Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Is Netanyahu Trustworthy?

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Is Netanyahu Trustworthy?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, the 27th of November, the day before Thanksgiving here in the U.S., and Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. Yesterday, President Biden in the Rose Garden announced a ceasefire between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army and the IDF. Why would Netanyahu agree on a ceasefire if his army was so strong and he was pushing Hezbollah back? Well, for Netanyahu, the situation had reached an impasse and that's what Israeli members of Netanyahu's national security team, cabinet, were telling the media sort of privately. They'd run out of targets. They were killing Hezbollah figures who were on the political

side, who operated openly, who had no military involvement, like Mohammed Afif, the spokesman. And meanwhile, the citizens of the North, the Jewish-Israeli citizens of the north, the Galilee, were not able to return home. We're talking about over 100,000 people. So Netanyahu is under mounting pressure. Netanyahu believes that he can interpret the terms of the deal very liberally and sell it back to his population as a victory. And while Netanyahu achieved no victory whatsoever, neither did Hezbollah. And it's going to be a really shaky truce. I wouldn't even call it a ceasefire that will likely be broken by Israel in the coming days. I mean, in the past few hours, they've already abducted people

in southern Lebanon and claimed that they're Hezbollah operatives. And you could see how they ended with a message to the overall population of Lebanon, people outside of the realm of resistance in central Beirut, including on Hamra, which is where you'll see women walking in bikini tops, the sort of hearkening back to the days when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, attacking Hamra is a message to the whole population that Israel will collectively punish them if they continue to allow Hezbollah to operate in their midst. So clearly Israel wants to see some kind of civil war and the population remove Hezbollah before the next round, which will not happen. So Netanyahu is on shaky ground. He did not achieve any real victory in a true sense, but neither did Hezbollah. Hezbollah merely survived and demonstrated that it could

continue to hit back until the end. And they were in a very difficult, if not impossible situation from the beginning, from October 8th on. How many casualties did the IDF suffer, or will we never know the true number because the Netanyahu regime won't release them? We won't know, but one thing I was noticing in the last days was in southern Lebanon in the villages as the Israeli army sought to push toward the Latani River. A lot of the soldiers they were losing were younger, closer to age 18. The reservist forces were unable to maintain the same coherence they had after October 7th. There were reports in Israeli media about the reservist core basically collapsing. And so the morale was definitely weakening within the Israeli military, but Israel always maintained escalation dominance.

And that's the problem for Hezbollah was that there's this air bridge of 2000 pound GBU bombs from the US through Dover air base going straight to Israel's Nevatim Air Base. And they could just basically bombard Beirut as long as they wanted, as well as southern Lebanon and Tyre, the city of Tyre was heavily destroyed. So they didn't need the ground troops that they relied on so heavily in 2006. This was, for Israel, it was an air war just attacking the civilian population. And they succeeded in part of their doctrine, which is what they call mowing the lawn, which is cutting resistance down to size for the next round, killing a generation of leaders.

Most of the Hezbollah Jihad Council was killed. Hezbollah's leader, longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed. Many field commanders were killed, but Hezbollah held on. They managed to maintain rocket fire into Haifa and even hit Tel Aviv all the way till the end. They hit Netanyahu's bedroom with a drone. They scored a big success in the Binyamina attack, hitting an Israeli army base precisely with a drone. But their rocket fire was suppressed because of the early tactical success of the Israeli military in attacking munitions bases in the days after the Pager attack, which was extremely demoralizing. So looking back, Hezbollah didn't want this war. It was forced into it because of the Al-Aqsa flood, October 7th attack by Hamas, which Hezbollah had no idea was coming. The political leadership of Hamas had no idea that that was coming.

