Judging Freedom - Matt Hoh: My 8 Days In Palestine.

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

Matt Hoh: My 8 Days In Palestine.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, November 27th, 2024, the day before Thanksgiving here in the U.S. Matt Ho joins us now, having just arrived home earlier today from his time in the Holy Land in Palestine and in Israel. Matt, welcome back. Welcome here. I know you'd probably rather be sleeping or crashing somehow, but thank you very much for your time. Deeply and profoundly appreciated. I'm glad you're back. Happy, healthy, and in one piece. Before we get to your observations of what you saw in Palestine and in Israel, I need your take on some events that occurred either while you were there or while you were flying home. Do you think that Netanyahu's hand was forced by Biden and forced by the

weaknesses of the IDF into a ceasefire with Lebanon without having achieved any of the goals he set out to achieve? Yeah, thanks, Judge, and thanks for having me on, being flexible with your schedule and everything. You know, I don't know how much leverage the White House actually has over the Israelis. I mean, they certainly had very little this past year. And now that Biden and his White House staff are lame ducks, I just don't really see them having much leverage at all. And there are reports there now of what, about a $700 million weapon sale, primarily of bombs and missiles going to Israel. So that could have been part of it. If you do this, we'll get these weapons through to you, although Trump's going to give them everything they want. So there's really not that kind of

leverage there. I think it's probably more judged to the latter point you said regarding the IDF's weakness, that they're overextended, they're exhausted. They went into Lebanon with a very difficult mission to accomplish, something that pretty much everyone on your channel is saying they wouldn't accomplish. And now nearly three months later, we've seen that. And so I think this ceasefire is a face-saving way for the Israelis to back out of Lebanon while also keeping options open. And so I'm agnostic as to whether or not the ceasefire will hold, whether it will make it the full 60 days, what will happen after the 60 days. But I think the thing that's apparent to us is that, yes, the IDF is exhausted. They're overextended, that their mission into Lebanon was simply a political ploy,

all right, to keep the ruling government in power, keep the war going, you know, so on and so forth. So that's my understanding of what's occurring there with that ceasefire. I want to jump to Ukraine for a few minutes, and then we'll come back to the Holy Land. How consequential do you think was the weapon that Vladimir Putin's Kremlin used in response to the attack inside Russia of American attack on some British storm shadow? And do you think the West perceives how consequential it is because they went right back into Russia with more attack on some storm shadows? We've heard the last three years, Judge, or nearly three years about the wonder weapons that the U.S. and its NATO allies are providing to Ukraine, how every iteration of these weapon systems, HIMARS

rockets, Abrams tanks, F-16 fighters, so on and so forth, were going to win the war or was going to be a game changer, as people like to say. And we saw that with this Russian intermediate range hypersonic missile. Best thing is a game changer. This thing has the ability to defeat and pass through any NATO air defense system. And the speed at which it travels, 10 times the speed of sound, it makes, it gives the Russians an upper hand in Europe that previously they had not had or previously had been something that existed on paper. And this demonstration of their capability certainly has put NATO and the United States on notice that the path they are going down is the path that,

again, Judge, just as we talked about with Lebanon, everyone on your channel has been saying, if you proceed down this path, United States, Britain, Brussels, if you go down this road, this is where it leads to. critical point in the last three years of war in Ukraine that when we hopefully get out of this thing and look back on, we'll say this was a key moment. This is a key marker, a key historical decision point. But what the White House will do, what the NATO allies will do going forward, they're scared to death that Trump is going to come in and end this war as if that would be such a horrible thing. But we are in such a dangerous position because rather than taking a step back and saying, okay, this is the capability Russians have. They just demonstrated it. They're telling us, they're communicating us very clearly. This is what they can do. We need to seriously, wisely, and maturely analyze where we're at and then maybe

do things differently. And of course, we're not seeing that from the people in DC, London, Brussels. Do you think that the West, President Biden, and the elites in the EU take Putin seriously? No, I think that the tropes, the narratives, the political messaging is what they actually do believe, that they have said it for so long that whether or not they actually once didn't believe it, knew it just simply as public relations and propaganda, they now have come to believe. And we see this. We see we know people in our lives, right? Our personal lives, Judge Wright, who believe their own lies. And I think that's essentially what we've had occur is that this misrepresentation of Vladimir Putin, this underestimation of him has created this belief in the West that he's

