Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté: Behind the Gaza Strategic Starvation.

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Aaron Maté: Behind the Gaza Strategic Starvation.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 2nd, 2025. Aaron Maté will be with us on just a minute on how bad is the strategic starvation in Gaza and what more do we know about the drone attacks deep inside of Russia. But first this while the markets are giving us whiplash, have you seen the price of gold? It's soaring in the past 12 months. Gold has risen to more than $3,000 an ounce. I'm so glad I bought my goal.

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Aaron, welcome here, my dear friend. Before we get to the latest in Gaza, to the news of the day, which is of course the use of these drones to attack a civilian train and numerous military targets throughout Russia, a project that apparently was in the works for a year and a half. What's your latest take on this? Is it strategically significant? Is it militarily significant? Is this insane because it's only going to produce the wrath of the Russians? Was the United States involved? It's humiliating for Russia. There's no doubt about that. And it's certainly a big hit. I mean, whatever the exact figure is of aircraft, and it's certainly a big hit. I mean whatever the exact figure is of aircraft and it's been disputed

Ukraine initially said about 40 aircraft were destroyed Russia says it's a lot less. It's embarrassing for Russia and these are strategic Bombers, it's a big deal and it's humbling for Russia. They were deeply penetrated in this very audacious Ukrainian operation. This is the problem though with the narrative that this is a turning point in the war. The war is being fought in the trenches between soldiers. And on that front, Russia has the overwhelming advantage they always have. That's why people like Barack Obama

didn't want to further inflame the proxy war in Ukraine that he began because Russia has such a military advantage. No matter how many audacious operations like this Ukraine can pull off. Russia has more troops and Russia has had a much easier time getting more troops. One because of the population size and B because it's been winning the war. So therefore morale is higher. Whereas Ukraine has had a very, very hard time. Everyone knows this with manpower.

And that's where it really matters, I think. And so certainly while Ukraine can claim success in this, they can claim that they humiliated Russia. Is this going to change the course of the war? I don't see any evidence of that. Every time there's been an audacious Ukrainian military operation against Russia, whether it was the Kursk Bridge or whether it was the downing of the sinking of a major Russian vessel Russia comes back harder because they had the military advantage and I expect

that dynamic to continue in your view is it likely that CIA MI6 and Mossad were involved and if CIA was involved can one argue that the United States of America again attacked Russia? Well, let me first say about Mossad. I strongly doubt that. Israel plays it pretty friendly with Russia. They have some overlapping interests. There's a lot of Russians living inside of Israel. And that's why Russia and its response to Israel's mass murder campaign in Gaza, they've occasionally raised some objections at the UN, but otherwise they haven't done very much.

I strongly doubt that Mossad would be involved here. I don't see what interest that would serve for them. As for MI6, the CIA, MI6 I would bet yes because they're just so, I was just in the UK last week and I saw this delivering a few talks to, you know, like a liberal audience. The level of paranoia there about Russia is very, very high and that's fueled by the government and the government's been proudly taking part in covert operations against Russia, especially throughout this proxy war. The gray zone's done a lot of reporting on this based on leaked documents from inside

the UK. So I'm confident betting that, and of course I have no inside knowledge, but if I were to bet, I would bet on the UK having some awareness of this. As for the CIA, well, it depends which CIA. Under Joe Biden, given that we recently had that article in the New York Times bragging about how Biden's CIA and military was running the war in Ukraine, I would be very surprised if that iteration

didn't know about this. Trump's CIA, I have more doubts. From what I know about the Trump team, at least Trump himself is not on board with this proxy war So I wouldn't be surprised if Trump was in the dark But look then you have people like Keith Kellogg who back when Joe Biden was in office was saying what a great strategy Joe Biden had he called it the acme of Professionalism that we're using Ukraine to fight Russia because it takes a strategic adversary off the table without using US soldiers.