And after that, for ideological and moral reasons, Hassan Nasrallah had to get involved in this war on October 8th. Hezbollah was not ready. They knew that Israel had escalation dominance. And so they fought a war that was basically a half war just to keep the residents of the northernmost settlements in Israel away with the goal, the strategy of forcing Israel to do a ceasefire in Gaza, because for philosophical and moral reasons, they had to act on behalf of the Palestinian struggle. There was no way that Hezbollah could have sat this out without losing total credibility among its own constituency

and the world. But at the same time, they couldn't go all the way and push as hard as they wanted. So when Israel finally turned its attention to Lebanon and to Hezbollah after it achieved the weakening of Hamas, Hezbollah was extremely vulnerable and they hadn't hit Israel hard enough. So there was this quandary and Nasrallah had suggested that he would even be targeted and assassinated because of the quandary he was in. He was unable to escape Israel's bunker buster bombs. And so here we are at a ceasefire after Hezbollah had been delinked from the Gaza cause and was fighting purely for the Lebanese front, once Netanyahu achieved that or the Israeli army achieved the delinking and then was able to just punish the Lebanese population, kill a

number of leaders, I think they decided you know let's call it a day because our own populations under pressure. And then there were domestic concerns for Netanyahu as well. He's under pressure, not just from the Ashkenazi elite, the middle class in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, over this Haredi draft bill, the bill to draft the ultra-Orthodox, because the Israeli public has paid a price since October 7th. Many deaths, injuries in the war, guys going into the reserves, losing their small businesses because they've been in the field for so long. And then you have this whole population of the ultra-Orthodox who study

Torah all day. So they're mad at them, but they're not the only ones now. The religious nationalists, the ones who wear the cloth kippot, the k kippas, like Bezalel Smotrik, Itamar Ben-Gvir's followers, they also served in the Israeli military. They want the ultra-Orthodox to serve as well. They actually want to capture them, get them out of their anti-Zionist synagogues and get them into this messianic religious nationalist world. And so Netanyahu is under pressure from his own coalition. And he has the ultra-Orthodox parties in his coalition as well, who are dead set against the bill. So the war basically had to end for Netanyahu in the north to relieve that pressure. Now, what's next on the agenda? Number one, settlements in Gazaaza let's give the religious nationalist camp that's that's that's

given so much let's give them settlements in northern gaza let's keep the ethnic cleansing going in the north that's something bezalel smotrik two days ago said was part of the agenda and that the goal was to depopulate gaza by half number two on the agenda, focus on Iran. Start carrying out more sabotage attacks on Iran. Attack Iranian shipping. Focus the entire military on preparing to utterly destroy Iran's leadership. That's what Netanyahu is thinking right now. And the U.S. has given him an opportunity to do that. Was this a victory for Netanyahu or a concession? It was neither. And, you know,

I just think we're in this interregnum between the next stage, the next stage of the conflict. And, you know, unfortunately for the resistance, which has always known this because of the U.S. backing, Israel maintains escalation dominance, but the ball is in Iran's court, and I can't really speak to what they have in store. Was there any resistance? I think I saw one negative vote in the Israeli cabinet to the ceasefire with Hezbollah. Yeah, I mean, there are residents of the North who spoke out against it to Israeli news channels and said, we wanted to go back,

but you promised to utterly destroy Hezbollah and you haven't done that. And I think there's an added dimension here, which is that Netanyahu's promised goals will probably never be achieved. He promised to completely destroy Hamas and completely destroy Hezbollah, and he failed. But at the same time, he denied Hezbollah what was probably an impossible victory from the beginning by refusing a ceasefire in Gaza because of the pressure in the north. And I say impossible from the beginning, from the point of view of a non-state group, one of the best

organizations, one of the masters of asymmetrical warfare, you don't want to be in a situation where your victory is contingent on your enemy doing something it doesn't want to do. And that's the situation Hezbollah founded in itself in on October 8th. So Netanyahu has at least denied Hezbollah a victory, even as Hezbollah sort of held on. And what he's hoping for, what I think the U.S. is hoping for. You've had the U.S. ambassador in Beirut say this. They're hoping for a more like a civil war situation in Beirut with the population turning against Hezbollah at this point. And so what they're going to try to do is torture the Lebanese economy, try to deny Hezbollah the opportunity to rearm or rebuild, immiserating the Shia population in the south and southern

