Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Is Netanyahu In Charge of His Own Government?

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Is Netanyahu In Charge of His Own Government?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, January 10th, 2024. Our dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us today. Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome back to the show. Great to see you, Judge. Thank you. I want to discuss at some length the South African complaint filed against Israel in the International Court for Justice. But before we do it, something came to me that I thought I would ask you. Have many Israelis, and if so, how many, if you know the number, left the country since October 7th? Yeah, there was actually a cruise ship which took Israelis with dual national citizenship away. Many of them were Americans.

They were more secular-minded. And they basically decided Israel was not a very good place for Jews to be, and that the only happy people there, the people who really consider Zionism to be a smashing success, are the religious nationalist settlers who have now disproportionate control over the government. So those who are leaving have found better places to be a Jew. And one place would be the United States. Another place would be Germany. Is it a large number? Like some of our former intelligence community folks are telling us 10 million Ukrainians have fled the country. Is it a statistically significant number of folks who have left

Israel since October 7th? It's nothing like Ukraine, but keep in mind there are 200,000 internally displaced Israelis. Many of these come from the South, and those Israelis are Mizrahi, many of them, which means they're from Arab countries, which they can't go back to. They're not able to get citizenship in Germany or somewhere else. Or they're in the north, which are also fairly poor communities. And many of these people are just simply stuck in Israel, the Israeli states paying for them to stay in hotels all across the country. And they can't go back until this extermination rampage in Gaza is complete, and until Hezbollah is pushed back north of the Litani River. Then you have the luxury refugees,

like the people that got on that cruise boat. But this was happening before October 7th. I wrote in my book, Goliath, which is my, you know, master analysis of my mega analysis of Israeli society, that, you know, Germany is just filling up with young Jewish Israelis who decided that's the best place to be a Jew. And that is Israel was actually a horrifying experience. And when you think about it, it's certainly the most dangerous place in the world right now for anyone to be Jewish. Is Benjamin Netanyahu in control of his government, or is he a tool of Smotrich and Ben-Gavir for fear that they'll leave the coalition and he won't have a majority any longer? And I think in many ways, Itamar Ben-Gavir and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, Ben-Gavir being the security minister, are the id of Netanyahu and his Likud

party. And that's the source of their popularity and they're playing it to the hilt. So Netanyahu, you know, back in 2001, in this leaked footage in which he was meeting with a family of settlers, said, I know how to move the Americans. I can move them and I can destroy the prospect of a Palestinian state and smash the peace process. That's what Netanyahu says in private. This is what Ben-Gavir said publicly when Blinken came to visit Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. He said, we need to be able to brandish the big stick in Gaza. Get out of the way, Blinken. And that's what Netanyahu thinks, but Ben-Gur says it. The problem for Netanyahu is he needs them to hold on to his very narrow coalition. The problem for Netanyahu's opponents is none of them is, even though Netanyahu is

widely hated, none of them is as popular as Netanyahu. So if they're going to patch together some kind of coalition, it's going to involve other right-wing elements, including figures like Naftali Bennett from the Religious Nationalist Jewish Home Party, and their government will be substantially controlled by Washington, which will cause a low-intensity civil war in Israel against those grassroots elements represented by Ben-Gavir and Smotrich. So it's a very unstable coalition, and the longer the war goes on, the more the instability increases. The Politico reports that, I don't know how they know this unless somebody was in the room, that when Blinken and Netanyahu speak, Netanyahu effectively says, my hands are

tied. It's the coalition. I can't risk breaking my coalition now. Do you think, A, that's true? And do you think, B, the Israeli public prefers a corrupt genocidal stability to the instability that would come if his government were to collapse in the middle of a war. Well, that was obviously a leak from Blinken's team to frame up Netanyahu as a weak figure who is being controlled by these fanatics from the Jewish power party, these Kahanist genocidal fanatics. But it doesn't really fully explain Netanyahu's motives. Netanyahu is also being guided by his opponents in the war cabinet who are determined to turn the war north, constantly provoking Hezbollah, attacking inside Beirut. They killed a major Hezbollah commander