nothing more than a thug, that he's nothing more than a second rate mafioso. Along the same lines, we keep hearing over and over again, you know, the incoming NASA security advisor for Donald Trump, Mike Waltz, he keeps saying, you know, he describes Russia as a gas station with nuclear weapons. I mean, after the last several years, seeing the way Russia's economy has performed, how can anyone just call, you know, demean it that way? But these people believe the lies, they believe the rhetoric, they believe the propaganda. There's complex reasons for that involving their own ego, involving the ecosystems in which they operate. But I think we're again, another aspect is why it's so dangerous is because these world leaders, our world leaders, our U.S. and NATO allied leaders have a very upside down view of Vladimir Putin and Russia. And of course, that's why they keep choosing to

make these decisions that are, again, leading us down this path. You know, it's interesting you use the word thug. Here's Mike Waltz's soon to be either deputy or equal. It's not clear what job he's going to have, but it's going to be in the White House. Sebastian Gorka calling President Putin a thug. Cut number 10. I'll give one tip away that the president has mentioned. He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation, you will negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts. But obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about.

And obviously this is no way to start out a relationship with another foreign leader. But where is Trump neutralizing that? That's the concern, Judge, right? A couple of weeks ago, whenever the election was at this point, I'm sorry, I'm still on Middle Eastern time. But, you know, whenever whenever that was. Right. I think there was this hope and it was a false hope and kind of fool me, fool me, fool me once. Shame on me. Fool me. You know, that that type of thing.

You know, I'm messing that up even. But, you know, this is this belief or this idea that somehow Trump might do things differently with regards to foreign policy, the same hopes we had in his first administration. And it's clear with this administration that's coming in that it will be it'll be a neoconservative, you know, no different than the John Bolton's, the John McCains in their imperial outlook. It's just that they sound a bit different. They speak differently in ways, or they're maybe a little cruder, and they upset the people on the think tanks throughout Washington, D.C. But certainly the ultimate beneficiaries of the American imperial foreign policy, the militarized foreign policy, the weapons companies, the banks, the fossil fuel companies, they will be extremely happy with this incoming administration and where this goes. I think even the point of that, I think if we spoke about this probably a few months ago with what would Trump foreign policy look like, the ideal being that they would pull back from Russia, we might get a negotiated settlement to end the Ukraine war, but that essentially what they were concerned about was not spending $200 million to kill Russians, but rather to spend that money to kill Chinese or kill Iranians. But we see here, there's not even that, but there's not even that degree

of pullback from the European theater. And so just like the Biden administration, just like the Democrats, we're looking at potentially war in the next several years in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia. In addition to authorizing the use of American attack as offensive weaponry in Russia, the president also authorized anti-personal landmines. And Donald Trump, President Trump's incoming national security advisor, seems to have justified that. I want you to listen to what Mike Waltz said. It's reprehensible to me. But the most important thing is the very end of the sentence where it sounds like he still believes that the Ukraine military can somehow stop the Russians. Listen to this. Cut number 17, Chris. Well, these mines are the type that you can turn on, turn off.

They're smart mines. But at the same time, it is a step towards somewhat solidifying the lines. And we also needed to stop Russian gains. Stop Russian gains. Wait a minute. I thought we were going to stop the Ukrainians from fighting the Russians because the Russian victory is inevitable and the Ukrainian defeat is coming and Donald Trump's going to end this war in 24 hours. Did I miss something? Yeah, obviously, Judge, we did. We missed the memo on the narrative change, on the policy change. The best we can hope for with this, Judge, is go back to Afghanistan under Trump, where he let the generals, Kelly, Mattis, et cetera, do what they wanted in Afghanistan. So in the first two years of Donald Trump's administration,

the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than Bush or Obama had. But then when that didn't work, Trump negotiated with the Taliban, and eventually that brought about an end to that war. Taliban took power, but the horror, the brutality, the death of that war has finally came to an end. Did we use anti-personnel landmines in Afghanistan? No, we did not. The only place, so there's a ban on landmines. This was initiated in the 1990s. The United States does not take part in that ban because of its desire to utilize landmines in Korea.

