Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: How Zionism Hurts the Jews.

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Max Blumenthal: How Zionism Hurts the Jews.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 Thursday, May 30th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thanks very much for your time. Much appreciated. Before we get to the subject at hand, there is some breaking news both in Ukraine and in Israel. And I'm happy that you're here to have me address it. the Ukrainians and their Americans that are showing them how to do this, advisors, to use American-made offensive weaponry and aim it inside Russia. How crazy is this? Well, it's especially crazy considering what the Ukrainians have already done, where they're not hitting military targets inside Russia. They're hitting Christmas festivals. They're hitting the Kerch Bridge. They're attacking civilian targets. They've carried out terror attacks and assassinations on civilians, including a foreign policy analyst, Daria Dugina, with a car bombing. So what are they going to do now

that they have attack them's missiles and the full authorization of Congress? And what good is it going to do? The reason that the Biden administration is lobbying for this insane measure is because Ukraine is losing the war. Russia's advancing on Kharkiv. And previously, they've said that the purpose, Lloyd Austin said the purpose of the military aid was to help Ukraine win in the close fight. But they're losing the close fight because they're unable to get reinforcements. Ukrainian polling shows in February that only 35% of Ukrainian males are willing to be conscripted. There's no close fight left. So they're trying to prolong this war, which as Biden and his lieutenants, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken have openly said, is financially profitable for the

United States. Something like 60 billion of the 95 billion in the supplemental to Israel and Ukraine is going straight back into the U.S. economy, to the upper and upper middle class working in the defense industry. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration sees that military aid producing new jobs in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona as helping their electoral prospects in November, so blood for votes. And so they want to escalate this war. They want to keep escalating so it can continue to go on. And they're going to provoke Russia in ways that we haven't seen before. And what's Russia going to do?

We've seen that at every point Ukraine has tried to escalate, Russia has been able to climb a step up the ladder further than Ukraine by hitting electrical infrastructure. That's what Russia did for the first time after the Kerch Bridge attack. Now it's taking out water purification plants, sanitation plants. It's going to destroy Ukraine's infrastructure completely as it's provoked to do so by the U.S. And for the past few days, the military leadership of the Pentagon has been lobbying and pushing members of Congress, having closed door meetings with the House Armed Services Committee against bipartisan pressure, with lawmakers from both sides saying, what the

hell are we trying to accomplish here? Ukraine is losing. Why are we going to provoke Russia any further? And the military saying, no, we need to do this. We're going to win. As they've said all along, I think we're just going to see more escalation with Russia being dominant in the end and more profits for the military industry and Biden's donors. The White House has said, quote, no final decision has been made, but the consideration comes amid mounting pressure from allies and Democrats. Politico is sticking to the story. The other breaking news is that Benny Gantz, member of Prime Minister Netanyahu's war cabinet and the Knesset and the leading opponent of Prime Minister Netanyahu, announced that he is moving for a dissolution of the Netanyahu government. You can take us through this. I would imagine that would

take 61 votes in the Knesset, and I don't know if he has the 61 votes unless he's going to get liberals who can't stand Netanyahu and the hard right wingers analysis showing that Netanyahu could still pull together a coalition with 65 votes or 65 members. So I don't think Gantz has what it takes to dissolve the Netanyahu government. I don't actually think there's enough public pressure either to dissolve this government. And I don't know how much of a difference it would make vis-a-vis Gaza. Well, that's what I want to ask you about. Wouldn't Gantz be just as horrific, if not more so, than Netanyahu with respect to the slaughter by the IDF? I mean, before we even talk about Benny Gantz, let's talk about Yair Golan, who is sort of the lion of the Israeli mainstream left right now, who comes out of the Labor Party. He is run for prime minister as a labor leader. He comes out

of the military. Look at his public statements on Gaza. They are no less, if not more genocidal than Netanyahu's. He said there are no uninvolved civilians. We need to essentially kill them all until we can have peace. His popularity has increased because of his genocidal rhetoric. And then there's Benny Gantz. When he campaigned for prime minister, first campaign for prime minister, he ran an ad, something like only strength wins or only the strong survive. And footage was playing with dark music, footage of the destruction of Gaza from the military campaign that he presided over in 2014, when entire neighborhoods were completely destroyed and wiped off the map when he was army chief of staff. So Benny Gantz is actually someone who was supportive of a strike on a massive campaign against Lebanon after October 7th.