just two days ago. And that's Yoav Galant. I mean, those are people from the blue and white coalition. So Netanyahu has to answer to them. And then he has his own life to think of after government, where he will likely go back to court. Right now, he's immune from prosecution. He's immune from going back to court. So the longer these wars continue, the longer his political life extends and maybe his own life as a free man. And Tony Blinken is responsible for that because he's not pushing, pushing the brakes, pumping the brakes on this full-scale genocide. He's green lighting genocide. He's attacking the South Africans for bringing genocide to the International Court of Justice. And he's doing nothing to exert leverage. filed by the South African government as incredibly detailed and factual and inassailable

as it is? Do they take that in the International Court of Justice? Do they take that seriously? The hearings begin Thursday. We would have known that Netanyahu and the Israeli state did not take this invocation of the genocide convention by South Africa, by CJ seriously, if they had brought Alan Dershowitz to defend them there. Alan Dershowitz, who is accused of sexually molesting more young women than Hamas did on October 7th. Alan Dershowitz, who is not even an Israeli citizen, who is affiliated exclusively now in the U.S. political mind with Trump. And they did not do that. They appointed someone who would be considered an ideological foe of Netanyahu and the Likud party, a very august figure named Aharon Barak, who is the

longest serving chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, which Netanyahu is seeking to destroy through his judicial reforms. And it really shows how seriously they take this, that they are bringing this figure forward. He's too old to really be directly involved in the day-to-day operations of fighting this case, but he's a symbol of the old Labor Party controlled Ashkenazi Israel that no longer exists, that it wants to present to specifically the United States and to Joe Biden and to liberals in the U.S. Aharon Barak was actually the mentor of Supreme Court Justice, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. So that really emphasizes the seriousness of this case. And you can also see Israeli pundits, if you follow Hebrew media at all, warning of sanctions on Israel, that Israel will no longer be a first world country and that it will essentially be under siege if this genocide case is actually approved by the 17 ICJ justices.

I don't want to divert from what we're talking about, but I do believe that the allegations against Dershowitz have been dismissed, but you're right. They're taking this very seriously. I said he's accused of that, but it's definitely damaging to Dershowitz's reputation. And for him to appear defending Israel while he's under siege right now from his own Epstein links, and the links are real, that would be very damaging for Israel to show that they didn't take this case seriously. So that's my point. Got it. What conceivable defense does this former chief justice have to offer to the court? What Israel is going to say is, you know, we're exercising our right of self-defense, even though there is no such

right in international law and an occupying power has no right to self-defense. It only has the right to end the occupation, which inspires violent attacks on it. And, you know, you can also argue in international law, there's a 1973 UN resolution giving occupied people or colonized people the right to take up arms against their occupier. But Israel is just going to argue that it was attacked on October 7th. It was the worst loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. And therefore, they are fighting the spirit of Nazi Germany. That's how their argument will proceed. And I don't think it will go over.

I don't know how the judges will rule, but it certainly won't go over very well with the international public. Well, it'd be hard to believe that an argument like that could defeat this complaint. We're showing some portions of the complaint on the screen. The complaint is consisted of facts from neutral and Israeli sources, and the complaint consists of quotes not disputed from the mouths of Israeli leaders, particularly members of the cabinet, especially the two that you just talked about, Ben-Gabir and Smotrich, as well as Defense Minister Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu. I mean, stated differently from the thousands of complaints I've read in my judicial career, but this is a slam dunk for the plaintiffs. There is effectively no credible denying the nature of the allegations, and they are hair-raising and horrific.

