Pod Save the World - America's Warning To Israel

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Tommy and Ben discuss the latest news from Israel and Gaza including the staggering figures of over 5,000 civilians dead in Gaza, the slow pace of aid arrival, the release of four hostages, and they hear the experiences of a woman with five family members kidnapped by Hamas. They also talk about the emotional impact of Biden’s visit to Israel compared to Netanyahu’s response, media organizations correcting the record on the Gaza hospital strike, and the sanitization of war through language. In other news around the world, they touch on new audio from an Australian Billionaire who Trump leaked secrets to, elections in Argentina and Venezuela, a strike for gender equality in Iceland, and an update on the war in Ukraine. Then Ben speaks to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy about America’s involvement in Israel and Gaza, public opinion in the US towards the conflict, and Senator Bob Mendendez. We end the show with a new bi-weekly Q&A segment for subscribers. To hear that segment in future episodes, and to get ad-free Pod Save The World, subscribe to Crooked's Friend of the Pod service at crooked.com/friends For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Welcome to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, the Patriots are back. Oh, God. Yeah. I'm wearing the hat. I saw that. Is that why the hat came back out? Well, I need a haircut. I desperately need a haircut. And I'm not going to be here for like a month.

So it's going to get ugly. Where are you going? Well. We're going to Chicago. Chicago, New Orleans. Oh, you're on tour? Yeah, bonnet off. Okay.

I also, you know. Hannah doesn't have a lot of sympathy for I'm like, I need to get a haircut. She's like, actually, you need to spend time with your daughter. Yes. Yeah, haircuts kind of go by the wayside. But anyway, Patriots. Thankfully, I don't have much hair. You look great.

You look great. We got a lot going on today, Ben. I'm back from D.C. It was very fun to see a bunch of NSC friends that we both know well and spend some time running around. The EEOB talking to folks, getting smarter. They're very generous with their times. It does remind you of, like, the best part of government is all the career NSC people who you get to, like, lean on to be smarter about literally anything in the world. Yeah, a lot of wealth of knowledge.

in the executive office building. Yeah. Great people. Like I'm, the one thing that bothered me though, they all looked younger than me now. And that, um. Much younger. I hate to tell you that.

Considerably. But actually, if anything, that also reminded me of how young we were when we started there. There you go. I was 31 years old when we walked in the last. Yeah, I guess. I will say actually, just on a somber note, since you mentioned the NSC at, our former colleague, Jeff Bader, who is the senior director for Asia, policy, but kind of real China expert. Great guy. Wonderful guy. One of the leading kind of thought

leaders on China in this country. He passed away yesterday, so we do want to pay tribute to Jeff. Very, very sad. Incredibly nice guy. Always super generous with this time. Always, like, fun to be around. Gallows humor when things were going badly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make you laugh on the plane, even when you screwed something up. Yeah, it's a good guy. Had a very good, good, dark sense of humor, which is a prerequisite to foreign policy work, I think. It should be at least. It absolutely is. Okay, we have a lot going on and a lot to cover today. We're going to cover the latest news from Gaza, the Biden administration's response. There's an update on the Ali Arab hospital explosion that we talked about last week and much, much more.

And then we are going to cover some other events in the world. There's this crazy series of stories about Trump and a billionaire in Australia. There's some big elections in South America. Protests in Iceland. We haven't talked about Russia and Ukraine for a while, so we'll do a quick update there. And then, Ben, you're talking later. this afternoon with Senator Chris Murphy, right? Yeah, Chris Murphy, one of the more thoughtful voices in the United States Congress focused on

foreign policy. So I want to talk to him, you know, I think as someone who's views generally aligned pretty closely with this podcast, but how is he seeing the situation in Gaza? What is he concerned about in terms of the ramifications for kind of the U.S. position in the world, which is something he's worked on a lot? What is in this aid package? I mean, I do think it's worth kind of questioning, like... $106 billion?

Yeah, and particularly, you know, like what is, you know, what is Congress's role and kind of, you know, necessarily conducting some oversight over is all that really needed? And, yeah, just, just where is this going in the Democrat Party that we shouldn't pretend like that's not an issue, you know. Can you figure out why Bob Menendez is still on the Senate foreign relations committee? Why there's a spy for a foreign government that it borders the war that is happening who still apparently has access to classified briefings. Yeah, that'll be all I'll ask him that. We had Rachel Maddow on POTSave America last night. We were watching her show beforehand. She went in on this and she was like, yeah, Rachel's right.

Like, why is this guy still on the committee? Totally crazy. Like, and friend of the pot, Andy Kim, who's running against him, keeps like, you know, exing or tweeting like, hey, can this guy be ejected from the Senate? Which is actually not in Andy's interest in some ways, you know? Like, it's shocking to me that Democrats are kind of okay with like someone the Department of Justice has deemed a spy being in the foreign relations committee. I think Menendez stays in the Senate because then he can continue to use his campaign account to pay for his lawyers.

It becomes your legal defense fund. But it doesn't make any sense to me why Democrats would allow him to stay on the committee. I can imagine Menendez playing some hard ball and screwing with Schumer, I don't know, maybe not caucusing with the Democrats, making his life a little harder. But I don't know. I'd love to know the answer. Be nice to have it just be a little bit cleaner. And you're right. I mean, you don't have to kick him out of the Senate, but why he's on a foreign relations committee when he's.

and that's what he was getting gold bars for. I mean, literally, the work he did on that committee was a part of what he was indicted for. Yeah, we're all innocent until proven guilty, but we're not all given access to sensitive information until proven guilty. That's not quite how my clearance works. Finally, we'll close today's show

with a preview of a new subscription segment. So starting today, Pod Save the World is available ad-free when you sign up for Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends. We will also be doing biweekly Q&A segments with questions from listeners. So you will hear the first of those Q&As at the end of today's show, but moving forward, they're going to be for subscribers only.

So sign up at crooked.com slash friends. You get ad-free, pod save the world, bonus biweekly Q&A segments, and then all the other excellent crooked content that you get with Friends of the Pot. Friends of a lot of benefits are times. Also, the crooked, the Discord, by the way, Discord, all you old heads out there, it's just a chat room. It's really easy to set up. But it's like very, very smart people sharing helpful information.

Well, we know that they have actually. exists to vast reams of classified documents. Vast resources on military bases around the world. Okay, Ben, let's start with the situation on the ground in Gaza. So authorities in Gaza say that more than 5,700 Palestinians have been killed since the fighting began on October 7th. The Gaza Health Ministry, which you should note is controlled by Hamas, said Tuesday it had recorded the single highest death toll day of this conflict, 700 people dead in a day.

The humanitarian aid is barely trickling in dozens of trucks carrying food, water, and medicine have made it into Gaza since Saturday, but hundreds of trucks worth of aid are needed per day. And those shipments so far don't include fuel, which is desperately needed to power hospitals and water pumps. Israel doesn't want to allow fuel shipments into Gaza because they're worried that Hamas will take the fuel and use it for military purposes. Hamas released four hostages so far out of the estimated 222 taken to Americans were released. Judith and Natalie Ronan, they were released Friday. And then on Monday, 79-year-old Norah Cooper, an 85-year-old old, Yoheved Lifshitz were released. Their husbands are still being held hostage. At a press conference,

Ms. Lifshitz said she was beaten, taken by a motorbike to Gaza, and then held in an underground tunnel network. Hamas has said, unfortunately, this is scary, Ben. They don't have all of the hostages. Some are being held by the Palestinian Islamic jihad militant group. So there's kind of be like several sets of negotiations to get people out. So, Ben, I wanted to get into the Biden response to all of this in a minute. But I was in D.C. last week. It is clear that they, the Biden team is very frustrated with the pace of aid shipments like everybody else is. I still can't totally figure out why it's happening. It seems like there's some combination of Israeli restrictions, the Egyptians initially

being kind of intractable, I think getting better. Hamas is obviously making everything more complicated and maybe the UN is not really fully taking ownership of the process here. But what's your sense of why it's been so hard to get this aid in and what it'll take to have freed up? I think everything that you said applies. And look, the question is, is this like a serious, comprehensive effort to mitigate the humanitarian situation in Gaza? Or is it just like a symbolic, you know, here's some trucks going across the border?

I mean, bringing in, to be clear, I think that the shipments that have gone in are like less than what would have gone into Gaza before the war. A normal day was a hundred trucks. A lot less than the normal day. and the humanitarian needs are much, much greater because of all the injuries and all the hospital needs and all the shortages that have been created by the siege.

And so, you know, what you'd want to see is not something that feels like, hey, we need some pictures of some trucks rolling it. And honestly, I think that Biden people are sincere in wanting something more than that. But like, you don't want a situation where it's kind of cynical.

