Judging Freedom - AMB. Chas Freeman: Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

AMB. Chas Freeman: Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?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 Wednesday, October 9th, 2024. Ambassador Charles Freeman joins us now. Ambassador Freeman, it's a pleasure. Dear sir, thank you very much for all the time you spend with us. The audience loves you. I love the privilege of being able to pick your brain. Let's start with some sort of big picture, if we could. How has the landscape in the Middle East changed in the past year, since October 7, 2023, as you view it? Well, for one thing, the United States has lost all credibility and clout.

Political influence, we're still enormously powerful militarily, but nobody in the region takes our advice. Nobody even asks our advice anymore. That is certainly the case with Israel. It's the case with the Turks. We, of course, have no dialogue with Iran, which is a major factor in the region. Therefore, we can't play a diplomatic role with Iran. We've just seen in a meeting between the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, that is Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, in Doha, in Qatar, at which they proclaimed their neutrality between Israel and Iran. And by implication, and I think they've confirmed this, they will not allow us to use our bases in those countries

to join in an Israeli assault on Iran. Among other things, to go back to your question, this puts an end to the notion that somehow we could bootstrap normalization with Israel by Saudi Arabia and others onto some kind of alliance, some kind of Middle Eastern NATO directed at Iran. That's not going to happen. So I think the changes have been enormous. And that's even without mentioning the fact that Israel has become the most hated country on the planet and subject to ostracism rather than people pursuing contacts with it. So pretty profound changes it's a lot of this due to uh what you uh ambassador have characterized as the worst or the least respected however you want to whatever words you want to use state

department u.s state department world war ii well i think a good deal of it does have to do with inept leadership from the Department of State by Secretary Blinken, who has singularly failed, I think, in virtually every diplomatic endeavor that he's undertaken. And in the case of the Middle East, he has been as much a representative of Israeli interests and demands as he has been of those of the United States or others in the region. But the basic fact is, as I said earlier, since we don't have relations with Iran, we don't have relations with Syria, we don't have a productive relationship with Lebanon. We don't have any relationship with the de facto government in Yemen, which is the Houthis. And our relations with Erdogan in Turkey are estranged. And Egypt is no longer content to follow our lead. We really don't

have any way of exercising diplomatic influence in the region, and we're not. I don't want to leave Israel, but I must comment on this. We don't have diplomatic relations with Russia anymore, do we? We don't even know when the last time is that Secretary Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov even communicated with each other. Well, we do have an ambassador in Moscow and we have channels of communication, but we don't have contacts at the top level. Ironically, it turns out that former President Trump has been talking to Vladimir Putin on the telephone. And one has to assume national security agencies got records of those conversations, but President Biden hasn't.

Secretary Blinken has not talked to Lavrov, to my knowledge. We've had a couple of calls from Lloyd Austin, our Secretary of Defense, to his counterpart in Moscow, apparently mostly warning the Russians on various subjects. Bob Woodward's new book apparently has it that on a number of occasions the Russians really did appear to be about to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and were warned off by either Jake Sullivan or Lloyd Austin. So we do have the ability to send a message, but we don't have the ability to have a dialogue to listen as well as talk. And that means this isn't really diplomacy it isn't really diplomacy uh is israel today a year after october 7th uh stronger more powerful more stable weaker

suffering less stable or something in between those two extremes? No, it's definitely weaker. It has had a number of casualties, soldiers perishing on the battlefield, or I should say, in the course of the extermination campaign that Israel has been conducting in Gaza, and which it has now extended to southern Lebanon. The battles there apparently are taking their toll. But militarily, because the United States has continued to give Israel a blank check and supply it with all the weapons it wants to use for these purposes, it is still very strong militarily. Politically, it's deeply weakened.

The Netanyahu government has gained some ground domestically by following the bloodthirsty demands of the Israeli public, but the Israeli economy is in tatters. We know now from the finance minister, the infamous Mr. Smotrich, that nearly $67 billion have been spent on the war so far, and there's more to come. Israel has not succeeded in releasing the hostages. plan for dealing with the day after, either in Gaza, where it wants to annex the northern part of Gaza and then reoccupy the rest of Gaza, presumably a military government similar to the one that they installed in the West Bank or that they had before the 2006 withdrawal from Gaza. There's no plan, apparently, no strategy for dealing with Lebanon after this.

