Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal (TheGrayZone) Netanyahu’s next move. The World is Watching!

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

What if everything you've been hearing about the Israel-Palestine conflict is far from the complex reality unfolding in the region? This episode shatters the conventional narratives and dives headlong into the raw, unfiltered truths of the war, unearthing shocking details of the Liddar Ramle Death March of 1948, alleged staged surrenders, and the impact it all has on the US and EU. @MaxBlumenthal draws a chilling picture of the unfolding situation, tracing back to the origins of Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the Oslo Accords, and the controversial figure involved in the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.We uncover the disturbing lack of substantive governmental opposition to the alleged ethnic cleansing led by Netanyahu and expose the disheartening state of Israeli public opinion. As we dissect the roles of Netanyahu and Hamas in the ongoing war, the larger objectives become alarmingly clear. This conversation is a journey through the harrowing events on the ground to the psychological tactics employed beyond the battlefield. It's a rare chance to understand the intricate dynamics of this volatile issue, beyond the political posturing and media narratives. Tune in, and prepare to see the conflict in a new light.#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 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 Monday, December 11th, 2023. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, my friend, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure. Good to see you. I want to go back to October 7th, the day of the initial Hamas assault on Israel. Did Israel kill its own civilians that day who had been celebrating in the Desert Festival? Well, we've been over this in previous engagements, and it's very clear that Israel killed many of its own civilians around that festival on the roads going in and out of Gaza. I haven't been able to come to any conclusions about what exactly happened on the fields inside that festival. There is some video showing crossfire.

You have strong military censorship on what happened on the fields inside that festival. There is some video showing crossfire. You have strong military censorship on what happened on that day. And then in the kibbutzim, the small kibbutz communities, where that festival was located, basically between two of them, one named Re'im, which has a military base, and one called Be'eri, there was tank shelling on the homes of Israeli civilians who were being taken hostage. And we now understand that a lot of that shelling, and particularly the Apache helicopter fire against cars that contained Israeli civilians, was being done under the Hannibal Directive to prevent them from being taken captive to prevent politically painful prisoner exchanges.

Does the Netanyahu government acknowledge that it invokes the Hannibal Directive as repellent as it is? No. And there's been very little pressure inside Israeli society to even discuss these events outside of the propaganda framework of mass rape, beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens. And a lot of that propaganda has been deployed to prevent that sort of discussion about how many Israelis were actually killed by disproportionate force, the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons by Israelis. And I mean, that whole narrative has been deployed also to prevent the US public from reckoning with the fact that the Biden administration is presiding over directly a genocide of civilians in the Gaza Strip. We spent all last week hearing from Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, this oligarch at the UN about Hamas rapes, one story after another pouring out into international media,

and none of it containing any direct testimony, any witnesses, any real evidence at all. And it totally tabled the reality of all of the critical discussion that needs to happen about October 7th and everything since, which is 17,000 dead civilians in two months in the Gaza Strip, where 50% of the population now doesn't have enough food or water. So I just want to make sure I have this correct. Does the IDF take the position that the deaths of Israeli hostages in Hamas hands was the collateral damage caused by IDF trying to kill Hamas? Or does the IDF directly aim at its own civilians and military who happen to be taken as hostages so it doesn't have to go through the pain of getting them back? Well, for the first time, we, the U.S. media consumer or the international media consumer, heard secondhand from released abductees in the Gaza Strip. In other words, Israeli citizens who had been released under the hostage exchanges that took place during the brief humanitarian pause,

and their families. And we heard them through testimony that they delivered to the so-called war cabinet of all of the ministers who were involved in war planning during a closed session, which was apparently secretly tape recorded by some of the participants. So the audio was released to Israeli media. We heard one participant say, a former hostage, that their car was attacked by an Apache helicopter on the way into the Gaza Strip. Then we heard others say that their worst fear was not from Hamas. Hamas took good care of them because they were important collateral. They were afraid of Israeli army bombing, that the Israeli army was bombing everywhere where they were. And they were not just in tunnels. They were taken from place to place on the back of donkey carts because there's not enough fuel for cars there. And the Israeli army would have never

known that they were Israelis. And they begged them, they begged the Israeli military not to conduct any operations to try to release them because it will lead to their deaths and not to enact this insane plan, which they've been discussing to pump the tunnels full of seawater because it would drown all of them. And they're saying that the worst threat to us and to our lives is the Israeli military. They're going to kill us and then blame Hamas for our deaths. Those were the exact words of one of the freed hostages. And we've seen this happen, Andrew, this past week. We saw the Israeli military gain the location of an Israeli soldier who was held captive in the Gaza strip, send an elite commando unit to try to get him out.

