Judging Freedom - Origins of Hamas/Israeli Conflict w/ Scott Ritter

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Origins of Hamas/Israeli Conflict w/ Scott RitterSee 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, October 11th, 2023. Scott Ritter joins us now. Scott, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming back on the show. Thanks for having me. What is going on in Israel and Gaza as you understand it as we speak? Well, what's going on is a continuation of a cycle of violence that's been in play for decades now um i mean anybody who woke up saturday and said oh my god there's violence going on in uh in israel um you know where have you been um this in this occasion the violence started on that day with Hamas a terrorist organization there's no uh if

hands or butts about that they're not freedom fighters they're not uh they're not there in defense of the uh Palestinian people Hamas is a terrorist organization pure and simple their charter chapter 12 of it says that their mission is to destroy the state of Israel and is critical as I am of Israel and I think you're going to hear to destroy the state of Israel. And as critical as I am of Israel, and I think you're going to hear me be extraordinarily critical of Israel, under no circumstances is the construction of the state of Israel. And you can't have an organization that believes it's okay to kill civilians, to slaughter civilians. I mean, if you wear a uniform, I'm sorry, you made a decision.

You're in the big game, and sometimes you pay the big price. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. You made that choice. So as much as my heart bleeds for the families of those Israeli soldiers who lost their lives, that's war. But if you're a mom and her child or husband or boyfriend hiding in a safe room, getting the door kicked down, getting machine gunned. No, that's murder. So that's what happened on Saturday. But, but if you think that was the first time murder took place in the Middle East, you're wrong. And if you think that it's only Hamas that commits murder, you're wrong. I'm not trying to justify this is not whataboutism, but Israel's been in the business of murdering Palestinians for decades. We're always silent about it. We don't talk about it. But now that Hamas has came out and committed this atrocious crime, and it is an atrocious crime, everybody's screaming at the top of their lungs.

No, what's going on right now is a cycle of violence. And sadly, all Israel is doing in their response is continuing that cycle. You can't, I'll just leave it at this. When your minister of defense gets on national TV, calls the Palestinians animals and says they need to be wiped out, that's a war crime. And if you sit there and say, I stand with Israel Israel and you don't stand up at that point and say, no, you don't get to say that, retract that, that's a war crime, I demand the American government take action on this, then you stand for nothing.

The Israeli government has responded to Hamas's crimes by ordering war crimes, by ordering the deliberate assault, attack, destruction, and murder of civilian infrastructure and civilian human beings. How can that possibly be justified from a moral, legal, or even military perspective, Scott? It can't, there's no justification whatsoever. Look,

I come from the Marine Corps, and I'm very loyal to the Marine Corps. But in Iraq, in Haditha, when the Marines murdered 26 Iraqi civilians, that's a war crime. And you can't spin it any other way. It doesn't matter how much you love the Marine Corps, how much you respect the Marine Corps. You can't explain that away. And the same way, we can't sit there and explain away what Israel is doing right now. Understand that Israel knows that Hamas is underground. I'll say that one more time. Israel knows that Hamas is underground. So every bomb that lands on top of the ground in Gaza is killing innocent Palestinian civilians, not Hamas leadership, not Hamas infrastructure, not Hamas fighters, and yet they're doing it anyways. This is a deliberate targeting of an innocent civilian population. It's called collective punishment, and that's a war

crime. Well, we know collective punishment is a war crime. It was expressly condemned by Nuremberg. It was expressly condemned by the Geneva Conventions. It was a tactic of Nazi Germany. One person committed killers, whom they're really after, are not being effectively impaired by the Israeli military behavior? Well, what's happening right now is the Israeli military is behaving with emotion, and that's very dangerous. You're supposed to be cold-hearted professionals. You're supposed to get beyond the emotion. I know it's difficult. Look, many senior Israeli officers were at home. They were kidnapped or killed. Their families were killed. These guys take it personally. Their friends are dead on the battlefield. The families of their friends have been slaughtered. This is an extraordinarily personal thing. But as a professional, when you put on that uniform, you have to behave as a professional. And right now, the Israeli military is behaving with emotion. And this is a very dangerous thing because it colors your judgment. Israel is supposed to be a nation that has educated its officers. And I know this for a fact.

I know many Israeli officers and I know that they've received training similar to the training I received that is intolerant of war crimes. And yet we've seen over and over and over again where Israel commits war crimes. And the people committing these war crimes are the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, despite their training. And the reason why is they get emotional. They go out on patrol in the West Bank. Ten-year-old kids throw rocks at them. They capture the kids and they snap their arms.