The whole policy and effort brokered by the United States to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the Gulf states has failed definitively. The peace Camp David Accords with Egypt are in trouble. Jordan is furious but frightened of what might come. And Iran retains the ability to control events. It can decide what it wants to do on its own. And it has several times shown that, contrary to what you read in the mainstream media here, Israel cannot defend itself effectively against missile attacks from Iran. And it can't even

defend itself much at all without the direct involvement of the United States Navy and other elements of the U.S. forces. So Israel is in trouble. Its people are emigrating, not immigrating. Its startup businesses, which were the pride of the world, have mostly left. No new investment is coming in. Tourism is dead. The sources of income, revenue for the Israeli state are drying up. And of course, that's reflected in write-downs of Israel's status by the rating agencies, which means it's going to have to pay higher interest on the huge debt it is now accumulating. Not stronger, no, weaker.

Do you have any inkling that the Israeli government was either complicit in or knowingly looked the other way upon the events of October 7th, 2023? I doubt very much that there was any complicity. I think this was a classic intelligence failure, meaning that there was plenty of information to warn people, but people were complacent, and they thought that the warnings were nonsense because they didn't fit the narrative.

The narrative was, we have Hamas under control. We've even got its paymasters working with us to keep it under control. Netanyahu's approach of divide and rule for the Palestinians, in which Qatar and others supplied money to Hamas in Gaza, was thought by him to have bought Hamas off. Palestinian nationalism was smoldering and certainly the Israeli intelligence agencies knew that. But the politicians dismissed their fears.

This is much like 9-11. There were plenty of warnings that we were going to be attacked, but they didn't fit the narrative in the White House. And so they were ignored. So I don't think there's any evidence of complicity. I think it was a shock. But once it happened, Netanyahu and company immediately saw it as an opportunity to complete the mission of Zionism, that is, to make Palestine a land without people,

which could be settled by Israelis, by Jews. And also, and this is the current objective, to continue to provoke a wider war in the region with Iran, which could drag the United States in and therefore complete the process of establishing Israel as the hegemonic power in the region. Of course, we earlier obligingly knocked out Iraq. Now the hope in the Israeli cabinet is we'll help them knock out Iran. A day more difficult task, but something that evidently is being discussed between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu. Colonel McGregor, who's an admirer of yours,

makes the following analogy to Prime Minister Netanyahu's efforts to fight a 3-4-5-6-7 front war of Custer at Little Bighorn, who sent his troops out chasing whatever Native Americans he could find, only to find about 100,000 of them all gathered in one place, and by the next day, Custer and his troops were gone. Is that a realistic probability, given the unpopularity, bellicosity, and economic weakness of Israel as we speak? Well, I think Doug McGregor is right that the belligerence that Israel is showing is more likely to harm it than to do in its enemies.

But I don't expect Israel to be done in by its enemies. The enemy of Israel, the peril that Israel faces, has always been primarily internal rather than external. It has the drop on its neighbors with guns. It is more powerful than they are. What it doesn't have anymore is any moral authority either in the region or beyond it. I noted a remark by Admiral Kirby after the murder of Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, he said he couldn't imagine anybody was mourning his death. Well, that just demonstrated his incredible ignorance because there have been demonstrations all over the Muslim world and indeed in our own country to mourn Nasrallah.

And I don't see any comparable demonstrations of consequence to support Netanyahu. So what he's doing is not strengthening Israel, but as I said earlier, weakening it and putting it really in peril. cabinet are basically indistinguishable from fascist, racist, genocidal Nazis. Ambassador, I think I know the answer to this. Is Israel its own worst enemy? But I have two questions. The second question is you can answer them in either order, of course. When you were Assistant Secretary of Defense, did you ever work with Admiral Kirby? No, thank goodness, I did not. What was the other question?

