Pod Save the World - How Long Will The Ceasefire In Gaza Hold?

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Ben and Tommy discuss the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas and how the US and Qatar helped broker it, Qatar’s unique role in international diplomacy, the debate over conditioning US aid to Israel, what we know about the Palestinians being released from Israeli prisons, and Elon Musk’s cynical trip to Israel. Then they cover right-wing populist election victories in the Netherlands and Argentina, reports that the US thwarted an attack on a Sikh separatist on American soil, leaked documents exposing the UAE’s plans to use COP28 to sell more oil and gas, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s run-in with a whale. Then Ben talks to Juliette Touma, Communications Director for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, about humanitarian efforts in Gaza and what she witnessed on her recent visit there. 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, uh, you have a good turkey day? Yeah, it was good. It was good. Uh, chat down. I had chowdown. Nice. We had 20 people over. Did you know 20 people? Yeah. Did you cook all that? You and in? I did very little of it. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's a lot of cooking. It's a lot of cooking, though. It's a big ass bird. I ate. I did a lot of eating. Okay, good for you. Did you know that you and I have a combined 16 losses in the AFCs? It's in the Jets and Patriots? I did. I mean, it's impressive that you guys are doing worse than us. Significantly worse.

It's not easy to do. Yeah, we absolutely suck. Congratulations on that. Well, good draft positioning. We may be two gigantic losers, but it's nice to be back doing the show with you. We're going to cover the ceasefire in Gaza, the debate over conditioning aid to Israel. Qatar, can you say Qatar or Qatar? Where do you land on us?

I say Qatar. Okay, so you're like a middle ground. You're a third way guy. Qatar's unique role. international diplomacy. We'll talk about the Palestinian prisoners being released by Israel as part of the ceasefire deal. Elon Musk's anti-Semitism. His surprise visit to go hang out with Bibi Netanyahu. Cover that. There's also been big elections in Argentina and in the Netherlands that suck. We'll talk about another assassination plot against a sick separatists in the U.S. The latest news about the upcoming

COP28 climate change summit and why the former president of Brazil is in trouble again. And he got in trouble this time while on a jet ski, which is an interesting wrinkle for Mr. Bolsonaro. And then, Ben, you did our interview earlier today. Who did you talk to? Yeah, I talked to Juliet Tuma, who is the communications director for UNRWA. That's the UN agency that is responsible for supporting refugees in Palestine and Gaza. So UNRWA, for those who don't know, they run schools, they run some health care infrastructure. They have huge responsibilities in Gaza.

since the beginning of the war, over 100 UNRWA employees have been killed. Jesus. Yeah, kind of an astonishing number. And currently, they are running makeshift shelters for over a million displaced Palestinians in Gaza. So we talked about, you know, what UNRWA does, what she, Juliet saw in Gaza, she was in Gaza until just the last couple of days, what the value and importance of this ceasefire is. and just what the human toll is. And also, what are the challenges looking ahead at helping to support, you know, over a million displaced people, helping to reconstruct, rebuild lives, rebuild Gaza.

So really wanted to get a sense from someone who's been on the ground of the scale of the challenges in Gaza right now. Yeah, I mean, look, we focus on the casualty numbers coming out of Gaza for obvious reasons because they're enormous and horrifying. But I've seen statistics that up to 75% of the population has been displaced, if not more. There are stats about 20, 30, 40, 50% of the country being essentially uninhabitable, or the Gaza Strip, that is, not the country. But it's really an enormous task ahead of them, even when the war has. Yeah, I think this is the least appreciated thing. I mean, imagine if it goes on, too, if the military campaign moves south, and we'll talk about this, and there's any comparable destruction there, I mean, you could have been. basically have two million homeless people who have nowhere to go and how do you support those people.

So, I mean, there's a lot of work ahead here. Yeah. This is far from the most important point. But who do we need to talk to at the UN about how they name these things? Like UNR, UNIFIL, like you can go through four years in the White House as I did and not know the names of all these little like ad hoc UN organizations that they throw together. Yeah, it's an acronym for the United Nations Relief. and works agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East. It's a bit of a mouthful.

What are we doing here? What's interesting about it is it's dedicated to, like, the Palestinian refugee issue obviously dates all the way back to the partition in 1948. And so this is this kind of very unique UN agency that exists for this one purpose. And what they mainly do is run schools. I mean, I think that's a big bulk of their personnel. But yeah, it's really, I mean, I can't imagine doing. that work while you're losing people.

I can't even that. It's unimaginable. Well, let's turn to Gaza, because there was some rare good news out of Gaza last week. With a big assist from President Biden and Qatar, Israel and Hamas brokered a temporary ceasefire deal. The initial deal committed Hamas to returning 50 Israeli hostages, mostly elderly and women and children. In exchange for a four-day ceasefire, Israel agreeing to release 150 Palestinian prisoners and a commitment to allow more aid trucks into Gaza. That truce held for all four days and then was extended two more days with Hamas releasing 10 more hostages per day in exchange for Israel continuing to release these Palestinian prisoners. On Tuesday, Barack Ravid, a great reporter from Axios, tweeted that Israel is willing to extend

the ceasefire for up to nine more days if Hamas commits to continuing to release 10 additional hostages per day. So that's hopefully good news. We also saw that Bill Burns, the CIA director, is in Qatar. I got there Tuesday for more negotiations with the head of the Mossad, Israel's version of the CIA, and the Emir of Qatar about possibly getting more hostages out and extending the ceasefire. So fingers crossed there. Of course, this temporary ceasefire comes after an estimated 14,000 deaths in Gaza, including 10,000 women and children.

Again, these numbers come from the Hamasran ministries in Gaza. I understand that people are sometimes skeptical about their accuracy. But let's cut those, say you cut those numbers in half. We're still talking about just an unimaginable, unprecedented loss of life. So I think it's just worth remembering that. We're also starting to see Ben some reports trickling out about how Israeli hostages were treated while in Hamas custody. The aunt of a 12-year-old boy who was held hostage by Hamas says he was beaten, threatened at gunpoint if he cried, and then forced to watch footage of the October 7 massacre. So just, you know, sadism beyond belief.

The U.S. believes there are still eight or nine American hostages being held in Gaza. We spoke with a woman named Ilana Curiel. She's an Israeli journalist for Wynet. She is a family friend of one of the American hostages who has been released, a little girl named Abigail Idan. Elana, who you'll hear from in this clip, was friends with Abigail's father, who tragically was murdered by Hamas. And Alana spoke with Abigail's family and sent us this update.

Amalia and Mikhail saw their sister yesterday. and they were really excited. Abigail, one of the first things she asked was about them. And she's doing good. She's smiling. She asked for pretzels and grape juice. Physically, she's in good condition. But like you heard from,

from multiple reports. In the Hamas captivity, they weren't fed well at all. The hygiene was lacking, to say the least. But other than that, it seems like they weren't injured and they're in general good condition. I'd like to say that they're coming home, but they don't have a home to come back to. They're staying somewhere else with family, and they're a little bit more isolated and sheltered over there, and they're being taken care of, and they're having social workers and psychologists that are treating.

them and they're being looked after and loved. And that's the most important thing. Yeah. So again, this is a four-year-old girl, turned four actually in captivity, in Hamas captivity, who saw her parents murdered in front of her on October 7th, but luckily is now home. So, Ben, why don't we pause there? What else do you think people should know about how this deal came together? And how important do you think the U.S. government was to helping facilitate it and get this thing done? Well, I mean, clearly what happened here is that Qatar has this relationship with Hamas. There's a Hamas political office based in Qatar with some of the Hamas political leadership there.