You've described them for us in detail in your previous appearances on the show. So is this going to be poor old Israel, everybody picking on it? Or is this going to be here's why we did this, here's why we did that? I mean, it's not a trial in the sense of an American trial with witnesses and interrogation and cross-examination. It's lawyers making arguments and answering questions from judges. Yeah, and I think, just look at what happened today. Israel put forward a 100-page paper explicitly justifying its massacre of over 100 Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip, on the basis that all of those journalists are affiliated with terrorism, including the son of the person who might be the most famous

Palestinian journalist today, Wael Dadu. They killed him in a drone strike. They blew up his car and they claimed he was a terrorist because one of his colleagues in the car was using a drone to film rubble. They said it was a terrorist drone. Now they're saying he's affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It's ridiculous that today Israel bombed the, bombed Dera al-Bala in the center of Gaza. They killed 40 people in one strike. Those who died most immediately were falafel vendors in the streets. There were no military targets there at all. And they previously bombed nearby at the Maghazi refugee camp, killing 70 people in one strike. Israeli tanks and Khan Yunis have wiped out an entire family, killing over 40 people in the past 24

hours. And this is all going on while they're destroying the hospital system, refusing to allow 1.1 million people to return to the northern Gaza Strip. But the strongest point that I think the South African case has here is that Israeli leaders and Israeli social and cultural leaders have self-indicted Israel by expressing their intent to commit genocide in a clearer way than any other country has during an armed conflict. Well, you are correct because the law requires, international law and those treaties require a demonstration of intent, and the intent is right there coming out of their own mouths, is it not? Yeah. I mean, today you had an Israeli minister call for all of Gaza. The communications minister

said that his name is Shlomo Karhi. And he said that we should voluntarily encourage people in Gaza to leave Gaza. And then he was asked how, and he said, by waging war on them. That's pretty clear intent to commit genocide. Then you had an Israeli member of Knesset call for burning everyone in Gaza alive, everyone. And he doubled down when he was criticized on it. And it's not, this is just today, the head of the news division of the largest newspaper in Israel, Ynet, Yediot Aronot, called for removing all non-Jews from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. I mean, on Twitter, they deleted the tweet, but this is what the application is filled with. So the intent to commit genocide is clear, and the wiping out of part or whole of a national group is taking place

before our eyes. So it seems to me a pretty cut and dry case. What would the consequences be, Max, of a finding validating the complaint and holding Israel liable for genocide? I mean, this isn't a criminal court. Prime Minister Netanyahu, regrettably, is not on trial. That may come. But what are the consequences here? What can the court do? Well, the ruling would then be presented to the International Criminal Court, which is under the control of this completely bought off co-opted figure, Kareem Khan, who I call Kareem Neocon. And he has done everything possible to avoid the Palestinian issue and to act as the tool of NATO. He was installed by the British government through basically a NATO operation. And he's a tool of

the British from the UK. And he runs around with Amal Clooney, George Clooney's wife, who's his former student, to give himself celebrity status. And his main achievement has been issuing a hollow indictment of Vladimir Putin for evacuating about 16,000 ethnic Russian children from the war zone in Donbass. So it will at least increase pressure on the ICC and further expose that institution as a tool of the West, as well as the UN. But it will also provide latitude for countries to impose bilateral sanctions on Israel and to take other measures. And it's mainstreamed the G word, which was very marginal before and only used by activists against Israel. Now you have hundreds of international legal

experts using this allegation against the state of Israel that has always thrown up the Holocaust as its defense. And now we see as it's committing a new Holocaust in the name of the old one, they are being held accountable by some of the most senior figures in international jurisprudence. The G word is genocide is now so well documented and so obvious that there's no longer a scandal to using the word. I was excoriated when, I don't know if it was you or one of our our guests first used it for the first time it's now commonplace and everybody uses it i'm glad you and the others have stuck to their guns on and i'm not glad it's happening but i'm glad for the intellectual uh honesty but you're right the international legal community i've never heard

joe biden use it but the international legal community well uh've never heard Joe Biden use it, but the international legal community uses it regularly and extensively. Biden has used it again, and Blinken has used it, and I actually went to the State Department to ask them about this. They used it against China, accusing China of committing genocide against the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang province of Western China. But Tony Blinken presented no evidence for that allegation. And he has never accused China of mass killing, of any wide scale killing of the Uyghur people. The only allegation is that they are put in these kind of camps or vocational centers, as China calls them, the U.S. calls them internment camps, where they're supposedly programmed. But so they're not even accusing China of violence, of direct physical violence. So it shows how much the US has cheapened