Beirut, as well as the rest of the population. And so it's going to be a tough time for Lebanon. And in the meanwhile, the killing continues in Gaza. And it doesn't look like there will be a ceasefire in Gaza. It looks like a permanent war from this point on. There's no pressure on Netanyahu or on the Israeli leadership, military leadership at all to leave Gaza. They have this plan to divide Gaza into three. There's the Netzerim corridor, which cuts the north off, which has basically become a series of military bases that is two kilometers wide. Netanyahu has even visited the Netzerim corridor, I believe. Hamas is still in the field. They're

still fighting. The population in the north is starving. The population overall across Gaza is in tents and buying a tent is very expensive. And right now it's the winter season. It's the rainy season. Tents are flooding. People are having to move away from the beach because of the flooding. I mean, the level of misery there is unspeakable. And Netanyahu, not just Netanyahu, but the entire Israeli leadership has free reign there and less pressure than before because of the ceasefire in the north. Here's Netanyahu earlier today articulating what he says are the three reasons for the ceasefire. Chris, cut number 16.

So why have a ceasefire now? Three main reasons for it. One, focusing on the Iranian threat. And I'm not going to go into it. And I expand on that, too. Refreshing our forces and getting armaments. I'm not going to hide it from you. There were many delays in getting armaments and weapons.

And soon this is going to open up. We will have the armaments, we will save our soldiers' lives and we will give us additional force to complete our task. Third reason for the ceasefire, separating Hamas and this front. From the first day of the war, Hamas planned from the beginning that Hezbollah will be at its side. But when Hezbollah is not in the picture, Hamas will be alone.

And this will aid us in our sacred goal to release our hostages. Does this make sense to you? Or is this Bibi trying to make himself look better than he is? Obviously, he's interpreting the terms liberally. He's touting achievements that didn't take place and promising goals that cannot be achieved, like the release of the hostages through pure

military action. I mean, last week we saw him desperately offering $5 million bounties for hostages. This is not something you do if you're confident that you can get hostages out. Many of them may be dead. We saw a female hostage die from the same conditions that people in Northern Gaza are dying of. And this has been happening throughout, that the hostages and captives would die because everyone in Gaza is dying from bombing, from starving. Point number two that Netanyahu made about being unable to, or having difficulties rearming, contains political undertones aimed at Biden and the Democrats in Washington, even though Trump is one, as one Israeli news outlet reported, causing Netanyahu and his team to dance the horror. But Tel Aviv Ted, Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, key ally of Netanyahu in Washington,

falsely claimed that Biden had been withholding weapons. And that ally of Netanyahu in Washington, falsely claimed that Biden had been withholding weapons. And that is why Netanyahu had to carry out the ceasefire, had to agree to the ceasefire and the concessions. I mean, and this is just something they're going to continue, Republicans in Washington will continue to say about the Democrats when Joe Biden's true legacy is Genocide Joe. And one other point about victors and losers, I don't think there are any victors or losers here, but if there is one loser, it's Israel's image. That is the real defeat that Israel suffered since October 7th. Its image will never recover. Its economy may never recover or may be distorted

for a generation. And Netanyahu's image is fatally damaged. He's someone who cannot travel now to parts of Western Europe. I just saw this film, The BB Files, which is effectively banned inside Israel. It's coming out in the U.S. It will be a major release. It is an anti-Netanyahu film. In some ways, I think it's kind of a dangerous film because it comes at Netanyahu from a liberal Zionist perspective, making him seem like he's at fault for the entire crisis that Israel's in and for the genocide in Gaza when Netanyahu is simply an exponent of Zionism, and Zionism itself is the issue here. So the film is in many ways liberal Zionist propaganda, but it's also deep state propaganda from the US. It's produced by someone named Alex Gibney, who is a sort of, he's one of the best documentary makers working today, but he's also a Democratic