And Qatar has also been kind of one of the principal external donors supporting kind of basic functions in Gaza over the years. And so their diplomacy, their offices kind of facilitated a negotiation in which, you know, I think the United States was. in some kind of three-dimensional diplomacy here because on the one end of the U.S. is negotiating with Qatar to try to get the maximum commitment from Hamas to release hostages and to do so in tranches and to do so in ways that can obviously be verified. At the same time, I think the U.S. was in diplomacy with Israel to try to encourage them and maybe even press them to be open to pausing their military operation. allowing humanitarian aid in and releasing Palestinian prisoners.

And the reason that was necessary is I think the Israeli government, you know, out of the initial stages after October 7th, was clearly committed to going forward with the military operation and didn't want to stop and negotiate anything. Right. And I think where the U.S. probably played an important role was in assembling the pieces of this deal, in part that Israel had to agree to.

You know, so trying to get Israel to say, look, it's worth stopping. That's a better way to get hostages out. And frankly, you may not want to allow aid on this scale into Gaza because Israel had wanted to keep Gaza under siege and certainly may not have wanted to release Palestinian prisoners, but ultimately that's what's going to work in getting hostages out. And frankly, that's necessary to alleviate a humanitarian crisis in Gaza that is exacerbating and obviously understandably leading to a huge international backlash. I think the U.S. probably had to bring Netanyahu along into this deal as well. Definitely. So in an interesting way, yet, you know, there are these details that, you know, you, you and I

been in stories where you, you know, the U.S. talks about the diplomacy and TikTok stories. Yeah, TikTok stories. Joe Biden called the near Qatar and yelled that. I actually think in a weird way that the U.S. probably had to, you know, Qatar had to deliver Hamas and the U.S. had to press Qatar, certainly to achieve the maximum amount of hostage releases in that effort. And then simultaneously the U.S. had to work with the Israelis to say, look, this is, you know, stop, think this is the better way to try to get these hostages out. I also think that, frankly, the public opinions out of Israel, the hostage families were mobilized. Yes. They were definitely delivering a message to Nanyahu, including sometimes, you know, kind of protests and demonstrations outside of his house, literally that, like, hey, the military operation, you know, is not necessarily.

necessarily the thing that's going to bring our loved ones home. You should be open to other approaches. So I think there were, there kind of a constellation of pieces that had to come together to get this done. And, you know, clearly the U.S. was an indispensable one of those pieces. And then last, I think Egypt obviously plays a role simply because they, they have their own context in Hamas, but they're also along that border. So obviously you have to coordinate with Egypt on any provision of assistance into Gaza. And also some of the hostages are being released out into Egypt, others in Israel. So multidimensional here. Yeah, complicated stuff.

And the U.S. role was obviously indispensable. And, you know, so was Qatar's, you know. And that you may not like that Hamas is an officer. So I'm not suggesting it's not without some complication, but like, you know, you need someone who can, you know, pick up the phone and get in the touch of these guys. Let's talk about this Qatar piece for a minute. And you're right. I mean, I think you can't give enough credit to the families of these hostages for their activism.

And probably that was pretty well-trained muscle at this point for a lot of them. who've been out on the streets for weeks and months protesting Netanyahu's attempt to shred the judiciary. So the Qatar's role in this. So I bet there's some listeners thinking like, hey, Tom, you did a whole series about why Qatar is terrible around the World Cup. And that was a specific conversation about their human rights record, their labor practices, the way the stadiums were built and the number of deaths. But they do play this unique role in international diplomacy. And for those don't know, I mean, Qatar is this tiny little peninsula in the Persian Gulf. It's about the size of Connecticut.

They host the biggest U.S. military base in the region. They're very wealthy, thanks to natural gas reserves. And their leaders like to both play this mediating role in international conflicts, but they also really like to piss off their neighbors, especially the Saudis, who the Saudis accused them of supporting Islamist groups. The Qatar also gained a ton of influence by launching Al Jazeera, which has a ton of influence in the Arab world. And so, you know, to your point then, you know, Hamas has had this office in Qatar since 2012.

Before that, they were based in Syria. But then I think Assad threw them out during the Arab Spring once Hamas started supporting the Syrian opposition. So they kind of shopped around. I think the U.S. probably helped facilitate this move to Qatar. The U.S. also, I think, helped facilitate the Taliban opening a political office in Qatar in 2013. And like you said before, I mean, some people are probably listening thinking, okay, how are we cool with Qatar hosting both a gigantic U.S. military base and multiple terrorist organization in the same country? And the answer is for moments like this. And diplomacy is messy and complicated. But like you need someone to talk to. Yeah. I mean, you know, they've had this very interesting policy that the previous ameer really developed, right, which is we're tiny. And so what's our insurance policy to survive? And our insurance policy to survive. And our insurance. policy is one, a giant U.S. military base.

11,000 U.S. troops. Two, the most watched and influential television channel in the Arab world. Three, we're going to try to get along with everybody, including a lot of Islamist. And they do support Islamists. And sometimes that support can be quite problematic. In Syria, you know, they supported different groups than, you know, just the Free Syrian Army. But the reality, I think this is a moment to stop and think. about what diplomacy is.

And I really want to make this point because something has happened, and maybe it's always somewhat been like this, but it's particularly happened over the course of my 20 years in politics, where it's become that, like, diplomacy is something, you know, you should only engage in with, like, you're your friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, that's not who you make peace with it. The waste, yeah, silly.

I think it's, it's a great-you-execra being, but there was a famous Israeli, you don't make peace with your friends. You make it with your enemies. Right. You talk to adversaries. That's what diplomacy is. And so if you don't have lines of communication into even the worst people in the world, you know, then what is left other than endless war. I mean, this is a reminder that you have to engage in difficult and complicated compromises in order to do things like get hostages out in order to stop wars. And in a weird way, what I'd like, what I'd like, like to take away from this is how necessary it is to do more of this kind of diplomacy. Totally. I mean, this is, otherwise, we can, fine, if you tell me, like, we shouldn't possibly do that, fine, then we can all fight each other for the rest of time. You know, like,

we can have wars and, and have total moral clarity that leads to maximalist positions, that leads to no reconciliation of any differences, you know, and I, I, so I do think it's, we have to remind ourselves that diplomacy is, the most important kind of diplomacy, is, the most important kind of diplomacy is most often with your most difficult doubt of a Cuban missile crisis. I'm glad that we could get on the phone with Khrushchev and not have a nuclear war. Like this is something that we have to get back to doing more of. Yeah, and you and I were talking this morning. I mean, obviously Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State is doing unbelievable amounts of

work, traveling all around the globe, meeting with everyone who will talk to him to try to sort of cool things off and broker some sort of deal in the Middle East. But you're also seeing Bill Burns, the CIA director, who was a lifetime diplomat doing all this shuttle diplomacy, you know, pop it up in places like Doha to try to negotiate a deal. And, you know, my hope is that going forward, someone like Bill Burns could be the model for a CIA director or some sort of like national security leadership. It doesn't always have to be some retired four-star general that's got a lot of experience killing people, but not a lot of experience leading talks or brokering diplomatic deals. And it's really, I think, exciting. It's not necessarily new,

Like a lot of times the heads of intelligence agencies play this sort of quiet diplomatic role. But I think Bill is uniquely well positioned to do this job currently and his impact is probably showing up well beyond the intelligence as agency collects. Yeah. And there's a couple pieces to this. I mean, one is that the Israeli foreign minister is not like a player in that government. Like, you know, Ellie Cohen is not exactly like a household name. It's not Netanyahu's guy, right? And so whereas the Mossad guy is actually more powerful in the Israeli system, probably, I'd say, than the foreign minister. And so sometimes, like, the counterparts don't match up, right? So Bill Burns, you know, sometimes these kinds of sense of negotiations, particularly in places like the Middle East where the intelligence services can be quite powerful. Yeah, if not more powerful than the head of state.