And certainly Ukraine bombing US, Russian strategic aircraft certainly advances that agenda. So there is a bipartisan support behind this policy. Whether Trump was involved with that, I doubt, but certainly there are many people in Washington who will be cheering this on, even though this pushes us closer towards disaster. Larry Johnson says there are credible reports that Secretary Hegseth watched the attacks in real time.

I mean, if that's true, I haven't seen these reports and I didn't ask him what his source was, but if that's true then clearly the highest echelons of President Trump's national security team knew about this. Did Marco Rubio wearing both hats as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor know? Did they tell the President? What does Trump say to Putin after something like this? I'm going to confidently say that I do not think Peter Hegsath was watching this attack in real time. I mean, even if he knew about it, it just wouldn't make sense for him to do that

and for that to get out, right? That's something that they'd wanna keep secret. So you're assuming he has the same sense and rationale that your gifted brain has. But listen, what I think is important to stress though is that people like Keith Kellogg, who's serving now as Trump's envoy, they encouraged this policy. You're gifted brain carrying out an operation that does hit Russia strategically. But listen, on the nuclear front, that's the thing. These are nuclear-capable aircraft. And now those aircraft are not being used every day

in the Ukraine War. What's happening in the Ukraine War is a artillery fight. It's in the trenches on the battlefield. So ultimately, all that Ukraine is doing here, yes, it's serving the proxy warriors' goal of weakening Russia, but they're doing it to all of our detriment. It's not a good thing for nuclear stability if Russia's nuclear arsenal is being attacked. And that's the policy that people in Washington from both parties have encouraged.

What do you think President Putin's response will be? Continued, measured patience or a couple of a Resashniks which can't be stopped and will do catastrophic damage wherever he wants to send them. I can't predict what's in Putin's mind. What I do know is that Russia has been winning the war overall. They've taken 20% of Ukrainian territory. The part of Russian territory that Ukraine took, Kursk, has now been completely returned to the Russians. So on the ground, Russia is winning, and I expect Putin is not

going to do anything to mess with that strategy, which although he took a big hit, it was very embarrassing for him. He suffered other embarrassments before, and that didn't stop him from continuing to take more of Ukrainian territory to try to impose his conditions. The commencement speaker and president of the class at MIT, one of the most intellectually challenging universities from which to graduate, was scheduled to give a speech at commencement. She gave a preview of the speech the day before and in that preview the day before, which was yesterday,

she criticized the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu. And then as a result, she was barred not only from giving the speech she intended to give at the actual commencement, which is today, but barred from attending the commencement. Here we go again with a place. What does MIT gain by engaging in this kind of suppression of ideas?

Well, MIT, like other academic institutions in the US, has ties to Israel. And MIT benefits from the military industrial complex, which itself benefits from the existence of Israel, Israel is essentially a U.S. military outpost in the Middle East. So it fits in with that. Israel is deeply embedded into the U.S. power structure. It has been especially since 1967 when it became a de facto U.S. proxy by smashing Arab

nationalism. And so therefore there's an interest in cracking down, plus the imperative of appeasing very powerful Zionist billionaire donors who have a lot of influence and they brag about it. They plot to undermine institutions that allow for free speech, that allow for protest against Israel's mass murder campaign. So these brave students throughout the US have repeatedly stood up to it and Done courageous acts like that MIT commencement speaker and but they're up against very powerful people. So the Justice Department Civil Rights Division Investigates colleges and universities

That fail to prosecute or punish people who express views in favor of the existence of Palestine. Why isn't what they did to this young woman a violation of her civil rights under the Civil Rights Act of 64, to which MIT is bound by virtue of the hundreds of millions of dollars it gets a year from the federal government.

