Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - In Israel’s Darkest Hour, Dan Senor Sees Reason for Hope

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

This week, Anthony talks with bestselling author, political advisor, and former Defense Department official Dan Senor about his timely new book The Genius of Israel. Even in its darkest hour, Dan explains how Israeli society has and continues to show remarkable grit, resilience, and hope. They discuss the history of the nation, how it arrived here, it’s crucial relationship with the United States, and the many important distinctions that most of us never consider… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is open. book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're

enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the point. So let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. We're currently living through one of the darkest periods in Israel's history, but the country's strength lays in its incredible resilience, grit, and society. Dan Sinoor joins me today to talk about his brand new book, The Genius of Israel, which shines a light on the distinctions of Israeli society and what other communities and countries can learn from them. It's an incredibly timely conversation, and it was a pleasure to have Dan join this week. Okay, so joining us now is Dan Senor. He's a bestselling author, political advisor, former Defense Department officials, spent some time in Iraq, if I remember that correctly. That's right. I believe you met your wife there. If I can remember that correctly.

This is true. You are the best selling author of a couple of books, Startup Nation, and this brand new book, The Genius of Israel, it's written by Dan and Saul Singer, the surprising resilience of a divided nation in a turbulent world, and could not be a more timely book. Obviously, a lot of the things that you write about in the book Israel is facing right now. They're at war, but there's also a little bit of an internal war going on, an intellectual civil war, if you will, in terms of where the society's going. So first off, thank you for coming on. But I want, if you don't mind, Dan, tell us a little bit about your background. Where'd you grow up? How did you get into Iraq as a younger man?

What are you doing now, et cetera? Does that imply that I'm no longer a younger man? Well, no, no, younger than you were today. Yeah, relevant. Just remember this about Life Center. You're always be younger than me. I'll never forget Patrick McKenry that congressman and up until recently the speaker pro tempore once was meeting with me on something and he was trying to get me excited

about this member of Congress that had just been elected, a freshman member a few years ago. And he was the military vet and he had all this interested in foreign policy in the Middle East and national security. And he goes, oh, yeah, Dan, you'll love the guy. I mean, he's like a young Dan Cynor. And I was like, Patrick, aren't I a young Dan Cynor? Like I'm not crazy about other people being told they're a younger version of me.

Like I said, you'll always have me beat. You'll always have me beat. So tell us about yourself. Born in upstate New York, Utica, New York, spent many years growing up in Toronto, Canada, never became a Canadian citizen. But my father's work brought him to Canada after he was working for the mayor of Utica, who lost his reelection. my father was out of a job and my father got a job selling bonds for the state of

Israel, Israel bonds. And we moved there and I spent many years there before I moved back to the U.S. I was raised by, my father was very engaged in American politics and in Israel and the, you know, the growth of Israel, the development of Israel, the investment in Israel, and my mother, who was a survivor of the Holocaust. So my mother was a little girl during the Holocaust. In fact, Campbell and I took our kids with my mother. and our extended family to her hometown in Cusha,

in Slovakia this summer, this past summer, mother's 85 now. She lives in Jerusalem. We took her there. It was purposes of going back to sort of, it was a route trip to kind of trace her roots and what happened to her and her family being chased out of their home and then being on the run for the final year

of the Holocaust. Her father was killed tragically at Auschwitz, but she and her mother escaped and never wound up on the train to Auschwitz. And so I tell you all this just to say this is the water in which I swim, this is the home in which I was raised. These are the people who shape me. And so I've always had a deep engagement and commitment to American political life and public life and American foreign policy. And I've also always had a very deep connection to what I regard as America's most important ally, at least in the Middle East, and probably one of its top two or three allies in the world, which is the state of Israel.

I have a lot of family that lives there. I have two sisters who live there, three nieces, three nephews, and a bunch of extended family, many of whom are on the front lines literally and figuratively of this war right now. And in my work in American government, I worked in the Senate in the 1990s, and then I went to get my MBA thinking I was done with politics and government. I worked at the Carlisleau Group in private equity in the early 2000s. But after 9-11, when the U.S. was gearing up for the war on terror, I got drawn back into government and found those away for me to serve. And the Bush White House recruited me to play a role working for the Pentagon in the White House where I was ultimately, just to fast forward. I spent some time in Doha, the U.S. Central Command Base in Doha, Qatar, Camp Asalia, and then from, which is where the war was commandeered out of, and then from there to Baghdad in April of 2003.

and I spent over a year in Baghdad, living in Baghdad, where I ultimately became the chief spokesman for the coalition in Iraq, which was, as you can imagine, very demanding, very rewarding, very saddening, but also was an experience that shaped a lot of who I am today and how I think about the world. Well, I mean, it's an incredible story. You know, I had the opportunity to go to Baghdad, I think, on a civilian, like, sort of troop support mission through Benz, the business executives for national security in 2011. And you were there when it was super hot. Obviously, it was calming down by the time

I got there. And so I think what people forget sometimes is when you're in a war zone, and particularly you for a year, how harrowing that actually is. You always have this veil of something bad going to happen. You'll like this part of the story. I was with George at Mossbacher. They gave us flack jackets. They told us we're going to ride on route Irish out of the red zone into the green zone. And she said, I'm not wearing that. And I'm going to tell you something right now because I view myself as an alpha male, Dan. I'm like, you know what? If she's not wearing it, I'm not wearing it. And I was so chicken shit that I actually wore it. Okay, so I just want you to know that. Okay, I just want you to know that I just want you to know that I've said, hey, hell with that, this bomb goes off.