You kind of need other channels. And in other cases, too, like discretion allows for other people to do things. I mean, look, I negotiated one prisoner exchange myself when I was in government with the Cubans. And the State Department, like John Kerry, literally could not have done that because it needed to be secret and to be quiet. It wasn't with the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It was with kind of their version of the NSC. I could fly with no fanfare to like a nondescript location in Canada and meet some people. Tony Blinken can't do that. Carrie's got a press plane. Yeah, yeah. Tony Blinkin's, you know, like you can't slip off in the middle night and pop up

somewhere for a couple days. Bill can do that. The CIA director can do that, especially when you're Bill Burns. Right. You've just got a sweet stash. Here you want. Yeah, yeah. So it is the case that sometimes you have to kind of find different interlocutors and kind of creative approaches here, and that's clearly what's happened in this case. Speaking of intelligence, before we move on to some the more U.S. pieces, it's worth mentioning that there continues to be a ton of reporting on intelligence failures that led up to the October 7th attacks. We've talked about how Israeli intelligence was warning Netanyahu that Israel's adversaries saw it as weakened because of the judicial coup efforts. But then over the break, Channel 12 and Israel reported that Israel's

military intelligence unit sent detailed warnings up the chain about Hamas actively training for this attack. And the person who got that warning shot it down saying this is a fantasy essentially. The BBC said they reviewed Hamas propaganda videos. And in those propaganda videos, they saw four such training exercises in 14 different locations that included five militant groups that eventually participated in the attack. So just mentioned this to say, like, a lot of this was happening out in the open. Some of the intelligence and military establishment did try to warn political leaders. But as we mentioned before, Netanyahu still has not taken responsibility for what happened that day. Yeah. And here's a reason why that's really important that goes beyond

just looking back. This is one of the reasons why I support a ceasefire. Some people will say, how can you support a ceasefire? It's asking Israel to go back to October 6th. You know, it's asking them to go back to the vulnerable position they were in. I don't think that's true. On October 6th, their guard was down. On October 6th, they had the IDF up in the West Bank, protecting settlers who were in clashes with Palestinians, often initiating clashes with Palestinians. You had Netanyahu ignoring warnings because he was more focused on his own political standing with all these protests. If this ceasefire continued indefinitely, that's not going to be the case. There's going to be the IDF along that border.

They're going to be watching everything. If Hamas pops up, they're going to take a shot at them. Nobody's saying that they can't take a shot at Hamas ever again. I'm saying that October 7th literally could not happen again right now. you know, because on October 7th, you didn't have that border fortified. You didn't have eyes on Hamas like the way it should have been. So I think that's an important piece of context. I mean, one is how much there should be accountability for Netanyahu totally falling asleep on the job here.

Because it's political and military, is intelligence and military leaders have taken responsibility. Yes, even though some of them were warning. And they were warning publicly, too, by the way. They were warning that the judicial coup was going to create open openings to this kind of stuff. So part of this is accountability and frankly Israel needs a new prime minister. I mean, like there's something really unpleasant and potentially dangerous about someone being prime minister who's lost political support who has every incentive to not end a war because the moment it's over like everybody recognizes there needs to be a new leader. But again, it's also this point

that Israel is more secure today right now than they were on October 6th. because they're not going to repeat the mistake of loving that border unguarded. And I think that that has to enter into the conversation here because people understandably are like, how can you ask them to go back to that? There's a separate question about how do you get rid of the military wing of Famaas. That's a totally separate and valid question as well. But on this question of protecting Israel, I think Israel can be confident that they're not going to return to the kind of asleep at the switch position that Netanyahu was in on October 6. Yeah, and so part of that, you know, sort of getting that defensive posture right involves more military funding.

So President Biden is working to get Congress to pass more than $14 billion in supplemental defense funding for Israel. That money has been held up by Republicans in the House of Representatives. They don't like Biden's plan to bundle the money for Israel with money for Ukraine, Taiwan, and the border and some other stuff in the House. They've been demanding spending cuts to pay for the Israel money, and that's sort of a non-starter. So there's a growing debate in the Democratic caucus about whether the U.S. should put conditions on funding for Israel. Biden seemed to suggest he was open to the idea last week during a press conference when he called it a, quote, worthwhile thought. But then, you know, Ben, I saw Jake Sullivan, our friend, National Security Advisor to Joe Biden, was asked about Biden's comments during an interview with Meet the Press. Here's a clip.

Jake, just to be very clear, should we take his words that it would be a worthwhile thought to me? that the president is open to signing legislation that would provide aid to Israel that comes with conditions? I thought the president really couldn't have been clearer when he answered the question. He acknowledged the idea and then he said, but the way that I have conducted our diplomacy and this is what is actually producing results. That's what he's done so far and that's what he's going to do. Is he open to it? Again, he is going to continue to focus on what is going to generate results. And as he said in the press conference quite clearly, and as you can see from the fact that for the last two days we've seen hostages released, the approach that he is taking, direct presidential diplomacy behind closed doors with the Israelis and with our Arab partners.

That's what's generating the kinds of results that we're seeing right now. That's the course that he's on. So that's actually two of the three times Kristen asked that question. It seems pretty clear to me there, Ben, that Jake was, I think, shutting down the idea of conditioning aid, at least from the White House's perspective. tell me if you disagree. But are you seeing Democrats come to any kind of agreement about what conditions might be appropriate, setting aside the fact that it will never pass the Republican House. But like, is there any consensus growing? First of all, and say this with great, you know, understanding of having been there myself and you two, whenever you have to say the president

couldn't have been clearer, the president wasn't clear. I know. I think he was crystal clear about this, Chris. Yes or no. Again, I think he was clear. I think he was clear. My read on it, by the way, talking to some other folks there is that Biden was acknowledging it's an idea out there. He was trying to be respectful of it, but saying the way I think we should proceed is through this high-level quiet diplomacy with Netanyahu, and that's what I'm going to keep doing. I think there's a few questions here. The first is just the threshold question of, does it make sense for the U.S. to provide, say, $15 billion in military assistance, Israel in the current context? Let's say Israel resumes a military operation of the scale

that they were carrying out before this latest pause. Because we should be clear about what's happened in Gaza. The New York Times report was quite powerful. And essentially, and I know you guys talked about this on PSA, but it just bears repeating. More women and children have been killed in Gaza in two months than in two years in Ukraine. Yeah.

And think about how we talk about the Russian targeting in Ukraine. If that resumes and the U.S. provides $15 billion in unconditional military assistance of that kind of military operation, given the nature of international public opinion, we better stop and think about that. I mean, wow. That is, that is not, that is not like a small thing to do, you know. So let's start with that. Then the question is, okay, if you were to condition aid, what would be the conditions?

I think there's, there's two or three different ideas that I've heard from Democrats in Congress. One is, and you saw Chris Murphy, you pointed this out to me, Tommy, like essentially conditioning around war crimes. So basically falling in laws of war. you know, if Israel is to follow the laws of war or else, you know, they'll be withholding of assistance. Obviously that makes a lot of sense. That does require the U.S. then to start making those determinations. Which they are loath to do in real time. Every time you've seen a U.S. official ask, they say, well, we're not going to, you know, be the judge.

Well, I want to say this with a great deal of sensitivity because I don't think it's a one-to-one comparison. But the U.S. has been willing to make, let's just say, the U.S. has been willing to make these determinations about other countries. Absolutely. So we should just acknowledge that. And so I think it is worthwhile to do that, but I then think you would need a mechanism. Basically what Congress would have to do is require. And Congress does this all the time, the reporting requirements. And there's precedent for this.

The Leahy law that has governed a lot of military financing to foreign militaries for a long time that says you have to basically report to Congress that their human rights violations of them would trigger conditionality. So I think there is a precedent for saying, hey, the administration may be required to report every X number of days, whether we think Israel is complying with the laws of war, and if not, we turn this off. That's one kind of conditionality. That would make sense to me. It would raise a lot of complexity because the U.S. does find that there are war crimes that could trigger international investigations. So that's complicated, but, you know, obviously worth considering because if the U.S. says Israel must follow the laws of war and then opens up the spigot to billions of dollars in military assistance, I think we have to hold them accountable to that.