It's like, here's like 20 trucks roll in every few days and it's like that just disappears like a drop in the ocean. So what you need is like a very sustained supply chain of humanitarian supplies that roll across that border without trouble from the Egyptians, that the Israelis like CIA as part of what they're doing and not as some kind of inconvenience to what they're doing. And that, you know, to address the Hamas piece of it, and I know Israel has serious issues

with the UN agency that works in Gaza, but, I mean, they are the United Nations. They should be able to have custody of this material and try to monitor. and get it to places. And that doesn't mean you might not see Hamas try to siphon off some of it. But like if there's a UN process, it should be able to call that out. And so, I mean, it just, this doesn't feel like a major push. It feels a bit thus far like kind of optics. Yeah, we also reached out to an aid worker in Gaza named Najla Shawa.

She works for Oxfam, a humanitarian organization. And this is how she described what life is like for her, sheltering in central Gaza with her two daughters. Here's a clip. I considered myself very, very privileged and lucky because I'm with just around 60 people in this place where everything is on top of the other. We don't have enough space inside to sleep. We still, some of us, like around seven or eight, sleep outside, either in cars or in the floor outside. It's again the situation is really challenging.

We had five of the children actually within less than 24 hours had vomiting and if you had some diarrhea. We hope that they are recovering and it's just a virus. Of course the water that we drink here is from the water tankers that we are not super confident of the cleanliness. Our sleep is of course never continuous. All night there has been tank shelling at Nusirat, especially Nusirat area, which is very close to here. And I was just without any exaggeration. I was just like expecting one to just fall on top of me any second. privileged and lucky to be with 60 people sheltering in one room. Yeah, it's a reminder, too.

Like, we were criticizing kind of the government policies that are making this harder. There are some, like, heroic aid workers on the ground. And just so people know, I mean, because the Samas issue is real, but there are, you know, the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, you know. These are, like, very credible agencies that have people risking their lives on the ground. And they deserve the support of getting what's necessary to alleviate what is a humanitarian crisis. Yeah. And what she describes there is some children starting to have problems with diarrhea and vomiting. Like, hopefully all those kids are okay. But I think this is the concern, right, is that these waterborne diseases could lead to a real medical emergency. Yeah. And when you don't know where your next glass of water is coming from and you're being traumatized by this kind of bombardment, it is a, you know,

It's an incredibly acute situation for children, and we should be trying to make that as better as possible. Yeah. We also reached out to a woman named Abby Own. She lives in Tel Aviv. Her 80-year-old cousin, Carmel Adon, and Carmela's 12-year-old granddaughter were murdered by Hamas. Horrifyingly, Abby still has three other relatives missing. Their ages are 50, 16, and 12 years old. They're presumed to be hostages.

The first clip you're going to hear is how Abby learned about the news that her family had been taken. The first confirmation that we got before anything from the military was a video that Hamas uploaded on October 8th on Sunday. With errors in their hands, they're holding him and they're dragging him down the road at that point. After we got confirmation of them being hostages, which in some level gave you hope that they could be alive and that they would return, two days after that, we got a military confirmation that both Carmelah and Noia had been murdered. They were indeed kidnapped, which is why they weren't found on the kibbutz. They were not among the living or the dead, but their bodies were found near the Gaza border. We're not sure which side. And so we had their funeral on Friday.

We buried a 12-year-old and her grandmother. And at the same time as we're trying to grieve, we are still fighting because we still have three family members that are part of the 220 now hostages. And so as much of the country, we are grieving and fighting at the same time. We also asked Abby about her context with the U.S. government, and she contrasted that with the outreach she has received from the Israeli government. I don't know any family right now that will tell you that Israel has been forthcoming in the way that they share information. What I think I know is that Israel was not well prepared. something broke, whether it was government or military, that allowed this attack to happen at this scale, and the cataloging of what happened, the cataloging of close to 2,000 bodies and doing those DNA checks

and finding places for those bodies, it feels awful to even talk about, but it's true. While you're preparing for some sort of response, the greatest terror attack Israel has seen, the most number of Jews killed since the Holocaust, there has to be a response. but we as the families continue to advocate for their turn of hostages before anything escalates. And then finally, Ben, Abby talks about, you know, just what this horror has been like for her family and President Biden's message in Israel, warning Israel not to react out of rage like America did after 9-11. Last Thursday, after we got the news about Carmela and Noia, you know, my children are 12, 10, and 7, and they are living through sirens, and they know that mom is busier than normal because I'm trying to advocate,

on behalf of our family, but they didn't really put the pieces together. And we had to sit down and talk about terror and death and kidnapping and hostages and murder and things that I would never want to explain to them. And so on one side, I feel heartbroken for them because you wish that this stuff would never come to their doorstep. And clearly I feel concerned for all of our children. I don't know anyone in Israel, really anyone that wishes the civilians of Palestine harm. I think they're being held hostage by Hamas the same way that my family is. We have both the terror attack and the war. And so we had October 7th, but it didn't end there.

We get rockets every day. We have more than 360,000 troops on the Gaza border right now. Every one of us knows someone murdered, missing, kidnapped, serving. We are as a country broken and fighting at the same time. And to answer what you asked about Biden, I don't think he's wrong. I think rage is the wrong emotion right now. I think we have to choose productivity and hope and optimism and, of course, realism at some level. But if we let rage take over, we lose.

So I just a little glimpse into, you know, the nightmare that so many of these families are living through right now. And pretty amazing poison. Yeah, no, that's considering that. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I mean, pretty remarkably thoughtful. And yet, it's a reminder that even as the lens has understandably shifted to what's happening in Gaza, I mean, that there are so many Israeli families that are still dealing with the trauma of losing a loved one, of having hostages missing. And as she points out, you know, it's a small country with an enormous reserve force. I mean, just about everybody knows somebody who is in some danger, right? If they don't already know somebody who's been affected by the Hamas attack, like they, they, they probably. probably have someone serving in the reserves on the northern border near Hizbla or down the southern border, perhaps preparing for a ground invasion. So this is still a very fresh moment,

but I think what she captures in her own comments is that there's ways to channel that that could be productive, you know. Yeah. So we recorded last week just before President Biden's trip to Israel. I think though, you know, it sort of went as I think we expected it would go by President's presence in Israel's message, I think, was incredibly meaningful to a lot of Israeli citizens. Amir Teabone, the Haares reporter, who's been on this show before, he was part of a small group of Israelis who actually got to speak with Biden just before he left. They brought a group of them together. And we asked him to send us, you know, sort of a little clip of his reflections of that time with Biden, what they talked about, what it was like and what it meant to the folks in that room. When the president arrived, he really moved.

around the room from one person to the other and each one of us received you know two or three minutes of his time and he shook our hands and he looked straight into our eyes and he listened to our stories and he hugged people and he shed some tears with us after he finished working the room he gave a short statement to the press and we were sure that was it because the secret service and someone from his staff was starting to hint that you know mr president it's time to go but then he raised his finger and he said no wait a minute i need to talk to these people it's something i will never forget and and i wrote an article about this in ha'ar it's i've been very critical of our leadership here in israel over the past two weeks because netanyahu he's not good at showing empathy

and he's not good at hugging people and showing love and support and emotion. He's also not so good at other things like running the country, running the military, keeping us safe. But just on the emotional level, it's just been very disappointing. And it was a great relief to receive this hug and support from President Biden. So pretty amazing, Ben, hearing that, you know, for a lot of Israelis, like the only comfort and empathy is, you know, they received from a leader was from Joe Biden and not from not from bbi nanyahu yeah i mean first of all something that comes out and and both those clubs beyond just the immense power of these stories is the anger at nenniahu you know which gets expressed more candidly in israel than here way more

it's interesting um but that that some of it does center around this kind of absence of empathy um or even services for the victims you know this lack of communication with people that have family members who are hostage or missing. The Biden thing, you know, it doesn't surprise me. I've seen him do that. And it is quite remarkable when he does it. He kind of locks in on people in a way that is unusual even for politicians that are usually good at that. But, you know, look, we should talk about the visit. I mean, on the one hand, it obviously was immensely powerful to show that support for Israeli people at a very visceral time. And he clearly accomplished that completely. You know, like there was no question that that was received in a way that was, I think, will always stay

with Israelis, you know. It's also the case. So what's interesting is that Biden's administration, by their own accounting, right, is kind of tried to stay out of this a little bit. You know, they didn't want to kind of be dragged back into the morass of Middle East peace processes and things like that. And I think there was an awareness at going, you know, in meeting with BB. You know, it's not Biden didn't really have a choice, but literally hugging. Yeah, literally hugging Bibi. And then being briefed by the Israeli War Cabinet, you know, that inserts the United States. We should just say that, you know, like right in the middle of this thing, you know, like we can't say that we're not, you know, if we're getting briefed by the war cabinet and, you know, making an emergency