But this idea that you're somehow going to utilize the landmines in Ukraine. First of all, Waltz, he's talking the way they talk about these weapon systems, that they're perfect, that they have no fault. In those landmines that do turn on and off, there's a high rate of failure on those. But also to the point that you're alluding to, Judge, and that we've talked about before, the idea of using the Ukrainians, using Ukraine to destroy Russia, and in the process, of course, destroying Ukraine, right? So destroying Ukraine to save Ukraine. That's what you're doing here. You already have a substantial part of Ukraine, about a fifth, maybe a fifth of the country, maybe 15% of the country, that is inundated with what we call the legacies of war. So even if we had a magic wand, if Donald Trump had a magic wand,

he hadn't put these military industrial complex ghouls and warmongering fantasists into his administration, and he wanted to end the war and he did it, you'd still have this reality that the Ukrainians have a land that has been completely inundated with what we call the legacies of war. So it's unexploded ordnance, it's things like landmines, and it's, of course, the toxic remnants of war, the things that cause women to give birth for generations to dead, to deformed, to disabled babies. And if people aren't familiar with that, ask the Laotians, ask the Cambodians, ask the Vietnamese, ask the Iraqis. That's what's in store for the Ukrainian people for generations to come, is that their children will be born dead, disabled, or deformed because of the remnants of war.

And so you see, just here's another thing, we're going to throw more landmines in, and this is going to stop the Russians. And if it even does stop the Russians, it means that you're dealing with generations upon generations of Ukrainians who are going to be stripped, who are going to be prevented from using their lands, because all these mines, as well as everything else, have infested the lands and made the land uninhabitable, unusable, essentially rendered eastern Ukraine into a no man's land. What is your impression of the Israeli economy today from the time you just spent there? It's in really bad shape. I think we've talked about this before, Judge, the numbers,

in a sense of seeing the money leaving the country, the foreign investment not going into it, the 40,000 plus businesses have closed, one of the four major ports in Israel going bankrupt, those types of things. But, you know, just saw other numbers, almost 35% decrease in imports and a similar decrease in exports in the last year. So, you know, the numbers themselves show that Israel is in a perilous position, but there's a huge caveat to that. I'll get to in a moment. But when I was there in Israel and in Palestine, you could see it. You could see this economic bleeding out occurring in real time. And the big thing where you see it is in the tourism. You know, you see it in the fact that Israeli tourism is down about 75%. And when you're in Jerusalem, it's empty.

I'll give some examples. People may be familiar with this. Judge, we had a problem with our schedule one day because the Palestinians we were going to meet in Jerusalem weren't allowed to go into Palestine, weren't allowed to go in Jerusalem. This is a consequence of the apartheid policy of the Israeli government that Palestinians can't go places, you know, Jerusalem or to other cities, what have you. So we had some free time. So we went to the Mount of Olives. And, you know, it's a beautiful Friday morning. Sky was blue, probably about 68 degrees. There should have been 1,000, 1,500 people, you know, on the Mount of Olives as there normally would be. We were the only group there.

We were the only group of people for more than an hour at that spot. And then we walked down the hill to the Garden of Gethsemane and went into the, you know, the Church of Nations down there. The same thing, too. There was nobody else there. We went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. If anyone's ever been there, and for people who don't know, that's the site of Jesus' crucifixion and his burial. And normally you're there and it's like you're online for Space Mountain at Disney World, right? I mean, like it's a mob scene. And no, it kind of reminded me of walking through a supermarket late at night. You know, there's some people there, but it's not very busy. So, I mean, you saw this over and over again. I mean, I can give you a lot of examples of places you go into, you talk to the restaurant owners,

they've laid off all their staff. The hotel we are staying at, they had had no visitors, no hotel guests for the 10 months prior to our arrival. And after we left, they were shutting down again. So you can just see that the emptiness, the consequence of this war in terms of the bankrupting of Israel. And of course, then if it's bad for Israel, it's worse for the Palestinians. So the Palestinians who've been under an economic strangulation for decades by the Israelis, well, a fifth of their workforce prior to October 7th worked in Israel. And this affects Israelis as well. But since October 7th of 2023, that 200,000 Palestinian workforce has been unable to go into Israel to work. There's rumors that about 20 or 30 thousand of those are still getting in because Israelis really do need them.