Then the second piece is interesting, and this is something that Bernie Sanders has proposed, which is there's this difference between the U.S. and the current Israeli government about the long-term future of Gaza. Is the goal here a Palestinian state? Does Israel reoccupy the Gaza Strip, or do they allow for Palestinian or some form of Arab governance to take hold? And essentially, there's a conditionality that the military assistance is dependent on the Israeli government embracing a Palestinian state or saying that they will transition to Palestinian or some multinational Arab administration of Gaza.

That to me makes a lot of sense. Because to me, actually, the biggest policy gap that I see right now is Bibi Netanyahu does not support a Palestinian state, full stop. Well, if the goal of the U.S. government, as continually articulated by Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and everybody else is this has to end in a two-state solution, you need some leverage to get there. Let me just double stand back. According to some reports out today in Israeli media, Netanyahu recently met with a bunch of backbench members of his political party, the Likud Party, in a desperate attempt to sort of, sort of, hold on to power, and he told them, quote, I am the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank after the war. Netanyahu also reportedly said that Biden didn't want Israel to launch a ground invasion into Gaza or enter the Al-Shifa hospital, but he bragged about

ignoring the U.S. in both instances. So again, this is like the latest instance, like you were saying earlier, of Netanyahu scrambling to stay in power and in the process making promises that will prevent any kind of meaningful peace talks and likely doom everyone involved to repeat this cycle of violence. And this is what Netanyahu does. And he's done it for like a decade. He looks over his right shoulder and he looks at the Ben Gavirs and all these lunatics. I mean, extremists.

People want to displace all Palestinians. Smotrich. And they want to build settlements everywhere. And he says to them, look, I'm the guy. I agree with you. But I'm the only guy that can, you know, appeal to the Americans. and I know how to go on American television and I know to like avoid

you know, you know, tough questions and I have friends in Congress. He bragged about this recently. A clip surfaced of him a decade ago bragging about exactly this. I'm telling you this, 100% this is not in my opinion. This is a fact. I watched that too.

This is what he says. He says essentially like, hey, I'm the only front man for the Israeli right that can keep the Americans in line, you know? I mean, that's literally his argument. And he might not be wrong. He's been right. Yeah.

You know, like, and that's why. why, again, you've heard me say, I don't, this approach is you, like, hug him in public and you're tough and private, that doesn't work if he's bragging that he ignores you and basically will never allow a Palestinian state. This is who this guy is, right? And unless the U.S. is willing to draw a line and say, no, you're cut off if you don't change your position. By the way, it's not at all unreasonable. We impose conditions on everybody we give assistance to. Why is there this exception where it's like, you know what, this leader doesn't share our values. He was trying to undermine Israeli democracy at home. He doesn't want a Palestinian state, but he can get

whatever he wants. Nothing about Bibi Netanyahu, and we have a long track record suggests that he's going to somehow change and be like, okay, now I'll embrace a Palestinian state. No, like, you have to have some conditions here. So I think this is a really good idea to say we need to, you know, Israel needs to support a Palestinian state and they need to support a different administration of Gaza than a reoccupation as part of getting this assistance. That to me makes a lot of sense. The only other one I was going to raise is settler violence because settler violence is a huge issue in the West Bank. And, you know, there are these settler militias, too, that literally like arm themselves and go out and the U.S. government's been pretty forward-leaning in its statements

about this. But I do think it's worth saying that if it turns out that any U.S. assistance finds its way into this kind of settler activity in the West Bank, that's cut off. Yeah, you know what else had an interesting proposal was Congresswoman Betty McCollum from Minnesota. It basically has, once a condition aid saying it can't be used to detain Palestinian kids, which, again, seems awfully reasonable. Ben, I think that gets us to another piece of context of this deal that I bet people are wondering about, which is understanding who is being released from Israeli prisons,

which Palestinians are being released. So the Intercept and Vox, both have done some great reporting on this, which we'll draw from here. So the Israelis put forward 300 names of Palestinians for potential release. So of that 300, 233 of them have not been convicted of any crimes. 124 of them are under the age of 18. There are certainly some, like, bad people who are, you know, convicted of attempted murder and other things. But, you know, more broadly, I mean, a lot of these folks have not been convicted of any crimes. And there's also this broader policy that's surfacing as part of this conversation of administrative detention where the Israeli government jails Palestinian prisoners indefinitely without charges.

And those who end up getting charged don't end up in front of a civilian court. They go for a military tribunal where the conviction rate is nearly 100%. There's also this weird piece of this that's happening. Itamar Bedin Gavir, who you mentioned earlier, the ultra-right-wing national security minister, has reportedly told Israeli police that they need to shut down any celebrations of the release of Palestinian prisoners, like at their homes. So the direct quote from him was, my instructions are clear. There to be no expressions of joy. Expressions of joy are equivalent to backing terrorism. Victory celebrations give backing to those human scum for those Nazis. So like that, you know, that's just sort of more adjut prop from a guy who's known for it.

Like you could understand not wanting some sort of massive celebration upon the release of a Palestinian in an Israeli prison who had murdered someone, right? I get that. But again, what we're talking about here is often minors, kids under the age of 18, who are detained for, you know, things like throwing rocks at soldiers getting released. But a lot of the reporting suggests that, you know, Israel's being forced to release 300 terrorists or people all convicted of crimes. But the reality is just a lot more murky. The reality is murky. And in a war that a lot of of people seem to be consuming on social media on Instagram and TikTok. You know, this gets over simple. I think you summarized it well. And I can't judge all these charges.

Nor can I. If you even just take the Israeli charges at face value, right? Israel has administrative tension. Part of what happens here is it like, and again, if you take the charges at face value, there are some people on this list, you know, who are charged with very serious things, like trying to stab Israeli soldiers, right? But even on the Israeli list, clearly. what happens in some cases is there's something that happens in the West Bank. There's a class between settlers and Palestinians or there's a demonstration and a lot of people come out. There's kids throwing rocks. And Israel just rolls up a lot of people and throws them in prison and kind of sorts it out later. That's kind of what administrative attention is. So even by the Israeli accounting

of these people, like a lot of these people like dozens of them are like kids like who just through through rocks at a protest, doesn't seem like those kids need to be like sitting in prison. Also, certainly doesn't seem like they're hardened terrorist or members of Hamas or anything. And so in the past, frankly, there have been different prisoner exchanges where Israel did release hard and terrorist members of Hamas. Including the current battlefield leader of Hamas. Including the guy who planned this attack, right? So in the thousand Palestinians released for Gilad Shalit when Israeli soldier, that includes,

this is different. I mean, even by the worst accounting. of the people being released. None of them are like terrorist leaders. None of them are like Hamas leaders. And, you know, they're women and children. And a lot of these people, clearly, are kind of people that were in the wrong place

at the wrong time or people who did things like throw rocks. And so I don't think there needs to be a sense that these are somehow, that somehow Israel is being forced to release, you know, terrorists. They're releasing people that were in administrative attention, most of whom were not even charged with anything. Look, it's fair, too. If I'm Israel, I don't want to release Hamas fighters.

Of course. That's not who they're releasing. And that's not who the U.S. is asking them to release. Yeah. I think the takeaway here is it's murky. It's murky. And it does seem like the administrative detentions have ramped up drastically since the October 7th Hamas attack. Yeah.

And so it's getting, they're casting a wider net. They're rolling up more people. It's a good point that you make about murkiness is like people can seem to find the facts that support their view of this. Right. So it's like some people want to say that they're releasing the worst policy. people so they find the worst person on the list, and that's the attempted murder thing and say, see, they're releasing all these murderers, you know, and then other people want to say, these Palestinians are totally innocent so they find the most innocent, you know, kid, it's murky.

