Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Are Biden and Netanyahu on a Collision Course?

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

With a reputation for insightful journalism and a keen eye for dissecting complex global affairs, Blumenthal comments on the intricate dynamics defining the relationship between the United States and Israel. The focal point of our discussion: "Are Biden and Netanyahu on a Collision Course?"As the world witnesses evolving power dynamics and shifting geopolitical landscapes, the interplay between the Biden administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes center stage. In this conversation, we seek to unravel the layers of this intricate relationship, delving into the nuanced factors that could potentially lead these two influential entities towards a collision course.Max Blumenthal, an authoritative voice in the realm of international journalism, brings to the fore his wealth of experience and analytical prowess. The Editor in Chief of The Gray Zone provides a unique perspectives on the historical context, policy decisions, and geopolitical considerations shaping the delicate balance between the United States and Israel. #Russia #ukraine #USMilitaryHistory #Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostages #Israel #Gaza #ceasefire #hostages #Ukraine #zelenskyy #Biden #china #IsraelPalestine #MiddleEastConflict #PeaceInTheMiddleEast #GazaUnderAttack #Ceasefire #Jerusalem #prayforpeace #hostagesSee 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 Friday, December 22nd, 2023. Max Blumenthal is our guest. Max, it's a pleasure to have you here. I appreciate so much of the depth of your knowledge and your ability to slice through the fog that surrounds these issues. Let's start out with something that's been intriguing me for the past two days. Are President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu headed for a collision? Well, I'm not sure because while Joe Biden and Tony Blinken want to isolate Netanyahu and they consider him to be a loose cannon and someone who is causing many diplomatic difficulties. At the same time, they refuse to implement or impose a ceasefire, the kind of ceasefire that would end Netanyahu's career, wind him back up in court being prosecuted for corruption and remove him from the Israeli political landscape

because they are so wedded to Israel's war and this delusional and psychotic goal of eliminating Hamas and the Gaza Strip that they are giving Netanyahu a political lifeboat, life raft. So how does Joe Biden, and I know your field is Israel, this is domestic politics, but it's so intimately connected. How does Joe Biden walk the tightrope of, oh, we're wedded at the hip with Israel because we've always been wedded at the hip with Israel because this is what I've always believed in my 50 years in public life with, my God, this is genocide going on and I'm paying for

it. Yeah. I mean, I don't see any moral consideration for Joe Biden personally. He's an old school kind of right wing militaristic Democrat who sees eye to eye with the neocons on virtually every issue. He is the top recipient of any active politician in the US of AIPAC money. He's received around 10 million throughout his entire career. He's someone who's been actually friendly with Netanyahu on a personal level and was in many ways brought into the Obama administration to deal with Netanyahu because he was considered so much more naturally pro-Israel than Obama. And so he can't imagine getting in Israel's way or imposing a ceasefire. And if you look at what happened at the United Nations today, where the US basically watered down and delayed a UN resolution on a ceasefire to the point where

there was no ceasefire and called it a sort of humanitarian intervention, a resolution to get humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. They can't understand how the only way that you can actually provide a humanitarian solution to a population that is starving to death across the board in the Gaza Strip, 80% homelessness, disease spreading rampantly, drinking brackish diseased water, children dying at a rate unprecedented in recent history, being killed through an industrial Israeli slaughter. They can't see how ending that is the only way to get humanitarian aid in. They're still insisting on this ridiculous dynamic of providing Israel with bombs with one hand and aid in the other. What does this do to isolate the United States diplomatically?

When you look at the numbers in the Security Council, the United States actually abstained on the resolution that it watered down and it crafted. And there was another abstention. In the General Assembly, it was something like, and I realize that that's more symbolic than substantive, 153 to 10. What do diplomats think about Joe Biden and Tony Blinken? Or doesn't it matter? Well, I think everyone is disgusted, but the U.S. has so many points of pressure on countries, economic points of pressure on countries from Canada to Turkey, where President Erdogan has actually effectively called for war or supporting some kind of war on Israel and is rallying his population for war while he continues to send gas and oil through Azerbaijan to Israel because his economy could be brought down tomorrow by the U.S. and NATO. So you also

have the U.S. isolated in the region militarily, where the only Arab partner they could bring to bear for this so-called Operation Prosperity Guardian, or what I would call Operation Plunder Guardian, to protect Israeli-linked shipping passing through Bab al-Mandeb by Yemen from the Yemeni military taking over those ships was the country of Bahrain, the smallest country in the Persian Gulf, which is basically just a parking lot for the fifth fleet of the U.S. Navy. So there's no Arab coalition to support the U.S. in this operation. And the European partners aren't even committing a lifeboat. I think Spain might've actually pulled out and then they brought in the geopolitical regional powerhouse of Seychelles