I've got to be wearing this thing. So I appreciate your service. This country, which you have a love affair with the United States. You have also a love affair with Israel. I have been to Israel many times. I've traveled with A-PAC there. I've traveled with some more conservative groups there. I've visited Yad Vashem. I've actually been to Starrot, met with the mayor of Starrot, obviously gone through some of the IDF centers, had looks at the Iron Dome Project and the ballistic missile attacks that are coming in, the case of rocket attacks. And I read your first book, and it really made me want to go to Israel, particularly Tel Aviv, to learn more about what was going on in the venture capital community. And just for our listeners, and you know this, but for our listeners, there's more

venture capital investing going on in Israel than all of continental Europe. I don't think people realize the magnitude of that. On an absolute basis. So you compare it on an absolute, it's not just per capita. It's not, no, no, on an absolute basis. If I said per capita, if I said per capita, I think when I, when people hear that, they think per capita. Because I mean, you didn't, you didn't say, but I think people immediately think, oh, well, it must be per capita. Then you're like, oh, no, no, no, no. It's on an absolute basis. I learned from your first book.

When I, reading your second book, I'm finding that Israel has grown up and in some ways is a victim of its success and its security. Because when we are successful and secure, sometimes we separate from each other. When we're in a fight for the existential existence of our nation or our family or whatever it is, you could be arguing with your brother. but if you got to get in a trench with them and fight it out with somebody else, whatever those arguments are, you sort of forget. But your book, I think, is identifying some of the arguments that's going on inside of the

country. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of a summary of those arguments, which include the soldiers, the activists, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, but also the Israeli Arabs. Yeah. So, look, 2023 before October 7 was an extremely difficult year for Israel and for for Israelis and for people who care about Israel, because it felt like the country had never been more divided,

not from an external threat, but from an internal polarizing debate. And at its core, the debate was about, and this is gonna sound really technical, but I'm just gonna say it, I'll say it quickly, and then we'll all go a little deeper. At its core, it was about the balance of power within Israel's government,

which is to say that Israel's Supreme Court is extremely powerful, Some would argue too powerful, I would argue too powerful, at the expense of the elected government, which resides in the Knesset and its parliament and its equivalent, the equivalent of its executive branch, which is formed through its parliament. And there has been a debate brewing for some time in efforts to push back on the power of the Supreme Court and rebalance power within the government. And that came to a head in 2023. And the truth is, it was Nathlahu's new government, which was formed at the beginning of 2023 or sworn in. And it was believed there was a majority of Israelis who supported reforming the Supreme

Court and rebalancing the balance of power. However, on the one hand, there was support for reforms, but the sense was it should only be done through building real consensus. And it should be done gradually, not shock and awe. And then Nathena'iou government came into power. and they didn't try to build consensus. And I say this. Many of the people in his government I'm close to, and I know the prime minister personally. I mean, I'm not, this is not, I'm not saying anything here that I haven't said to them. They moved too quickly, too swiftly. They did not have a

mandate to move at the speed and comprehensiveness that they did, trying to, the way some characterize it, trying to appear to gut the Supreme Court. And that was a bridge too far. And that provoked a backlash, which you're referring to. And suddenly, you and I and others were looking at a, and Israel that seemed at each other's throats. The society was coming apart. Now, there's two points here, Anthony, that we make in our book. One is we go through the history of Israel and point out that about every decade or decade and a half, they have some kind of crisis where the country feels like it's about to be

torn apart. Obviously, there was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, where half the cut in the 90s where half the country blamed the other half for creating a political environment where something that could happen. There was Israel's first Lebanon war in the early 1980s, where the protests were massed. and turn violent. You can go all the way back to the 1950s when the Israeli government was contemplating, accepting reparations from West Germany for the Holocaust and the opposition led by Menachem Began. I try to prevent that and organized, you know, what he protests in which he called for quote unquote,

and I quote here, the violent overthrow of the Israeli government. So Israel has had these moments before, but I think we all tend to have a recency bias. So if you haven't seen it in a while and then you see it, you think it's the worst it's ever been. The reality is it wasn't the worst it's ever been. There was also underneath the debate about the debate over the courts, there was, as you said, these debates between these different ethnic and religious groups, debates between and a sense of polarization between them, between what some call hedonists from Tel Aviv to Haredim, ultra-Orthodox, from Bené Braque, from the tech community in Tel Aviv and those struggling in in some of the smaller towns in the periphery of Israel from Jews from the eastern part of the