supplemental request to Congress, like we are a part of. whatever military operation they do. And Biden seems to be betting that this goodwill that he has and this affinity that he has for Israel will allow him to affect their decision-making to show some degree of restraint to provide that humanitarian assistance into Gaza, and perhaps to scale back what might be more maximalist ground invasion or effort to displace people out of Gaza, that we don't know. And so it's not to criticize, it is just to say that we should be clear that, you know, this is, there were risks associated with this that have yet to play out, you know. Absolutely. Yeah. I want to ask you about that because the public messaging was basically,

you're not alone. We got your back. But also don't repeat the mistakes we made after 9-11. And you're right. I mean, there was this really unprecedented meeting the Biden had with the Israeli War cabinet where he reportedly pressed them on kind of what's your day after plan for the day after the war in Gaza. How do you occupy it? What happens then? And then it also seems clear to me from public reporting that Biden is pushing Israel hard to refrain from launching an attack on Hezbollah. There's reports that members of the cabinet, even the defense minister, actually wanted to preemptively strike Hezbollah targets in the north. The Biden administration is pushing them hard not to do that. But I, too, am having a hard time figuring out what the Biden position is

on a ground invasion. Like my theory, after kind of reading all the coverage and then talking to people in D.C. last week, Ben, is I think that they are very concerned about a ground evasion. They're worried it could turn into a quagmire that leads to big casualty numbers and no clear ending. I think they're also very worried that a Israeli ground invasion into Gaza would draw in Hezbollah and other regional militia groups. You're already seeing Iranian proxy forces in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen launching strikes. I mean, the U.S. carrier strike. group, I think, had to intercept a bunch of cruise missiles launched by the Houthis at Israel. Our troops are getting attacked in the Middle East. But it also seems like the Biden team maybe

is sort of resigned to the fact that ground invasion is going to happen, or at least that the Israelis wanted to happen. And they don't want to be seen as telling Israel what to do. So instead, they're asking like all these questions. They sent over some general who's apparently an expert in urban warfare. Yeah. But I don't know. But either either they, just don't want to tell anyone they're not pushing for ground invasion. Maybe they privately understand that it's going to happen or that it might be what's required to get rid of Hamas. But I don't know. Like, what's your sense?

My sense is that, I mean, they clearly have succeeded in getting these Israelis to listen to them. I mean, literally flying all the way over there in the President of the United States and a senior team and Tony Blinken's been there multiple times. And we're sending generals like they clearly think that they can just get in front of these. Israelis, they can make them think twice and three times and four times before doing certain things. They clearly want to control for escalation. Like you said, I think they don't want to see a conflict with Hezbollah. And look, I think on a ground invasion, you and I have expressed our concerns about it. I've read a piece of people want to read it in the New York Review of books that expresses concerns about that escalation.

There are more limited ways. There's a difference between full ground invasion, house-to-house fighting, versus, you know, targeted incursions to take out Hamas leadership or try to rescue hostages, right? And I'm not suggesting that it's easy. Or like a phased approach. Yeah. I mean, I have concerns about all of it because we've already seen just from the aerial bombardment, just how devastating that can be in a densely populated area like Gaza. But they may just think they can turn that dial of it. I mean, that they've succeeded in getting the Israelis to listen. I don't think anybody thought it would take this long for there to be a ground invasion. So that alone, I think, is evidence that that they've gotten through to at least have them

thing twice, but that doesn't mean that this still might not happen. And when it does, you know, the U.S. is kind of positioned behind it. And that's how, whether they stay in that posture will be very interesting. Hopefully it doesn't have to happen, you know. But, but I mean, this is still early days here. Yeah. I should say, Amir Tebowen from Horat in a subsequent conversation said that he thinks that Biden's visit and pressure is the reason that the fighting hasn't been extended to Hezbollah yet. So that was interesting. I mean, obviously, complicating everything is the fact that there are these hostages, right? Some of them are American. But also, 500 American citizens are trapped in Gaza and can't seem to get out. ABC News, I think it was this morning, interviewed a lawyer for some of the families who is, you know, furious at the State Department for not doing more to get them out. I reached out to some folks at state about what's going on. And they said the issue is that Hamas won't let Americans leave. They won't let them get to the Egyptian side of the crossing. Or maybe they just haven't had personnel there to, like, open the gates literally at the times when some of these families have tried to leave.

But, like, these 500 Americans are in desperate situations. Like, some of them are drinking salt water to stay alive. They've got one family of the little kid. I mean, it's real scary. You can imagine what a desperate scene is at that border crossing. You know, it was just total chaos on a good day. And with the horror of what is happening in Gaza and bombs and shelling behind you. And let's be clear, like the Israeli strikes have hit into the south of Gaza, not just the north where they told people to evacuate.

And so there's this ongoing war zone behind you. There's the kind of bureaucratic craziness of, hey, I'm an American, I can prove it. There's Hamas guys. There's Egyptians. You don't want to let anybody in because they don't want any refugees. Like, this is a real crucible for those 500 Americans. And you just hope that they can get out. Yeah.

One other thing that you've mentioned in a couple episodes is this uptick and violence. in the West Bank. Yes. I just want to quantify that. The New York Times reported that more Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli occupied West Bank in the past few weeks than in any similar period in at least the past 15 years, according to Palestinian health authorities and historical data from the UN. So Israeli forces and settlers have killed 95 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since October 7th.

Most of those deaths are in clashes with the IDF. Some are settler attacks. And then, you know, one other thing we've been watching, Ben, is intra-euro. U.S. government frustration. So last week, a staffer responsible for arms transfers and security assistance at the State Department resigned saying he could no longer in good conscience, provide more arms the Israeli government. And then Huffington Post reported that there is, quote, a mutiny brewing within state at all levels over Gaza policy. I suspect, you know, that reflects a lot of the differences we're seeing in polling when it comes to race and age in the broader U.S. electorate.

Yeah, I've been talking to people in the administration, too, and I find that in my own conversations, you know, like younger people are feeling deeply conflicted. I think what was, you know, what merits a lot of attention in that kind of resignation letter from the state official, you know, it was both the complaint about the policy, but, you know, he was suggesting that there's not a space to err questions or raise concerns. And that's something I think that should be addressed. I mean, there has to be a space.

We're all dealing with that as a country, as we've talked about in past episodes. It's language can be provocative. One person's question can be insensitive to somebody else. But I do just think that, and this was, I think, one of the most important things in the statement of Obama put out yesterday, is there has to be some space, particularly in the U.S. government, to be able to kind of ask hard questions and raise concerns and pressure test things. better to do that. That's the better way to try to get this right, you know. So we'll see if that, we'll see how that evolves here. Yeah. So the guy, Josh Paul is the former director in the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs who resigned. He had a good op-ed explaining why in the Washington Post on October 23rd. That's worth checking out. One important update, Ben, from last week.

So last week, we recorded a few hours after the explosion at the Al-Airp Hospital in Gaza City. So the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry initially blamed the explosion on the Israeli irstrike. They said nearly 500 people have been killed. The IDF said no, the explosion was the result of a rocket fired from Gaza. That's when we went into the studio and tried to record based on what we knew. So sitting here a week later, the U.S., Canada and France have now all said that the explosion was likely the result of a rocket fired from within Gaza, so from militants and investigations

by the Wall Street Journal Associated Press and CNN, also backed that. Israeli U.S. version of events. So, you know, look, it was not great that a lot of news outlets ran with blaring headlines, blaming the IDF for the strike without noting that the sole source was Hamas or that it was unvetted or uncorroborated. But also worth pointing out that the IDF over time has created credibility problems for itself by lying to press, in particular lying about the murder of a Palestinian-American journalist named Shireen Abu Aklai initially the IDF blamed her death.

She was shot on militants. It's come out, it's pretty clear now that she was shot by a member of the Israeli military. Yeah, that's a real issue. And look, this is, I understand people's are right to be concerned about this and right to caution that there needs to be some acknowledgement that reports are preliminary. that makes complete sense to me. It's unfortunate and wrong that that context was missing from a lot of reporting. I think we tried to caveat our comments on this last week.

I think our caveat was we don't have any fucking... We don't have any... What I will say is two other points I'd add to this. It is worth identifying the fact that when you see health ministry that's like Hamas controlled, I'm going to add a butt here to this, though. Like, the doctors and the hospitals, like, Hamas took over Gaza. I don't think that we should then, therefore, suggest that all health care workers are, like,

these are not people that had anything to do with happen on October 7th. You know, if you're some doctor and Hamas runs Gaza, you know, you're just going to work trying to treat patients. And so sometimes I see this kind of spilling over into kind of impugning everybody who works in any health infrastructure. in Gaza, and that's just not the case, you know. So it's just worth noting that. And look, I, this has to be gotten right, and particularly on something that is hugely consequential like that, where passions are going to be inflamed around the world, and you've got world leaders reacting, absolutely call out what became misinformation. It's not as if there are not a lot of IDF airstrikes into Gaza, though. I mean, there's, you know, we shouldn't suggest that therefore

none of this is true. I mean, there's, there's, there's, we are watching. watching before eyes, you know, last night, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians, including a lot of children, got killed, you know. And so let's keep this in the proper context as against everything else that is going on. And, yeah, try to get these things as right as possible in the future, but it's a war. There are going to be things that are, that reporting changes on. Yeah. And look, there was, I mean, a lot of people died. It wasn't 500 people died, but well over 100 died at this hospital. It was an explosion in a place that is being heavily bombed by one party.

