Judging Freedom - Max Blumental: Do you ever wonder what's really driving the Israel-Hamas conflict?

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

How do key players like @POTUS, Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Erdogan, President Al-Sisi, and the King of Jordan shape the course and outcome of this ongoing feud?In our conversation with @TheGrayzoneNews editor and founder @MaxBlumenthal , we pull back the curtain to explore the international and regional pressures that may influence the future course of this conflict, offering you a deep understanding of the geopolitics at play.We navigate through the roles and stances of regional actors, providing an insightful analysis of Erdogan's fiery rhetoric, his political base, and Turkey's controversial support of Israel's war effort.We also unravel the paradox of Al-Sisi's stance, shedding light on his complex geopolitical chess moves.Join us as we critically evaluate President Biden's policy in the situation and discuss the internal pressures faced by Israel's leaders. This conversation will offer you a unique perspective on how these dynamics could potentially lead to a resumption of hostilities, an insight you can't afford to miss.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, November 29th, 2023. Our next guest is someone I have waited for a long time to have the opportunity to share a camera and microphone with. He is, of course, the inimitable Max Blumenthal, a courageous journalist, a brilliant intellect, and a fearless writer.

He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gray Zone. Andy joins us now. Max, it's a pleasure. Thank you for coming here. The pleasure is mine. I'm a fan of the show. Where do you see the, thank you, where do you see the conflagration between Israel and Hamas going in the next 48 hours when the truce is over. I can see a lot of pressure on Israel to extend the truce coming from Biden, who's terrified of his political, dwindling political fortunes at home. His base is collapsing over his

warm physical embrace of Netanyahu and the massive amount of military aid, including bunker buster bombs he's delivering to support Israel's exterminationist rampage throughout Gaza. There's pressure coming down on the Israelis from within the talks in Qatar, which are taking place right now. You'll notice that Tony Blinken's not there. It's Bill Burns, the CIA director. He's really running the show here. And David Barnea, the Mossad chief, is there as well. And they have Hamas on the line. They're talking about releasing more captives. And the question is, when does it reach a point where the rest of the captives become superfluous?

And at what point does Netanyahu and his security chiefs, who are responsible for this entire disaster of October 7th on so many levels and who are being held responsible by the Israeli public, when do they have to go back to war because they cannot afford to have this war end without satisfying their maximalist terms of regime change in Gaza, of months and months of warfare, completely changing the regional calculus and restoring what they call deterrence? When does that take place? I don't think it's the next 48 hours, but I think there's enormous pressure internally in Israel for that to take place. Do you think that regional actors from President Erdogan to President al-Sisi to the King of Jordan will allow the type of extermination that Prime Minister Netanyahu

had begun to continue. Well, Erdogan has used a lot of tough, flamboyant rhetoric. He has, within his AKP base, guys who are actually trying to go to the Syrian border and basically hitch a ride to fight Israel. I mean, he has to satisfy a base that's completely whipped up and he's doing nothing about it. He's allowing oil and gas to transit through Azerbaijan to Israel. A lot of the fuel that Israel is relying on for its war effort is coming through Turkey. So he's done nothing. What Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has done has been very interesting because here's someone who came into power basically exterminating the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the first elected government in 5,000 years,

which had started to allow things to open up with respect to the Gaza Strip. They're much more sympathetic to Hamas. He has the elected president basically killed in prison. So you would think that he would also agree with Israel's goal of eradicating Hamas. who are desperate refugees in a state that has 80 million people who are already largely many living below the poverty line. Sisi has said, we will sacrifice millions of lives to prevent our country from being flooded with refugees. So he has blocked what the Biden administration initially called for, which was a quote, civilian corridor to Egypt, which was crazy because what it meant was Biden and his people were signing on to the Israeli policy of ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, which is a goal supported by many Israelis that would be a continuation of the policy that created the Gaza Strip as a walled-in human warehouse that is engaged in armed resistance to end this endless siege and

cavalry that Palestinians have experienced. So Egypt has blocked that, and that has taken a huge option off the table for the Israelis. And we should also consider what's happening militarily in the Gaza Strip, what we've seen through this truce. We have seen Hamas's armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and Saraya al-Quds of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad emerge in the center of Gaza City with large crowds, bringing these captives to Red Crescent staffers to be released into Israel and demonstrating that they still can kind of control the battlefield in the northern Gaza Strip when Israel has destroyed all of the civilian infrastructure, but they have failed to penetrate into the Hamas organization, into its military wing, and do any structural damage to it.

