and uk Ukraine and we're almost empty of a strategic reserve. All that, yeah, I get that. But I don't see the trigger. What would be the trigger that they launch 100,000 rockets from Hezbollah and then Israel does what? They level Beirut and China says, don't level Beirut? No. And Russia says, don't level Beirut, or Iran decides, you know what,

the United States is just too big for its bridges. Biden is cognitively challenged. They're disunited. We're going to sink that fleet and send, we'll have Hezbollah send 10,000, we'll send 10,000. And so they take out the U.S. Eisenhower, and the United States does what?

I think I know what the United States I don't I know Joe Biden would not want to react but I think he'd be forced to react and they would take out all the Iranian new nuclear facilities the power grid they wouldn't bomb of course and oil refineries yeah oil refineries especially. And then they would stop. And I don't see that turning into a theater-wide conflagration. It would be terrible, but would it be 800,000, 600,000 to 800,000 casualties in Ukraine? No. I've never seen anything like it. We have something right on the footstep doors of Europe where we've never seen this level of violence, this level of death, this level of sophisticated munitions, this level of nuclear threats. Every month somebody from Russia threatens to nuke us or to nuke Britain or to nuke, or they're sending weapons to Belarus so theyarus so they'll have tactical and no one

says a word and this thing and so i don't i don't see the symmetry of concern and i don't see the step-by-step progression that leads us to armageddon but perhaps for another talk we we should discuss the the the threat that you see in there I do see I do see I'm very worried in Ukraine for a variety of reasons because you have an unstable dictatorship you've got the greatest losses that the the Russia has experienced since World War II you've got people uh in the west they're talking about sinking the Black Sea fleet, of hitting the Kremlin. We've had drones from Ukraine going. All of that is perfectly strategically logical when you're attacked. I have no problem with the logic, but the logic only goes so far when you're

dealing with a country with 6,500 nuclear weapons. And yet, our best and brightest will... I've been attacked a lot for just saying what I did to you. Oh, don't give in to nuclear threats from Russia. That's what they want. Okay, well then don't give in to World War II threat, World War III threats from Iran and Hezbollah. Well, Victor Davis Hanson, it was such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you for having me.

Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hanson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.