Party propagandist who made a film about Russiagate during the Trump era, and who speaks not just for the Democratic Party, but I think many elements within the national security and State Department bureaucracy that see Netanyahu as a criminal, as a tyrant. And the film also gives voice to the part of the Israeli public that Netanyahu does not want in the street protesting him. So for a film to be made of this caliber, of this level, really speaks to the PR defeat that Netanyahu personally and Israel in general has suffered. Is this the film that actually airsations of Netanyahu, his wife, and people who gave them gifts, including Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who kind of throw Netanyahu under the bus in these interrogations. The level of corruption actually seems minuscule and petty

compared to what we see in the United States. But the film overall is a vehicle for destroying Netanyahu's image in the English-speaking world, using a corruption trial that was mostly only known within the Hebrew-speaking world. So that's why I think it's significant. And then it deals with Netanyahu, the war criminal, at the end. How has the Israeli public received the indictment and issuance of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant? Well, the Israeli public is divided, but there's a fear there,

which is that every Israeli woman or man has to be conscripted into the military at age 18. So they all feel like they could be targets for following the orders of these characters. And the level of criminality and sadism displayed by the Israeli public through this citizens or people's military that we've seen recorded in a more intimate, comprehensive fashion than in any war in human history in Gaza and Lebanon is off the charts. So they should be afraid. And what Lindsey Graham said is true as well, that after they come for them, they will come for our leaders and they should. There should be an investigation into Tony Blinken's role in this war, colluding with Netanyahu's military to obstruct humanitarian aid. There should be an investigation into the entire Biden team,

as well as the propagandists who sold the war. I don't think it will go that far, but there's a clear precedent here. It also freaks out the American exceptionalists, the imperialists at the Washington Post editorial board, who said the ICC is actually supposed to be, I mean, they didn't say this, but this is what they meant. It's really supposed to be the international Caucasian court. We're only supposed to go after brown and black tin pot dictators. We're not supposed to go after Jews like Netanyahu and American leaders. This is not what the court is for. We're supposed to have two systems of justice in the world. And that has been shattered and upended by this precedent set by the court, which puts us in a

new era, an era in which anyone who believes in international law has to understand that either the authors of this genocide get prosecuted or international law is utterly meaningless. Here's Senator Graham on the ICC. See if you can tell who he's talking about, Max. Cut number nine. This is a legitimate complaint in our eyes, and we'd ask the ICC to investigate. You can find yourself in the Hague if you have a scorched earth policy. So the world is watching you to hold one of the most vicious people on the planet finally accountable. Enough of the murder, enough of destruction and carnage on your behalf. There'll come a day when the rule of law will trump the rule of the gun.

Now, sounds like he's talking about Netanyahu, but he was talking about Putin when Putin was invaded because they picked up children whose parents had been killed and the ICC accused him of kidnapping. But it is interesting how the Americans in this case, one of the more bellicose neocons and Zionists, will find that the ICC jurisdiction is legitimate when the target of it is someone they hate rather than someone they revere. To people like Tony Blinken or Joe Biden, the rules-based order represents the post-World War II international legal and multilateral system that the U.S. helped construct and which it leads. And when I say leads, I basically mean manipulates. And that rules-based order would not have collapsed so decisively and so rapidly after Israel began its genocide after October 7th had the Biden administration not gone in so strong on

the Ukraine proxy war, along with a cast of bipartisan allies like the Senate's chief neocon, Lindsey Graham, welcoming, not only welcoming the ICC warrant for Vladimir Putin for not any crimes committed in Bucha or any massacre or bombing of hospitals or anything like that, but for evacuating Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian children from the war zone when they were under the bombing of the Ukrainian army. It was a bizarre warrant, and it was constructed with, as we exposed at the gray zone with research by someone named Nathaniel Raymond at Yale university, who is funded by the state department. The state department basically funded the research that comprised the bulk of the warrant, which Kareem