The other question is, is Israel its own worst enemy? Yes, of course. That has always been the case. You know, you've got to remember that this struggle to establish Jewish supremacy in Palestine and to rid Palestine of Palestinians goes back a century. And, you know, ironically, Judaism is an admirable religion. Jews in Europe were mostly indifferent to Zionism until the Holocaust occurred and scared the bejesus out of them. And they naturally wanted to go along with the idea of establishing a state in which Jews would be the absolute majority. There might be a small minority of other people,

but they'd be easily controlled. And the state of Israel would provide a home for Jews, which would secure them. But there has been no place on earth which is less secure for Jews, more dangerous. And that is why more and more people from Israel are immigrating, because they can't be confident of their own safety there. The Israeli armed forces, which have been the pride of Israelis, have failed. And at the same time, you have the

generals in those forces and the heads of intelligence, Israel's formidable Mossad and Shin Bet, counseling the government that it needs a political solution. It can't have a military solution to its security problems. So you have a divided country which seems to be unable to produce the sort of crisis of conscience, introspection that South African white people managed, which caused them to abandon apartheid. Israel's not abandoning apartheid, it's strengthening it. Israel's not abandoning genocide, it's continuing and expanding it. Israel is not abandoning the effort at ethnic cleansing,

which the South Africans never attempted. It's intensifying it. So all these things are not answers. They create more problems than they solve. Ambassador, Secretary Blinken has spent months telling the American people and anybody else that would listen that a ceasefire in Gaza is imminent. Yes. Was he lying?

I can't tell whether he was lying or deceiving himself. I suspect it's the latter. He doesn't apparently know how to listen. If you don't listen, you can't figure out where the other party is coming from. If you don't know where the other party is coming from, you can't devise an effective strategy for bringing him over to your side. You can't devise an effective method of convincing him or the movement that he or she represents to want to do things your way, to believe that your counsel, that it would be in his or her interest to do that, is correct, that it would benefit them. But there's no evidence that he's engaged in any of that. The only discussions during this whole time have been about releasing the hostages,

combined with a brief pause in the genocide, after which Israel would resume it. And in the midst of all this, Israel kept assassinating the people who were essential to reaching a deal. So there wasn't a deal sought by Israel. And I think Antony Blinken was taken to the cleaners by the Israelis. So aside from Secretary Blinken, the folks largely involved in efforts to bring about some sort of a ceasefire and some sort of a hostage exchange appear to have been Bill Burns, the director of the CIA, admittedly an odd role for him. You know the American directors of CIA prior to Burns always operated, I should say prior to Pompeo, always operated below the radar screen. You can comment on that as you see fit in a minute, Ambassador. Amos Hochstein, born in Israel and fought for the IDF, now holding dual citizenship, and one of those Victoria Nuland-type survivors, because he's worked for both Republicans and Democrats, a guy named Brett McGurk.

Were they duped by Netanyahu into thinking he and the Israeli government really wanted to negotiate a ceasefire in exchange of hostages? Or were they part of Netanyahu's duping the public into believing that the Israelis are serious and wanting to negotiate. Three comments. First, the reason Bill Burns has been doing diplomatic work is because Blinken has not been. And that is the strongest reproach on Blinken that you could imagine, that when there was serious diplomacy to be done, he was pushed aside and an old diplomat who now heads the CIA was brought in. Second, American foreign policy has become an instrument of Israeli foreign policy.

American defense policy has become an instrument of Israeli military policy. American defense policy has become an instrument of Israeli military policy. So third, unfortunately, after the end of the Cold War, Americans got the idea that foreign affairs, foreign relations were somehow a discretionary pursuit that you could either undertake or not, and that therefore you could afford to, we could afford to apply the same system to foreign affairs that we apply to domestic affairs.

So if you look at, for example, the Bureau of Handicapped Affairs in the government, it is always headed by a handicapped person, and the handicapped make the government. It is always headed by a handicapped person and the handicapped make the policies. Well, I mean, that's a good way of doing that. But in foreign affairs, the Black Caucus got Haiti because people in Haiti are black and for no other reason. The Save the Whales crowd got Norway and sometimes Japan. Multiple franchises were given to different groups on China, religious freedom, protectionist economic interests, and so forth.

And in the Middle East, virtually everybody in authority is a Zionist, many of them Jewish, some not, committed Zionists, meaning that they listen to the government of Israel and Lebanon, who doesn't, by the way, talk to Hezbollah, which is the real issue there, because we don't talk to the people who really are essential to buy into solutions. And that person is a dual national. You really have to wonder which side he's speaking for and how much credibility the Lebanese give him. I mean, at a minimum, that is a pretty cynical approach. So this is not a problem limited to the Middle East, but it is one that is most acute in the Middle East, and it may have something to do with the utter fecklessness of American policy in recent years. There's no peace process. There has not been a peace process

since the turn of the century, and that was botched by some of the same people who claim influence now. Is the CIA director a committed Zionist? No, not to my knowledge. I think Bill Burns is a very professional diplomat, distinguished career in the Foreign Service, a possible candidate for Secretary of State. After all, he's been doing a fair amount of the Secretary of State's job. And I have every reason to believe that he's quite objective and he's devoted to the interests of the United States above all others. I want to play for you a clip, Ambassador.