this term leading up to what I consider to be the most credible allegation of genocide. At the gray zone, we've actually been fighting against the phony allegations of genocide. At the Gray Zone, we've actually been fighting against the phony allegations of genocide because they're being weaponized by the U.S. to stir up regime change from Syria to Russia to Venezuela to China. Here's a potential expert witness for the South Africans if they need one, Professor Mearsheimer. I don't know if you've seen this, but this is a great clip of his analysis of the genocide and his analysis of the South African complaint. It's not very... As I said in the Substack piece that I wrote on this, as you read the document, you can't help but thinking about how the Nazis talked about the Jews when you read about how the Israeli Jews are talking about the Palestinians. I mean, the parallels are marked. And it's almost incomprehensible to me

that Israeli Jews would be making these kinds of comments about any kind of people. But the evidence is overwhelming. The piece is heavily footnoted and hardly anybody disputes. Hardly anybody disputes. I don't know what this retired judge, I have a thing for retired judges, I don't know what this retired judge can possibly say. You mentioned the Brits before. We have a very interesting clip. You may have sent this to us, but I'm anxious to hear you comment. I mean, this is David Cameron, absolutely at his worst, the former British prime minister, now Lord Cameron, now defense minister, trying to hide something about British nationals who were or are hostages in

Gaza. It's not very long. Some of it is a little mumbo jumbo because of the way they speak English, but I'll be anxious to hear your thoughts on this, Max. Be specific about the number of UK nationals who remain as hostages. Yes, there are two. And do we have proof of life? y nifer o Gwledydd Cymru sy'n parhau fel hynod o'u hwstad? Fynddwch yn dda. Mae yna ddwy Gwledydd Cymru sy'n parhau fel hynod o'u hwstad. Dydw i ddim am wneud unrhyw sylwadau arnynt. Mae yna hefyd... A ydym yn gwybod eu bod yn fyw? Dydw i ddim am ddweud unrhyw beth. Dydyn ni ddim yn cael unrhyw wybodaeth i'w rhannu. they're alive? I just don't want to say any more. We don't have any information to share with you.

There are also, of course, people very connected to Britain who are also hostages. A few of us were in Doha in December where we met with Roger Carstens, who is the US hostage negotiator.

He can tell me in a minute's notice the names of all the hostages who are American who are still being held by Hamas, let alone the ones in Venezuela or anywhere else in the country, and he can most certainly tell me how many have been brought back to the US. How many have been brought back to the UK who had UK citizenship? There were two, as the Foreign Secretary mentioned

British nationality who were hostage there were others who were connected to the UK through family ties I think the answer to your question is brought back to the UK by the UK government I don't really care who brought them back I care about British nationals who were held hostage

how many have been brought back? Let me confirm after this but I'll speak for myself. I don't think there are any. OK, so that's a zero. I think that's right. Well, Jumbo is about who or whatals who moved to Israel, gained Israeli citizenship as Jews, and then went to join the Israeli military to participate as members of the Gaza division as active duty combatants in the siege of Gaza, which made them targets in an armed conflict, in an ongoing armed conflict. And Cameron can't say this because they lose all moral validity. And it also raises questions about double standards within the UK, where the UK has

prosecuted citizens or stripped them of citizenship, like Shamima Begin, who is a 15-year-old girl who was manipulated actually by a British intelligence agent when they went to go join ISIS or fight with ISIS. But here you have British citizens, British youth joining as foreign fighters for a foreign country engaged in massive human rights abuses, an occupation that is organized, like ISIS, around religious lines. So they now have to no one out because Israel is getting no one out because Israel is refusing to end its assault and the UK refuses to call for a ceasefire. There's another amazing exchange there between Cameron and the head of that panel, whose name is Alicia Kearns. We've written about her before at the Gray Zone. She's very well connected to British intelligence and is, you know, a very, an establishment figure. She's no radical. And he keeps being asked, is Israel cutting off the water