Or suggesting that by talking about them together, you're drawing an equivalence between Palestinians being released from Israeli prisons and hostages who are taken by Hamas. No one's drawing an equivalence there. They're just part of the same deal. You know what I mean? You're being released in concert. And it gets to what we're saying with diplomacy. diplomacy is complicated.

Yeah, it's really messy. Speaking of messy. So, Ben, about a week ago, some random Twitter user posted an anti-Semitic diatribe, as one does on Twitter these days, where he said he didn't, quote, give the tiniest shit that Jews were dealing with increased anti-Semitism because those same Jews had been pushing, quote,

hatred against whites, end quote, and somehow enabled, quote, hordes of minorities to flood into the country. To that post, Elon Musk, replied, you have said the actual truth. That was Elon boosting and explicitly endorsing the great replacement theory, which basically says liberals, Jews, you know, people like you and me, want to bring minorities into the country because the Democratic Party wants more voters and we want to replace all the white people out there. That theory inspired the Tree of Life Massacre,

which is the deadliest attack ever on Jews in the United States five years ago. And that tweet is far from Elon's only or first dalliance with anti-Semitism. He loves to spread conspiracy theories about George Soros, for example. So that context is why it was notable to see Elon hop on a plane and decide to go to Israel, where he took a tour of a kibbutz that had been attacked on October 7th, and he met with the president and the prime minister, Beben Netanyahu. Elon also did a Twitter spaces with Netanyahu. And so here's a clip that we took from a CNN report about, without Elon's visit. Those who are intended murder must be neutralized,

then the propaganda must stop and they're making Gaza prosperous. And if that happens, I think it will be a good future. Well, I hope you'll be involved in it. I'd love to help. Welcome to Israel, Mr. Musk. Your visit means a lot to us. You have a huge role to play,

and I think we need to fight it together. Because under the platforms which you lead, unfortunately, there's a harboring of a lot of old hate, which is Jew hate, which is anti-Semitism. We have to do whatever is necessary to stop the... I mean, essentially, these people have been fed propaganda since they were children. The first half of that was Elon with Bibin'N Yahoo on Twitter spaces. The second half was a press conference he did with President Herzog.

What do you think, Ben? You just think Elon's going to be a key ally in the fight against anti-Semitism going forward? He sounded really committed to the fight there. I mean, there's a couple of things here that are really gross. One is that Elon Musk, you know, beyond indulging anti-Semitism,

he's endorsed anti-Semitism. Boosting it. He's welcomed people back to the platform who were Nazis and, you know, tweeting the worst kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He himself has tweeted all kinds of conspiracy theory type stuff

about like George. Soros and obviously then endorsing the great replacement theory. And so call me not convinced, you know, basically what happened is like he started to lose all these advertisers. And he's like, well, what can I do to like stop the bleeding with my, you know, X ad revenues? Oh, I can get on a plain Israel. The second thing that I have a problem with here is, you know, maybe it won't surprise people to know that I have a lot of skepticism about BB Nanyahu. But, you know, this is a, we've seen a pattern with Nanyahu where Victor Orban, for instance, is an ally of Nantyahu. Nanyahu and Orban are buddies.

Victor Orban is in any semi. Like Victor Orban engages in the worst kind of conspiracy theories about George Soros and shadowy Jewish financiers interfering in politics. And also he's rehabilitated kind of the Nazi-era Hungarian right statues of going up of those types of people and going down of others. But as long as he backs Bebe in his kind of politics, then that's okay. I guess, you know, and what I, what I'm concerned about here is, and we're going to wait into some difficult waters here, Tom, if you wait away, hold my hand and walk away on this. But essentially, there's been this question about like the definition of any Semitism. And there's been a lot of efforts to kind of equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and say, if you're against Israel, essentially, you're an A-Semite, you know. And what, what bothers me, essentially, is sometimes you'll see people, you know, like Elon Musk, who are clearly, who are clearly. engaged in all manner of anti-Semitism, you know, all the conspiracy theories about, you know, shadowy financiers and Jews replacing us and Jews playing an outside role in society. Like, these are

things that got people killed. Got my family. You know, my family, I can, you know, I've actually seen recently, like, the documentation of what camps my family ended up at. Like, so I, you know, this is not, um, this is not the thing I'm unfamiliar with. What I hate is this idea that is so long as you support Israel in its military operation against the Palestinians, you can say all this anti-Semitic crap over here. Like that is a danger. Like I don't like this kind of dynamic where it's like, well, you know, sure, like there's all this anti-Semitism. All the traditional tropes can be weaponized and can, you know, percolate on X and all these platforms so long as you go over and like take a photo up with Bibi Nanyahu and say, yeah, we support your effort to neutralize

Palestinians. Like that is not an answer to anti-Semitism at all. In fact, I think, I think that compounds every problem in a way because it's like you're enabling all this anti-semitism over here and you're kind of suggesting that the only thing that matters is like the Israeli military operation like that that is not fighting anti-semitism right and remember when heeland got took control of Twitter he declared that he was a free speech absolutist just put that in the back of your mind so he tweets this crazy thing back at this guy endorsing the great replacement theory he also tweeted a bunch of criticisms of the ADL attacking them this is after he had a history have criticized the ADL and net with the president of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, where they had

sort of like some sort of kumbaya, they came to an agreement. Shortly after tweeting, in support of the Great Replacement Theory, Elon then says that anyone who tweets the words decolonization from the river to the sea or anything implying, you know, euphemisms implying genocide, they'll be suspended from the social media platform. So that somehow seems to get him right with the ADL. So he boosts this incredibly dangerous conspiracy theory. They got people killed very recently in the United States has been the motivation behind all kind of like white nationalist terrorists in this country. But if he bans things that are perceived as being anti-Israel or pro-Palestine,

that gets him right with some of these folks. It's very cynical, as you say. That is precisely the point I was trying to make, and you made it better, And this is not to endorse it from the river to the sea slogan at all. But what I find so wrong about the ADL's approach or Jonathan Greenblatt's approach to that whole dynamic is it's like this guy just endorsed a horrifying anti-Semitic conspiracy theory over here. He didn't like apologize and explain that. Just he went and then condemned a Palestinian slogan. And it's like, oh, okay, that's fine.

Then you get out of jail free card. That to me is, that makes no sense. Makes no sense. And I don't know why. It's like saying you can, it's the same thing with Orban. It's like you're allowed to be in any Semite where you are so long as you back, what, Netanyahu or so long as you, you know, quash Palestinians. Like this is not the way, any sentiment is serious. It needs to be dealt with.

It needs to be confronted. But it has to be confronted across the board and not just, you know, something that is acquainted with whether or not you support Bibi Netanyahu's government. Yes, absolutely. And by the way, in addition to this. scary rise in anti-Semitism that we're seeing, there's also been an increase in Islamophobic rhetoric and incidents around the world, including this horrible incident on Saturday where three Palestinian college students who were just visiting family up in Burlington, Vermont. Two of whom were Americans, I believe, but they were shot by some random asshole. And again,

like, it's early. But authorities are investigating this incident as a hate crime because, you know, they were dressed in a way that made them look Palestinian. They were speaking. Arabic, right? So, like, you know, there's scary things happening in both sides here, into Semitic incidents and Islamophobic incidents. Yeah, but he just needs to chill the fuck out here. Because the sense is equating all Jews with something you don't like that the Israeli government is doing is wrong and fucked up. Equating all Palestinians or all Arabs or all Muslims with Hamas is fucked up. And can we just, we don't have to agree on anything else. Can we just If we can just agree on that. If we can just agree on that, we can save ourselves a lot of trouble.

Well said. Last thing on Gaza, Ben, so as listeners to the show know, we've been trying to lift up voices of people who have been harmed by this war in both ways. In an earlier episode, we played a clip from a journalist named Noor Harzine. She was talking about basically what life was like in Gaza at the moment. We are very happy that we were finally able to get back in touch with her after many weeks. and here is Nora just basically given an update on life for her these days all these weeks later. I'm with my family, my kids and my husband, I'm my parents. Everyone is fine. We personally, we did not get any aid because basically most of the aid is going to people who are sheltering inside the UN schools for now. And that's actually a big problem. So the people who are sheltering in governmental schools or in hospitals or in shops or in the streets or in each other's homes, they do not get any aid.