So, so far, this has been a major, I would say, a military failure for Israel. Israel has killed more women and children in eight weeks than the Russians have killed in 18 months in Ukraine. this kind of mass slaughter of innocent civilians for something as basic as he can't afford to lose Michigan, for something as profound as it's a war crime, Joe. Yeah. I mean, what did he, I don't know what they expected Israel to do. They keep saying, oh, well, we ordered, we urged them to use smaller bombs, small diameter bombs. And now we're asking them to be very precise if they go into the south of Gaza, where one, like hundreds of thousands of people have been pushed into refugee camps built on top of refugee camps. That's not Israel's military doctrine.

Israel's military doctrine has been spelled out clearly by its army chiefs of staff since Gadi Eizenkot was chief of staff during the second Lebanon war in 2006. It's called the Dahiya doctrine. It is a doctrine of state terror, of attacking the civilian population and demoralizing them to the point that they turn on the political leadership. And that's what they think will happen if they, that's what they thought would happen if they destroyed northern Gaza, which is much wealthier than the southern part. It's where all the administrative government offices are, where more of the cultural centers were. And so they actually targeted everything from government buildings, press buildings to UN schools, UN buildings.

Journalists were killed at home. And they've killed more journalists and UN workers than they've killed Hamas commanders because that's their doctrine. And now Biden is shocked. The New York Times is saying it's a very, Israel's liberal use of explosives is shocking, even experts. And the rate of the killing of children is historically unprecedented. Well, this is the essence of the Israeli military doctrine. Israel's military is basically a bunch of TikTokers who are trained to push buttons and hide in tanks and operate on screens with remote-controlled machine guns and drones to attack civilians, but they're not going to be able to fight face-to-face. And their special forces,

you know, Sayeret Maktal that's actually in Gaza right now, they've had two officers resign because they failed to get fire support during an ambush, meaning they couldn't fight face to face without artillery, F-16s, drones backing them up along with tanks that they could run and hide into. So I just don't see where the military goes from here except for further extermination that is tantamount to genocide without any structural degradation of the Hamas military organization. Let's go back to October 6th. I'm sure you have seen the piece in the Financial Times about the half-dozen female tank operators who attempted to report unusual drone activity

on the other side of the border between Israel and Gaza, which was dismissed by their male superiors. And you've probably seen the piece either in the Telegram or the BBC explaining the observations of 10 or 11 different militias training in Gaza to take over buildings and to capture hostages. It's hard to believe that the vaunted Mossad didn't know about this. What's your take about what Bibi knew and didn't know and whether he knowingly looked the other way because he needed the war to stay in power? Well, I don't think that the Israeli security services or Netanyahu would have allowed something like October 7th to take place because it's been so devastating to their image that they need to project on the world stage as the masters

of suppressing indigenous resistance, suppressing arrestive indigenous population, because that's something that they can market. They can market their surveillance wares and their weapons and their fencing to countries around the world that are seeking to keep refugees out or seeking to seal up their border. Now it's clear their intelligence services are kind of a joke. I mean, a lot of people don't know this, but not only did Hamas and PIJ commandos get into military bases and wipe out the entire division that was enforcing the siege of Gaza, the Gaza division. But 10 commandos actually used that as a distraction or a smokescreen to get into one of the most sensitive Israeli military bases called Yarkon, which is a key base of Unit 8200, Israel's cybersecurity force, which contained computers that had lists of intelligence operatives,

confidential operatives inside Gaza, all kinds of information that if it had been retrieved would have been explosive and would have given Hamas much more negotiating leverage than they currently have. They didn't make it out of that base because it was so far away they were actually eliminated. But it exposed how badly the Israeli intelligence services had performed. And the reason that they were, one reason why their performance was so poor on October 7th was just the general chauvinistic racist attitude towards Gaza that they weren't capable of something like this. And second, that Netanyahu has always sought to avoid, along with his security chiefs, a major, major long-term war against Gaza, like the one we saw in 2014. He has this idea or doctrine that comes out of the military called mowing the lawn, where they'd like to engage for

two or three weeks, kill as many people as they can within Hamas, and then reach another long-term truce. And that's just the way that they were trying to maintain the siege of Gaza. They were trying to maintain it indefinitely, along with kind of some payments going in, letting Qatar bring fuel and money in, and giving the workers, the people who are sort of the working poor of Gaza, the ability to work inside the West Bank, earn a little bit more money and come back. That was the strategy. And October 7th blew it up for more reasons than I think I have time to elucidate. And now Netanyahu is paying the political price and he's being pushed towards a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide to kind of settle the problem once and for all.