They totally failed. They were shot. One was killed. Several were wounded. Their communications gear was taken and the hostage was executed or they killed him in friendly fire. And then they bombed the entire area just so they could get the rest of their team out. How many, I know this is another dispute, how many IDF have been injured and how many IDF have been killed from your best sources?

Well, I don't have any inside sources, but, and very few do. So we have to go based on the public record and through a synthesis of different reports. Ynet, which is one of the biggest tabloids in Israel, initially reported 5,000 wounded, and then they changed that number to 2,000. That was this week. And reported that of that 2,000, over 50% have undergone amputation. So 2,000 severely wounded. Haaretz has reported around 1,600 severely wounded. And then they're including also 10% with severe mental issues, post-traumatic stress disorder. They need to go to like mental hospitals in Israel. Hospitals, military hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed according to reports by Haaretz and civilian hospitals are now treating wounded Israeli soldiers. And then if you just make kind of a, take a cursory glance at videos being released by the Al-Qassam Brigades and Sayyara al-Quds,

the armed wings respectively of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. You're going to get every day footage of them hitting Israeli soldiers. They filmed themselves in the field hitting Israeli tanks. And I was a little bit skeptical at first that these so-called Yassin 105 RPGs that are kind of tandem rockets were actually working. They reverse engineered an old Russian anti-tank weapon, but it appears pretty clear that they are doing damage to the tanks. The Israeli soldiers are posting video from their own social media of the tanks being hollowed out. And many, you know, you see a lot of these combat casualties coming from the engineering corps brigades, the armored divisions. So it's real. And this is a real

problem for the Israeli military. How does the Israeli public react to the Netanyahu government when they learn things like you intentionally killed our own people, you're lying about the number of injured, you won't retell us the number who are dead. Isn't the Israeli public notoriously political and seeking transparency from its government? Yeah, I mean, you have to go back to the protests against Netanyahu leading up to October 7th, which also played a role in the failure of the Israeli military, because so many of the reservists were protesting Netanyahu. Netanyahu was just hated. And this was a reflection of the broader culture war in Israel. It wasn't just over judicial reform.

It was about a section of the Israeli public that is mostly Ashkenazi, more educated. They live in Tel Aviv and some of the coastal cities and in West Jerusalem. And they hate the religious nationalist, crude, extreme coalition that Netanyahu brought in. They hate the settlers. They want to return to the old days when labor controlled Israel and Israel was admired in the world, even as it was an occupier and an ethnic cleanser. And they want to go back to that. You even had one woman, and by the way, in the Israeli Air Force and with the helicopter pilots, that's who they are. They're the Ashkenazi elite. They tend to come from the cream of the crop of Israeli society, more educated.

So you actually had a 60 minute special on these protests. And they interviewed a group of pilots who were leading the protests. And one of the pilots, who is a woman, said, we have to trust our commanders. And when someone gives us an order to bomb a house that's full of children, we need to believe in them. So, I mean, that really gives away the whole game. It's that they want to have more moral cover to continue to wage these wars in Gaza. But Netanyahu is kind of hated on the world stage. He's crude and he has literal fascists in his coalition. so yeah but this woman that was interviewed i didn't see the interview this is the first i've heard of it where she even though it was an american television was she basically saying we will do as we're told even if it means killing babies well she's saying we're more likely to do as we're told and we will have a more orderly army which kills babies in Gaza, if we trust our leadership. And we don't currently trust our leadership. And they see the leadership as settlers and being more politicized. But she

understands what the Israeli military doctrine is. And 60 Minutes aired it because they thought, well, the issue is that just Netanyahu is the bad guy. His opposition can't possibly be bloodthirsty thugs, but they are as well. They follow those orders and always have. Actually, my friend Yonatan Shapira was an Israeli helicopter pilot who organized a letter of pilots refusal during the second intifada, refusing to attack civilian targets in the Gaza Strip. And he was pilloried and ultimately kind of run out of Israel. And the rest of his friends, he said, had no interest in refusing