to the Gaza Strip? And is this not a crime against humanity? And Cameron ultimately has to admit it. And so, I mean, this is a pretty significant exchange because the British government is now finally admitting that Israel's engaged in violations of international law. Where that goes, I don't know, but it's all coming out now. And incidentally, on the same day of that exchange, the Daily Mail, the Murdoch tabloid, published a piece instrumentalized by the Israeli foreign ministry about four Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip. And they're presented as teenage girls, just innocent teenage girls. And you saw them in their street clothes. They

were active duty soldiers who were basically prison guards for the Gaza prison camp on October 7th in charge of manning these remote controlled machine guns that are placed on the billion dollar electrified wall that closes Gaza in, and they were captured. And so the whole international media and the Israeli delegation at the UN is just saying that these are kidnapped girls in order to strip the context away from what happened on October 7th, which was that the Gaza division in charge of the siege of Gaza got wiped out. What do you think the chances are of the United States being a co-defendant under standard international law and the genocide treaty as an aid or a better and financer of genocide as a co-defendant with Israel before the International Court of Justice.

Well, my colleague, Sam Hussaini, went to the State Department and asked Blinken spokesman Matthew Miller that very question. He said, do you fear becoming a co-defendant charged with genocide? And Miller just basically shrugged and dismissed the question and moved on. I think they're sweating a little bit more. A group of something like 100 South African lawyers, senior figures involved in international law, have submitted a filing as a compliment to the South African government's invocation of the Genocide Convention to bring the U.S. government, the Biden administration in as a party to genocide. And this would be especially ironic for Samantha Power, who is the director of USAID and has banked her career on this phony industry of genocide prevention. And she always

accuses countries where the US seeks regime change from Libya to Syria to Yugoslavia of genocide in order to justify US military action, which worsens the situation, destabilizes everything. But she says her hero is Raphael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention. And here she is, Samantha Power, a party to genocide, while the Auschwitz Museum has actually issued statements in support of Israel's genocide. So the whole genocide prevention industry stands exposed right now. Here's a clip of President Biden this week. He went to South Carolina, I guess, too concerned about the South Carolina primary, which is coming up pretty soon. I don't even know who's opposing him. Maybe this congressman from Minnesota,

but whatever. He's speaking in a South Carolina church. He's reading forcefully from the teleprompter, and then he's interrupted. Without the truth, there's no light. Without light, there's no path from this darkness. If you really care about the lives lost here, then you should honor the lives lost in the culprits, ceasefire, and Palestine. Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!

Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! That's all right. That's all right. That's all right. That's all right. He basically mumbled shortly after that clip ended, I'm doing what I can. I'm talking to people about this. Quietly, he said. Correct. Right.

So quietly. Very reassuring. So quietly that nothing is happening. is happening you know max we talk every week i'm deeply grateful and the viewers you're you're a hero to my uh to my viewers but the situation seems to be getting worse and worse every week every time we see the situation for the democratic party right now doesn't at least on the national stage, does not look good. By the situation, I meant the situation in Gaza. You happen to be right about the Democratic Party. And, you know, I don't think the American public wants another Trump against Biden,

but it looks more and more every day like that's what we're going to end up with. But how do you see events progressing in Gaza? Do you see the court in Brussels having any effect on them? Do you see an international economic blockade having an effect? Do you see Prime Minister Netanyahu resigning and being replaced by somebody who's going to do the same thing, but it's not as personally hateful as Netanyahu. I mean, I think we can look at that clip and see one point of pressure on the Israeli government in Gaza because it runs straight through Joe Biden. And you see what the Democratic Party that supports Biden is. It's a bunch of, as we would say in Yiddish, alter cockers, people over 65 who've been shepherded into a church chanting in a zombie-like fashion four more years while the

young generation, the only young people in that entire church are protesting Biden. And then you have the Democratic consultant class coming out and chiding those protesters and saying that they stained and disrespected, hollowed ground that the sacred church represents the civil rights movement. They're hiding behind the faded nostalgia of the civil rights movement as represented by Jim Clyburn sitting next to Biden, one of the biggest democratic machine hacks who shivved Bernie in the back, who shivved Nina Turner in the back by supporting the Israel lobby candidate, whose career is financed by big pharma. And so young people are going to sit this out. If Biden is going to continue to arm Israel, he's going around Congress, more and more democratic senators are coming forward and demanding that Biden allow congressional