to round out the coalition. So this is just direct US support for one of the most, the biggest atrocities of our time with no international partners. Is there any question, but that the IDF is slaughtering women, children, and civilian non-Hamas fighter males? Any question whatsoever? by the Israeli military, of them rounding up hundreds of Palestinian men, including old men, taking their shirts off, blindfolding them and humiliating them, forcing them to kneel in mud, and then carting them off to an internment camp near the city of Be'er Sheva, where, according to Haaretz and Euro Human Rights, Euro Med Monitor, many of them have actually been killed, subjected to torture. But the Israeli military has acknowledged that only 10 to 15% of those men actually have anything to do with Hamas, which could mean that they just be low level political activists. Meanwhile, the Israeli

public and the world is being told that these are entire battalions of Hamas being taken down. And what this is about is presenting a picture of victory to the Israeli public and restoring their sense of masculine domination that was taken away from them on October 7th, when no actual military victory exists. The Golani Brigade, the most powerful brigade, infantry brigade of the Israeli military, was just pulled out of Gaza because it has suffered so many casualties, including a brigade command, battalion commander. Do we know, I'm going to talk in a minute, I'm going to run an interesting clip from Professor John Mearsheimer, who goes through the numbers of Palestinians killed. Do we know the casualties on the IDF? I realize the Israeli government has a sensory, I also realize there are some very industrious investigative journalists in Israel, probably folks that you know. Have they managed with credibility to get their hands

on those numbers? Well, the Israeli military has declared something like 140 casualties in the field in Gaza, which is pretty high for a small, tight-knit society. And for such a powerful military fighting a force using mostly locally made weapons, including locally made sniper rifles, locally made anti-tank grenades. They have lost scores of tanks, of the Merkava tank, and they have had something like 2,000 wounded. And according to Israel's Channel 13 today, 25% of those wounded would have died several years ago were it not for extreme military interventions in the field. So they are severely critically wounded and may actually die. So the casualty count is high. Many of those, if you look carefully, if not most, are officers.

So this is starting to impact the Israeli psyche. You've had three of the top colonists in Israel, Ronan Bergman, Ben Caspin, and Nahum Barnea, someone who's considered sort of the Israeli Thomas Friedman, declare this week that there is no military solution in Gaza and that Israel must accept a ceasefire deal. You've had Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, declare the same in an op-ed at Haaretz published yesterday. And yet Netanyahu is resisting all of this and Netanyahu's base does not care about getting the hostages back. All they care about is slaughter, killing to avenge October 7th and the elusive destruction of Hamas, which is not happening. Would the behavior of the IDF change substantially if Netanyahu were to leave office by whatever means he were to leave? I mean,

stated differently, isn't the Israeli public, though disdainful of him as a person, united in an overwhelmingly high percentage behind this policy of genocidal cleansing in Gaza? No, the old secular Ashkenazi elite has been displaced by a religious nationalist class in Israel that is heavily represented within the ranks of the military, especially in the officer corps. You can take a look at them getting together and chanting before they go into Gaza, may your village burn. You can look at the soldiers putting up giant menorahs and destroyed Palestinian neighborhoods east of Gaza city, or firing off one tank shell for each night of Hanukkah into Palestinian homes. This is all reflective of a new culture coming into Israeli society,

moving through the institutions that is genocidal in nature towards the Palestinians. And when I was in Israel, I covered a conference of influential state-backed rabbis who had gathered at a hotel in Jerusalem to defend a book called the King's Torah or Torah HaMelech, whose authors, very popular rabbis from the settlements who had come under interrogation from Israeli security services because the contents of the book were providing religious justification for the mass killing of any infant who would grow up to harm Jewish Israelis. And this book was distributed throughout the ranks of the Israeli military and is extremely popular. And it sort of speaks to the mentality we see on display in the Gaza Strip, where civilians are being killed, waving white flags and execution style

killings as reported by the UN. This is the future of Israel. And Netanyahu sits between the old elite and the new elite as a kind of moderate, even though he was once considered an extremist. Well, if Lapid became prime minister or Omer became prime minister, would the genocide continue or would it stop? Well, Omer presided over many of the assaults on Gaza that were preludes to this attack, as well as the second invasion of Lebanon. But he left as a failure with 2% approval. Lapid himself can only govern in a coalition with Likud in the right. He just doesn't have the popular base that someone like Netanyahu has. So I don't know what comes next. All I know is the grassroots of Israeli society are primed towards a kind of ethnic cleansing operation or genocide, especially after October 7th.