those orders. So you can see right now, I mean, how is this war being waged mostly? It's mostly being waged by air. Most of the deaths, as we see, are over 60% are civilians being killed by aircraft. And those aircraft are being flown by the cream of the crop of Israeli society, university graduates, highly educated people who often hate Netanyahu. And they're not refusing orders to push that button, knowing that 30 to 60 people from one family could be killed. Wow. Chris, tee up the Lawrence Wilkerson clip. So this is former Colonel Wilkerson who was the chief of staff for the late Secretary of State Colin Powell expressing some very, very harsh criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu, about as harsh as you can imagine because of what he called him. You'll hear it in a minute. I'd like your thoughts

on it. Since Netanyahu took over, indeed, probably since Ronald Reagan had to really bash the Israelis when they went into Lebanon in 1982. But it's certainly been their policy since Netanyahu took over. He is the most draconian leader Israel has had in its short history since 1948. He is the Fuhrer. He is the Fuhrer. Wow. What do you saying? Well, I respectfully disagree. I mean, I respect Lawrence's analysis a lot and benefited from it over the years. But most of the violence against Palestinians historically has occurred not from under the Lik Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, who essentially launched the Second Intifada or provoked the Second Intifada by, according to the Israeli

military of defense, having his military fire one million bullets at Palestinian protesters. This is before suicide bombings ever began during the Second Intifada. During the month of October 2000, Ehud Barak has presided over, he's been involved in the Ministry of Defense or in governments from the Second Intifada before to Operation Grapes of Wrath, which saw civilian shelters bombed across southern Lebanon, all the way through the second war of Lebanon in 2006 to Operation Cast Lead, the first punishing assault on the Gaza Strip. And when you have these figures in government, they're more likely to get the consent of the US because they say, oh, we want a two-state solution. We're not like big bad

Netanyahu who's a Likud one-stater. And that's the danger of these figures and of the opposition to Netanyahu. Take a look at his opponents. I mean, you have like Benny Gantz. This guy led the wars against Gaza from 2009 to 2014, thousands and thousands of civilians. It set the stage for the current assault. And Netanyahu is being criticized because he has always avoided long wars and preferred the strategy of mowing the lawn, which is itself really sick and twisted, if you think about it, which is just going in for a week or two, killing a few mid-level commanders,

doing some damage to civilian infrastructure and saying, hey, we mowed the lawn, now let's manage the occupation. So I'm worried about- You're saying a pox on both their houses. There is no real governmental opposition. There's opposition in the public, but there's no real governmental opposition to the type of ethnic cleansing that Netanyahu is participating in.

No, there's no peace camp in Israel. You have 1.8% of the Israeli public answering a recent poll saying that Israel's using too much firepower in the Gaza Strip. The person who presided over the Oslo Accords, which was supposedly the peace plan, Yitzhak Rabin, he was the author of the original act of systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. He presided over the so-called Lida Ramleh death march during the 1948 war, in which 150,000 Palestinians were sent marching at the point of a gun after several massacres in the towns of Lida and Ramleh towards the east. And they all live in Ramallah and refugee camps in the West Bank now. His final speech, he said, I'm not going to give the Palestinians a state. This was a speech to the Knesset. I will give them less than a state. And that's been the plan from the point of view

of the Labor Party. Netanyahu has just lifted the mask on all that in the same way that Donald Trump sort of lifted the mask on U.S. empire. And that's why Netanyahu is seen as a threat to this whole system that the US had in place. This whole war that we're seeing right now is ripping the entire mask off the entire program of occupation management. And by design, that was Hamas's plan. Hamas doesn't want to govern anymore. They're done. And what they want to see happen is for the Palestinian Authority to be so discredited that it too dissolves and that Israel is forced to govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as it had been before. And they finally have an honest occupation and that will force the hand of the U.S. and EU because they can no longer say, oh, well, the Palestinians have their sovereignty and they're getting their work permits. It's their fault for walking away from the negotiating table, but they got that. And that's what we're going to see take place. Did the IDF recently stage a fake

prisoner surrender with Palestinian civilians or 85% Palestinian civilian males in their underwear? Yeah, I shouldn't be laughing because this was a calamitous war crime. I mean, just, they shoved it in our faces. When I first saw these photos, I thought, are they real? And then I realized the Israelis released them. And then I realized that they're doing it to project an image of victory

because they have no clear battlefield victory to present back to their public, which is still traumatized and humiliated by October 7th. So they took a bunch of guys from UN schools where they were sheltering with their families. They threatened and beat their wives and kids and sent them away. And then they stripped these guys who are bakers, electricians, just regular guys, paraded them on the street. And then at one point in a staged scene, forced a man who runs an aluminum shop in northern Gaza to hand over a gun that they handed to him. And then they told the Israeli public, we have destroyed the Hamas-Jabalia