oversight of the weapons being sent to Israel. At the same time, the Israeli government is unable to defeat Hamas. Hamas has said, we are not going to accept your relocation. We're not going to just leave with our weapons, so you go away. They're still in the field. Israel lost 10 soldiers in one day this week and it's losing more and more. There's new video online by Hamas's armed wing showing many many attacks on armored vehicles and Israel wants to continue its assault on babies and women and on the Palestinian womb

which it considers a demographic threat and we're going to hear more and more exterminationist genocidal tirades from Israeli leaders until somebody puts a stop to it. And it may be that Biden buckles under political pressure and finally orchestrates a ceasefire. I don't see that happening. It may also be that Israel buckles under an all-out war with Hezbollah, or it may be that this war continues for the rest of the year as Netanyahu and the people around him have said they want it to. And that I think until other forces intervene, countervailing forces, that's the agenda. And I don't like to make predictions because I just never want to be wrong. I want to play one more clip for you because I think you know, as I do, the person in the clip, not Jamie Raskin, who's speaking, but the person who silently stood next to him until the police intervened. The political scientists tell us that the hallmarks of an

authoritarian or fascist political party are that one, they do not accept the results of democratic elections that don't go their way. Two, they refuse to renounce or they openly embrace political violence as an instrument. What's the matter with this? Is there something wrong with the sign? Israel is not above the law. Hold Israel accountable. Hold Israel accountable. They accept. They're worse than Jan 6. Hold Israel accountable.

Israel is not above the law. Hold it accountable. They accept. I'm sorry. Let me just start that again. Let me start that again. You who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Outside the Capitol building, the quintessential place for expressing a political opinion,

Medea Benjamin is silently standing there with a sign, and they yank her away with his approval. Well, that was a great intervention by Medea, as usual, alongside Ty Berry, who shouted, what Israel's doing is worse than January 6th. Of course, the only person killed on January 6th was Ashley Babbitt, who was a protester, who was shot trying to charge into the Speaker's lobby. But Jamie Raskin stands there as, in my opinion, the biggest hypocrite and tool in Congress and one of the biggest McCarthyites who would accuse anyone calling for peace in rally about Trump's ties to Russia held by all these democratic big money groups. And he was calling for regime change across the world, anywhere where Putin had an ally. And he's founded so many untruths and misleading statements. And I called him for it in this interview. It made him look so bad that I ran into him actually at a cocktail party like a year later in Washington. And he just started screaming

at me in the living room and demanding I apologize. And I said, he should apologize for dishonoring the legacy of his family because Jamie Raskin's father was Marcus Raskin, who founded the first anti-war think tank in Washington, the Institute for, IPS, Institute for Policy Studies. Marcus Raskin was a major opponent of the Vietnam War. Marcus Raskin would have been calling for a ceasefire now, and Jamie Raskin's son, Tommy Raskin, was a writer for antiwar.com and an intern for the Libertarian Institute who took his own life in his family's living room. Tommy Raskin would be standing with us right now, but Jamie Raskin embodies the face of the mainstream congressional Democrats who are constantly howling about Trump's fascism

while supporting some of the most fascist terrorist political activities on the planet in Israel or refusing to do anything to stop it and supporting Biden to the bitter end while accusing anyone who calls for peace in Ukraine of being controlled by Russia. Jamie Raskin just disgusts me. And you can see his hypocrisy on display there, throwing Medea out while howling about authoritarianism. McCarthyism on steroids. Max, you're a great man. And again, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your brilliance. You're a favorite of all my people, and you and I become friends, and I'm the better for it. Thank you, my dear friend.

Thanks as always, Judge. Of course. Of course. We have a full day for you tomorrow. We have Tony Schaefer. We have Professor Jeffrey Sachs. We have Professor John Mearsheimer. And we have the boys, the Intelligence Community Roundtable. Get ready for a full and exciting day. Judge Napal, thank you so much for watching, my dear friends. Judge politano for judging freedom Altyazı M.K.