world and Jews from the Western part of the world, that is Sephardic versus Ashkenazi Jews. There was tensions between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. So these fault lines, you know, when someone's talking about a movie, when people are pitching a movie idea, they always say the movies about this, that's what it's about, but then this is what it's really about. Well, in Israel, the judicial reform, you could say that's what the debate was about in 2023 before the war, before October 7th. But what it was really about was real tensions between these groups and communities that I think came to a head through the debate over judicial reforms.

Okay. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a really good summary. I want to step back for people that are not as close to this as you and I are. And so I'm going to give a quick summary for listeners and then ask you if I'm right or wrong. And then talk about the allied relationship. So right. or wrongly, I think most people are not informed on the issue. And so in 1947, we'll go a bit prior to that, the Balfour Declaration more or less gave Zionists Jews that wanted their homeland returned, the right to go back to what was then known as Palestine. After the Second World War, there was a negotiated settlement where the Jews were allowed to return and a state of Israel was formed. And there's a great speech by Harry Truman on this explaining this dilemma.

Ample land for everybody. Lots of space to make this decision. But there's a group of hardcore Arabs that don't want a two-state solution because they don't really even want a one-state solution. They want the Israelis pushed into the sea. And so you've had the formation of Israel, some wars, 67, six-day war, the 73-Yon-Kippur War, other acts of aggression, terrorism, etc. since the existence of Israel. And why am I mentioning all of this? There's been ample opportunity for deals to get struck. There was the Oslo Accords. There were deals prior to that. Isak Rabin's deal, obviously he was killed from Orthodox Jews, people on his right, so it wasn't even Arabs, if you will. And so I guess the big outstanding question for people, will there ever be peace? And what's your

thoughts there. And then the secondary question is, the United States has had unstinting, in my opinion, supportive Israel. I think vice president, I'm a Republican, you're a Republican. I should say the president. The president has done a great job, in my opinion. And so, am I right about the summary of the situation? And where do you think we stand with them right now? So you're right that there was a proposal just before the founding of the state of Israel, multiple proposals to divide the land into, as you said, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. And Israel accepted the deal, or the leaders who would lead Israel, accepted the deal, accepted the proposal, and the Arab leaders rejected the deal repeatedly.

And David Ben-Gurion, who is the leader of the Jews in Israel at the time, many around him are telling him, this is a terrible deal, don't accept it. The way they handle Jerusalem is not advantageous to us. There was a bunch of pushback from many in the Jewish camp against accepting the deal. And Ben Gurian said, no, no, no, no. Like, this is this, we're going to get a Jewish state. We're going to take what we can get. We can, you know, and let's let the Arabs have their state.

And so he, he overcame disagreement in the, is what became the Israel camp. And then you were right in 1967, which I think is the key inflection point, where Israel fought a defensive war, the six-day war. and Israel was left after that war with the, in terms of lands they're truly in dispute, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. And the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip were Egypt's. Both Gaza had been occupied by Egypt up until 1967, and the Golan Heights was Syria's, and the West Bank was Jordan's. After 67, Israel said, and the UN passed Security Council resolutions, basically saying,

There should be a two-state solution that recognizes Israel's security, recognizes Israel's borders, and in return, Israel would relinquish territories. And Israel made clear from that moment on that it was ready to negotiate. The PLO at the time, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was founded in 1964 before the Six-Day War, interestingly. So before Israel even had the West Bank or Gaza Strip, the PLO passed what was called the Three Nodes, which was no recognition, no negotiations, no security, no nothing. We're not negotiating. So yes, there have been the these periods of negotiations, as you said, the Oswald peace process in the 90s. There was the Camp David peace process in 2000 between Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton and Arfat. There was an effort by

Ehud Omar at the prime minister in 2008. Fast forward. There were all these, there was Israel's disengagement from Gaza, unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. There were all these moments where Israel was ready to go to the table, ready to provide extraordinary concessions to get the Palestinians to yes, to get them to accept a Palestinian state. And they kept getting rejected. But even before they got rejected, Israel was in this impossible situation where at the peak of negotiation, some of the most violent outbursts, sustained violent outbursts against Israelis took place. So in 2000, for the subsequent couple of years, was the second intifada, which was when a suicide

bombing campaign in Israel's major cities went on for a couple of years. thousands of Israelis were killed. This is while Israel is trying to negotiate with the Palestinians. That campaign was launched by Hamas. So I think what your net out is there's reason to be skeptical that there can never be a solution here because there's fits and starts, but they never end with a real implementable deal. Nothing like the Camp David Accords in the late 70s under the Carter administration when Israel negotiated with Egypt, Sadat and Beacon. negotiated. The deal that they contemplated was Israel returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, a piece of land that's three times the size of Israel. And Sadat flew to Israel, went to Jerusalem,