Reporters weren't making this up out of nothing. They were looking at horrifying images. Do they move to quickly? Absolutely, in some cases. But I think they moved to correct it afterwards. It's also the case, though, in terms of, you know, the rate of airstrikes. I mean, the IDF is saying on the record that they're increasing the volume of air strikes in a lead-up to a potential ground invasion because they want to take out as many targets

by air as possible, get rid of as many Hamas tunnels as possible in advance of a ground invasion. So that's just the reality on the ground. It's no safer now than it was 10 days ago. It's probably worse. No, and the fact that it's picking up maybe because it's some kind of preparation for the ground invasion. I mean, the only thing I'm going to say about the language question, because, you know, we do read your feedback listeners and like we get feedback in our own lives on this stuff.

I think people make very good points when it's about, hey, don't. ignore this suffering and trauma that's happening. So we do not look away from the hurt that Israelis are feeling, the pain that people are in from losing loved ones or having hostages. In the same way that Palestinians are saying, don't look away from what's happening in Gaza, look at what's happening to people here, innocent people, look what's happening in children. When you start to say, like, don't look at the other side suffering, like, that's when I start to have a problem, you know, like, why are you paying any attention to these people in Gaza? or why do you, you know, like, everybody is equal here as human beings.

And that should be the kind of value proposition that we bring to these discussions. Yeah. And, you know, again, like, I think at 1.4 million people in Gaza have left their homes. I've seen reports that up to a third of homes or structures have been destroyed so far. I think 200,000 Israelis have evacuated from the north of Israel because they're worried about fighting with Lebanon. So it's just a horrifying situation all around for everyone. One last thing, Ben, I wanted to play before we move on to some other topic. So I caught a clip from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from over the weekend. She was at a peace rally in Washington, D.C., I believe.

So Ilan Omar was born in Mogadishu, and she spent her early life in Somalia before fleeing the country to escape the Somali Civil War. She then spent four years living in a refugee camp with her family in Kenya before coming to the United States. Here's a clip from her comments. Imagine sitting in your house, hearing, hearing the noise that announces that you might vanish at any given moment, holding onto yourself, your family members, trying to get as close to the furthest wall as you can because all you are hoping for is if that bomb drops in your house, that you're you can at least, at least crawl out. I did that every night, every week, every month, repeatedly, 12 rockets fell on the house I lived in. I am 41 years old.

To this day, to this day, my bed, the side I sleep on, is right next to the wall. Because that trauma has not left me. So I just want to play that because I think that's a perspective you don't hear a lot in Washington, let alone from a member of Congress. And, you know, I sort of say this with a lot of self-awareness and kind of pointing the finger at myself as a former NSC spokesman. But I think the conversation about war in the West is often filled with euphemism and this language

about smart bombs. Collateral damage. Yeah, all this sort of sanitized. antiseptic bullshit that I think obscures the wounds that the wars inflict, even on people who survived, like she did. Yeah, it's incredibly powerful. I've talked to some people a lot about this over the years and talking to people that grew up in circumstances exactly like she describes, actually.

It's kind of eerie. Because what they'll describe to you is the terror of the uncertainty, right? If you're getting shelled day after day, rockets are coming in day after day. You're obviously afraid of dying. You're afraid of losing loved ones. You're hearing about people you know who've been killed or maimed. You don't know where your next meal's from. You're rationing water.

You're taking a sip when you used to have a cup of water. You can't sleep because of the noise. Any sound could kill you. I mean, on and on and on. And I think hopefully there'll be some good additional pieces we can lift up about this. And that obviously can completely, it takes life, it maims life, it devalues life in the lived moment. But as Ilhan says, like, that never leaves you. Like the people deal with trauma their whole life.

And so when you're looking at two million people in that circumstance and, you know, a lot of communities in Israel that are facing rocket fire in addition to the terrorist attack, this should be part. like this antiseptic way, I'm glad you called this out of Tommy, like the antiseptic way we talk about war, you know, an incursion, you know, like an incursion into God, I was on TV that and someone just kept talking about an incursion, like what? Was that your name? That makes it sound kind of like, oh, just going to walk on through here, you know, like, or, you know, smart bombs. Smart bombs, precision guided weapons.

No, like if it's a rocket that's going to hit something and kill people. And even if it does hit the right target, all the people, you know, you know, it's a rocket that's going to you know, hear that think what she, what Ilhan describes. And so this is, we don't own the outcome of what these wars do. And what I did in my New York Review of Books piece is I talked a bit about, you know, basically Israelis and Palestinians are locked in this cycle of trauma, like where, by the way, the origin of their traumas, you know, go way, way back, you know. And at some point, if you don't stop that cycle, it just keeps replicating itself. And, you know, you need that kind of leader that has the wisdom to say enough, actually, you know, on both sides.

And that leadership is missing on both sides. And I think that's why people feel so anxious about what's coming here because there's not someone standing up and saying, like Yitzhak Rabin did and saying, you know what, actually, like there's a better way of protecting ourselves. You hear actually a lot of Israeli citizens saying that. Yeah, you hear like Ehud Barak. Some of the more thoughtful, sort of more statesmen like former elected officials in this case. But yeah, I mean, this is I think why I think a lot of us are so anxious about what comes next because it's like ground invasion, no ground invasion, air strikes, like humanitarian pause. All of that would be important, but there still has to be some sort of long-term process to give people a sense of hope and the future for themselves, whether you're in the West Bank or Gaza. And that has just been off the table since what, like 2000?

Obama made a hard run at, you know, a real Middle East peace process and summit in 2010. We had a boss, Netanyahu, the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, everybody at the White House, and it just led to nothing. Well, you didn't have to live through the John Kerry process in 2014. It was even more intensive. It's interesting. I mean, your core point is right that the outcome of this war should be a Palestinian state, you know? I mean, because anything else other than that is likely to perpetuate this conflict. The one thing I've been thinking about, though, is that sometimes those efforts felt like a waste of time because it, you know, just didn't.

I never felt like we were on the doorstep of Middle East peace, even when Kerry had proposals and we had that summit in 2010. But the act of trying. It kept the lid on things. It kept the lid on things. You know, like, I don't want to be, because there can be a cynicism to that too. No, it did. It allows people to kind of channel their. feelings about this into some political process. There were kind of talks about a Palestinian

authority, Hamas, you know, reconciliation to try to peel off some people from the worst elements of Hamas. So, you know, so even when you're not solving a problem, trying to solve it can help prevent things like this explosion. You know, when I think back on those days, my core frustration now is like with the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious that Net Yahoo never wanted to give up what you needed to give up to get to a deal and was just essentially playing us all. And I think frankly the Clinton administration people felt the same way in 2000 when they spent what two weeks at Camp David trying to negotiate a Middle East peace deal and ultimately felt like the U.S. can't want it more than the two parties.

In that case, it was Arafat, right? In that case, you had a Palestinian leader who had a deal on the table and just couldn't get there. But that's what I mean. Like, there's just this need for leadership on both sides of this conflict that is woefully short. Yeah. Anything else on Gazi want to talk about before we move on? No, I think, you know, I think, you know, there's a lot to watch, obviously, around escalation and ground war, but we'll see where it goes. Yeah, I mean, just keep an eye on just how many military assets the United States has moved to the region.

There's, like, two aircraft carriers, a bunch of missile defense batteries. Like, I, you can tell the administration is just very nervous about what these Iranian proxy groups are going to do next and what Hezbollah might do. And there's a question that I asked Chris Murphy, which is, you know, if Hezbollah gets involved, we've kind of warned them. Does that mean we're potentially going to bomb Hisblah targets and become like an active participant in this war? What is our, you know, tripwire to, is it Hezbo attacking us? Or, you know, I think there's a lot of ambiguity out there right now, which, you know, sometimes you want that ambiguity to give yourself room to maneuver. So I get that, but it's a tinderbox.

Yeah, it's a little scary. Okay, let's take a quick break. We come back. We are going to talk about why Donald Trump was coughing up nuclear secrets to Australia. Okay, Ben, so Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is in Washington this week for an official visit and a state visit. He will not be addressing a joint session of Congress because there is no Speaker of the House who could even have invited him, which is great and very functional. But Ben, so the Australian comedy gods are smiling down upon us once again. We discussed Anthony Pratt on this show before.