I mean, this is just the reverse of what Trump is trying to push on them. I mean, because we don't have free speech when it comes to criticizing Israel. That's the lesson. That's one of the lessons of this genocide. We don't have free speech in this country when it comes to criticizing Israel. Israel is too big to fail for the people in power. And it's especially tragic in light of all the legitimate grievances that people in Trump world did have against the Democrats for their crackdowns

on free speech. And the Trump team has taken that crackdown and made it much worse because now they're deporting people for speaking out against ethnic cleansing and mass murder. What is the status of the aid to Gaza today? Israel has allowed in a bear trickle after more than 80 days of a full-blown starvation siege and they did that after some governments around, some allies around the world finally managed to speak up after being silent in such a cowardly

way. And Israel also pushed through this fake front group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, funded according to Israeli officials by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and staffed by shady figures from the national security state in the US. One of the top officials of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was a former CIA official who trained death squads in Central America in Nicaragua in the 1980s. But amazingly, the titular head of the group, the initial one, Jake Wood, he's a US Marine veteran,

he resigned just as it was being launched because he couldn't take part in it. He was stricken by an active conscience. Even though he must have known he was taking part in a fake group, he couldn't go along with it, perhaps because he realized he might be open to criminal charges one day for weaponizing and privatizing humanitarian aid. And what's been happening? The aid, I hate to use the word aid because this is not an aid group, it's a fake aid group, but these distribution points were set up in the south deliberately to encourage Palestinians in Gaza to all go there so Israel could advance its ethnic cleansing campaign of concentrating

Palestinians in the south to eventually push them out into Egypt. And what's happened? On Sunday, there was another massacre of at least 30 people going to pick up these boxes of aid that are being handed out. And you've seen this along with scenes of people being put in cages and just treated in the most inhumane ways. It's, I've never seen such evil in my lifetime.

It's a real life concentration camp. It's dystopian and has the full support of the U.S. government. Is the United States involved in this fake aid stunt which was perpetrated by Mossad? It's 100% involved. As I mentioned, there are U.S. officials deeply embedded in it. There are U.S. officials on its board. It's been promoted by the Trump administration. And the agenda here is not just to promote ethnic cleansing. Well, it's to promote ethnic cleansing by also replacing

the United Nations, the UN, the World Food Program, UNRWA. These are UN bodies that keep Palestinians in Gaza alive. They keep Palestinian culture alive. And Israel's goal is to erase that, because they're perpetrating a genocide. So therefore, the next phase in their final solution has been to come up with a shell fake aid group and the US has been fully on board with it. And it's not just Trump because the Biden administration totally advanced the Israeli

campaign to undermine UNRWA, the main UN refugee agency working inside Gaza. So this has been a policy from one administration to the other. One of the retired IDF generals used the phrase strategic starvation. It's absolutely horrific. It's starvation under the guise of helping people. Are IDF troops still killing people as they attempt to get flour and water off these trucks? Well, you know, they were calling the massacre on Sunday the Witkoff Massacre, because it came right after Steve Witkoff,

as Israel's lawyer, rather than being an impartial broker, helped to undermine the latest ceasefire talks when he presented demands that Hamas couldn't accept because there's no path to ending Israel's mass murder campaign permanently. And when Hamas insisted on returning to the previous terms, Wyckoff declared yet again that Hamas' demands are unacceptable. And then you have this new massacre of people trying to get some aid in Gaza. So people in Gaza were calling this the Wyckoff massacre. And yeah, who takes Wyckoff seriously? He's a partisan and he's a Zionist. How can he be a mediator?

Fair point. Listen, I have to admit to some naivete, I had some hope for him. After Trump won, he did broker a ceasefire. He did tell Netanyahu to stop the killing, and Netanyahu did. And from what I know about Wyckoff, from sources I have, he's a relatively, and I really stress the term, the word relatively, fair-minded person when it comes to this issue. Yes, he's a Zionist, obviously,

and his son is a fanatic Zionist. But in terms of his ideological, his ideological blood lust for killing Palestinians, as some other people in Washington have, like Joe Biden, he from what I heard, he wasn't afflicted with that. But so far, in terms of his actions, he's been exactly no different than Joe Biden. I think I saw something you either recently wrote or said or produced or talked about with the intriguing title, you probably know what I'm about to say, of everything I was taught was a lie. What is this about?