the president of Egypt, gets before the Israeli can ask set the parliament and says, I recognize Israel's right to exist. I want peace with Israel. When he made this sincere case for how passionately he wanted this mutual recognition, the deal was basically metaphorically done overnight. And so I continue to believe, and Israelis continue to hold out hope that when there's a real interlocutor who's serious about delivering and can enforce a deal, that these Israelis will make extraordinary concessions, tragically, as we're seeing in the last month, it's harder and harder to believe that could happen. Anyone who thinks, and we can talk more about it, but anyone who could look at what Hamas did to Israel in southern Israel over the last month or what they did in those first couple of days

after October 7th and then think that those are the leaders that Israel can expect to have in control of Gaza or in control of the West Bank leaves most Israelis today from left to right thinking there's no deal to be done. There may be one in the future, but the country, as you know, Anthony, because you've been there, is so tiny, right? Israel right now is surrounded by it in southern border it has Hamas, it's northern border it has Hezbollah, both organizations that are committed to Israel's genocide destruction. The West Bank, at least, is led by more secular, more moderate Palestinian leaders, but there are fringe elements even in the West Bank that pose a threat. Israel can wake up any morning and not just have what it had in Gaza, had in southern Israel in October

7th, but could wake up to a three-front war with any or all of these threats. So given why who's in control of this land matters so much to this tiny country, which is smaller than the state of New Jersey, and like I said, is totally surrounded. The stakes couldn't be higher in terms of who it's dealing with. And right now, as was made evident tragically in the most barbaric ways, it has on October 7th, it has nobody can deal with. So let's talk about that. So we have a terrorist attack.

We have the beheading of babies. We have hostages being taken. And in some cases, we know that they're being tortured and some have been killed. We have 1,400. You tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I think it was 1,400 civilians killed. Yeah. And a surprise terrorist attack. And so the magnitude of that, if it was the U.S. population, is, you know, 20-fold?

I don't know. You tell me the number. No, it would be the equivalent of what Israel dealt with on October 7th. You know, it's about 40 times the population. So between 40 to 50,000, imagine 40 to 50,000 Americans being killed. Americans killed in a terrorist attack. It would be like 15, 15, 9-11s on one day. Okay.

And I think it's important to state that so people can really understand the magnitude of what happened in the repercussion. And yet I'm finding people at my alma mater, Tufts University, places like University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University. We have people in support of these terrorists. And so how do you square that, given you? your upbringing and background. So I'm not a Jew. You know, I'm a goy, for those of you listening, that know Yiddish, okay? I'm a non-Jew, although I am one of these few goys that knows the difference between a Shegis and a Shiksa. We can talk about why. You're more legit than you give you some credit for it. I'm a phylo-Semite as opposed to an anthemsite. This is true. This is true. And so, and I'm a

big supporter of the state of Israel and the Jewish people, but also because, as I said at the RJC, after I got fired from the White House, Sheldon Adelson invited me there to give a luncheon talk, that you can trace our liberties right back to the foundation stone in Jerusalem through the works of the Torah, out to the refinement of ancient Greeks, off to Rome, into the UK, out to the United States. And we've lived under Western liberality, Western freedoms, all of which are foundationally represented in the Torah. And so when you don't protect the Jewish people, you're setting off a potential domino series. Well, first it will be the Jews, and then it will be other ethnic groups and then it will come to you. And so this is why I'm such a strident believer in this.

But the question, in that statement, there is a question, what the hell is going on in this country today where people can no longer discern between right and wrong? And there's a tremendous amount of moral relativism. And apparently there are students and professors at places like Cornell University that think it's justifiable to slaughter babies. So, I got to tell you, I'm going to try to answer the question, but I'm going to be full disclosure. I am both, because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this. It's deeply, deeply upsetting to me. It is shocking and it is perplexing.

That after, I mean, what happened on October 7th was something on the scale of like a Nazi-like attack. It was attempted, it was an attempt to genocide. It was an attempt at genocide in the most barbaric ways you can imagine. You cited some of them. We don't need to rehash them. They're just unbelievable. And they were broadcast everywhere, meaning it was clear that it was part of Hamas' strategy to record everything and broadcasted at some sort of psychological warfare against the Jews. And then the last part, you know, after the Holocaust, there was in the fringe.

elements of academia, and I mean really French. There was this term called Holocaust denial, Holocaust denialism, which is there was an effort to, and it wasn't really denialism. It was more just to start questioning the facts. Well, it wasn't $6 million, it was $2 million. Well, they didn't use, you know, these kinds of chemicals in the gas chambers. They really just did mass slaughter. You know, well, it wasn't industrial scale, a murder. It was just challenging and questioning. as a means to chip away the credibility of the reality of the Holocaust. What was so striking to me about October 7th is it's not really denialism. It's legitimization that the arguments being made are not, this is awful.