They did not get any aid until now. I did not manage to go and see my home. But according to people in the area, I mean, we talked to some of them a week ago and they said that the home is still standing but without walls. Yeah, it's like an open area. It is standing, but it is like completely damaged. So even if this war ends and we go back to our home, we will not be able to live in it because there is no walls. So it's technically it's completely destroyed.

So I mean, just another example of, you know, the fact that the work could end today, the ceasefire could be made permanent today, but for millions of people, life is just unthinkable. Unrecognizable, yeah. Yeah. And you'll hear you. in the interview, I mean, Unra runs some of those schools where they're getting aid. And she makes

the point that aid has to go into the private. There's no food in the grocery stores. There's no bakeries. There's no, you know, so it's not like people might say, well, can't, not only is the aid not getting, they've nowhere to go to get food and water. So clearly, that needs to be dressed. And man, if this military operation resumes and goes on for weeks and weeks and weeks, I don't know what happens to those people. Yeah, I don't either. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. We come back. We're going to talk about some major elections in Argentina and the Netherlands, so stick around for that. All right, friends, we get some bad election news for you guys. So first, Argentina elected a far-right libertarian-slash-anarchal capitalist named Javier Miele

to be its next president. Then in the Netherlands, the far-right anti-immigrant Party for Freedom did extremely well in parliamentary elections, much better than expected, which means a guy named Hert Wielder's may be the next prime minister of the Netherlands. So let's take this one at a time, Ben. So Mule, we talked about before. He ran on eliminating Argentina's central bank, big tax cuts, making abortion illegal, extreme deregulation to the point where he talked about allowing the sale of organs. He cloned his dog, apparently, and it attacked him.

He's just a crazy person. But mostly his message was, you know, I'm going to destroy the political class that has gotten Argentina to this place with 140% inflation and economic catastrophe. and literally campaigned holding a chainsaw at all his rallies. Wilders is over the Netherlands is best known for his Islamophobia. He wants to ban the Quran, shut down all mosques. He wants to drastically reduce immigration, and he ran on the Netherlands leaving the European Union. So Vilders, you know, he will have to form a coalition with other political parties.

So it's not clear he'll be in charge yet. He will probably have to moderate on a bunch of issues to get other parties into a coalition with him. But his surprisingly strong victory was quite alarming. So Ben, these are obviously two very different countries than Netherlands in Argentina, but these guys have a few things in common. One,

they look like scary grandparents from a Twilight movie. Right? You got the fucking coked out werewolf. And then Wilders is like the ghostly pale, like vampire. Yeah, he's kind of the creepy guy next door. Yeah. Yeah. He's drinking your blood. Two, they were congratulated by all the shittiest people in public lives.

You had Trump, Elon Musk, a Victor Orban, all saying that, boy. And then third, they both basically ran as populace who wanted to burn the establishment down. So, Ben, what do you think these two elections tell us about the rise to these far-right populace? And are you worried about one of these characters potentially doing more damage than the other? Well, I think it tells you that the anti-establishment rage is not at all abating. It's interesting. I have a friend from Argentina who said, you know, hey, I disagree with you.

I, I, I, I, I, I, what you have to understand is, we fucking hate all our politicians, you know, like, like, and he made, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't agree with the solution, but like, you know, you know, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, the country would like, you know, uh, who basically, one after another wrecked things, you know, right. Um, now, what I'm interested in Argentina, I do think if this guy did everything he said, I, I don't even, like, I don't know what would happen. Like, you know, like, the country would break. Yeah, will he follow through is a big question. So, I'm, you know, so, I'm, so, so with him, so with him, I think, I think, I the question is essentially, you know, how much is he actually tried to implement his program? Is that even possible because he doesn't control all of the legislature and things like this? I think in some way, and we've talked a lot about Latin American populism and just a sense of like any, like there's a Bikali model, like a recid all model that is concerning. And that it, by the way, doesn't fit on an ideological spectrum. I don't think it's all far right. I think it's just anybody that comes along and is like, I want to burn it down. Like people are like here for that and that's a problem. I want to focus more in builders here.

This guy's been around. A long time. So what to me is scary about him is unlike our, because you can kind of understand the guy who comes out of nowhere and it's like, oh, you're some new guy. Let's try him out. This guy's like the Le Pen of the Netherlands. That's what's scary to me. It's like it's not like Dutch people don't know who this guy is.

They know damn well. He fucking hates immigrants. He hates Muslims. He says terrible things. He's a nationalist. He's a racist. And fine, at me. Dutch listeners, if you don't agree with me, I'm sorry, I've seen enough from this guy. I'm throwing the

flag. Like, that's who this guy is. And what's concerning me about that is, number one, the Netherlands generally has been this, like, very reasonable, you know, kind of center of European politics. I mean, this is a OG European Union country. This is, like, these are very reasonable people. I love Dutch people. Like, and so this is not the country that you expect to have wild swings in politics. So to me, what this tells me is that the comment. of a cost of living crisis, of refugees coming in, not just obviously from all parts of the world, but an influx of Ukrainian refugees, of a feeling that like the traditional parties are not responding.

And frankly, just some old-fashioned national xenophobia that is kind of reemerged on the scene in Europe, not a place where you want that to happen, by the way, it usually leads to really dark places, that this, you know, at some point it's a trend, you know, and we saw some good news in Poland and Spain, and so we're feeling pretty good. But, you know, this makes you wonder, we've got a French election coming up in a couple years. Can Marine Le Pen kind of surf this wave? We obviously already have someone in Italy who surf that wave, although she's monitored a tiny bit in office. But to me, this shows that there's like a resiliency to the far right in Europe. It doesn't mean that the sky is falling, because like I said, you could point to Poland and Spain

as good news stories too. But, you know, I do think that we ignore at our peril. this kind of building, you know, and it's same thing here in this country, by the way. I mean, it's a warning sign for here. Big time. You know, because it's the same mix of stuff that people are pissed off about. They're pissed off about immigration. They're pissed off about cost of living. I don't agree with their views on immigration in particular when it comes to a guy like builders.

It's just a warning sign. And it's going to require, I think, pro-democracy, anti-ethonationalist forces to ban together in these countries. There need to be coalitions built. These parties on the center right and center left and left in the Europe can't fight it out with each other and create openings for people like this. They need to get behind alternatives. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. Like, Miele is a singularly weird guy. I mean, he seemed to have a mental breakdown on live TV near the end of the campaign. Like, he started saying he was hearing voices in an empty studio and they still voted for him. I guess 140% inflation will do that for you. But I'm with

you. Like, Vilders is, he's the longest serving member of parliament in the Dutch parliament. He started as sort of like a guy in a center-right party. And then in 2006, he left to start this anti-Muslim populist party. What this tells me is, one, the left in a lot of these countries, including the Greens, are just like they're not getting traction. And two, the playbook for these populists could not be more simple. It's like you pledge to do more social spending. You pledge to fuck with elites. You say you're going to block immigrants from coming into the country. And you pick some group to demagogue. In Builder's case, it was Muslims in part because of the Syrian refugee crisis.

He just sort of leapt on that years and years ago and slowly built support. Yeah. And I mean, you saw like, you know, there were riots in Ireland from far right people in Ireland. Right. That was such a weird thing. Yeah. Like, this is something going on here. And by the way, I really do think it's bullshit.

I think there's scapegoating immigrants for other problems too. Oh, totally. The cost of living problems or employment problems. You know, and that. But again, like, there's a really dangerous history of where that leads in Europe. Yeah, and I don't know if that's the case in the Netherlands, but certainly both in the U.S. and in the U.K., the immigration systems are being overwhelmed by the number of asylum seekers. And so you're seeing really gross responses from conservative governments.