They snap their legs. If it gets too close, a sniper shoots them in the belly and then laughs as ambulance drivers drive up. And they shoot the ambulance drivers because they allowed emotions to take over. No, you're supposed to be a professional. When troops are ordered to engage in behavior that is patently unlawful and is a war crime, like the intentional attack on civilians. Who has committed the war crimes? Is it the troops on the ground? Is it the person who presses the button or throws the switch on the artillery that's aimed at a university or a hospital? Or is it the general that orders this? Or is it Benjamin Netanyahu on the civilian command? Everybody up the chain of command. I mean, you know, the bottom line is you're not allowed to obey an unlawful order. Now,

if we're getting into issues of constitutionality, Judge, with all due respect, the private on the ground, he's not a constitutional scholar. And if he's been ordered to do something that is impotently illegal, for instance, to cross into Iraq, he can't say, I refuse to invade Iraq because that's a violation of international law. That's not his job, or his job as a lieutenant or the captain of the major or the colonel. International law is within the president, his cabinet, and people who are empowered to make those decisions. But if you're a pilot in the Israeli Air Force and you've received a mission that requires you to drop a bomb on a university

that's identified as a university, you have a moral responsibility to ask, you know, is this proportional to the threat? What is the threat? Why am I doing this? What is the potential collateral damage? And all of these questions should have been answered already by the targeting cell, and they should have the answers there. And if they don't have the answers, then the pilot has a moral obligation to say, I can't fly that mission until these questions are answered. Then we take it up the chain of command, and the bottom line is that they all insist to go in without adequate answers, and everybody is guilty, from the prime minister that ordered the action, the minister of

defense that turned that order into reality, all the way down to the pilot. They have all committed a war crime. They are all culpable for the crime. They should all be held accountable for the crime. Gary, put up the images of the Gaza University. I think Scott and I can talk over it if I'm not mistaken. Here we go. So this was Gaza University four days ago.

You can see what it looks like. You're going to see a very compelling view from a drone in a couple of minutes. So your argument is that not only the civilian command, but the guy who dropped the bomb that did this or the bombs that did this or who pulled the trigger or threw the switch that sent the missiles that did this ought to have known what he was doing. There's a view of what was a university in Gaza as recently as last Saturday. Actually, that photo you just

showed is even worse, Judge. It's a mosque. It's a mosque. It's a religious site, which is a protected site. And again, they knew it was a mosque when they bombed it. And in order to justify bombing it, you need hard intelligence that there's an imminent threat coming from that mosque that justifies this. Otherwise, you can't strike that. That's a protected target. And even if even if Hamas was hiding in there, that's not an imminent threat that justifies the destruction of a religious house. It comes down to proportionality. If three Hamas fighters who are wounded run into that mosque to seek shelter and it's full of 50 worshipers, no, you don't get to bomb that mosque. If the commander of Hamas is holding a secret

meeting in the basement, or the commander of Hamas is in the basement holding a secret meeting, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to eliminate that leadership target, then you get to do it. Like I said, everything has a, you have to push through it. What is your view on how this happened? Not the politics or the history that got us there, but the intelligence failures of Mossad with its vaunted reputation of MI6, of CIA. How could the three best intelligence services on the planet have missed this? Well, first of all, the CIA has for some time now, when it comes to issues of Israel and Israeli security, they basically give a nod to israel so if israel says this is a threat there's some exceptions for instance the iranian nuclear

problem the cia has said no we have our own independent assessment on that but when it comes to hamas or hezbollah or anything dealing with the potential of terrorist attacks on Israeli soil. The CIA, if there's any question, they will yield to Israel and say, we will follow your assessment. That's the same mistake we made back in 1973, by the way, on the Yom Kippur War, when Israeli intelligence failed again. At that time, the CIA admitted in an after action report that they stopped doing critical assessments of Israeli related intelligence because they simply took the Israeli assessments at face value and didn't want to challenge them. And I believe that's the model that was going on today for Israel. Again, it's the 1973 model. One of the things that came out of 73 is the following.

Israel's collectors were collecting all the data necessary to show that Egypt was getting ready to attack the Krasnoyarsk Canal. They wrote assessments saying this is when they're going to do it, where they're going to do it, how they're going to do it. That was sent up to chain of command. The King of Jordan was warning Golda Meir, the prime minister, that Egypt and Syria were getting ready to do something big. But Israel was infected with what they call the conception. And the conception at that time was that Egypt would never engage in this because it wasn't in Egypt's best interest to do this. Therefore, we dismiss all of the intelligence. Today, we come forward. This isn't that the Israelis didn't collect information. They have very good collectors out there. They collected a lot of data, and that data was pointing to

something was going to happen. They also had Egypt apparently providing a tip-off saying something big is going to happen. But once again, Israel was infected with conception. And the conception this time was that Hamas was moving away from being a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and instead becoming an organization dedicated to the governance of Gaza. Israel was taking off some of the pressure. They had allowed thousands of Palestinians to leave Gaza and get jobs in Israel to bring in income the standard of living was going up hope was rising up at least from the Israeli perspective and then you really said it's not in Hamas's interest to carry it out and attack like this all this information that we're collecting that