So these are not doves. These are not peaceniks. The only difference they might have with Netanyahu is on how to handle the hostages issue. And we've seen in recent days, more intense protests in Tel Aviv by the family members of the hostages demanding a deal and a cessation of hostilities. And Netanyahu's thugs have actually come out into the street and physically assaulted those hostage family members with one parent getting pepper sprayed in the face. Has Hamas offered the full return of hostages in return for a permanent ceasefire and the return of the Palestinian hostages? And if so, can Netanyahu accept that without the dissolution of his government by the right-wingers leaving? Well, after October 7th, Hamas offered a full return of hostages on the condition that Israel did not invade Gaza, didn't physically send troops in.

That was obviously going to be a non-starter with the Israelis, but they've been keen to have this kind of deal from the beginning. The deal in early December was enacted in good faith by Hamas, and they've been offering all the hostages except for the soldiers all along in exchange for Palestinian hostages who are not high-level security prisoners. But what they're saying with the hostages who are actually prisoners of war, like these female hostages that the New York Post presented as just poor, innocent, young girls who are being sexually assaulted by Hamas on October 7th and then dragged to Gaza to be sex slaves, which was just a complete hoax, who are in fact members of the Gaza division, whose job was to surveil the open air prison of Gaza, who are active combatants. What Hamas is

saying with them is they have to be exchanged for people who are also carrying weapons or being arrested for engaging in resistance to occupation. And that's a red line for Israel, which is why there's been no action. Hamas is also demanding a permanent ceasefire, not this kind of six-week pause that the U.S. is calling for. And they're holding firm to their terms, no matter how much violence Israel enacts on Palestinian civilians. And they're holding firm because from a military perspective, they're also, they're not being significantly degraded. How many Palestinian hostages, I know the New York Times calls them prisoners. How many Palestinian hostages are the Israelis holding from the West Bank, from Gaza, from whatever source derived?

I think we have maybe like 120 living Israeli hostages and prisoners of war. In Israeli prisons, you have what's called administrative detainees. They are jailed without charges and therefore are hostages under international law. And there are something like 3,300 of them in Israeli prisons. Some of them are being tortured in the Ofer military prison right now. Many of them are actually children under the age of 18. There's a special children's court that I visited. I've witnessed children be put on trial for stone throwing in that court. They're brought in in surplus UPS uniforms and chains to stand before a judge. And they're, what usually happens is instead of being sentenced, the judge says, well,

we're going to wait till the next hearing for three months. And they just hold them and hold them and hold them. Someone I know who I've been friendly with, who's been defending his village, Anya Parampil talked about him a few weeks ago, but defending his village against basically a settler takeover. it's called Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, is Bassem Tamimi. And he has been in an Israeli prison as a hostage since October 7th or soon after October 7th. His illegal detention or hostage or captivity was extended by six months by an Israeli military

court. And the Israeli security services just censored a Haaretz report about Bassem Tamimi's status. If you actually look at that report, you can even find it now and put it on screen, you're going to see entire passages redacted with black ink. So that tells you a lot about the so-called only democracy in the Middle East, which claims that it has no hostages and that the only victims are the ones being held in Gaza. How can Israel call itself a democracy when it's based on ethno-supremacy, which is the height of racism and apartheid? Yeah, I mean, when we have an election States government controlled only about, controlled all U.S. territory, but only about 50% of people were allowed to vote because of their religion. That's Israel. control over the Gaza Strip now than it ever has, will not be able to vote in the next Israeli election because they are not Jewish and therefore cannot be citizens of the state of Israel because the system of Zionism, the definition or essence of Zionism, is that a Jew anywhere in the world,

anyone who can prove that their mother was Jewish before the Israeli rabbinate has more rights than a Palestinian who is a direct descendant of the apostles whose family has lived in that land for thousands of years. That's the essence of Zionism. And so I have no connection to the land of Israel, except I can, what, through the Bible? I'm a white person from America. I have more rights than Bassem Tamimi. Bassem Tamimi has bluish eyes and light skin, and many of the people in his village have blonde hair because they intermingled their blood as indigenous Palestinians with the crusaders. That's how far back they go. And I have more rights than him in his own home as a Jew. Because your mother is Jewish. Because my mother is Jewish. And all I have to do is come to Israel to Ben Gurion Airport,

tell the lady who asks, are you Jewish, at the customs line. All I have to do is tell her I'm Jewish. Then I go in, declare that I want to be a citizen. I can then join the Israeli army. And as a reservist, I can go into Bassem Tamimi's home and arrest his children and his grandchildren if I wanted to. That's the essence of Zionism. And who do they get to vote for? Well, the last election that Palestinians had, they voted to elect Hamas. And look at what happened. Israel negated the results, arrested

all the Hamas leaders, including local leaders who were elected, across the West Bank, kidnapped them. Some of them were just completely disappeared. And then they placed the entire Gaza Strip or Hamas took control under siege. And now we see them waging genocide. So there's the only democracy in the Middle East in action. What cultural powers or cultural forces pull the levers of power in Israel? Question one. Question two. Does the vast majority of Israelis accept Zionism, this apartheid form of government? And question three.

