Judging Freedom - Prof. John Mearsheimer: Is diplomacy possible in Hamas_Israeli war?

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Join us as we sit down with esteemed guest, Professor John Mearsheimer, and delve into the intricate tapestry of international relations. We navigate the tension-filled waters of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, scrutinizing the dwindling commitment of the US and its European allies. Our discussion dissects the stalemate at the heart of the conflict and evaluates the potential fallout of the White House's staggering request for an additional 68 billion for Ukraine. Brace yourself as we unearth the chilling prospect that the US and Britain might have inadvertently fanned the flames of war, leaving Ukraine in an increasingly precarious situation.Switching gears, we cast a discerning eye on the fraught Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We critically evaluate the role of the US and whether its actions may constitute complicity in alleged war crimes. Reflecting on the consequences of America's seemingly unquestioned military support for Israel, we grapple with the ramifications of Netanyahu's political prowess on the conflict. Embark on this journey with us and Professor Mearsheimer, as we strive to illuminate the shadowed complexities of international relations.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 Friday, November 3rd, 2023. Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago joins us now. Professor, always a pleasure. Thank you very the University of Chicago joins us now. Professor, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for making time for us today. Given the well-known and understood closeness of the United States to Israel, what leverage, if any, does the U.S. have? Example, as we speak, literally as we speak, the Secretary of State of the United States is in Israel trying to ask the Israelis to engage in a pause, I guess a euphemism for a temporary ceasefire while humanitarian aid comes in, and apparently he's not having any success.

What leverage does he have? He has remarkably little leverage. The fact is that the United States and Israel are joined at the hip. There are no two countries in recorded history that have a closer relationship than the United States and Israel. And when this crisis broke out on October 7th, the Biden administration made it very clear from the get-go that we would give Israel whatever aid it needed, and that meant both weapons and money, and that we would support Israel to the hilt. And we have done that. And once you take into account that tight relationship and just how committed we already are to this war, it's very difficult for us to back off and then to begin to put pressure on Israel to do X or Y or Z. Excuse me.

I mean, there's no question that Blinken can go to the Middle East and he can try to put pressure on Israel, but the Israelis can tell him no. And then what is he going to do? And if he decides that he's going to get tough, which he isn't going to do, American domestic politics, the power of the Israel lobby here would kick in and make it very difficult for the Biden administration to put any meaningful pressure on Israel. To the Arab world and to much of the world, the Israeli military response to the horrific attack on October 7th is entirely out of proportion and it has caused the deaths of thousands and thousands of innocent civilians. Given the closeness of Israel and the

United States, as you've just articulated it, Professor, does this cause some blame to be placed on the U.S. in the minds of those who condemn the excesses of the IDF? Absolutely. And in fact, you can find evidence of people around the world saying that the Americans are more responsible for what's going on than the Israelis. More responsible? Well, some people can understand why the Israelis, given what happened to them on October 7th, have, in a sense, escalated this war in truly significant ways. But the Americans were not attacked. And you would expect the Americans, especially given that they claim the moral high ground, and they claim that they believe in the laws of war, to try to moderate what the Israelis are doing. That's what you would expect. But

instead, the Americans have jumped into this conflict with the Israelis, and we're supporting the Israelis down the line. So I think there are people who think that we're more at fault than the Israelis. Again, you can sort of understand why the Israelis have spun out of control here. It's similar to what happened to us after 9-11. We were hit on 9-11, and almost everybody now agrees that we overreacted. One could argue that the Israelis are overreacting, for sure. And I'm not justifying what they're doing in terms of killing all these civilians for one second. But in a sense, you can understand it. But the Americans, they have no excuse. Do you think that Hamas intended to provoke this overreaction in order to generate animosity towards Israel and unity amongst the Arabs and sympathy for the Palestinians and support for the two-state solution? I don't think they're interested in the two-state solution. I think they're interested in the one-state solution where Hamas controls all of what is now Israel.

But putting that aside, I'm not sure exactly what they expected. My sense is that this operation, Hamas's operation, turned out to be more successful than they anticipated. I think that they put a lot of effort into planning this operation, and they understood that it would be a much larger operation in terms of the scope than past attacks on Israel. But I think they were surprised by just how successful they were at overwhelming the Israelis, capturing hostages, and so forth and so on. And I think that they recognized they would provoke a response, but I don't think they expected it to reach this point. How dangerous do you think it would become if the Israelis asked for American troops on the ground

to fight alongside the IDF in Gaza? I don't think the Israelis would ask for that. It may be the case that we'll put in special forces. And there's some evidence now that we have special forces there who are advising the Israelis. But actually putting American ground forces in large scale American ground forces, I think is out of the question. I think that Biden wouldn't do that. Is it dangerous, by which I mean, are the Israelis going to lose more than they can politically tolerate for the IDF to engage in urban warfare, remembering that two-thirds to three-quarters of the IDF are reservists, certainly not experienced, perhaps not even trained in urban warfare?