an attack is imminent it's propaganda on the part of Hamas to tell everybody, look, we're big and tough, but the reality is Hamas has given up being tough. They want to become a responsible governing body. And so the conception overrode all of the actual intelligence data. And then the last thing about the Israelis is this time around, they collect so much data on Gaza that they put into a supercomputer and they allow artificial intelligence to come up with various algorithms that do threat modeling. And so they allowed themselves to be held prisoner to a damn computer instead of listening to the expert whose brain is 20 times better than any AI program you can come up with. The conception model, which you've just described and of which you are rightly critical. This is the this is the 67 war, the 73 war.

This is now it was the 73 war where they were guilty of it. And then they did away with it. When I was in Israel working with Israeli intelligence, they had created this this body called the Doubting Thomas. It was a colonel and he had a staff, but his job was to be critical of every analysis that went up the chain of command. Before it could get to the head of intelligence, to the prime minister, it had to go through him. And he challenged every single assertion, every single assertion.

Are you of the view that Israeli intel said something's coming, but politics, culture, history, whatever you want to call it, rejected that intel. Or are you of the view that they were asleep at the switch and didn't even look at their intel? Or are you of the view that they looked the other way because they wanted an excuse to invade Gaza? Well, first of all, I don't accept they look the other way. They want an excuse to invade Gaza. I know that's a popular conspiracy out there. Let me just say this. I worked at very close level with Israeli soldiers, with Israeli professionals, and they would never sacrifice their soldiers or their citizens in this manner. But anybody who

comes up with that has no clue who Israel is, what Israelis are. That's just not something they would be willing to do. What happened this time? Did they ignore actionable intelligence or did they not acquire actionable intelligence? No, I believe they acquired a upon artificial intelligence to do threat modeling was corrupted by the conception that Hamas would never do this. And I believe that the leadership had bought into the notion that their policies of pacifying Hamas through economic incentives were working. And therefore, they weren't going to allow anything to disrupt that. So they ignored information they were being told about the possibility of an imminent attack. Here's President Biden yesterday saying what, of course,

you'd expect him to say and what politically he had to say. We now know that American citizens are among those being held by Hamas. I've directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts. Are there American special forces or Navy SEALs on the ground in Israel, in Egypt, in Gaza, wherever they might be, ready to pounce? No. First of all, Israel doesn't need them, and Israel doesn't want them. Gaza is an Israeli problem. If they go into Gaza, they have Sayyid Matkal, they have Flotilla 13, they have Yaman, they have a whole bunch of units that specialize in this unit, the Israeli way, on Israeli soil, in defense of Israeli citizens.

The last thing you want is Delta Force or SEAL Team 6. Is that the dog, Scott? Not the dog. That is somebody calling me on Skype. I didn't know you were going to call me. I don't know why they're calling me, but there it is. But anyways, this is purely a political move by the president because he's going to be criticized. First of all, let's be very clear here.

The United States has a relationship with Israel where American Jews can go and serve in the Israeli army. And so there's a whole bunch of Americans The Americans are over there now. They're in the Israeli military. There's lots of Americans there.

And so Biden is under pressure, political pressure, because Americans are killed, Americans are taken hostage, the SFT is doing something. This is meaningless, empty talk. We're offering help that Israel doesn't want or need. Look, Israel's already trained with our guys. They know our techniques. They've taken what they already need. They don't need to introduce an American component to this already complex problem. Here is President Putin giving what I think is one of the best analyses of the dynamics of the politics in the Middle East and the atrocious decision-making by American diplomats in the past 40 or 50 years. Unfortunately, we can see a sharp deterioration of the situation in the Middle East. I think that many will agree with me that this is a clear example

of the failure of the policy of the United States in the Middle East, which tried to monopolize the resolution of the conflict, but unfortunately wasn't concerned with finding compromises acceptable to both sides. On the contrary, it promoted its own ideas about how this should be done, put pressure on both sides, first on one side, then on the other, every time without taking into account the fundamental interests of the Palestinian people, bearing in mind, first of of all the need to implement the un security council decision on creation of an independent sovereign palestinian state

your thoughts look i've said this from um i just don't know what to do with these people who keep calling me, but he's the only adult in the room. And his maturity as a leader, the balance that he shows as a diplomat comes through. If we had an American president that articulated what he just articulated, there wouldn't have been this tragedy in the middle east today that's problem would have been solved but we don't know how to be balanced uh we go in and every word he said there was 100 true and i know i'm going to be called a putin fanboy and all this stuff but you know what when the guy is right the guy is right and you know he's right how um oppressive is gaza Our friend and colleague, Gerald Salenti, referred to it as an open air concentration camp.