division and they have all surrendered en masse. We won. And Netanyahu went on Fox News and actually said hundreds of hundreds of some Hamas fighters are surrendering. In reality, Hamas fighters do not surrender. They rarely surrender. They believe in martyrdom, victory or death, freedom, liberty or death, as Patrick Henry put it. That's their motto. Does the Israeli public know that this was staged, was reprehensible, and was a series of war crimes? No. I mean, talk to your local pro-Israel

friend if you're watching this, and they'll tell you that Israel scored a massive victory. Most people who are affected by this propaganda believe it. And they believe that the Palestinian deaths are simultaneously Paliwood and are all made up. And at the same time, they all deserve it. So there's a lot of compartmentalization going on. But you look at what's happening in the field, and Israel has been so far unable to control or deter the guerrilla attacks of the armed factions in the Gaza Strip. They haven't struck a blow against Hamas. They've struck a blow against Palestinian babies and Palestinian women and Palestinian old men. When will it become apparent to the world and to the Israeli public that Netanyahu's tactics are a failure.

Well, one thing that Netanyahu always says, and he said this recently, but there's also leaked video that shows him saying it to a settler family in very revealing terms, is I know how to move America. I am the leader who is most able to actually control, corral, and manipulate the Americans

because I'm kind of one of them. He was raised in Philadelphia. He went to MIT. He worked at Boston consulting with Mitt Romney. When he was out of power, he spent all of his time cooling his heels at the AIPAC headquarters in Washington. And that's his selling point. When some US president shows the Israeli public that Netanyahu can't control him and actually gets the Kishkas to stand up to Netanyahu. Actually, I stupidly thought it might've been Trump at some point, but that didn't happen. Biden went over and bear hugged him and gave Netanyahu all the latitude he needed to carry out this brutal war. But when Biden or someone stands up to him, Netanyahu loses that key selling point.

The other option is they don't do that. Hezbollah gets drawn into the war and they start reducing Israeli cities in the north to flames. And the Israeli public sees what a disaster this is. Last area I want to ask you about. Over the weekend, Secretary Blinken signed an authorization which permitted the sale of $106 million in ammunition, small arms, as well as heavy artillery under a national emergency provision whereby he could bypass Congress. In order to sign that, he had to swear under oath that this was a national emergency to

American national security. How can that possibly be justified by any standard of right and wrong? I don't know. You saw the deputy ambassador to the UN, Robert A. Wood, casting his notorious lone vote against the ceasefire. He said, we were attacked. Our people were killed on October 7th. I guess it was a slip of the tongue, but that seems to be the way this administration sees it, is that American national security interests and Israeli interests are identical, or they're presenting it that way in public. And I find it curious how sending tank shells to Israel advances U.S. national security when U.S. targets across the region are now coming under attack by allies of the Palestinian resistance factions from Iran to the Red Sea,

to, you know, you have sitting ducks there in the Eastern Mediterranean, the USS Eisenhower, that's a multi-billion dollar sitting duck. Right. Putting American lives in danger to enhance Israeli security. And this administration won't show any daylight. And finally, how much skin in the game does Tony Blinken have through Pine Island Capital Partners, which is a firm that he helped launch, which is connected to West Exec Advisors, the other lobbying firm that he helped launch, which is connected to West Exec Advisors, the other lobbying firm that he helped launch, which have relationships with not only the arms dealers and the major Lockheed Martin, Raytheon arms firms that are designing some of the more boutique items that are being used in this war. How much skin in the game does he have?

Well, you think this will get worse before it gets better. You think it'll be more violence and more regional actors getting involved? I do. We saw the Israel use white phosphorus in Southern Lebanon today. That's a war crime by definition. Yeah. Yeah. And they're seeking to escalate. They're seeking to provoke. And they told the Americans, because they're clearly not on the same page with Lebanon, that they're going to deepen their attacks in Lebanon. So let's see. Deeper into the abyss we go. Yes. And darker and darker and darker it gets max thank you very much i know you're busy and really appreciate your time as do uh the viewers they love you

on this thank you i love them back thank you thank you they they do praise you to the skies but we should share with you the things they say about you and uh makes me look good But thank you, Max. Appreciate you, Andrew. Of course, all the best. We have a full week for you of all of our regular superstars, Colonel McGregor, Scott Ritter, Professor Mearsheimer, Professor Sachs, Karen Kwiatkowski, Matt Ho, all the regulars who love to tell you the truth, even when it hurts. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.