He's this weird Australian billionaire. Yeah, in the context of this story. Okay. He's a guy who joined Marlauga. Oh, yeah, no, I know all about Anthony. Right. He got an earful of nuclear submarine secrets from Trump, as presumably around the pool,

including details about the number of nuclear warheads that our subs carry and how close they can get to Russian submarines without being detected. Pretty sensitive stuff. Yeah, you think? Fun stuff to share with your boys. By the way, that's not even information that I, like, consumed in government. Because I didn't, you know, like,

Donald Trump had to seek that out. It's not like, you know, why does he even know, like, I didn't sit around worrying about, like, the position of the nuclear submen. Yeah, the nuclear sub, like warhead payload thing is weird to me. You can imagine some, you know, the head of the Joint Chiefs being like, sir, this submarine can get within 16 feet of a Russian sub. And they can't even hear. He's like, oh, I'm going to brag to Malani and my buddies about all of it. And some Australian billionaire. Yeah, and some Australian billionaire.

Who told 54 people. But now, Ben, Australian 60 Minutes got hold of this audio of Pratt. talking about his dealings with Trump. We also, we played this on POTS of America, but it's very fun, because it's just such a unique window, I think, into the kind of operation that Trump runs. Yeah, and Trump said, you know,

that Ukraine phone call? That was nothing compared to what I usually do. He knows exactly what to say and what not to say so that he avoids jail, but gets so close to it, that it looks to everyone like he's breaking the law. All of these guys are like the mafia, Trump, Rupert, Rudy, you want to be a customer and not a competitor.

Rudy is someone that I hope will be useful one day. Plus, I just think he's cool. It's not all just sort of like sit-of-the-pants shit. I think that him and Rudy are like that, and they're plodding all this out. Melania, who was sitting next to him at dinner, he said, I asked Melania to walk around the pool in a bikini so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing. Then Melania said, back to him.

I'll do that when you walk around with me in your bikini. I love the comic relief for us on the show is Trump coughing up nuclear secrets. Australia, like, you're not sending your best. I mean, do you ever, like, hear somebody who's, like, a multi-billioner who just sounds like a dumbass? Yeah, this guy. It's just a good reminder that you can be really rich and just be an idiot. Rudy is so cool. He offered him a million dollars to come to his birthday party.

This guy's judgment is lacking a little bit. Like, he's so impressed by Trump's, like, I was going to say dick measuring. Can I say that? I mean, yeah, like, I just did. Like, it's just like, Melania in the pool. I mean, like, what it actually, it just further reinforces just how completely casual Donald Trump is with corruption, foreign interests, the nation's secrets. Like, there's no distinction probably in Trump's brain between talking about nuclear stealth submarine technology and Mlani in a bikini. Like, they're the same thing.

It's just showing, like, let me show off with my, like, pretty wife. And then let me show off with, like, my stealth subs that I got to brief, get briefed on as president. Like, it's just so fundamentally unsurious. And it juxtaposes with Gaza, too, like, oh, this is the guy we want to put back in charge as, like, World War III is two-thirds of the way there. I mean, it's not good. That has really been highlighted for me this week. It is interesting that Trump leaks all these nuclear submarine secrets to the Aussies shortly after by cuts a deal to sell the Australians, our subs.

Do you think Kurt Campbell owes Trump a thank you for helping like pre-grease this deal? It does suggest, I mean, I wonder that too, because it was like, it does suggest maybe there was like a longstanding August negotiation that Trump probably had nothing to do with, but got a briefing on and just decided to take that with them back tomorrow. Yeah, it's not on the golf course or something. Kirk Campbell, by the way, newly nominated to be Deputy Secretary of State. He was on this show recently. Clearly this show was like a springboard.

for Kurt's career. He was, he'd hit a ceiling, he was stuck at the NSC. He does potse the world next and you know this guy's like deputy-sacrating. Off to the races. Springboard for everyone but us. Two big elections we should mention in South America. So Argentina held its presidential election on Sunday. No candidate was able to get a majority of the votes. So the current economy minister, Sergio Masa, and far-right candidate Javier Miele are headed to a runoff election next month. Masa got 37% of the vote. Miele got 30%. Patricia Bullrich, the sort of center-right candidate, only got 24%, and she is out. So Argentina's economy has been in and out of crisis and defaults for decades. The annual inflation is currently at 138%. And so Masa's success was surprising to a lot of

folks because most analysts thought voters are furious about the economy in Argentina. That means they're going to punish the incumbent. Miele, on the other, hand is a nut. He shows up at campaign events with a literal chainsaw, I think, because he's going to slash government spending. Maybe his opponents do. I'm not entirely sure. So far, though, it's interesting, though, that people weren't mad enough even about 140% inflation to vote for a self-described anarcho-capitalist. And then, Ben, in Ecuador, they elected 35-year-old banana fortune heir, Daniel Noboa, as its youngest, president. He ran on an aggressive anti-crime platform suggesting proposals ranging from more

cops to turning ships into floating jails. Ecuador has a really horrible violent crime problem. This year alone has tallied more than 4,900 violent deaths. And earlier this year in August, a presidential candidate was assassinated. Then any thoughts on these results here, especially are potentially, you know, chantsaw-wielding friend down in Argentina? Yeah, so this guy's really a lunatic. You know, he has some proposals like the dollarization of the Argentina economy. Like, so putting the whole, you know, country's currency into the dollar. He has, he wants to cut like most departments.

It reads like Vivek Ramashami's, like, platform essentially. He also, I think, had four beloved dogs or something that, you know, he said we're like his advisors. and then I think the dogs may have died, but he took their DNA and made a new dog. What? Yeah, some dog situation that is not normal, basically in which he says, like, they're his advisors and, you know, it's not like a good.

And like to be clear, like Argentina, very important country, we have a lot of love for Argentina. They're also in the G20. I think they're due for like the presidency of the G20 too. So this guy could end up presiding over that. So he does, even though he's more like, you know, clearly far-right libertarian lunatic vibes. There's a Buckele thing.

Like, we've talked about Buckele in El Salvador, this just kind of like complete Uber populism for populism's sake and sensationalist and weird. That, I mean, maybe we started that with Trump, I guess, but like that virus is spreading. And unfortunately, it seems like it's likely to spread to Argentina. Yeah, not great. Do you hear that the world's oldest dog passed away at age 31?

Bobby was his name. He lived in Portugal. Apparently never went on a leash. Aitwood as humans ate. Got food from the farm. 31 years old. That's an old ass dog. I'd like some of that dog DNA and my dog.

That's a really good run. It's a hell of a run. Yeah. I'm looking and it does not look like Argentina is due for the presidency of the G20. So that maybe one crisis averted. Thank God. Just that guy at summits, does he bring the chainsaw to the summit? I don't know.

He also looks like a dog to the summit. A wolverine? He doesn't look going on. I don't know. Come on. I know Argentina's had some rough politics, but I'm not sure this guy's the answer. Yeah, he's not the answer. Let's talk about Iceland.

Tens of thousands of women in Iceland went on strike Tuesday to protest workplace inequality. Organizers called for a stop to all work. That includes household errands, child care, so all work, even the prime ministers that she would take part, and she expected other women in the cabinet to join. The strike is going to highlight wage and pay parity, and it will highlight the problem of violence against women in Iceland. Iceland has the best overall score on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, but the wage gap still is 21%. So in the best performing country, the wage gap is still 21%, which is why the prime minister

of the country is hitting the streets to protest. So all for that. Good for Iceland. Yeah, I expect better out of them. I mean, our wage gap is totally shitty too. But, you know, that's, you know, Iceland can be like a laboratory for fixed. things because it's of a certain scale, you know, and reasonableness. Yeah, what else? Hopefully they can help us fix a lot of our problems.

We could just put them in, you know, Obama used to have this joke about, like, having receivership for global leadership to the Nordic countries, you know, because they're just like very reasonable about a lot of things. Yeah. They give a lot of foreign aid, you know. It would be nice that everyone had their, you know, giant natural gas stores. It makes it a little easier to have a lot of foreign aid. That's fair. That's easier to balance the budget. And then finally, so update on the war in Ukraine. We haven't talked about it in a couple episodes. So, Ben, last week, we learned

learned that the Biden administration secretly sent these longer range attack-a-missiles to Ukraine. Those apparently were used in a bunch of surprise attacks all at once on Russian forces that took out dozens of Russian helicopters. So sort of interesting introduction of a new weapon system. Russia has also reportedly been taking huge losses in the Avdivka region in eastern Ukraine. Russia has launched this kind of, you know, crazy counter-offensive. They've been trying to take this town. It's gone disastrously. I've read reports that they've lost like over 900 guys. guys in this one little theater. And I saw the British government now estimates that nearly 200,000 Russian soldiers have been

killed or permanently wounded in the conflict. So that doesn't include guys who get patched up and go back out. It also doesn't include Wagner Group fighters or the prison conscripts. You got to think that total number. Yeah. It's tens of thousands. Massive. Yeah.