And the Israeli political leadership is responding to that with just openly genocidal rhetoric, calling for a Nakba 2.0. These are people inside Netanyahu's party or the president of Israel, sort of a ceremonial position, Isaac Herzog. He comes out of the Labor Party, out of the old Ashkenazi elite. He said there is no distinction between civilians and military in the Gaza Strip. Right. In the materials you sent me prior to us coming on air, I think you quoted a well-known lieutenant in the IDF, in the elite part of the IDF that you mentioned earlier, saying the reason we have to slaughter the children is because they nurse anti-Semitism with their, there he is, thank you, Chris, they nurse, I gotta say this the way it's written, they nurse anti-Semitism with their mother's milk.

Yeah. Is that a widespread view amongst elite officers in the IDF? I mean, we can look at polling of the Israeli public, something only something like 2% declared in a Tel Aviv University poll, I believe, two weeks ago, that Israel had used too much firepower in the Gaza Strip. And 56% believe Israel has not used enough firepower. This is possibly the most brutal military assault since World War I, possibly, according to Robert Pape, a military historian at the University of Chicago, Israel has destroyed 33% of all housing and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, whereas the Allies destroyed only 10% of that in Germany in years. So in two and a half months, one third of Gaza, everything is completely destroyed. In years in Germany, the allies only destroyed one tenth. The amount of bombs that

have been dropped on Gaza, unprecedented. The amount of children who are being killed per day, unprecedented. It is an industrial slaughter of children and there is very little pushback at all from Israeli society. However, there is pushback to save Jewish Israeli lives, the lives of Jewish Israelis in the Gaza Strip who are hostages. And this is the understanding that Yahya Senwar, the prime minister of the Gaza Strip, has of Israeli society, which is fundamentally correct because he spent 25 years of his life in an Israeli prison. He's fluent in Hebrew, that they will only negotiate with us and let up on us if we have leverage, some leverage over their lives because they don't care about our lives. And that's why you see these protests against Netanyahu and this pressure is building for a kind of deal.

After Israel killed three of its own hostages who were trying to get free in the neighborhood of Shujaiya. They hunted them down and killed them when they were holding white flags. That's when it became clear to as many Israelis that there was no way to get the hostages back without a political deal with Hamas. What do you think that Netanyahu understands? There's no way to get the hostages back without a political deal with Hamas? I think Netanyahu sees a political deal with Hamas as the death of his political career. Right. Maybe the death of his personal liberty too. Yes. And that's the main thing on his mind. And that's what motivates Netanyahu. He's thinking about number one. You mentioned the University his mind. And that's what motivates Netanyahu. He's thinking about number one.

You mentioned the University of Chicago. And I know Professor Amir Shamra, who teaches there, admires you because he has talked about you on my show a couple of times. But here's what he said. It's mutual. Yes, he's a great man. Here's what he said yesterday. I want your thoughts on his statistical analysis of the human beings that the IDF has slaughtered in Gaza. First of all, the Israelis only control about 40 percent of Gaza. Just think about they control 40 percent.

That means the other 60 percent is territory where Hamas can go and the Israelis can't get at them. Second, the Israelis have not captured any hostages. That's quite surprising. If they haven't captured any hostages, that probably tells you a lot about their ability to find the Hamas fighters. Furthermore, if you look at the number of people that the Israelis have killed, the number is about 20,000, as you said before. And most people agree that about 70% of that 20,000 is women and children. So that would be 14,000. That means that the Israelis have killed 6,000 males. Now, those 6,000 males were certainly not all Hamas fighters. Most of them, I'm sure, were innocent civilians. So let's say of the 6,000, 4,000 were civilians and 2,000 were Hamas fighters. I don't think that's the likely

number, but let's give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt. That says that they've killed 2,000 Hamas fighters. Well, most people argue that Hamas had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters to start with. If they had 30,000 to 40,000 fighters and they've killed 2,000, that means they have a whole heck of a lot of fighters left. He paints a grim picture for the future of the IDF fighting there. And he also articulates the size of the slaughter, 20,000 human beings dead, two-thirds of them, three-quarters of them women and children. What do you think? Deliberately, according to Israel's them, three-quarters of them women and children. What do you think? Deliberately, according to Israel's doctrine, the Dahiya doctrine, which is aimed at attacking civilians in order to put pressure on a political leadership that they cannot defeat. And it's failed time and time again because Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have nowhere