Well, I mean, the Israelis face two problems. One is pressure on the home front to scale down these operations, and a lot of that has to do with the hostages. The families of the hostages are not happy about what's happening in Gaza because they live in fear that their loved ones will be killed, which is completely understandable. There's also the basic fact that as the Israelis take casualties in Gaza, there will be pressure from inside the society to pull out or to pull back so as to minimize those casualties. That's the domestic dimension. Then there's the international dimension. Just seems to me watching world opinion on this one and all the pressure that's being brought to bear, not simply on the Israelis, but on the Americans to move towards some sort of ceasefire and then de-escalate.

Given that, it's just hard to see how this goes on, you know, for more than a few weeks, if even that. I could be wrong, but it does look like the Israelis are going to be forced to at least ameliorate their efforts, if not move to a ceasefire. Doesn't Prime Minister Netanyahu have a personal vested interest in extending the war, knowing as he must that as soon as it's over, the cries for him to leave office will be overwhelming and universal within Israel. And he may even lose his liberty as well as his job because his corruption trial will resume. Yeah, I think there's no question about that. and actually win to defeat Hamas and get some sort of political arrangement in Gaza that is suitable from Israel's point of view. I think the likelihood of that happening is zero, but he does have a vested interest in pursuing that. And if all of a sudden there is a ceasefire, that in effect means that Hamas has won because

the Israelis have not beaten Hamas. And that would be extremely damaging to Netanyahu, who has already damaged goods, as you pointed out. But Hamas is an idea. Can the Israelis really kill an idea? No. I mean, the fact is that as long as you have an occupation and you are, in effect, suffocating the Palestinians, whether it's in the West Bank or it's in Gaza, they're going to rebel. I mean, a lot of people think that what happened on October 7th is an anomaly. You know, this is the first time you had a major uprising by the Palestinians, but this is not the case. You had the first Intifada in 1987. You had the second Intifada in 2001. And no matter what happens to Hamas, you're going to have organizations that come along and they're going to rebel against the Israelis because they hate the occupation and they want to resist it and they want some form of political autonomy. Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet have said horrific things, racist is almost a charitable

description of it, about the Palestinians. Does Prime Minister Netanyahu, if you know, does the Likud party, if you can derive it from their public words, believe that all men are created equal? Look, the fact is inside greater Israel, and greater Israel includes the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, you have about 7.3 million Palestinians and 7.3 million Jews. And in a country with that kind of demographic distribution, there is simply no way you can have equal rights for the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews, because you would eventually end up with a Palestinian state, and there would be no more Jewish state. So there's no room for equal rights. And that means that you end up with a brutal occupation. And when you have a brutal occupation, what you end up doing is dehumanizing the victims. And there's a very powerful tendency

inside of Israel, and this is certainly not true among all Israelis, but among Israelis on the right especially, to dehumanize the Palestinians. And dehumanizing the Palestinians is necessary for lots of people because it provides a rationale for the occupation, for keeping the Palestinians down. So I think given the present situation in Israel, talking about equal rights or treating people equally, whether they're Jewish or whether they're Palestinian, has no place in the discourse. I want to take you back to 1948 at the founding of the State of Israel, with the support and encouragement of the president of the United States at the time, here he is. We had several other people in the country, even among the Jews, the Zionists particularly, who were against anything that was to be done if they couldn't have the whole of Palestine and everything handed to them on a silver plate so they wouldn't have to do anything. It couldn't be done. We had to take it in small doses.

You can't move 5 or 6 million people out of a country and fill it up with 5 or 6 million more and expect both sets of them to be pleased. 49. But don't think that decision to recognize Israel is an easy one. I had to make a compromise with the Arabs and divide Palestine. The Jews wanted to chase all the Arabs into the Tigris and Euphrates River,

and the Arabs wanted to chase all the Jews into the Red Sea. And what I was trying to do was to find a homeland for the Jews and still be just for the Arabs. I guess he couldn't have imagined that 75 years later, literally, this would still be going on and would reach the depths of bloodshed and horror that it has. Well, I think if you think about the Hamas-Israel conflict today, what Truman says rings true. I mean, it's quite clear that Hamas would like to ethnically cleanse Israel and turn it back into a Palestinian state or make it a Palestinian state. And at the same time, it's quite clear that lots of Israelis would like to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, so that the demographic balance inside of greater Israel favored the Jews over the Palestinians. So I think basically Truman understood at the time what the problem was.