But what you see then is in Palestine, in the West Bank, you see an unemployment rate of 60 percent. And we can go on, you know, different points. But the one caveat I want to mention, Judge, is, well, how is Israel surviving? How are they going to get by on this? And that's because of the United States loan guarantee. That's back that the United States is a guarantor of Israeli debt. And so since last year, in the last 13 months, you've seen a 300 to maybe 300 or 400% increase in the amount of debt, the amount of bonds that Israel has issued. And you say, who's buying these things? Why would they be buying them? Noting, knowing the reality of the economic situation, the military situation, the political situation for Israel? Well, it's

because these bonds, this debt is backed by the United States. We guarantee it. So it'd be like you or I getting a mortgage and having Elon Musk co-signing with us. And this is essentially where the Israelis come back on, why they're willing to go the way they are, why they're willing to allow themselves to be isolated by the world, to hurt themselves economically, to overextend, exhaust their military, to cause their own political chaos, friction. People talk about civil war. I don't think it'll get to that point, but it's also something that you just can't dismiss outright. And the point is that they can do it because the United States is going to continue

to back them financially and be that guarantor, be that co-signer for them going forward. Were you able to get into Gaza? No, no, Judge. Nobody gets into Gaza. Nobody gets into Gaza. And even talking to people from Amra, talking to people from Palestinian civil society, talking to someone who is a medical worker, even those folks, they're getting into Gaza, has been greatly diminished by the Israelis.

I think people watching and listening would expect. What are we looking at, Matt? So that is part of a public information campaign that was in Ramallah. Ramallah is the third biggest city in Palestine. It's the administrative capital of Palestine. It's where the Palestinian Authority has their headquarters. And this is a public information campaign called Unmute Gaza. So throughout Ramallah, you'd see posters like this,

other ones. And, you know, I don't think it was so much to tell the Palestinians to speak up about Gaza, although they are under a lot of pressure not to speak. When we went to Nablus, we visited the university students there, and they were related to us how four of their friends had been arrested in the last several months. They've spent three months, four months in prison now because they have posted on Instagram. Arrested by whom and for what? By the Israeli army. And so the Israeli army controls everything in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Isn't the West Bank another country? everything in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Isn't the West Bank another country?

Isn't the West Bank Palestine? Or is it occupied like Gaza is? It's occupied to full military occupation. Israeli military controls all aspects, something like 16,000 regulations issued by the Israeli military that the Palestinians live under. And that trumps everything. People will say, well, about the Oslo Accords, they created areas A and B and C and an area that Palestinians have sovereignty. Now it's meaningless. It's impractical reality and truth. What was the most lasting impression of everything you saw? Well, for me, you know, meeting with Palestinians who have been directly affected by the occupation. So as you're showing

here, this is Fakhri and his wife Amna, whose home have been demolished by the Israelis. The Israelis have demolished, well, since 1948, they've demolished about 175,000 homes, Palestinian homes. In the last year, they've demolished a couple thousand, I believe, different structures, many of them homes throughout Palestine. In this case, it was the home that Fakhri had been born in. And the Israelis claimed that this was an illegal building, an illegal structure. And they tore it down. And the purposes, of course, are to make room for settlers. So this is in Jerusalem.

It's an area called Silwan. Dozens of homes have been destroyed by the Israelis in the last five, six, seven years to make room for settlers. And just in the last month, on the day of the American elections, in fact, five, six, seven years to make room for settlers. And just in the last month, on the day of the American elections, in fact, Judge, six or seven homes in Silwan were destroyed. And so now Fakhir and his wife live in a trailer next to the rubble of the home, again, the home he was born in. And that trailer is under demolition orders. And there's another 100 homes, Palestinian homes, just in that neighborhood that have demolition orders against them. And, you know, I mean, to top it all off is that the Israelis, after they demolish your home, they give you a bill for about $10,000 to pay for your own home demolition.

I mean, so the cruelty here, the cruelty here is just immense. But the Israelis definitely understand that this is the best opportunity they have. In Fakhri's case, in Amna's case, they've had, they're quite prominent. He leads the efforts in the area to resist these home demolitions.