else to go. They have a culture of steadfastness. And he makes a really, Professor Mearsheimer makes a really strong point, which is that Israel has failed to achieve its military objectives, its stated military objectives from the outset in the Gaza Strip. It has failed to recapture the hostages through military means. Instead, it's killed them. It's killed them through bombing as well. You have all of these abductees coming back to Israel who were released in the last swap, who were saying our greatest fear was being killed by Israeli bombing, and then you blaming it on Hamas. And then they shot them in cold blood, thinking they were Palestinian civilians, because their doctrine is to kill Palestinian civilians. If you are watching this

now, you can easily go on Telegram or on Twitter and watch the videos that the Al-Qassam brigades and Saray Al-Quds, the armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are putting out respectively. And you will see them killing Israeli soldiers day after day, operating freely, using homemade weapons to take out Merkava tanks to kill soldiers who are hiding in Palestinian homes, using them as bases, creeping up on them, ambushing them. There was a major ambush last week in the eastern northern Gaza region of Shajia where 10 Israeli officers were killed, including a battalion commander, in a single ambush. As this is happening, Hamas is showing no sign of military degradation. As Professor Mearsheimer pointed out, Hamas political leadership is likely in the south. Israel is not in direct control of the south the way it is in the north. Yet in the north, Hamas's military wing continues to operate. And their objective is not to hold ground. They're

not trying to hold territory like a traditional military. All they're trying to do is raise the price tag on Israel by ambushing them within the rubble. So as long as they remain there and hold territory, the Israeli military, they are sitting ducks. And these casualties hit very hard on the home front in Israeli society. I mean, you can look at the funeral footage. These are heavily attended funerals. A lot of these guys dying are the cream of the crop in Ashkenazi Israeli society.

And people are weeping and crying. And it's hitting them psychologically. So how long can this go on for? How free are Israeli journalists to report this? I mean, stated differently, does the Israeli public know what you've just recounted to me? And do they know it in a granular way because they see it? Death after death after death, failure after failure after failure. Well, they're starting to see it, death after death after death, failure after failure after failure. Well, they're starting to see it. I mean, what they don't see in Israeli media and don't hear is the voices from Gaza. They don't hear, for example, about Dunya Abu-Mosin, who is a 13-year-old

girl whose home was hit in an Israeli airstrike. Her parents were killed. Her siblings were killed. She survived after losing her leg. She was interviewed in Nasser Hospital and Khan Yunus. And she said, I want to go on and have a future. I want to be a doctor to help children like myself. And I want to teach them how to walk with prosthetics. She was killed on December 17th with an Israeli tank shell,

which hit her hospital room, blew her head off. This was one of those tank shells that was fast-tracked by the State Department to Israel without congressional approval. They're not hearing these stories, but they are seeing the funerals. They are hearing about the injuries to their own. And that's why this week, so many of the most prominent columnists in Israeli society have said, we need to accept a political solution at a high price because there is no military solution. And what I think the danger is here is that Yoav Golant, the defense minister, could move away from Gaza and say, hey, we have another much more bigger issue to resolve on our northern border

with Hezbollah, which is below the Litani River, and we have 80,000 to 100,000 people who can't go back to their homes in the north. Let's just forget about Gaza, but keep the war going because it's convenient for all of us, and widen the war into Lebanon. this is the Gestapo on steroids. When will the revulsion, the moral revulsion of what is happening before their eyes put a stop to this or bring outside state actors in? The moral revulsion among who? Because, I mean, I don't see any capacity for moral revulsion from Tony Blinken, who referred in his last press statement at the State Department to Israel as the victims and Palestinians as the perpetrator and the oppressor. I mean, he sees everything in an upside down world where morality

is completely reversed, where the people who are suffering a genocide are actually the perpetrators. The, you know, Annalena Baerbock, foreign minister of Germany from the Green Party, celebrated her birthday on December 17th with Israeli soldiers in uniform at an Israel lobby event in Berlin. I mean, across the Atlantic, all these people see the lives of Jewish Israelis as fundamentally superior and more precious than those of Palestinians. That's just the cult of the transatlantic foreign policy establishment has this cult-like mentality and they can't see Palestinian death the same way they see the deaths of Israelis on October 7th. Here's Tony Blinken at his worst saying exactly what you said, that the Israelis,

the Israeli military are the victims. It's cut. It's been very clear, including as recently as today, that it would welcome returning to a pause in the further release of hostages. The problem was and has been and remains Hamas. They reneged on commitments that they made during the first pause for hostage releases. And the question is whether they are, in fact, willing to resume this effort. We believe that, as we said from the outset, Israel has not only a right but an obligation to defend itself

and to try to make sure that October 7th never happens again. Any other country in the world faced with what Israel suffered on October 7th, would do the same thing. What is striking to me is that even as, again, we hear many countries urging the end to this conflict, which we would all like to see, I hear virtually no one saying, demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that.