And then finally, Ben, you know, the Washington Post ran this long piece about CIA cooperation with Ukraine's intelligence services. Those are the folks who have been conducting these attacks in Crimea and then deep into Russia. This report in the post includes details about the multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge, which is the bridge that Putin built to connect to Crimea. It talks about the bombing outside Moscow that killed Maria Dugina, who was the daughter of this virulent nationalist propagandists. I think the attack was clearly meant to kill her father, but it killed her much, much more. stunning amount of detail in this report about what the Ukrainian intel services are doing, how they're doing it, and probably raises some ethical and legal questions for the CIA

about supporting this unit. Obviously, I think a lot of people are going to say, well, look, they're in a war. They've got to defend themselves. But that doesn't mean that all laws go away on restrictions on U.S. assistance under the Leahy Act, etc. But a really great report worth reading. Yeah, I think for the CIA, you know, in my experience, you know, when you give it a mission, like they really go after that mission, you know. And so it's, you don't want to stifle, you know, their capacity to do their jobs, which is by definition in like a murky, ambiguous space. But you do want to have some sense of like limits, you know. I would think, for instance, you know, I would think, for instance, violent, you know, kinetic to use the antiseptic word, but violent operations on Russian soil is probably the kind of thing that you would not want the CIA to be involved in. Especially as a civilian.

Yeah, in any kind of escalation risk. So that, you know, you wonder whether the incentive for that story to come out is somebody being concerned about where this is going. Or it could be like Ukrainians, like, proud of their work. Well, also, or a little bit of both. The Ukrainian sort of like head of operations guys on the record. Yeah. about like, oh, yeah, we're working with the CIA on these boat drones. That's how we're doing it.

Yeah. Or, oh, yeah, we smuggled a bomb into a truck that drove over the Kerch Bridge. Like, okay. And look, the Ukrainians have this, like, tactical interest in, obviously hitting behind front lines where they're kind of stalled. But they also have the strategic risk of showing their people, like, we're going after the Russians. These people that are killing you, like, we're going after them.

And that's a different interest than the U.S. one. And so that does create tension, I think, which is apparent that article. Yeah, and I also think they're trying to open the aperture of how the so-called Ukrainian counteroffensive is being described. Like, obviously, it's a bit of a stalemate on the border. But I think they would point to the fact that they're launching these counterstrikes deep into Crimea. They've basically driven the Russian fleet out of, you know, the Black Sea. So, you know, they're, I think, trying to show success wherever they can to keep the assistance flowing. Yeah, morale issue, assistance issue.

But, I mean, that front line is pretty frozen right now. Yeah, it's pretty frozen. Before we go to break, two quick things. So we're big fans of Kare Yuma here at KroKMedia. They make cool, eco-friendly shoes that we all wear all the time and love. We're excited we're releasing our second collaboration with them. It's Kare Yuma and love it or leave it. Run, don't walk to get them.

They're very cool. Check them out at crooked.com slash store. And then some fun news from POTSave America. We wrote a book. It's called Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps. It's coming out on June 4th. And whether you are a long-time pod Save America listener or a first-time voter, this book is a fun, useful guide to saving our country without losing your mind. And Cricket will donate its profits from democracy or else to support Votesave America, its partners, and other organizations mobilizing to help progressives in the 2024 election and beyond. I'm going to share a lot of more details in the coming months, but you know those pre-orders. They matter for the New York Times bestseller list. So if you want to help us out, pre-order democracy or else today at cricket.com slash books or wherever books are sold. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you will hear Ben's interview with Senator Chris Murphy. So stick around for that.

I'm about to begin my interview with Chris Murphy. I do want to just mention to people you might hear a slightly buzzing sound in the background a couple of times. I believe that's the alarm for senators to vote, which Senator Murphy seemed like he was. who's going off to do at the end. So just power through it doesn't last long. I promise you that. We are very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World, the great Senator from the great state of Connecticut, Chris Murphy. Great to see you, Senator. Hey, thanks for having me. And I did notice I was saying to you, you're off your walking across Connecticut eating hot dogs tour, which is one of the things that is occasionally I see something that makes me think that being Senator is an

attractive job. Is that one of them? I'd love to just walk across the state and eat a lot of hot dogs. So just to be clear, those are actually two different things. So I walk across the state every year. And this year I'm also touring all of the great hot dog joints of Connecticut. But when I walk across the state, it's for the purpose of meeting constituents, not eating hot dogs. Okay. I mean, we'll give you that correction, that addendum.

I mean, what you could do is you could eat the hot dogs with the constituents and then you get it both. But look, we know it's a busy time. I want to obviously focus on Israel and Gaza. And just kind of start, you've been, I think, very eloquent in expressing an argument that we've heard, you know, President Biden and former President Obama have given versions of it. I mean, I have myself, but I think you very aptly summarize this, the sense that, you know, that, you know, we should support Israel and providing them with funding in arms in order to destroy Hamas's military capabilities. but I also believe that we should be sharing the lessons that we learned from our response to 9-11, and you later were going to say, with respect to us, we had a day one strategy, but we did not have a day two strategy, i.e. we clearly invaded countries without thinking through exactly what was going to come next.

As you're watching events unfold, what are you looking for to demonstrate that advice, which is coming from a place of support for Israel, is being followed? Like what kind of mix of military and political and humanitarian assistance policies would, to you, be in concert with your advice here? So I don't think that it's a perfect corollary what we did in Afghanistan and what is happening in Gaza, but I think that there are useful comparisons. And frankly, the first one is to just think back to those first two or three weeks after the attacks of September 11th. Frankly, we weren't looking for a lot of people to second guess our political strategy. We weren't looking for a ton of advice on how to be careful to hurt too many civilians. We weren't listening to anybody who was talking about ceasefire.

We wanted accountability, right? This was morally devastating to the country, and that's what Israel is going through today. So I think we just have to first remember where we were in those days and understand the fundamental psychological disruption that has happened in Israel. But we did make mistakes. And one of those mistakes was not understanding that when you are too casual, too permissive about civilian death, you end up creating more terrorists than you kill. The other mistake we made was to have plans that looked really good on paper, but didn't actually play out in reality. So you can tell yourself that the PA can run Gaza. That might look good on paper, but that government might be only slightly less legitimate

than a permanent Israeli occupation, and that's a recipe for long-term disasters. So I think what we need to see is more concern for the impact on civilians and a real workable plan for what happens after you dislodge Hamas from political ownership of Gaza. And I guess, I mean, the two follow-up questions of that or how concerned are you that of the military viability of dismantling Hamas in an urban zone with over two million people and or how concerned are you you've talked a lot to people in the region including you know Gulf nations that have obviously a lot of resources do you see the capacity to help try to build a viable alternative to Hamas and frankly to the PA, which doesn't have much credibility either, maybe with Arab resources,

is there some kind of Palestinian alternative leadership that can be like an end state here as well? So this right now sounds to me like one of those plans that looks very good on paper but may not work in reality in the absence of some really serious conversation about the future of a Palestinian state. I think if the ground invasion begins, and there are, are mounting civilian casualties, it becomes harder, not easier, for Gulf states to step in and help build whatever comes after Hamas. But if there is a belief that there is a new commitment from the Israeli government to get serious about a Palestinian state after this crisis passes, perhaps that is what's necessary to get that buy-in from the Emirates or the Saudis or the Qatari's who

can be helpful in trying to stabilize Gaza. But again, the higher the civilian casualties are, the longer the humanitarian nightmare continues, the more difficult it is to get those Gulf countries to buy in to the future of Gaza. Well, obviously, so much of this is continued on how the ground invasion goes forward. I wanted to ask you a few questions about different aspects of potential escalation here. And the first is there's a major request that's been made of Congress for additional supplemental funding for Israel, among other partners. Obviously, that's kind of tied up in the circus in the House of Representatives. But just taking it face value, what is in that package? How would you make the case to your constituents that this is assistance that is needed for Israel?

And I do want to cite there was an official from the Political Military Affairs Department at State who resigned. And one of his reasons for doing so is he suggested that, and I'm quoting from an op-ed in the Washington Post, Israeli request for munitions started arriving immediately, including for a variety of weapons that have no applicability to the current conflict. So, I mean, how can you simultaneously want to express support for Israel, but also do the due diligence of scrutinizing? is this, what is this stuff that we're being asked to spend a lot of money on at a time when

there's not a lot of money go around? Yeah, well, that's part of our job, right? Part of our job is to do that due diligence and make sure that we are effectively and efficiently spending taxpayer dollars. So I'm only interested in sending material to Israel that they need to defend themselves. I mean, I think that there's a wellspring of support to help Israel across the country, one, because people just fundamentally believe there is a U.S. interest in helping to secure the viability of a Jewish state in the Middle East. But second, though, you know, Hamas is a very

different entity than al-Qaeda or ISIS, the United States is stronger when we're making it clear that there's accountability for terrorist crimes. That makes it less likely that terrorists are going to try to take another shot at us. So for both of those reasons, it's a pretty easy decision for members of Congress to make on behalf of their constituents to support Israel. Most of the money, the bulk of the money, is frankly, to replenish Iron Dome. Today actually was the day that we're speaking. Tuesday is the added, from what I understand, the highest number of rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel since October 7th. So those rocket attacks continue.