In other words, to finish what Israel started in 1948. But is he a dead man walking politically because of what happened on his watch on October 7th? And because of the rational opposition of secular Israelis who don't buy the justification that he's given for the ethnic cleansing. I mean, he's established a war cabinet, which includes many of his opponents from the so-called blue and white coalition who are leading the protests against him in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the more urban, middle class,-class sectors that oppose Netanyahu, their leadership are not some liberal peaceniks. In many ways, their leadership is more warlike than Netanyahu. It's all the former security chiefs, the Mossad chiefs, the army chiefs of staff, and they've come in to kind of right the ship that Netanyahu had left kind of sailing blind. So that's already a major political concession for Netanyahu. Then for him to hold on, he has the biggest whack jobs

in Israeli society in his cabinet, Idmar Ben-Govir, who is this extremist settler who's person... I mean, I've been to shops in Hebron where he personally destroyed the shop on a settler riot. He's a maniac, along with Bezalel Smotrek, who is the finance minister. I mean, these are some of the most extreme people in the Middle East, period. And Netanyahu needs them. So they're constantly pushing him towards more extreme action. Then you have all this corruption scandals Netanyahu has that being in office, he's immune from prosecution. As soon as he

goes out, he's going to go back to court. Well, he's going to go back to court. He's also going to be, I would think, the object and subject of an enormous independent, not run by his government investigation of who knew what when yes who was asleep at the switch uh on october uh seven that's hard for me to believe that he will survive that as a free man well let me make it a little easier it's hard for me to believe that he will survive that as the prime minister because his government will collapse his government will collapse either i think because the people will learn that he was asleep at the switch, imbued by arrogance, or Ben Gavir and the other fanatics will leave the government and he won't have a majority and he'll have to face the electorate, which would never send him back. I don't even know if Likud will keep him as their leader.

Yeah, where was the military on October 7th? They were in the northern West Bank, much of them who would have been able to reinforce the Gaza division that was wiped out. They were in the northern West Bank around Nablus, where there'd been riots, settler pogroms in this Palestinian town, Huara, Palestinian armed resistance, the Palestinian Authority had lost control there. The army was all there. That's Netanyahu. That's the constituency of Netanyahu's coalition partners who are provoking and inflaming that kind of violence. And Netanyahu is going to be held responsible for that on the day after, whenever this war ends. Can the Biden administration exert enough pressure on Netanyahu to get him to stop the ethnic cleansing once the ceasefire is over on Friday? Well, the Biden administration could end the occupation of Palestine tomorrow. They could have a Palestinian state while we're doing this live stream. All they have to do is say no more spare parts for your F-16s, no more F-35s, and it's over because Israel depends,

its occupation depends entirely on its direct line to Washington. And Biden won't do that. And Tony Blinken won't do that because Tony Blinken comes from a long line of Israel lobbyists, including his father-in-law, Samuel Pissar, who is kind of a leader of the French Israel lobby, a consigliere to Francois Mitterrand, and also the fixer for Robert Maxwell, who was a Mossad agent who had a de facto state funeral in Israel and was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell. Tony Blinken's just deeply invested in the project of Zionism. Jake Sullivan, who's a Gentile also, they're just, they're believers in this. And so they see themselves as the best they can do is saving Israel from itself. They have this ridiculous idea that they can bear hug Netanyahu into some kind of rational resolution, which is

the whole problem with U.S. policy going back to, I would say, the aftermath of Camp David. The whole U.S. policy is the idea that you can love Israel into giving the Palestinians some kind of sovereignty. And that's just not the way it works. You actually have to bring the stick and not just give them carrots. And what they're doing at Gaza is an absolute insult to anyone's intelligence. The USAID, led by Samantha Power, who is this guru of the fake genocide prevention industry, is sending a giant plane load of aid over to Gaza, while the Defense Department under Lloyd Austin, former member of the Raytheon Board of Directors, is sending a bigger plane load, plane load after plane load after plane load the Raytheon board of directors, is sending a bigger plane load, plane load after plane load after plane load of Raytheon and General Dynamics and Lockheed-made

weapons to kill the people who are getting the aid. And Israel has faced no consequence for this at all. I can't think of one concrete step Biden has taken to generate a ceasefire, although he tweeted yesterday that the war must be ended. I don't know what he's going to do to enforce that. Well, as you say, he could do it with a phone call, but he doesn't have the courage to do that. And this will be the end of his presidency. I mean, yesterday- Well, think about the bind he's in.