And so he has representatives from international organizations like the UN, representatives from NGOs like MSD International or whatnot come and visit him. He also has governmental representatives. And he's had American embassy officials come into his home and say, we're going to help you out. And of course, they do nothing. And I said in a piece I wrote on Substack about all this, that what Fakir said about these high level visitors who come and visit him, he said, they're all liars. And as I said in my post of the eight days I was in Palestine, that was the

probably truest thing I heard the entire time was that they're all liars. This is Leon Nasir. We spoke about her briefly last week, Judge. She's a 24-year-old Christian woman who has been held for eight months by the Israelis without charge. I mentioned that she's Christian because I think for many Americans, for many Westerners, they don't realize that Christians, Palestinian Christians, endure the same apartheid, they endure the same annexation, the land theft, the annihilation that the Palestinian Muslims do. This is her mother, Lulu. When they came and they took Leanne, because Leanne was living with her parents, they put a rifle in Lulu's face and said, be quiet or we will shoot you. And so Lulu and her husband have not seen their only daughter

now in eight months. She's being held in what's called a ministry of detention. So there's 12,000, more than 12,000 Palestinians from the West Bank being held in the ministry of detention. We have no idea the number of thousands upon thousands of Palestinians from Gaza who have been essentially kidnapped, tortured, executed. But we do know with this 12,000 of the West Bank who are being held by the Israelis, about half are held without charge and they can be held for as long as Israelis want them to. We also know that the Israelis torture systematically and deliberately, that nearly all the Palestinians who go into Israeli captivity are tortured and many of them are sexually abused. They're raped. A friend of mine who I had not seen

in seven years, a Palestinian, he's a member of the Palestinian resistance there in the West Bank. He has been arrested a number of times. Every time he is arrested, he is raped. I mean, this is the reality. And I know men who led the resistance there who have been broken by this. So it is a cruel, barbaric, sadistic system meant to break the spirit of the Palestinian people, meant to subjugate them, meant to destroy their resistance. How do you, before we go, how do you see this ending? You know, Judge, this is really, really awful to say, but I don't see any hope for the Palestinians. I don't see anyone coming in to intervene for them. As the Israelis can do what they want, as long as they want,

because the United States is backing them. This here on the left is a gentleman whose entire family, Nasser's entire family, or nearly the entire family, were killed in one airstrike in Gaza. He's in Ramallah in the West Bank. Most of his family lives in Gaza. And on November 1st, a single Israeli airstrike using American-supplied bombs killed 130 members of his family. I mean, so as I said in my piece on Substack, to shake a man's hand like that, to shake someone's hand who had 130 members of his family killed by weapons provided by my government,

I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do about that. But the idea of where this is going, I think one of the things that you're going to see is as the Israelis concentrate on the West Bank, it's clear that they are going to annex it. They have said it out loud. You can see the preparations being made. They're overt about it, is that the Palestinian resistance will be West Bank is not nearly as armed and as organized as, say, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups in Gaza, you will still see a level of violence in the West Bank that we haven't seen in 30 years. We're seeing it right now. I mean, essentially, you're seeing levels of violence in the West Bank higher than at any point since the second Intifada, which ended 20, 23 years ago. Detentions in the West Bank is another example of the highest they've been since the first Intifada, which ended in 1992 or 1993.

I mean, so you're seeing extremely high levels of violence in the West Bank that as Israelis progress forward on annexing it, will be met with a very stiff resistance from the Palestinians. And of course, who will intervene? Who will help them? I think this really strategy will be to destroy the Palestinians in the rural areas, what are called areas B and C, essentially push them out, pogroms, if you will, destroy their villages. And then they'll isolate the major urban areas to cities which is essentially what they're doing already but they'll really isolate and fully isolate them and they'll just try and let the people there uh die on the vine if you will just wither away and i think that's the strategy we're

going to see in the next few years uh from the israelis sounds like it'll only get worse under Trump that they really have no hope. Matt, you're an American hero, a genuine, genuine hero to go there and look at this and expose all of it to the extent that you did. Thank you for your time. I know you're operating on very little sleep and your body clock is 10,000 miles away, get a good night's sleep and happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. All right. Thanks, Judge. And happy Thanksgiving to everybody who's watching and listening as well. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a terrific week. Thank you for watching. We are very, very close to our goal of 500,000 subscriptions. We have four weeks to go. Four weeks from today is Christmas. We will have some surprises for you, things you saw a long time ago and things you haven't seen yet on the

Thanksgiving weekend, including, of course, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern. From my heart to yours in this quintessential American holiday, happy Thanksgiving. Be thankful for the freedoms that we do have and hopeful for freedom, peace, and limited government to come. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Welcome