That was a catchy title put on an interview that I gave to Miriam Francois, who's based in the UK, wonderful journalist and activist and a public speaker. And I was speaking more about, but not so much myself, because I wasn't indoctrinated in Zionism, but just most about North American Jews. So much of what North American Jews are taught about Israel and Zionism is a complete lie, which you're taught at a very young age to build up support for this foreign apartheid state, this idea that Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land. All the foundational myths were on Israel that there was no ethnic cleansing by Zionist forces, that all the Palestinians who lost their homes, now occupied by Israelis, just left on the orders of their leaders, not because they were ethnically cleansed. There are just so many myths that young

North American Jews are taught to indoctrinate in the Mzionism. And what I'm saying is everything that they were told was a complete lie. Do you think there'll be an end to this slaughter short of the destruction of the Palestinian people? That's the question in front of us. It's up to us. I think that Gaza is destroyed. I do not see how. Look, even before October 7th, the UN was warning that Gaza would be unlivable within

a few years. So imagine that being updated for now. I think Gaza is no more, as Norman Finkelstein says, and I do think Israel will push out as many people as possible. Some will refuse to leave and they'll stay, they'll live lives in devastation in what's left of Gaza.

And now the question becomes what happens to the West Bank? Where Israel just announced one of its biggest expansions of illegal settlements in many years, where daily terror against Palestinians there continues. And they do it because they have the complete impunity of the US. And it's, you know, look, the only possibly realistic solution that's been on the table in recent years to me was letting Palestinians have a state and just 22% of their stolen homeland. That's the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem. Hamas accepted that. The Palestinian Authority accepted that.

Iran accepted that. The entire region accepted that and has offered Israel that. It's only Israel and the US that have refused that because Israel is driven by supremacy, not security. And so can we now salvage what's left of Palestinians' homeland in the occupied West Bank? That's up to us. I wonder if Trump will get so sick and tired of Netanyahu he'll just throw up his hands and say enough is enough. Or if, as John Mearsheimer claims the donor class has such control over Trump, he couldn't get away with that. That's the question. And look, Israeli hegemony has really advanced since October 7th. They dealt a serious blow to Hezbollah, which was a deterrent somewhat to Israeli aggression. They succeeded in regime change in Syria. And Syria, whatever you

think of that government, they were targeted not because of authoritarianism and repression, they were targeted because they were part of the axis of resistance, which stands up to Israeli aggression. And so Assad was overthrown. That's a huge victory for Israel. And now the new government led by Jelani, a former al-Qaeda leader, is saying that Israel and Syria have common enemies, by which they mean Iran. So Syria is off the table in terms of being a part of a axis that deters Israeli aggression. So they're on the march right now, and Israel is a fanatically supremacist state, and they sense an opportunity to continue. Now, Trump negotiating with Iran, that does impede their plans because, you know,

so long as Iran exists, that is a deterrent to Israeli aggression and hegemony. Netanyahu wants to sabotage any peace deal because he wants to push regime change. So it's still possible that there is some deterrent to Israel. It's possible that Trump gets sick of Netanyahu. I mean, you never know with Trump. Certainly under Joe Biden that wasn't going to happen. Joe Biden's policy was a bear hug. But then look at the people around Trump, all the donors he has, Mary Magdelson, he's openly bragged about doing her bidding. And that seems to be the trend right now in Washington. So if there's going to be any reversal, a large part of it will have to come from the American public demanding that for once the US respect international law and respect international consensus that says Palestinians have the right to

self-determination and not live under this occupying regime. Aaron, thank you my dear friend. Thank you for all your good work and thanks for sharing so much of it with us. All the best. We'll see you again next week. Sounds good, Judge. Thank you. Coming up at 3 o'clock this afternoon on the attack on Russia and the devastation of Gaza, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. MUSIC