These are the forces of barbarism against the forces of civilization. And we need to be on the side that's taking on the forces of barbarism. No, it was, as you're describing in many corners, including on some of our most elite campuses, college campuses, it was, well, you need to understand. Yes, it was bad, but. That's what I, whenever I hear the but, no, no, no, there's no, there's no, whatever I hear the but when, yes, it was terrible, but you need to understand the Palestinians live in an open air prison. Yes, it was awful, but you need to understand the Palestinians and Gaza need their own state. Yes, but, yes, but. And the moment I hear the yes, but my head, I want, like, I, like, I, I want to explode. What do you mean? It's like an effort at,

at saying there's a logic to it, and there was no logic to it. And then, never in a million years did I think, after what was attempted against the Jewish people on October 7th, that it would be followed by Israel being accused of a genocide and Israel being the wrongdoer in this situation before Israel has even identified all the bodies. The protests against Israel from the river to the sea started to be chanted at college campuses. And it has like unearthed Anthony this, this wave of anti-Semitism and in some cases violent anti-Semitism that I honestly thought I would not see in my lifetime. Anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred.

And it's the most persistent and consistent hatred. It is the one that people use to blame the Jews no matter what. The communists said the Jews were too much. They were capitalists. They were rootless cosmopolitans. The capitalists called the Jews, you know, communists. You know, in the Nazi area, the Jews were of an evil race that was to be exterminated. The Jews were Christ killers.

The Jews, I mean, go through every area, in every century, I mean, here's a little experiment. If you go onto Google and you type in anti-Semitism, violence, and then just type in a century, the 18th century, the 17th century, the 16th century, and every century you will see some kind of outburst of violent anti-Semitism against the Jews throughout history. And it's shape-shifting, meaning the Jews can always be responsible for what the masses or the elites think are going wrong

in that moment. And so we're just seeing the reemergence of it now, but it's actually not without precedent. And I will tell you, I've lived a wonderful life, you know, in North America, in the West, in the United States. I basically only known the state of Israel as being secure in most of my adult life. Obviously, there have been violence, but nothing on this scale. This is the first time in my life as a Jew that I feel vulnerable.

I've never really felt vulnerable. And being raised by Holocaust survivor, I've always presented with how vulnerable I should feel. And I've never felt it. I feel it today. Shop Wayfair is Black Friday in July. From July 26 through 29th, save up to 80% off everything home. Plus flash deals you don't want to miss. Head to Wayfair.com to start shopping our lowest prices of the summer.

Wayfair, every style, every home. Well, you know, it makes me very sad. And I can remember going to Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Memorial just outside of the city of Jerusalem. And there was something on the wall there that I will never forget. And I shared this with my adult. shoulder. There's a depiction of the evacuation of Jews from their homes are being shoved into these ghettos by the Nazis. And it's in Germany. And on the wall, it says the Jews lived peacefully in Germany for 500 years, which is one of the reasons why 40% of them remained in Germany.

60% evacuated began the process of becoming refugees. And 40% of them stayed in Germany because they saw themselves and they identified as Germans, never to think that this type of atrocity could happen to them. And what you're saying now is some semblance of that thought process that the sinister nature of anti-Semitism, it ebbs and flows, it wanes, it waxes, but it's there. There's an undercurrent there. And I guess as free people, as we try to diffuse that, doesn't Israel matter? And I want you to address that because in the Second World War, the United States wasn't taking the Jewish refugees. The other countries that were outside of the perimeter of the war were not taking the Jews. And one of the feelings about Judaism and the Jews

was that they needed their homeland. They needed a place of refuge to go if the specter of this nonsense was once again perpetrated. So what are your thoughts there and identify it for? I'll tell you two, two stories. One is, one is Joe Biden has this wonderful story that he often tells. In fact, when he was in Israel right after, right after October 7th, which was very dramatic and moving, that he came to Israel in the middle. First time our U.S. president has done that, gone to Israel in the middle of a war, met with the war cabinet, symbolically very important.

In his remarks, they were very important. And one of the things he told is his first trip to Israel as a young United States senator, and he tells a story all the time. and he's meeting with Golda Mier who at the time as prime minister. And she's pointing out on a map or something, all the challenges, strategic, military security challenges Israel faces. And she could tell that then Senator Biden was jostled, that he was like really taken aback. And at one point she made a comment to him. She said, let me tell you, don't have to worry, we have a secret weapon.

And he said, what's that? And she said, we have nowhere else to go. And I think of that statement, and I think about today. I think the Jews were chased out of Europe and told to go to Palestine. Those were part of the anti-Semitic chance. The Jews are in Palestine and they're saying, go back to Europe. Or they're saying from the river to the sea, let's clear the Jews out of their Jewish homeland, which goes back, the roots of Jewish presence there goes back thousands of years.

