Judging Freedom - AMB. Charles Freeman: Why Netanyahu Will Fail.

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

AMB. Charles Freeman: Why Netanyahu Will Fail.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024. Ambassador Charles Freeman will be here with us in a moment on why Netanyahu will fail. But first this. We're taught to work hard for 35 to 40 years. Save your money, then live off your savings. Unfortunately, there are too many threats undermining the value of our hard-earned dollars. The Fed's massive money printing machine is shrinking your dollar's value. Just the cost of groceries is absurd. Let me be brutally honest. I think the dollar is on its way to being extinct.

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They help me diversify into gold and silver. They can help you too. Call Lear today at 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Ambassador Freeman, welcome, my friend. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. I want to spend a fair amount of time exploring your thoughts on Prime Minister Netanyahu's stewardship of Israel. But before we get there, I do have some questions to ask you about events that are happening as we speak. What's going on in Syria, as you understand it? What's happening there today, Ambassador? Ambassador Cronenberg It's extraordinarily complicated. There are multiple Syrian factions, all of them with foreign patrons. Basically,

the United States and Israel have had a longstanding objective of overthrowing the Assad government. Israel has an objective of fracturing Syria so as to render it not a threat or a contender for power in the region. Turkey has a bone to pursue with Assad, the president of Syria. And it also has a problem with the Kurdish minority in Syria, which is quite independent and allied with the PKP, which is the insurgent Kurdish party in terrorists, basically, in Turkey. So now we have a situation where Israel, having taken down much of Hezbollah's strength in neighboring Lebanon and trying to interdict the supply of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through Syria, has, I think, turned on the tap, probably with our help,

to unleash the jihadis, the allies of Al-Qaeda that we have been supporting in Syria for the purposes I mentioned. And they've gone on the attack. And the initial response of the Assad government has been weak and basically apparently lost control of much of Aleppo, Aleppo, the major, second major city in Syria in the north. And so we have, the only change really from the past is that the Gulf Arabs who were active in trying to overthrow Assad now have made their peace with him and are staying out of this. But it is an incredibly complex mess with many moving parts. Why is the U.S. involved at all other than because we do whatever Netanyahu wants?

Well, we have been involved in trying to overthrow the Syrian government for decades before Bashar al-Assad, his father, Hafez al-Assad, was our target. We've consistently failed to dislodge the Assad government. But this is just a case of the United States picking fights with people who are enemies no affection for us. Is the Israeli military itself attacking the Assad government? Yes, they have been bombing Syria intermittently for years. You know, this is a strange situation where a country like Israel feels free to cross borders, bomb targets, kill civilians. Don't forget that they took out the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the capital of Syria, back in April. And this led to an Iranian retaliation against Israel, from which Iran has subsequently escalated as has Israel. The start of all of this against the present president of Israel, is this Hillary Clinton

and Barack Obama deciding that Assad must go and unleashing the CIA and whatever local colleagues it can muster to attempt to do that? It actually goes back to Eisenhower. I mean, it's been a long-term project of the United States. And of course, Hillary Clinton was rabidly against the Assad government, presumably reflecting the influence of Israel on her thinking. But this is a long-term phenomenon. And for much of the decades that we've been trying to overthrow the Assad government, we've had assistance from other Arab countries who don't like the secular politics of Syria.

I mean, Syria is a country in which women have total equality with men and serve in the army and so forth. It resembles Israel in that regard. And it is therefore a bit of a deviant within the Islamic world. Understood. Switching gears to Ukraine, Ambassador, is the West and is the United States properly fearful or maybe I should say regardful of this new Russian weapon, the Ereshnik? Well, I think it changes the equation because it gives the Russians an alternative to an escalation to the nuclear level. It is devastating. It cannot be defended against. it is ingenious and it is formidable and so in a way it reduces the danger of a nuclear war

of course that danger is receding anyway because Russia's winning the war and the only circumstance in which it would use nuclear weapons would be if it were losing, which it is not. But this is a major technological achievement, combining ICBM technology with MRBM, IRBM technology, and hypersonic capabilities. And essentially, the warheads, if you can call them that, are not explosive. They just come in at such a speed that their kinetic energy is the equivalent of more than if they were filled with TNT.