Khan, the ICC prosecutor who is installed basically by the UK authored. And that's what Kareem Khan was supposed to do. No one expected him to actually turn around and indict Netanyahu and Gallant, but the credibility of the entire ICC and the international legal system hung in the balance and he had to do this. So this obviously is what infuriates Lindsey Graham, whose hypocrisy is on bold display there, as is every institution, FIFA, the United European Football Association, for banning Russia immediately after it invaded Ukraine while letting Israel and its band of thugs rove around the world for matches and international play. Last topic with you. You and Aaron and I have discussed at length the assaults on free speech by the Biden administration, by members of Congress, like Elise Stefanik, as an example, who's slated to become Trump's ambassador to the UN. I think you'll agree with me that this is about to get worse. Here is Pam Bondi, the designee to be Attorney General of the United States, suggesting that demonstrators on college

campuses should be deported at worst or interrogated by FBI agents at best. Cut number 14. Whether they're here as Americans or if they're here on student visas and they're out there saying, I support Hamas, you and I have seen that on all of these television shows. Frankly, they need to be taken out of our country

or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away when they're saying, I support Hamas, I am Hamas. That's not saying I support all these poor Palestinians who are trapped in Gaza. That's not saying I support all these poor Palestinians who are trapped in Gaza. That's not what they're saying. So I think their student visas need to be revoked. I think we need to reinstate President Trump's travel ban immediately. There's a lot of things that can be done to stop this. But yeah, the anti-Semitism that is rampant throughout this

country now, and it's truly, truly heartbreaking to see what's happening to all of our Jewish friends in this country. So this woman who's about to become the head of the Justice Department and indirectly the head of the FBI believes that the First Amendment, notwithstanding, the government can evaluate the content of speech and decide which political speech is worthy of praise, which is worthy of interrogation, and which is worthy of kicking people out of the country. Worse than anything Joe Biden's DOJ ever even imagined. Well, the Biden DOJ has helped set the stage for this, but let's look at how Pam Bondi came into the position as Trump's attorney general nominee. It was the downfall of Matt Gates,

who has taken one of the few members of Congress who has not taken Israel lobby money, who actually voted against one of the major aid supplementals to Israel, along with other members of the Freedom Caucus, mainly because it also was linked to Ukraine aid, but he did it. Matt Gaetz went down mainly because of this bizarre background he has and this saga that involved apparently sexual blackmail. And Pam Bondi comes in. She's welcomed by CNN. It appears Senate Democrats will let her slide through. She's been a longtime corporate lobbyist for GM, Amazon, Uber, and even Gulf monarchies. She's a corporate tool. And so that's why she'll sail through. But also, in the last hours of Matt Gaetz as AG nominee, the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League

condemned him as an anti-Semite. And Pam Bondi appears, someone with a very clear record, working under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he'll be the most pro-Israel governor in America, of shilling for Israel and advancing Israel's objectives politically and legally inside the United States on behalf of Tel Aviv, crushing the First Amendment and the rights of students and other Americans to organize against this genocide. And what I think we're going to see happen, and this is an agenda that's been spelled out in the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther, which was actually largely written by Christian right activists, Christian Zionists, is to seek terrorism designations for groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, the groups leading the demonstrations in the

streets, and then to begin to actually prosecute them and debank their activists going to places like PayPal, Venmo, and ordering them basically to block transactions of anyone who's leading Palestine solidarity activity. This is all spelled out And Bondi seems to be the perfect person to advance this authoritarian, anti-freedom, un-American agenda on behalf of Netanyahu and the Israeli apartheid regime. Is there anybody in Trump's cabinet that's not an ardent Zionist? I mean, yeah, it's mega. It's make Israel great again.

And the ceasefire in Lebanon, the terms aren't really supposed to technically go in effect until Trump is in office. So that's another ominous sign. Right. Max, thank you very much for your time. A short week, and I appreciate you jumping on like this. A happy Thanksgiving to you and Anya and your family. Remember me to your father, and all the best. Happy holidays.

Thank you. Coming up later today at 2 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer at 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi at 4 o'clock, just returned from eight days in Palestine, Matt Ho. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.