I do wonder, and one of my, I have a podcast where I've been dealing regularly with Israel over the last few weeks, and one of my guests who's an Israeli journalist just made this point. He said, you know, he thinks that part of what the Hamas campaign was about was to make life so miserable for the Jews in Israel that they would leave. And he said that is a classic anti-colonial mindset, that if you think of the people your war with as colonialists, you think you could chase them out. The Jews aren't colonialists in Israel. They've had a presence there for their entire history. but if you look at like what the French experience in Algeria, right, the French occupation and presence in Algeria, they were colonialists, became so difficult that the French just had to leave and they went back to France. If you look at the UK, the British experience in pre-state Israel, in pre-state Palestine, the period you were talking about the beginning of this conversation, life became so difficult for the British there that they just said, you know, we're out of here.

They were a colonial power, and they just said, we're going to set a date and we're going to leave. What do we need this for? And the mindset of Hamas is, if we do the same thing to the Jews that previous revolutionary movements did to the French or the British, the Jews too will leave. The difference is the Jews have nowhere to go. That is their only state. And what is in the world, and what was so scary about October 7th was the one job the Israeli government has to do, The one idea that undergirded Zionism and the Zionist idea was that there would be a Jewish state that was a refuge for Jews that could always provide security for Jews.

And for that 10 to 12 hour period, the morning of October 7th, that 10 to 12 hour period where there seemed to be no security and Jews were just being slaughtered, it did feel like a time before there was a Jewish state, like as though the Jewish state had evaporated and the Jewish people were no longer safe. Well, it's painful for me. And I'm glad we're talking about it because I think more people need to talk about it. More rational people need to talk about it. I applaud Mark Rowan for the efforts that he's making at this very woke school, the University of Pennsylvania. I'm one of 1,200 people that signed a petition at Tufts where you have a morally relativistic administration. It's allowing for this kind of nonsense. Again, these are private colleges on private property. So

You may have a free speech right. You certainly don't have a right to violence, but you've got to go into the public square for that. These are private institutions. And the trustees of these places, they do not need students like that representing the school. You have people saying, please take my name off the scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania or not one penny ever for your endowment ever again until these actions are seated. Governor Huckle had to be forced into going to Cornell. She's got this woke group of people that she's trying to support. And so she realized that it was going to be a big loser for her if she didn't show up. But there's just pure lack of courage, Dan, and political expediency going on. But let's talk about a couple of things in your book. And then I will let you go. I promised you a half hour. We're an OT because you're so, no, you're so good at podcasting. And I need the ratings.

That's why I invited you on because people love you and think you're brilliant. Here's a couple of things out of your book. The life expectancy, this is pre-war, but this is from your book, the life expectancy is higher in Israel than its peer group. It's also got the lowest suicide rate. It's the forced happiest nation in the world, at least according to the surveys that have been taken. And there's a general feeling of hope and optimism in the country. This could be due to the venture capital nature, the tech scene, just the general vibrancy of the country. You know, when I, it's a young country, you look at the demographics. So tell us about this country that you write about in the genius of Israel. So it is a, our first book was about Israel as an economic miracle.

And we talked about that at the beginning of the conversation. And we do have a chapter in this book that picks up where the last book left off to explain what has happened, how the economy and the economic, the sort of dynamism of it of Israel as a technology superpower has continued to flourish. But we're really focused on it as a societal miracle, which is we stumbled upon a series of data, Saul and I in doing our research that blew us away. And you rattled off some of them. That is basically at a time that most of the Western world, especially affluent, developed Western democracies, are experiencing some version of the following. Plateauing life expectancy, in some places declining life expectancy,

what are called deaths of despair, which are people suffering, this like 20-year trend of people suffering in a completely terrifying numbers from deaths from substance abuse, from suicide, from opioids, shrinking populations. We're having a demographic crisis. People are having fewer and fewer children. So for the first time in history, we're going to have an experience where the world's population is going to start shrinking. Most countries today in the Western

world are below the replacement rate. The replacement rate is 2.1, meaning for every woman, if they have fewer than 2.1 children, the population will shrink. And if they have more than 2.1, the country's population will grow. A loneliness epidemic, more and more around the world, There's been much written about this, particularly in the United States, of people feeling lonelier than ever, a mental health crisis, specifically a teen mental health crisis. And then a mental health crisis with a term I never in a million years thought I would say at other these words, which is a teen suicide crisis. So the CDC came out with a report last few months ago that laid out that for the first time,

over the last number of years, the public health authorities are identifying this epidemic of teens taking their own lives. I mean, someone with teenage kids, I just can't, this is like that it's a thing, is quite disturbing to say the least. And in every one of these metrics, Israel's moving in the opposite direction. So the Western world is moving in one direction. Israel's moving in the other. Israel's way above replacement rate. The population is, as you said, young and growing, not aging and shrinking. And it's not just the ultra-Orthodox Jews who are having lots of kids. It's the real secular Israelis that are having a lot of kids. The life expectancy is high, high.