How debilitated is Ukraine as we speak? How decimated is the army? How gloomy is the future? Here we are in early December, and I don't know if Ukrainian homes and businesses are going to have adequate heat in the next four months. I think most objective observers judge that Ukraine has actually lost the war. It's run out of manpower to conduct an effective defense. The indiscipline in the Ukrainian armed forces is growing. Many people are conscripted and sent to the front where they immediately defect to the Russians. Others risk their lives trying to escape Ukraine. Morale is low. Even the Zelensky government is beginning to recognize that it cannot recover the territories that it has lost as a result of this war. And of course, the infrastructure is devastated.

The economy is ruined. The country has been depopulated. It started probably with 40 million people. It's now down to about 20 million. And of course, the graveyards are full of brave young Ukrainians who gave their lives defending their country. In the end, Kyiv is beginning to recognize that it has lost the war and it's going to have to settle on Russian terms. And I think that is quite frightening to the Ukrainians. Final point, however, is that for propaganda purposes,

the West, the United States and NATO, some NATO powers have deliberately distorted Russian war aims. Those aims have been very clear and they do not include conquering all of Ukraine and absorbing it into the Russian Federation, nor do they include a plan to conquer all of Western Europe. So I think the terms that Russia will demand, I hope the Russians will have the sense to realize that given the war and all of the disinformation that's been piled on it, they have a problem. If they want a long-term peace in Europe with NATO and with the United States, they're going to have to be a bit magnanimous, as Churchill advised one should be when one is victorious.

I don't know whether they have it in them to do that. They've lost an awful lot of men and spent a lot of treasure and they reoriented their country in fundamental ways. They've learned to cope without the West. Will they now turn back to the West? I don't think Europe can be stable or peaceful without a role for Russia in its management. That is the lesson of history. After World War I, when the United States and other countries, Britain, France, sought to exclude both Russia and Germany from a role in Europe,

we got World War II, then we got the Cold War. The 19th century was one in which Russia was an active and welcome participant in European affairs. And I think that should be the thing that we aim for in the future, much as it is just unpleasant to Americans to contemplate our brainwashing by the Cold War. here's um President zelinski just two days ago talking about some sort of a vision for a termination of hostilities it doesn't make much sense to me but I'm being anxious to hear your thoughts Chris cut number one if we want to stop the hot stage of the war umbrella we should take on the NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control. That's what we need to do fast. And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically. But this is delusion. This is delusion, isn't it? It is. The Russians have

shown everyone that they are prepared to take enormous risks in order to prevent Ukraine from being part of the Western alliance against them. They know that if Ukraine goes into NATO, American and other NATO troops and weaponry will be stationed in Ukraine. That is what has happened with NATO enlargement everywhere else. And they have shown that they are prepared to go to war to stop that. So the notion that somehow or other, when Ukraine is losing the war, it can be brought into NATO, and that will magically empower it to diplomatically recover the territory it's lost, is completely delusional. Before we hop over to Israel, here's Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.

This is yesterday, giving a summary of what he thinks the West is planning. Cut number two. We are concerned about what we are hearing lately, particularly from the West in Brussels, London, Paris, and Washington. There is increasing talk about a ceasefire as a way to give Ukraine a break and provide time to arm it with modern, long-range weapons. This approach is certainly not the way forward. Western leaders, it seems, are catering to Zelensky and his demands. Their stance has been, not a word about Ukraine without Ukraine. Yet they have been discussing Russia without Russia for over two years within the framework of Zelensky's proposals. As President

Putin pointed out, Zelensky's Western backers should first compel him to cancel the decree that prohibits negotiations with Putin's government. Russia is ready for negotiations, but they must be based on a comprehensive and legal consideration of the legitimate interests of all parties involved. Yes. So what Mr. Lavrov is referring to is discussions in which Ukraine would be modeled on Korea. So there would be a ceasefire, some sort of demilitarized zone, and the war would be over. But in fact, the Korean model is exactly the opposite. That is to say, if you do that, Korea shows, the war never ends.