And so Iron Dome is important to replenish. Some of those dollars are for upgrades to U.S. security for our own forces in the region. and the rest of it, as you said, Congress will have to look at on a line by line basis to make sure that it's things that Israel actually needs to carry out this mission. And we also need to hear what the mission is, right? That's going to be an important conversation that we will have over the course of the next two weeks. As we appropriate these dollars, we're going to want to understand what is the scope of the mission, what does victory look like and assess the viability of that war plan. And you mentioned U.S. forces in the region, and again, you follow this closely. You've seen these kind of warnings from the U.S. to Hezbollah, to Iran, to running proxies, to kind of stay out of this.

And there are also, frankly, you know, been some reporting that the Biden administration has cautioned Israel against a significant escalation into Lebanon just to avoid that kind of escalatory scenario. But we've seen these aircraft carrier strike groups deployed to the region. It felt to me like, there was a degree of ambiguity, you know, in the warning itself. The question I have that comes from that is, if you saw Hezbollah get involved in a significant way in northern Israel, does that bring the United States into this? If you see Hezbollah taking shots at the U.S., does that bring the United States into it? I mean, how do you assess what might actually risk U.S. direct involvement in a conflict in the Middle East? So I am a believer occasionally in the concept of strategic ambiguity,

and my guess is that that is at play today. You want to keep Iran guessing as to what level of escalation may bring in the United States. Clearly, if there are deliberate attacks on U.S. forces that take significant amount of U.S. life, that risks bringing the United States into this conflict, either with those proxies or potentially directly with Iran. And that is, I think, a pretty clear message that we need to send as to whether a sort of large-scale incursion from the north into Israel would bring the United States into hostilities with Hezbollah. That, as you know, would have to be a decision for Congress. The Biden administration doesn't have the ability to make that decision on their own. There would need to be a declaration of war, and Congress would

need to vote. But I think leaving that question open, leaving the possibility that has balled draws the United States into the conflict is probably part of the deterrent. Yeah, no, that makes sense and a good reminder of how the war power should work. Another risk here that we're seeing around escalation, obviously, is the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Thousands of people killed, many of them children, and you know as someone who, again, is well-traveled, how much those images are likely, you know, being consumed around the world and could get worse in the instance of a ground invasion. What is your concern about, obviously, first and foremost, your concern is about the innocent civilians and what can be done to help them? I also wanted to kind of surface

this question that I think people have not yet integrated in this conversation. of the risks to the U.S., of kind of being so outwardly in support of Israel, the president went there, that as that humanitarian crisis escalates, that that kind of gets laid at our doorstep in a way that kind of could further harden this sorting of the world where the global south is drifting away, doesn't see the U.S. is caring about their concerns, more open to the China's and Russia's, skeptical of Ukraine. I mean, these things all. all do come together in some way. And are we appropriately evaluating the potential risk to kind of U.S. interest and reputation from what is an escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza?

So I think that is a real risk, and it's a greater risk if we don't properly message that the United States can believe in two things at once. We can believe that Hamas needs to be held accountable, but we can also believe that it is necessary to carry out that mission in a way that protects as many civilians, as many children inside Gaza as possible. We simply don't believe that you have to make a choice between recentering the moral order of the universe after these attacks, but also protecting civilian life. It's also important to message that the only country that is actively at work trying to make sure that civilians are protected, trying to make sure that fuel and food and medicine is entering Gaza is the United States. China and Russia aren't working the

phones to try to open up humanitarian pathways. They're not using their chits with the Egyptians to open up the crossing. They're not putting dollars on the table. It's the U.S. who's leading that conversation. Sometimes we don't engage in the diplomacy of, of, of, of comparison, and we need to hear. But yes, I think President Biden has been fairly forward-leaning. And you even heard Secretary of Lincoln today at the UN suggests that we may actually need some temporary pauses in hostilities that Israel may have to stand down for a period of time in order to let aid in, potentially in order to let fuel get to the places it needs to get to, that's leadership. And I think we've got to do a better job of explaining how high a

priority protecting civilians is for the United States. And I just wanted to ask you, I mean, I think that's a good point about the need to kind of be clear about, you know, the messaging of what all that we're doing. When you step back from all this, I mean, I think part of what is so unsettling to people is, you know, you have, you know, you have a war in Ukraine that is, you know, grinding towards a third year. Now you have this explosion in the Middle East, which risks the kind of escalation we've talked about. The Biden speech, you know, which I thought was a, you know, powerful statement describing, you know, the U.S. why the U.S. cares about these things. The Biden speech had, you know, and the package that he asked Congress for has, understandably,

request for military support to Ukraine, to Israel and to Taiwan, which is kind of the the third front in what feels eerily like the World War II map, you know. And that's not through any creation of Joe Biden's, but that is something that you, I remember when I read the speech, I felt like that was an uncomfortable reality to sit with, you know, like it was almost like a for freedom as one lease kind of message, which, you know, obviously it was something we're all proud of, but also, you know, foreshadowed something really cataclysmic. I mean, how do you process this moment that we're in in terms of the risks and how we might try to get through it without kind of falling into or spiraling into what could be an even worse kind of global conflagration?

I think it's one of these moments where you have to appreciate the exceptionality of the last 80 years. this world was consumed by massive state-on-state violence for centuries. And the post-World War II order, though certainly not ridding the globe of conflict, set up an order in which that kind of massive state-on-state violence was less likely. And if you chart the sort of course of human events and look at how many of us have died in violent conflict deaths, the numbers are going down, in part because of the rules that we set up after World War II. This is a moment where those rules are at risk of falling apart. Big states all of a sudden invading smaller states and getting away with it, terrorists attacking

in brutal ways and sensing no real consequence. So I think this is, you know, as President Biden talked about, an inflection point, and if the world falls apart and all of a sudden, borders don't matter any longer, well, then ultimately the benefit that has come to the United States from that or disappears. Now, I will say, the reason that democracies feel weaker today is largely a question of domestic politics. Democracy has not been delivering for people. And so, you know, on my walk, across Connecticut. I'm going to be honest with you. I did meet a bunch of people who had a lot of sympathy for Israel and Ukraine, but, you know, said a version of what about me? Yeah. What about me? And so if you really want American democracy to survive another 75 years, we can't spend

the entirety of the rest of this year talking only about supporting Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. We're going to have to give people a vision that their life is going to get better or they're not going to be terribly interested in supporting big long-term packages of aid overseas. If you spend more time walking your state than hanging around Washington, D.C. Think tank conversations, you will come to the conclusion pretty quickly that we better focus on Americans at the same time that we are focusing on the rest of the world. Yeah. Now, look, that's really good advice. And, you know, it's easier to talk about these things in concept in Washington than having to go out to a town hall or a conversation at a hot dog joint.

All right, I have one tough question for you that you may not love, but I feel like I have to ask it. Senator Menendez, he's no longer the chair of your committee, the Farm Relations Committee, he's on the committee. I have to ask it because we literally just talked about on this podcast, the kind of awkwardness of a guy that the U.S. Justice Department is literally charged to be a foreign agent. And why is he on the committee or how does that, you know, how does that affect the running of that committee? I get that you're probably somewhat limited in this one, but I did want to pose it to you. Yeah, listen, I think it's a fair question. So, you know, we took the step of removing him as chairman. I am amongst those in the Senate who believes that he should resign.

But, you know, this is a new charge, right? It's about a week old that he's been charged with being a force. an agent. And I think it's a logical question to ask whether someone who is subject to that accusation should be receiving classified briefings, which are available to you as a member of that committee, but also available to you as a United States Senator. I don't know that I necessarily think that he should be removed from the committee, but I do believe that we should probably have a conversation about whether Senator Menendez should still have access to the kind of briefings that might be relevant or connected to the charges here that have been

that have been levied by the prosecutors. I think that's maybe the next step in a conversation I'm sure we'll have amongst colleagues over the course of this week. Yeah. No, and it's a good, I mean, look, there's so many reasons, including your last answer why Donald Trump shouldn't be president. But there's on the very smaller reason, but not insubstantial one of like being good stewards of the nation's secrets and protocols. I think that would be a good process. Well, look, thanks so much for joining us, Senator, and really admire your efforts to kind of wrestle with the complexity of these things. So best of luck, and we'll see if you get a speaker on the other side to actually do some stuff. That would be nice. All this is moot if we don't have

a functioning House of Representatives. Can you be a speaker? I saw that, you know, Trump can be. Does that mean anybody could? Could you throw your hat in the ring to be the Speaker of the House of representatives? We came up with the idea this morning of we'd just bring all nine candidates over to the Senate Democratic caucus. We'd tell you which one was most objectionable to us. And maybe that person would have a chance to get to 218. So I want to be helpful in any way that I can. All right. Well, let's hope it happens for the government shuts down. But good to see you and thanks, as always. Thanks, Ben. All right, Ben, let's close out the show with our new subscriber Q&A segment. So we're going to play this for everyone this week. But if you want to hear these going forward,

You have to join the Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends. When you do, you can ask us questions on your own or just hear these biweekly Q&As and listen to POTSave the world. Ads free, which I know everyone likes because they're sick of hearing me read the same ads. So let's get to the questions, Ben. Jeff asks, are there any credible and peaceful Gaza political organizations that are anti-Hamas that could be a potential partner to help Israel remove Hamas and protect civilians? It seems that the best-least catastrophic option is to have an alternative to Hamas. that Israel will be willing to work with to change political power in Gaza, remove Hamas, and stabilize the situation. Great question, Jeff.