higher than most of Europe, if not all of Europe, much higher than the United States, higher than its very wealthy neighbors in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia. There's no loneliness epidemic. It's the lowest level of teen suicide in the OECD. I can go on and on and on and on. So it's not like Israel's just doing a little better than the rest of the world. It's that Israel's moving in a completely different direction. And so what we tried to understand in this book is why?

what is Israel doing that we're failing at here in the U.S.? And what can the West learn from Israel to head off this societal crisis? Well, you know, look, it's a brilliant book. It's a book about a very large, I know you say it's a small country, but it's a very large group of people who are resilient. Imagine the whole state of New Jersey with the fighting mentality for life and living as Israel. All right. So I'm at the point in the podcast where I have five words I read to my authors based on their book.

And then I need you to give a reaction to the words. You know, you could be a sentence, a paragraph, or whatever. Let's start with the word grit. When I say grit, you think of what? I think of young Israelis who at their formative period in their lives, they are taught not to focus on their own individual excellence, but they are learned how to work in a team in the most difficult circumstances possible. And that's an experience that starts in their youth, in their youth movements.

It continues on into the military where most of them serve. And I think you see that grit and that team communal mindset flourishing, despite the darkness of this war, right now. Okay. I love that. I'm going to keep going. I say the word society. You think of what? I think of community, that a healthy society is a society that is not just a collection of people, but is a collection of people that operates as a community. Right. And Israel operates as a community, as a real community, not everyone living in their own little echo chambers.

So this is probably going to get me in trouble to say this, but I want to get your reaction. The current conflict is probably creating more community, right? More unity. Am I right in it? 100%. 100%. What I say, Anthony, is that Israel is like a big family that argues and is contentious and is noisy and is divisive. But if you poke that family from outside, that family, they lock up. They're all in.

And it's like beautiful solidarity. It's probably why the Jews and the Italians are so close to normal. Yeah. I say the word courage. You say what? I say 150 percent. I choose that number carefully. When Israel did the call-ups for reserves, for the reserve duty after this attack on October 7th, they overshot in the call-ups because they assumed a lot of Israelis were traveling around the world. A lot of Israelis are working around the world. You know, some families and reserves are two-parent, two-couple, two parents that both of them can't serve. There's a lot of division in Israeli politics over the last year. Some of them may not want to serve. Reserve turnout has been 150%.

People are turning out in massive numbers to risk their lives to defend the state. I say the word genius. Yeah. So that is the most interesting word of everyone you said, because people think genius means smarts or intellectual and analytical horsepower. And it may include that. But genius, according to Webster's dictionary, is about a defining character, a defining feature of a person or a place that makes it special and makes it excel. And in that sense, what I think the genius of Israel, I don't think about brain power, although there's a lot of brains in Israel. I think

The defining feature is this sense of community, the sense of groupness, the sense of we're all in this together, and that's the genius of Israel. Okay. I'm going to end it with this last word, Israel. Can I give you two? I'll be brief. Yeah, please. So when I hear the word Israel, I think the single defense against atrocities against Jews, the most reliable defense against Jews that exists in the world. world after centuries and centuries of atrocities against Jews. That's one thing I think about.

The second thing I think about is rituals that create community. What you have in Israel is a society where there are rituals throughout the year that bring people together. Whether there's the Friday night Shabbat dinner that over 70% of Israelis participate in with their families and they know the whole country is sharing in it. Whether it's the Jewish holidays throughout the year, that the whole whole country shuts down for, whether is Israel's Memorial Day, where they honor their fallen, and the whole country stops. There's a two-minute siren that goes on throughout the country, and everyone gets out of their cars, stands in silence. People come out of classrooms, out of restaurants, out of their busy lives, as one people, as one nation, as participants in one

project, even though they disagree about religion and politics and society and a whole bunch of other things. When it matters, they come together. These are all rich. rituals and you need rituals to create community. And you need community to create a healthy society. And Israel, one thing has many things, but one thing when I think of Israel is this endless stream of rituals throughout the year that bring the country together that never lets the country get too far apart, even when they're disagreeing with one another. And one of the things I hope for for the United States is we find more rituals in this country that can create community and bring people together. We have too few of them right now. You know, I have one last question if you don't mind,

because it's relevant to all this. This is beautiful what you just said. If you had written this book after the war started, would you have added a chapter? And if so, what would you have written in that chapter? I would have described what you're seeing right now in terms of the civilian mobilization. There are big holes in the government's capabilities right now. And the government has failed in many respects to deal with this crisis. And the civilian population has volunteered to the tune of 10 to the tune of tens of thousands of people have stepped up. Everything from the tech community that's created these artificial intelligence capabilities to use video footage from the Hamas video footage to identify people who are missing to hundreds of thousands of people from the south and now the

north who have no homes and have had to evacuate and people in the center of the country just opening their homes up to total strangers to people volunteering to do everything from farming to keep the farms function tens of thousands of people from the wealthiest part of the country coming down to southern Israel where these farms have been evacuated and they're just going there to volunteer to do farming to keep the farms functioning I can go on and on and on and on this is awful what has happened to Israel awful It's a horror show, okay? But out of the ashes of this, you are seeing rays of this incredible volunteer mindset, civilian mobilization, and coming together in the greatest expression of solidarity and patriotism we could possibly imagine.