Doesn't Zionism harm Jewish people for the reasons you just articulated? Well, whatever cultural force influences people, whether it's people from the LGBTQ community in Tel Aviv, whose pride parade was just canceled, and the rainbow flag has had its yellow stripe expanded in displays across Tel Aviv because yellow is identified with the hostages in Gaza, whether it's them or fanatical religious nationalist settlers in Hebron and Kiryat Arba. They all tend to believe that if they give one inch to the Palestinians, the next Holocaust will take place. And they need to display total ruthlessness because they are settler colonists and they have nowhere to fall back to if the Palestinians gain any sovereignty. I think the ultimate cultural force in Israeli life, besides the Bible and besides the rabbinate, particularly the religious nationalist rabbinate, is the religious nationalist, religious forces. Besides that is the Holocaust and the idea that Israel represents not just deliverance from Jewish perpetual persecution, but also its continuation. And in some ways, it's true in a self-realizing perverse way, Israel aims to

perpetuate anti-Semitism in order to justify its own existence. And so through the violence that we're seeing disseminated in ways that are more graphic and intimate than ever before, where you can just open up your phone, log onto Twitter and watch children being exterminated, blown to pieces, having their heads blown off in Gaza. A Syrian child was blown to pieces by Israel recently. People are becoming infuriated and people who are less politically sophisticated, more reactionary might tend to blame all Jews. They're also seeing Jewish billionaires demand that Joe Biden or Donald Trump or New York Mayor Eric Adams support Israel's agenda and basically legally bribe them to do so. So antis-Semitism tends to rise in moments like this, and that benefits Israel.

Benefits Israel because they're saying the whole world is completely corrupted by Gentile hatred of Jews, and you all have to come here. And it also benefits forces like the Anti-Defamation League. What would happen to Jonathan Greenblatt's salary, CEO of the ADL, without anti-Semitism? He'd have to go back to his business as a bottled water salesman. So Zionism is the ultimate engine for anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is the fuel for Israel's occupation genocide machine. Are American liberal Jews, friends that you and I have, that live in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, are they Zionists?

I mean, there are different kinds of Zionists, but those of the baby boom generation tend to be. I was reading Bob Kuttner, editor-in-chief of the American Prospect, a real progressive economic populist, someone I've known almost my whole life, that today anti-Semitism is on the rise because criticism of Israel is growing too extreme. And he never defines what anti-Semitism is on the rise because criticism of Israel is growing too extreme. And he never defines what antisemitism is. He equates, obviously, psychologically, he equates opposition to Zionism or rejection of Zionism with antisemitism. And therefore, he's expressing

a kind of liberal Zionism, where Netanyahu is the problem. And once we get Netanyahu out of the way, then maybe there can be peace. And liberal Zionism is the ultimate form of hypocrisy. You can't square traditional liberalism, even if you oppose liberals today and you're against the Democrats, whatever. Liberalism in its traditional form does support equality before the law and civil liberties, ideas like free speech. Zionism embodies the exact opposite of that. It's ethno-supremacy and freedom only for those who fit within the ethno-supremacist model. And so October 7th has produced this titanic psychological crisis for liberal Zionists, where they're forced to engage with this issue in a way they haven't before. And they can't square the circle and they can't recognize what

the true problem is here, which is the system of Zionism. And so they're looking for all of these boogeymen. And it really speaks to the kind of foreignged Netanyahu while criticizing him and privately pushing him. The idea that he could in any way pressure Israel and exercise leverage over Israel without suspending weapons shipments and basically cutting off the financial feeding tube of the Zionist system of apartheid, the idea that that could have happened, it was fueled by liberal Zionists. So they're the ultimate hypocrites. And they are the ones who I think deserve real contempt because they're insidious. Whereas the Zionists on Trump's side, I've been around them. They're just pretty open about what they want. Just like the fascistic forces in Netanyahu's coalition. Like they openly support full ethnic cleansing. They're openly calling, they're dumping Palestinians into the desert in Egypt, if not killing them all. So at least we know what they are. Max, it's difficult, tough stuff to to discuss but i thank you very much for your uh

explanations of it uh i'm sorry i have to go i'd like to be able to talk to you a little bit longer but much appreciated my dear friend we'll see you again soon thanks a lot judge okay uh we will see you tomorrow for colonel larry Wilkerson at three in the afternoon and the Intelligence Community Roundtable at four. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.