I think it's a great question. I guess my answer would be that, you know, in part because Hamas is a violent and repressive organization, there's not really like an organized political opposition, but what I would look for in that kind of circumstance, and I think it's a good rule of thumb, even in less fraught situations, is there are Gazans. that have civil society around the provision of basic services. You know, there are health workers who team together to provide emergency care. There are people that try to help Palestinians with like legal services or to meet basic needs. I've often found that, you know, if you go underneath, like a corrupt or violent political structure, the best alternatives sometimes aren't just like, you know,

sometimes you get a brave dissident. But it's like who has credibility in this community, you know, and that person may not be a politician, but all the better, you know. So I would be trying to identify what is the best functioning civil society in Gaza? Who has credibility in neighborhoods? You know, who we've heard some articulate voices just on this podcast, you know, there are people, and we should never think that there's no alternative. Now, there may not be like a built-up political party because Hamas wouldn't allow that. But I, I do think that part of the work that should be done, and ideally in partnership with Palestinians, is trying to identify those people that, again, may not be an act of politics now, but may have the

credibility to do so if there's a changed reality there. Yeah, and I think it's important to remember that Hamas hasn't always controlled the Gaza Strip and thus it won't always be that way. I mean, we mentioned this before, but in 2006, the Bush administration forced the Palestinian authority to hold elections in Gaza, Hamas won those. They didn't win all of every seat, but then they violently took control of power and pushed out Fatah their rival. So I do think, you know, that's just a way of saying that like don't feel like that Hamas is this deeply, deeply entrenched organization. There's no way to get rid of them. Now, the flip side of that then,

I think like the kind of the convenient answer here would be, okay, Israel clears out Hamas and then they install the Palestinian authority in the Gaza Strip to kind of run it for them as a proxy. I think that is a recipe for a government that will not be looked at as being particularly legitimate and maybe short-term beneficial, but a long-term mess. Yeah, this is the problem I have even with some of the, like the Egyptians had this peace summit the other day with Mahmoudabas and like more for peace summits. But pretending that the Palestinian Authority has any credibility with the Palestinians. Palestinian people is part of the problem here. I mean, 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, camped out in Ramallah,

you know, like subcontracting off of international aid, running a pretty corrupt organization. That guy's not going to come into Gaza and, you know, run things. I mean, there has to be a more bottom-up process. And, you know, it should be said, like, sometimes Israel doesn't, like, permit that to happen. You know, there have been Palestinian leaders that were nonviolent that we're getting some traction leading kind of demonstrations and things, and then they get thrown in prison, you know. There has to be a space for an alternative to emerge here. Yeah, if you don't allow people to use politics as an outlet to express their frustrations, then they will turn to something else. Yeah. So, Ben, here's a question from bippity-boppity.

Bip-de-bap. In my heart, I hope that President Biden is holding back his true opinion on civilian casualties in Gaza for a strategic purpose. Samantha Power notes in her memoir a similar situation for the Armenians where President Obama could not acknowledge their history. Can you please explain what the probably similar reasons might be to avoid denouncing avoidable civilian casualties in Gaza, perhaps understanding it will make it seem less hopeless? Thank you. So the reference in the question to Samantha Power was the failure, and we've talked about this a lot on this show of the Obama administration to recognize the Armenian. Genocide. It happened. We did not acknowledge it because a bunch of, you know, smart people thought that it would lead Prime Minister Erdogan. I think he was then Prime Minister, right? Yeah. To

flip his lid and for Turkey to turn away from being an ally and do a bunch of unhelpful things. I think we've all said in hindsight, that was the wrong calculation and a mistake. Now, I'm curious what you think, but I'm not totally sure that compares here because we're talking about something sort of that happened in history. And I do think, I know, look, I'd like to see Biden talking a lot more openly about his concern about civilians in Gaza. I think the empathy he showed in Israel was incredible and powerful and that there should be a similar meeting in the Oval Office for, you know, people with family in Gaza, you know, so we can hear from them directly. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good suggestion because, I mean, you don't want to suggest. You know, it's interesting when there was

the horrific killing of the Palestinian American in Illinois, you did see the White House come out and speak to that. You'd like to see kind of a similar level of empathy and candor about what is happening in Gaza. Look, I think it's in part because we allow ourselves, and I've even noticed in some of the responses to this podcast, you know. We allow ourselves to think that you can't do two things at once. You can say you support Israel in this horrific time and then just kind of candidly describe what is happening in Gaza, you know. And I think that's a false choice and I think it's a trap, you know,

because the world can see what's happening in Gaza. And, you know, we used to have. have a, sometimes there's a caution, Dan Fifer was usually the best at cautioning against, like, narrating events, but there's two differences here. Like, it is right, you don't want to narrate every event in the world. But one is this is like the epicenter of what's happening in the world. I mean, the eyes of the world are on this, and the U.S. should have, like, a moral and ethical position. And just thinking that saying, respect the laws of war, kind of counts as seeing the cost to civilians. It doesn't. It gets you halfway there. It doesn't get you

all the way there. And I think just feeling that concern publicly would be important. And by the way, like if some people don't like it because it feels like some pressure on Israel, we've talked about this a lot. Like if we don't think it's right for Israel to be doing certain things, I don't know why it helps Israel to not say that. The Biden people will say it's better to deliver those messages in private. But when, you know, this leads to me to the second point I was going to make, part of the reason why we have to narrow events is we we arm Israel to the tune of over three billion dollars a year in military financing and there's a supplemental package like we we are not an uninterested party here you know and I think that does raise the bar on the U.S. to call out

things and to name things and and to see the equal humanity of everybody on each side of this conflict yeah and listen I think for a lot of people in the United States It's probably very easy to read an article about a massacre at a music festival and think to yourself, I could have been there. My friends could have been there. You know what I mean? You can see yourself in that position. When you hear about stories in Gaza, it's easy to feel like that's a very faraway place that you maybe don't understand that feels distant. I think one of the jobs of the president can be to lift up the core humanity of people in both places and just help make clear that everyone's the same, even if they speak a different language than you or look different than you or live in different circumstances.

And I think that gets lost in a lot of the coverage for a variety of reasons and is something that, you know, political leadership can help address. And look, it feeds, look, there's on the Israeli side, there's this kind of fear that this trauma of what has happened to the Jewish people throughout history is being reawakened and therefore Jewish people generally feel more vulnerable. And that is something that I think people have to be mindful of. I think on the Palestinian side, to the dynamic you're describing, that body language kind of serves to intentionally or not, you know, convey that their life is of less value, you know, that it's not the same, you know, when their kids are killed. And that's wrong. And I guarantee you, by the way, if you don't know people in places like Gaza, have one conversation, you know, realize. They're just the same as you, like, care about your kids just as much, like, have the same aspirations, probably, like, in this day and age, like, use the same apps and do a lot of the same things. And, but it's also the case that the rest of the world sees this.

And, you know, we've talked a lot on this podcast and asked, you know, the quote unquote, global South and why they don't support the war in Ukraine and why they are drifting away from the U.S. Like, well, this is part of the reason why, because the global South sees them. themselves in that position of our lives valued as much by the superpower in Washington as other lives. And so this is an uncomfortable conversation, but I think it's one we need to have. Again, on both sides, because the Israelis feel a distinct trauma that is different than like what a lot of people would feel in the world because of their history. The Palestinians feel this, I think, sense of being devalued. And that's not something you want to be condoning even implicitly.

No, absolutely not. Okay, that's it for us for the Q&A portion. I just want to say thanks again to Senator Chris Murphy for joining the show. Thank you, Nadla Shawa. Thank you, Abby Own,

and thank you, Amir T. Bone, for all sharing your stories with us. And we really appreciate it and we're thinking about and praying for all of you and talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor,

Van Roads, and Reed-Churlin. Our producer is Alona Minkovsky, and associate producer is Ashley Mizuo. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, audio support by Kyle Seaglin and Charlotte Landis. Our studio technician is David Tolls. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Phoebe Bradford, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com slash Pod Save the World.