And I find it quite moving. And it's of a piece of our book. It's what we basically write about. We explain how it happened. We explained what the building blocks were. we just didn't have the actual event like this to validate it in real time. And obviously, we would have pointed to the event and the aftermath. Well, you've been sensational.

I can't be more grateful. Couldn't be more grateful for all your time. The title of the book is The Genius of Israel by Dan Signore and Saul Singer. The surprising resilience of a divided nation in a turbulent world. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Anthony. Always a pleasure. So I've had the good fortune starting in 1985 of visiting Israel.

many times. In fact, my first entrance into Israel was in March of 1985 at the Rafa gate. It was actually occupied by the Israelis at that time, as before it became the Gaza Strip. And I crossed over the Sionai Peninsula and the Suez Canal. I took actually a cab ride. This is even before Uber, right? 1985, four college students in a cab from the Cairo Hilton to the Rafa gate. Unfortunately, it was the Sabbath, and so the Israeli soldiers told us the border was closed, we had to go sleep in the desert. I bring this up because I've had a 38-year love affair with the country of Israel and the Israelis themselves. And while I'm saddened by these civilian lives that are being lost in this great tragedy, it is super important to remember that the Israelis have a right to exist, as other nations do,

as formulated by the UN Charter. So I hope that they can get to a peaceful resolution of all of this, but I've thrown my hat and my support clearly behind Israel. I thought Dan did a wonderful job today of explaining the culture, the resiliency of the people, the reason why it has such startup mentalities, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, but also why it has low suicide rates, a happy group of people because they're living a life with purpose. And so you should pick up the book. I learned a lot from that book. And of course, Every time I talk to Dan, I learn so much from him. You know, you've got to come on a podcast.

You're part of the, you're the star of the show, Ma. My gosh. All right, you're ready? Get you ready. Get your mind around it. You ready? Okay. Now, you're coming on the air, Ma.

All right, so this week, I interviewed a guy by the name of Dan Sanoor who wrote a book called The Genius of Israel. Okay. And so what do you think about the situation in Israel, Ma? What's your opinion there? I think it's terrible. Right. And I'm glad that they're finding the other people so that maybe

they'll leave them along for a change. Right. That was ridiculous that they go to attack Israel, and then Israel attacks back, and now of a sudden they try to treat Israel like the aggressor, right? That's not fair, right? Uh-huh. Okay. Absolutely.

And so, Ma, we've had a lot of Jewish families and Jewish people that live on Long Island, right? Right. I have Jewish friends. The Italians get along with the Jews, right? Or no. Well, I think they're Jewish and the Italians are very similar. The only thing that's different is the Jewish people send their country. kids to camp and the Italians don't do that. Yeah, no, there's no way. We would never send our

kid away for that long, the Italians, right? You're too possessor, right? The Jewish mother sending the kids the summer camp, boom, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You only sent me to the Manor Haven public pool, ma'am. You wouldn't send me to summer camp. No. Uh-uh. All right. But Israel has produced, like, some of the biggest successful startups and technology. They have the lowest suicide rate, the Jews in Israel, ma. Why do you think that is? Why do you think this is so successful? I think that they're very happy of their people getting ahead.

They're not envious or jealous of their people. You know, they work hard, and they're very aggressive, and they're not jealous. That's what it is, right? And they team together. It's a good culture, good culture of family and dedicated to success. I think these other people are jealous. I think that this was Jewish, and we got a lot of. along very, very well.

Italian to Jewish people get along very, very well. And, you know, the Italian is intelligent and the Jewish person is intelligent. They mesh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I agree with you. But so far, Joe Biden's done a pretty good job on this, right? Or no, be honest.

They did a good job on what? The situation with Israel. Well, he made points going there. For sure, right? Yeah, but I, I don't know. I think that he's, he's, uh, a very nice person, but I don't think you need someone so nice to run the country. I think you need someone a little bit more feisty.

More rough and tumble, right, ma? Yeah. You need someone to smack the people up a little bit once in a while when they need smacking, right? Yeah. Right. No, I know. All right. Love you, ma'am.

I love you, baby. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, and make sure you hit follow or subscribe. wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram.

You can also text me at Plus 1-917-909-29-996. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.