And so talk to me about NATO and Western Europe. What do they expect the United States to do in order to bring about some resolution of this? I don't think they have any expectations. I think all these people understand that there is no resolution to this problem. I believe that Tony Blinken and Joe Biden understand that as well. We're in a situation where there just is no solution. Is there an angle here for Vladimir Putin or President Xi to show some leadership? United States, which was or has been principally responsible for trying to settle this conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, has failed. We failed. And they've been pointing that out. And they argue that if they had been more involved in the process or the international community had been more involved, we would have been successful at solving this. And then furthermore, they're arguing that now that this massive

conflict has broken out, the United States is mismanaging it because instead of trying to settle the conflict, to calm the Israelis down and try and work out some sort of modus vivendi, we're just fueling the flames and making a bad situation worse. And that's an argument that resonates with people all over the planet. It resonates with people in the United States as well. And by the way, that includes a lot of American Jews, right, who are very interested in settling this conflict once and for all, because this is a nightmare scenario for them as well. You have argued, as you always do, compellingly and articulately, that 30 years ago there was one great power in the world, the United States,

and now there are three. There are a variety of reasons as to how that happened. You understand them better than anybody I know. The other two, of course, are Russia and China. Is the world going to look to the United States for leadership because they love NATO, because NATO is a security blanket for them. So we'll be fine there. But once you get out of Western Europe or the West more generally, what you discover is that there's a great deal of animosity towards the United States. They think that we're hypocritical in the extreme. And there's much more sympathy for the Russian position and for the Chinese position. And that's why the Russians and the Chinese are making hay in what we call the global south at our expense. I want you to listen to a clip from a young former member of the Israeli Defense Force,

born in New York City, truly Americanized, but one of those young American Jewish males that went to Israel to fight for Israel. The clip is only two days old. He is referring to his military activity in the IDF in 2014. I'd like your thoughts on this. His name is Benzion. Where do I have it? Benzion Sanders. After we went in and we suffered our own casualties, killed also thousands of Palestinians in that operation, I came out and I looked and I started thinking about what we accomplished. And I saw that actually what happened was that Hamas just got stronger. And not only did it get stronger, it got stronger with the help of my own government. My own government thought that it was convenient and preferable to bolster Hamas while it simultaneously delegitimized

and called Palestinian initiatives from the Palestinian Authority at the UN, diplomatic terrorism, delegitimized Palestinian human rights activists, human rights organizations, designating them as terrorist groups, meanwhile facilitating the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza into the hands of Hamas. And they just got stronger. All of that for the purpose of preventing the creation of Palestinian state, preventing hope, really, for Palestinians to achieve the same rights and freedoms that we cherish so much for ourselves.

And that is actually crushing Palestinian hope, which also plays into the hands of Hamas. I think he probably expresses a view that's shared by a lot of Israelis, not the Netanyahu government, but a lot of Israelis. I think that's true. I don't think the majority of Israelis share his view. But I think that, as we've talked about on the show before, it's important to understand that the Netanyahu government is deeply committed to

preventing a two-state solution. And Hamas is very useful for that purpose because Hamas is not interested in a two-state solution either, and Hamas makes it clear that they would like to control all of what is now Israel. So they're the perfect boogeyman for purposes of undermining a two-state solution. And unsurprisingly, the Netanyahu government has gone to some lengths to support Hamas and to undermine the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, because the Palestinian Authority is interested in a two-state solution, which of course the Israelis are not. But nevertheless, it's important to understand that every once in a while, the Israelis like to go into Gaza, this has been the case in the past, and inflict significant punishment on

Gaza, especially on Hamas. They don't want Hamas to get too powerful. The Israelis sometimes refer to this as mowing the lawn. They say that every once in a while we have to go in and mow the lawn. All that's done for the purposes of making sure that Hamas, which is useful to them, doesn't get too powerful. This used to be called the iron wall. This is a concept associated with the famous Zionist Zviabotinsky. And the idea was you could use the iron wall or the mailed fist to beat the Palestinians into submission. And mowing the lawn is very similar to that. But the fact is, it hasn't worked, as we found out on October 7th. And as we were talking about a few minutes ago, the idea that you're going to defeat Hamas once and for all, and then the

Israelis are going to live happily ever after, that's not going to happen. So is this going to end diplomatically, or is it going to end with a wider regional war? Well, I don't believe, I hope I'm wrong, it's going to end diplomatically. I believe it's just going to go on and on. And what that means is that the potential for a wider war is always there, right? Can I say one way or the other that you are going to get a wider war? No, I don't know. We just don't know where this train is headed. But the potential for horizontal escalation is significant. Does Joe Biden truly want a two-state solution? Does he understand the significance of the President of the United States calling for it? Oh, I believe that he wants the two-state solution? Does he understand the significance of the President of the United States calling for it? Oh, I believe that he wants the two-state solution. I think he understands

that that is one way out of this mess. But to get a two-state solution, Joe Biden would have to put significant pressure on Israel, and he's incapable of doing that. Joe Biden has a passionate attachment to Israel. He has made that clear on countless occasions. He is deeply devoted to Israel, and the idea that he's going to step back and begin to put serious coercive pressure on the Israelis, I think is unthinkable. Professor Mearsheimer, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for your time and for your insight. I hope you can join us again towards the end of next week as well. My pleasure, Judge.

Thank you. Have a great weekend. You too. Okay. Judge LaPaltina, for judging freedom, one more product for the week after a busy, happy, and fulfilling week, for which I am deeply grateful. We're up to 227,000 subscribers. As you know, you've heard me say this until I'm as blue in the face as my shirt is, that our goal is a quarter of a million by Christmas. I think we will easily reach that goal thanks to your warmth and affection for our work. 3.30 Eastern today. Ask the judge. A-M-A.

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