You don't get a peace. You get a permanent situation of tension and confrontation. And that is something that Russia absolutely will not accept. Let's remember that the reason, one of the reasons, or the main reason perhaps, that Russia went to war was that it had demanded a discussion of European security architecture that would enable it to feel safe and enable the West to feel safe. It wanted a discussion. We refused.

It is significant that in his four years as Secretary of State, Mr. Blinken has never visited Moscow. That is what Lavrov, the last time Lavrov was in Washington was five years ago before the Biden administration. So I think there is no diplomacy here and people waving the magic wand of diplomacy and claiming they can accomplish things without regard to what has happened over the last two and a half years on the battlefield are smoking dope. Switching over to Israel, Ambassador, why do you think Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon? I think there are complex reasons. First of all, it isn't a ceasefire,

really. It's just a pause in the fighting. Israel is continually violating the so-called ceasefire. It's for a limited period, 60 days. It happened for many reasons. The main one, I think, is that Israel got badly roughed up by Hezbollah, which acquitted itself very well in the southern Lebanese battlefield. Israel was not able to accomplish its objectives there, although it did enormous damage to housing, infrastructure, and killed a lot of people. And of course, it has bombed Beirut repeatedly. But I think Mr. Netanyahu has gained something from this. Namely, Hezbollah is not in a position now to support Hamas. And you can see that the Israelis are taking advantage of this to prepare for the resettlement of northern Gaza by Israeli settlers and the annexation of that part of Gaza to Israel. They originally wanted also, their maximum objective

in southern Lebanon was to annex that, but that has proven impossible. Still, Mr. Netanyahu has gained. Iran has yet to retaliate against Israel. Its retaliation is now complicated by the probable unwillingness of Hezbollah or inability of Hezbollah to join it in an attack on Israel. So this is a mixed picture, but the basic fact is the war wasn't going well for Israel, and Israel needs some time to recoup. So does Hezbollah. Former IDF chief and former Israeli defense minister, you may actually know him, Moshe Yalon, also a member of the Likud party, that's Prime Minister Netanyahu's party, over the weekend accused Netanyahu of engaging in genocide, rather startling given the military and militaristic background of the former and now retired defense minister. Are cracks beginning to show in Israeli solidarity or is the former defense minister an outlier? I think he's a bit of an outlier, certainly in

his use of the word genocide. But the cracks in Israeli society and politics have been visible for a long time. There are too many groups in Israel that are disgruntled and totally dissatisfied. There are the Israeli residents of Northern Israel who've been driven from their homes by the skirmishing with Hezbollah and who are now reluctant to return. They don't feel safe. There are the ultra-Orthodox

who have been threatened with conscription because Israel's running out of manpower to conduct all the wars it has initiated. And there is the hostage families who are upset about the failure of the government, Netanyahu government, to pursue the release of the hostages. But I think the startling thing is that so many Israelis seem to favor genocide. While they object to the word, they favor the policy. I don't know Mr. Yalom, but he seems to be a realist.

Do you think that American neocons truly believe that Iran is a threat to American national security, or do they say this to further Netanyahu's political goals? Well, I think they regard Israel as the equivalent of the 51st state and very much part of the American national security world. And certainly Iran is a threat to Israeli efforts to commit genocide in Palestine and to expand its territory into Gaza and to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and to take southern Lebanon. It has been a threat to every country on its border. At one point or another, it has attacked every one of them. And so, yes, Iran is a threat to Israel. And if you equate Israeli security with American security for some reason, then it's a threat to the United States.

Do you think that Israel is on the brink, that Netanyahu's leadership has brought it military, political, and economic destruction from which it cannot easily recover, no matter the nature and extent of American financial and military support? I think Israel's neighbors, against Iran. He's been trying to enlist the United States in all these battles and having some success with the Biden administration. And he looks forward to further success with the Trump administration. So he's going for broke. And indeed, this may end up in the destruction of Israel rather than its aggrandizement.

Ambassador Freeman, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. A belated happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, and I hope you'll come and visit with us again next week. Thank you. Of course. Coming up later today, a busy and happy day at nine in the morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. At noon today, Matt Ho. At two o'clock this afternoon, Roger Waters. Yes, that Roger Waters from Pink Floyd. And at three o'clock following Roger, Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.