It's about a minute and a half long. It's a reporter questioning the spokesperson for the State Department. This is the State Department at its worst, but it's also a reporter brilliantly and articulately cataloging the failures and inconsistencies of this State Department. And I'd like your thoughts on a cut number seven, Chris. So Israel is still poised to strike Iran. And in July, Blinken said that Iran was one to two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon. So I guess for all we know, they might have one by now. And meanwhile, in Ukraine, they've struck deep within Russian territory several times, as deep as 300

miles from the border. And in that case, we don't have to guess. We know that Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, as many as 6,000 warheads. And so one of the risks of arming militaries that are striking in the territories of nuclear powers is that one of those gets deployed and then it could escalate very quickly from there. So it's rarely discussed, but it's important to address that the nuclear risk is real and it could very abruptly mean the end of what humans have worked for thousands of years to collectively achieve. And us today are very lucky to live in with the fruits of that achievement. And I feel like we're treating the risks kind of brazenly. So my question for you is, you know, we often hear in response to these concerns that, well, Putin, Khomeini, you know, they're war criminals, they're terrorists,

as if they're too inherently evil or immoral for us to negotiate with. But meanwhile, this administration has financed a genocide in Gaza for the last year. And every day you're up there denying accountability for it. So I mean, what gives you the right to lecture other countries on their moral? So if you have a policy question for me, I'm happy to take it. If you want to give a speech, there are plenty of places in Washington where you can give a speech. Yeah, but people are sick of the bullshit in here. I mean, it is a genocide. You are abetting it. And you are risking nuclear war in Ukraine for this proxy war.

Plenty of other places to give a speech. Go ahead. Well, I'll make several comments. First of all, the loathsome Mr. Miller is a political appointee, not a career official. He was previously, I understand, a Zionist spokesman on Fox News, which you may or may not remember, given your own affiliations there. But he has aimed primarily, and this is the great failing of the Biden administration in foreign policy,

he's aiming at spinning stuff for domestic audiences and not influencing foreigners. Every time he opens his mouth, he costs the United States credibility internationally. But the issue, the questionnaire, I mean, he was asking a question, a very aggressive question, almost in the style of the British press, rather than the meek, subservient American mainstream media, that was a very good question. aiding and abetting is the one set of actions that could direct Iran to become a nuclear weapons state. That is to say, we are giving Iran every reason to develop a nuclear deterrent or even to use it in default since it has no effective method of fending off Israel, apparently, other than nuclear weapons. So this is incredibly

dangerous. We're playing games in Ukraine that threaten nuclear weapons. I mentioned Bob Woodward's book and the reports that there were apparently serious indications of a Russian intention to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But here, too, we are pushing Iran to follow North Korea into developing nuclear weapons, despite the very strong religious scruples that up to now have held it back from doing so. We think Iran has enough nuclear material to build four bombs. Whether it could put them in a missile warhead and have it get to Israel or not, I don't know. Whether it would take, as some people say, a few days or it would take a few weeks or even a month for it to do that. I also don't know. But this is very, very dangerous. We are provoking Iran to do what we do not want it to do, and we're not talking

to it either. The reporter is named Liam Cosgrove, and he works for our friend Max Blumenthal at the Gray Zone. I thought he was brilliant and articulate, and we're trying to reach him to ask him to come on the show. Ambassador, thank you for your time. Thank you for your comments. As always, from my perspective, I could talk to you for hours, but we limit ourselves to about 30 minutes on this show. But thank you so much for your time, dear Ambassador. I hope you'll come back again soon. Let's buy each other a beer sometime. Oh, you got it. You got it. That's a deal. That's a deal. It's an excuse for me to come up to where you live in beautiful New England. Thank you. All the best. And to you too. Thank you. Still to come at three o'clock this afternoon, Phil Giraldi and at four o'clock, Liam Cosgrove's colleague, Aaron Matei. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.