This would have been over a month ago, six weeks ago, if Hamas had done that. And how could it be that there are no demands made of the aggressor and only demands made of the victim? Such tortured aggressor. Profound untruths that can't be accepted uncritically by anybody who knows what's going on. Yeah, I mean, Tony Blinken, the grandson of an Israel lobbyist, the son-in-law of an Israel lobbyist, is operating like Israel's lawyer, as we see at the UN. He's providing diplomatic cover for genocide. That's his main role. What he seeks to do, the solution he seeks is one in which Palestinians are forced to accept permanent occupation, get whatever crumbs they can off the master's table and be happy about it and never raise another hand against Israel, which is a complete fantasy. What he sees happening in the

Gaza strip is somehow Hamas is defeated as if an ideology can be defeated, as if a movement that draws its strength from a mass popular constituency can be wiped away. The only way you can do that is through ethnic cleansing. But beyond that, what Hamas is beginning to demand for the next hostage release is the release of political prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, who are not part of Hamas, who are secular, who also have a mass popular base, and who even believe in nonviolent resistance, but who do not accept Israeli occupation. And Tony Blinken cannot accept that either. Hamas is seeking to actually step away from government and let other popular figures rule on the basis that they will continue to resist Israeli occupation.

What Blinken is going for and Israel is the same thing, which is permanent occupation with the fantasy of Palestinian control over territories which Israel doesn't seek to rule, which is what you have with the unpopular, corrupt, discredited Palestinian authority of Mahmoud Abbas. But he says, if Hamas lays down its arms, it's over tomorrow if Hamas does that. That is not true,

because the IDF wants to continue all the way to the ocean and all the way down to Egypt. Well, if they lay down their arms, then they'll get that. I mean, you have video after video being published on TikTok and other social media platforms by Israeli military officers declaring that we are back in Gaza. It's all ours and we are going to build settlements. You have Israeli construction companies advertising new settlement units inside Gaza city with plans on top of the rubble. You have Israeli officers declaring, and you can go on any social media platform and say this, that after Gaza, we're going to take Lebanon. So that's what will happen if Palestinians

put down their arms. Why doesn't anyone ever ask Israel to put down their arms? Why doesn't Tony Blinken stop sending the arms? Then it will be over tomorrow. But you don't want the slaughter to stop. Last question. What was the scandal involving Netanyahu's son in Miami? What was that all about? There's so many.

There are so many scandals. My very close colleague, Anya Parampil, did a documentary on the crimes of Netanyahu a few years ago. And she published the whole thing on her Twitter account. I'll get her to pin it after this if possible. But there's just a dizzying array of corruption scandals. For example, Netanyahu siphoned off millions of dollars or is accused of doing that from German Holocaust reparations, which come in the form of dolphin class submarines to Israel. His son was tape recorded, drunk outside a strip club, asking a buddy for dollars so he can like get lap dances. And he said, you know, if you give me more money for lap dances, I'll have my dad give your dad a lucrative deal for like gas field investments

because his father was a Israeli oligarch. So it's that kind of stuff. So yeah, you're Netanyahu while Israelis are dying in Gaza is in Miami in a luxury apartment, maybe next door to Zelensky and Juan Guaido's condos. And the Israeli taxpayer, which probably means the U S taxpayer has paid something like $250,000 for the past few months for him to just be there in Miami, just chilling out by the pool. Wow. Max, it gets worse and worse,

but you're insightful and your grasp of the subject matter is so much appreciated. Thank you very much, my dear friend. My best of this holiday season to you and I hope we can see you again next week. Yeah, happy holiday to you and thanks as always for bringing me back.

Thank you very much. All the best. All right, my dear friends, truly one of the smartest and more courageous people that we're able to bring to you. We have some surprises for you on Monday and Tuesday, and we'll be back with our live interviews by midweek. Merry Christmas to all of you. Thank you for all the wonderful subscriptions that you've sent to us. Thank you for watching!