Like over in the U.K., they're threatening to send people to Rwanda, even if they have absolutely no connection to the country. Like, that's their plan. Yeah, and the other challenge here is that there does need to be an effort to kind of fix and fortify and sort of. strengthen asylum procedures and to have kind of a rationalized process here. But what some of these right-wing governments do is that they actually disrupt that because they kind of like the illegality of the immigration system. Exactly. And so it's the same thing in this country, but instead of passing immigration reform and rationalizing the system like you guys talked about yesterday, right, path to citizenship for people here, more legal immigration, but also

border security, you know, more asylum judges to make that system work in a more efficacious matter, they want it broken so they can demagogues. Yes, they go on Fox News. Yeah. A couple more quick things. So a few months ago, we talked about how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made this extraordinary statement where he accused the Indian government of being behind the assassination of a guy named Hardeeb Singh Najjar, who was a supporter of the creation of an independent state

for the Sikh religious group. Last week, the Financial Times reported that U.S. authorities, quote, thwarted a conspiracy to assassinate a sick separatist on American soil and issued a warning to India's government over concerns. It was involved in the plot. So this target was a dual U.S. Canadian citizen. This guy was a senior leader for U.S.-based groups that advocates for an independent six state. The FT said that Biden raised the issue directly with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 in September, which, by the way, was in India. I'm sure that was a good time. And remember that Modi just got a state visit in Washington back in June and addressed the Joint Sessions.

of Congress. The White House says that when they raise this with Indian officials, they were, quote, surprised and concerned. So, Ben, I guess like best case here is Modi has some kind of rogue element in the security apparatus doing unbelievably stupid stuff targeting these sick separatist leaders. But the worst case is that he knows about it. He's sanctioning it. He somehow thinks it's okay to try to kill people, American citizens in the U.S. and Canadian citizens in Canada. that is a big deal and has some serious implications for, I don't know, everything the U.S. wants to do on every issue with India. Yeah, I mean, this, you know, unfortunately it wasn't surprising.

And I hope that this, you know, we've been saying, like, the U.S. should get Canada's back on this. And this certainly reinforces that idea. Because, look, it just, this is a norm that cannot be violated. if it's fair game to just start, you know, assassinating people in other countries, like the international system of borders can't work, you know? And so I'm a little skeptical that that somehow there's like a rogue element in the Indian government.

I mean, I don't know if they were shocked and surprised about that happening or they're shocked and surprised that they're confronted by it. But, like, I really hope the message gets crossed. And by the way, I also hope that it means that they're not going to like try to punish Canada because they're smaller and easier to punish in the United States. And it also bears repeating, it's not like there's some massive sick insurgency and, you know, there's an imminent, you know, declaration of independence in, you know, Punjab or something. Like this is a tiny segment of the population.

This is a paranoid mindset. I mean, part of what is so alarming about this is just like the deep nationalism and paranoia that seems to be behind this. It's just, just time, slow your role, guys, you know. Yeah, stop doing stupid things, Modi. And to say that you're a big, powerful country, you don't need to do this kind of crap. No, no, not at all. In fact, it'll only hurt you. Last week, we focused that whole episode on the upcoming COP climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates.

And we talked a lot about how there's a lot of activists. We talked to a bunch of activists who feel like it's ridiculous and cynical to hold a climate change conference in a major oil and gas producing country like the UAE. unfortunately, Ben, since then, it's gotten worse. So just days before COP28 starts, the BBC published leaked documents that show how the UAE is planning to use the upcoming summit to meet with countries to pitch them on new oil and gas deals. So that really sucks. Yeah, kind of your most worst case cynical. Literally worst case, yeah. I mean, like, but is anybody surprised?

I mean, like, what did you think would happen? You get a lot of wealthy people in a room. You make some deals, you know, whether they're. those deals have to do with renewable energy or fossil fuels? Do you think this leaking out now could maybe, I don't know, make the UAE obligated to go a little further on doing the right thing, on renewables, on anything? I think the UAE approach to this thing is that they have a lot of, they're very, in a cash poor world, they're cash rich, right?

And so their solution is probably like, we're going to try to surprise on the upside with all of our commitments for resourcing around, yeah, other things. what I would you know urge the UAE to do if they want to do that game is don't do the like you know over the next 30 years we're going to spend a gazillion dollars on renewables with no kind of hard money put some real money in the loss and damage fund you know like the UAE could really fucking you know make that thing real top that off yeah top that off a little bit you know yeah last thing for Ben's interview so we have talked about former Brazilian president jire bolsenaro many times on this show

None of them have been for good reasons. This is definitely the weirdest, though. Wait, wasn't he, is it weirder than when he was in like that? What fast food restaurant was it? Was it like a chick filet or something in Florida? Yeah. Yeah, he was just cruising around like Orlando or something. Yeah, yeah, it was weird.

Well, you decide if this is weirder. So Brazilian media reported that federal police in Brazil are investigating Bolsonaro for harassing a humpback whale while he was out tooling around on his jet ski. So the report says Bolsonaro was shooting a video on his phone of this poor whale. 15 meters from the thing while it was like jumping up and down, slapping its arms, showing signs of distress. Brazilian law says boats with their engines on can't get within 100 meters of a whale. According to the Guardian newspaper, Bolsonaro wouldn't be the first right-wing politician to get in trouble for harassing a whale. In Brazil, a decade ago, Bolsonaro also apparently got fined for illegal fishing in a marine reserve.

In response to this whale report, Bolsonaro said, quote, every day they accuse me of some kind of mischief. Yesterday it was hounding whales. Bolsonaro was told supporters, and then he made a disparaging remark about Brazil's justice minister, whom he likened to a whale. So it sounds like he's learning his lesson. I mean, can we just like leave the fucking whales alone? I mean, if you see that, humpback whales are wonderful animals. They're mammals, you know.

One of the coolest moments of my life, Hannah and I were in Maui, and we went on a whale watch way, way further than 100 meters away from any of these things, by the way, our little whale watch. We saw two whales breach at the same time, jump up, kind of did like a 50-degree rotation and landed back down. Truly like the coolest thing I've ever seen. That's a good transformative moment. It was amazing. One of my first memories is of being five, I think it was my fifth birthday party.

My mom took me and some friends on a whale watch. I've always loved whales. My favorite book growing up, which I've now, I recommend this for you, actually. Amos and Boris. I read this to my kids all the time. It's about a whale that rescues a mouse. in the middle of the ocean. Okay.

And takes the mouse all the way home. I'm bought in. And then, wait for it, the whale is washed up on the shore where the mouse lives many years later in a hurricane and is dying on the shore. And the mouse goes and gets two elephants to push the whale back in the water. So it's about the friendship between a whale and a mouse. It's kind of a metaphor for something. That's lovely.

It's quite powerful. Amos and Boris. That's great. I read a book all about whales on my honeymoon. Yeah. Frankly, I think it was about 50% more book. on whales than I needed, but it was good. I also just bought a novel called Whalefall, a novel,

but I have not started again. So I'll keep you up there. There's always Movie Dick. I will say, Lizette, you know, looks remarkably like Hannah. She does. Yeah. Well, she's starting to learn noises. Not that you're not a very attractive man.

That's the, thank you. I'm just trying to say that like she's definitely got. Well, the difference, you know, I don't appear to have eyebrows. She does. so that's a step in the right direction. We now say to her, what is the cow says? And she'll go, mu. And we're like, yeah, moo.

She's a genius. She's a genius. Then clearly you know she's a genius. A duck says, she's going to quack. Yeah. And we're like, yeah, you're the smartest kid in the world. You're going to go to Stanford. I don't know what we're talking about anymore.