Sorry to interrupt, but the Democratic Party base is much more diverse than the Republican Party base, which is solidly pro-Israel. So you have like the progressive base, the voters in Michigan, the people who supported Bernie, and then they wound up putting Biden in there because they're afraid of the bad orange Hitler, Trump coming in. So they're willing to hold their nose. That's people of color, Arab Americans, Muslims, growing constituencies, fervent constituencies. But what if Biden actually did a ceasefire? Well, he would lose the donor base that had supported his whole career with over $10 million from AIPAC, and he'd lose Debbie Wasserman Schultz's district in Florida, where there is a substantial number of

Jewish voters who are fervently pro-Israel. So he's in a huge bind and he's going with the donor class. So yesterday, the House of Representatives voted 412 to 1 to say, effectively, if you criticize Netanyahu's government, you're anti-Semitic. The one is a courageous member of Congress, Thomas Massey. And then Congresswoman Tlaib, who was censored by the House for singing a song about going from the river to the sea, abstain. When will the American public tire of this? When will Israel lose the PR war? I think it's already lost the PR war. Yeah, they've lost the PR war. And what they're focused on right now is keeping their domestic base in Israel from losing morale. But they've lost, they've definitely lost the youth. I mean, I know young people who are just going out to

protests, to protest for Palestine, because it's the cool thing to do now. It's like in New York City, it's like the new Black Lives Matter. And that's not good for, these are young people from like upper middle-class families that are solidly democratic. And they say, there's no way I will ever vote for Joe Biden under this circumstance. So it's really happening within the democratic party, the contestation over Israel-Palestine. And Israel has lost the future of the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party is not democratic. It's deeply undemocratic. Its largest single donor is his own bank account to independent presidential candidate. So both parties are totally controlled from the top, but at the bottom, more and more people are just disgusted. And we can see what just happened in Congress, as you pointed out. Millions of Palestinian Americans who live in the city of Patterson, New Jersey, were just defined by

Congress as anti-Semites because they don't like Israel's occupation. And it happened to be a Republican who was the lone vote against it just because Thomas Massey has principles. He believes in the First Amendment. Right. How do you see this ending? I mean, if Bibi is unrestrained and if Biden gives him whatever he wants for whatever reason whatever reason, uh, there must be some other outside force that will stop the slaughter. No. I mean, Israel's a, it's a mad dog off a leash is not a rational force right now. The Israeli society is whipped up into a genocidal bloodlust. If you look at like, there's an Israeli telegram account called Dead Terrorists. It has 110,000 followers. And all it is, is pictures of dead

Palestinians and people follow it so they can celebrate seeing video of their families crying. It has close-up images of their wounds. It's the most sick thing I've ever seen. Israeli TikTok videos that are blowing up in Israel right now show Israelis dressed up like in racist Arab blackface costumes, including with their kids, mocking people in Gaza for not having electricity. turned it into a stadium as one of their former ministers, Ayelet Shachet said. And that's what the U.S. has to deal with and the U.S. isn't willing to use any leverage. So then you have, I think, I mean, for the same reason that October 7th happened, where all diplomatic channels to Hamas were cut off, they were even blocked from joining the Palestinian Liberation Organization and allowing the Palestinian authority to actually lead. They were blocked from agreeing to let Fatah negotiate for a Palestinian state. All channels were blocked off to them. So the only option they had left to bring Palestine

back into the worldview and to force negotiations onto the table, which are now focused on prisoners, captives, was violence. And so I see a future marked with regional warfare. We haven't even seen Hezbollah use its full might in this conflict yet. Iran is a real X factor. The Saudis are trying to broker a regional conference and they're trying to bring Iran closer in and offer them incentives because they've been sanctioned so heavily to try to step away from the brink. But then there's no one restraining Israel right now. And it may be that the only thing that Israel's maniacal leadership understands is force.

Max Blumenthal, you are the personification of personal courage. Thank you very much for the time you spent with us and for your extraordinary analysis. I hope you'll come back again. Thanks so much. I do hope to come back. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. What a great man, and I'm deeply grateful for the time he spent with us. We're on our march to 250,000 subscriptions, and we have some more surprises for you before the week is out. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll be you next time. by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.