That's the appropriate way to put it. A lot of people are calling it an open air prison. The problem with that comparison, that implies that the Palestinian civilians who live there, over two million, are prisoners. They've committed a crime. They've committed no crime. The only crime they're guilty of is being born, born in a refugee camp, born as a concentration camp inmate. And it is an open-air concentration camp. Israel controls this. Israel has put a wall around it. Israel dictates the quality of life, the pace of life, every aspect of what goes on in Gaza. It denies them the right to have their own airport, denies them to have the right to their own ports. So yeah, it is an open-air concentration camp. And the important thing about that word is that it's the Israelis,

a Jewish nation, that's imposing concentration-like, camp-like reality on these poor Palestinian people. The Israelis should know better. They suffered under concentration camps. They know what concentration camps are. Why they're continuing to do this, I don't understand. Your reviews on the tenure of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. I've hated Benjamin Netanyahu from day one. My initial dislike of this man came in 1982 when a Marine Corps captain stepped up on a Israeli tank and told him that it could not go across the Marine lines over his dead body. He pulled a pistol and told the Lieutenant Colonel he'd blow his brains out. The Israelis backed off. We called, charged the affairs at the embassy to condemn the Israeli actions. That was Benjamin

Netanyahu. His response? To go around and create rumors about this captain saying he was drunk, there was alcohol on his breath. Benjamin Netanyahu is a disgrace. He's a coward. He's been that way ever since. He was prime minister from 1996 to 1999. I was there for two years of his prime mentorship. He knows what the truth of Iraqi weapons destruction is because I worked with the head of his intelligence and they agreed with me. And yet in 2002, he went before the United States Congress as a private citizen, but with the cachet of being a prime minister saying, there is no doubt that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. He lied. Americans then went into Iraq and died. Benjamin Netanyahu has the blood of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands. And now he's the war criminal prime minister of Israel. He's responsible for all this violence. He's the man

who empowered Hamas to take over in Gaza in 2006. He did it. He's the one. So let's just remember who the ultimate criminal is in all of this. And his name is Benjamin Netanyahu. Will the Israeli people throw him out of office? No, because his shtick has been security from day one. Look, I can't say I personally knew Yitzhak Rabin, but I was there with Yitzhak Rabin. I worked with his government and he was a man seeking peace. I was there the day he died, that he was assassinated. I watched Israel bury a leader they loved.

And he was killed because of Benjamin Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahu's hatred. A man who empowered the religious right in Israel, issued a death warrant against Yitzhak Rabin. So some right-wing fanatic assassinated him at a peace rally. When Yitzhak Rabin went into the ground, that was the end of the hope for peace for Israel. From that moment, Benjamin Netanyahu played the fear card, the fear card, the fear card, and he has intimidated the Israeli population based upon ignorance and fear to continue to empower him to be their leader. How do you see this ending? I mean, unless this becomes a two or three front war, Hamas is a pipsqueak compared to the military power of the Israeli government.

No? Well, no. Look, in 2006, Israel mobilized 30,000 troops to go up against 3,000 Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. 34 days later, got beat. Had to admit they got beat. They got crushed. Hezbollah stood, fought, and defeated them. Hamas, there are many thousands of Hamas fighters, highly trained.

They're underground. All they have to do to win is survive. Israel will eventually lose the support of the international community based upon the slaughter of the innocent Palestinians. At some point, the international community is going to get fed up of seeing dead Palestinian people. And they're going to say enough is enough. When that happens, Israel will have to take a compromise. Hamas is going to win this war. They're not going to win by defeating Israel. They'll win simply by surviving.

We lost the last two or three sentences of what you said because of the interference. Can you say it again about Hamas is going to win this war? Hamas is going to win by not being beaten. All they have to do to win is survive, just like Hezbollah did in 2006. Israel cannot defeat Hamas. If you think Israel is going to go in to Gaza and carry out urban warfare on a scope and scale that's just mind-boggling, you know nothing about the Battle of Stalingrad. You know nothing about the Battle for Monte Cassino in 1944. You know nothing about Mariupol or Bakhmut.

Israel can't do this. They don't have the forces to do this. And eventually the world will get tired of dead Palestinian children, and the Israeli people are going to get tired of dead Israeli soldiers. Scott Ritter, you're on the top of your game. What can I say? Thank you very much for this extraordinary analysis. We'll come back to you soon, my dear friend. Thank you. Morris, we get it. Thank you for watching. We're going to change topics in 25 minutes at 4.30 and go to the problems with the Republicans in the House of Representatives. We'll continue to cover Israel. We'll continue to cover Ukraine. We'll continue to do what we do here at Judging Freedom,

looking out for your liberty. Thank you.