I love whales. Balls andro sucks. We've lost our producers over here. Yeah, we've lost the thread. She's not laughing. She's not laughing and shaking your head with her forehead in her hands, which is the sign. Which is a sign for wrap it up. Real quick before Ben's dinner.

So, Ben, I don't know if you're planning to watch the debate of the century coming up between Ron DeSantis and Governor Gavin Newsom on November 30th. But if you want to join the Crooked Media Group Thread, we'd love to have you. Me, Favs, Dan, Walby, in there. Why is this happening? Nobody knows. But we're going to be in the Cricket Discord. So if you want to join us, it's just a fun chat room. Go to cricket.com slash friends to learn more. Also, Pod Save of America has two more live shows left this year. You can catch us in El Cajon on December 7th and in San Jose on December 13th. We got great co-host Sam Sanders at Dissu, DeMessi. So go to crooked.com slash events to get tickets. And we'll be right back with Ben's interview. I'm very pleased to welcome to Pats of the World. Our guest, Julia Tuma, who is the communications director for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Unra. This is the major UN agency that has worked for decades in Palestine in Gaza,

and currently is hosting more than one million people in its shelters in southern Gaza. Juliet, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Ben. So I know you're joining us from Amman Jordan, but you were recently in Gaza until a couple days ago. Just to begin, our listeners have obviously been following things quite closely. But could you share with us just what it was like for you to be on the ground in Gaza and how you'd compare the conditions there now to, you know, previous life in Gaza,

even previous wars in Gaza? I don't think we can compare, Ben, for the simple reason, is that this war is unprecedented. And the level of destruction, the volume, the speed of this war, they've been phenomenal. Displacement of people, like you said, UNRWA is hosting right now more than 1 million people

in our shelters. We have to open 156 shelters across the Gaza Strip in the north, in the middle, in the south. I visited one of those shelters in the south in Khan Yunus and it was appalling. I mean, people were literally

on top of each other. We're hosting only in that shelter 30,000 people. This previously used to be a training center for UNRWA, a vocational training center, like a college for UNRWA. So conditions there were absolutely inhumane. People shared four square meter for five or six people, a whole family.

Some people who had moved early on during the war, they were not able to change their clothes because they left so quickly. There was not much clean water. People had one meal a day, if at all. And then there were people who arrived recently. So just a few days before I visited, those were the people who stayed until the very end, if you wish, in the north did not want to leave their homes, because who wants to leave their home.

And they were the ones who arrived already a very, very crowded shelter, and they slept on the concrete floor. So we're currently in this period of pause, and part of that agreement is that there's supposed to be more assistance getting in across the Rafa crossing into Gaza. What is your sense of what is actually getting in, how much more is needed to meet these humanitarian needs, how valuable is this time of pause

and yet how big is the challenge that remains in terms of the type of assistance that needs to get to people? It's most valuable for the people of Gaza in terms of the respite this pose has brought with it because, you see, I was there before the polls kicked in and it was constant, constant bombardment during the day, during the night, I was awoken myself to the sound of heavy bombardment,

and one could not help but think about the fact that people in Gaza have lived through this bombardment, these airstrikes, this brutal war for more than 50 days, right? So it certainly brought respite to people. Our colleagues and people in the shelter, they were very much anticipating and waiting anxiously for this post. So certainly that's very, very welcome. And the extension of the pause for another two days as of last night was very, very good. And yes, you're absolutely right in the sense that more aid, more humanitarian aid, has finally started trickling into Gaza, a significant increase in the supplies that have been coming in. We also seeing fuel coming in,

which was banned until just a few days before the pause. I mean, Andrea itself ran out of fuel, if you recall, and we had to bring our operations to a total halt because fuel was not coming into Gaza. So now we have that, which is very good. Some cooking gas is coming in. What is really, really needed is a boost to the private sector. So to open more crossing points that would bring in commercial supplies,

including via Karim Shalom, which was the crossing point that Gaza had with Israel before the war began. Because the private sector is completely dead, we were driving around, every single shop was closed, the pharmacies were closed, the banks were closed, there were a few vegetable stalls here and there. A few bakeries were open with very, very long queues. So humanitarian assistance cannot do it alone, and there needs to be a revival of the markets in Gaza. So I want to just kind of take stock for people of what has already happened in terms of the scale of the suffering. And I want to be sensitive to the fact that, you know, UNRWA itself has suffered significant losses in terms of personnel.

Can you describe to people just the colleagues that have already been lost, the type of people that have worked for UNRWA who've suffered or even died in this war? Yeah, we have 108 colleagues who were killed since the war began. This is the highest number that the United Nations has recorded since its establishment more than 70 years ago. It's a huge loss. It's unprecedented for the agency. We had staff killed in previous wars, but never at this level. So this is another proof that this war has been.

been very, very brutal. These were colleagues of ours who were mainly teachers. Some of them were school principals. Some were staff counselors. We had a doctor, a gynaecologist, Sireen, one of the very, very few health specialists in Gaza, one of the few gynaecologists in Gaza, in fact. We have support staff, drivers, warehouse workers, staff safety. Colleagues, many. Many, many of our colleagues were killed while they were at home. Many were killed with their families. We had one young colleague, in fact, the youngest colleague who was killed. She was in her early 20s.

She was physically disabled, and she was a software developer in one of our information technology centers. The agency is never going to be the same without these colleagues. Well, we're really sorry. I think there's not enough attention, frankly, on the sacrifices being made. I mean, I guess, and talk a little bit about Unra may be not well known to our listeners. I'm curious how the mission changes, because in normal times, which are not normal in Gaza ever, because it's been under blockade. But as your description of the colleagues you've lost demonstrates, you know, you're running schools, you're helping with. the healthcare infrastructure, you're really just helping with the basic services inside of Gaza. Whereas in a war, now you have this responsibility for these enormous amounts of shelter and just kind of basic needs. How does the organization kind of adjust to that mission in the context of a war? Like how would you describe what UNRWA is doing for the people of Gaza right now and in the days to come?

Before the war, UNRWA ran schools in Gaza. You see, we are the only United Nations agency that operates schools around the region and in the world, in fact. No other UN agency operates schools. And we have 700 schools across the region. Half a million boys and girls go to our schools. The vast majority of our students are, in fact, in Gaza, 300,000. of them. We sadly had to close our schools when the war began in Gaza on the 7th of October, and many of our schools, we turned them to be shelters. This is also another unique aspect of the work of

UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, in the sense that it's one of very, very few places in the world, and certainly the scale that a United Nations agency opens its facilities to, take in displaced people. And now we have more than 1 million people, a huge responsibility, like you said. And even those shelters are not protected. We had recorded 80 incidents where these facilities, including the shelters, have been hit during the war. So even the UN flag was violated.

Even the UN facilities were not spared during this brutal war. And so when these crises happen in Gaza and in other parts of the region, UNRWA shifts gears from providing basic services like health and education primarily to respond to emergencies. So we have the shelters in the case of the Gaza Strip. And with the shelters, of course, come the basic life-saving assistance. So that's food, clean water, cleaning material and protection. safety where we can. Our teams, regardless of the fact that they themselves have endured huge losses, whether it's the colleagues that we've just spoken about or family members and loved ones and

friends and neighbors, physical losses, many of our colleagues have been displaced themselves. They had to flee their homes. Our colleagues have been on the front lines, catering and providing to those families and those displaced people who need us most. when we say these are our unsung heroes, it's not just a gimmick or a good soundbite, it's the truth. And I had the absolute honor to reunite with many of them when I was in Gaza just a few days ago. And so one of the, there's obviously assuming the military operation resumes, we know that there'll be these terrible humanitarian needs and continued civilian suffering. I think one of the issues that it's hard to get your mind around is also just to say,

scale of people who are displaced and who may be left homeless by the scale of destruction of buildings in Gaza. Have you even begun at UNROT to begin to think through, you know, if the fighting does stop and we hope it, you know, obviously that there's a longer term ceasefire. But what is going to happen, you know, how many people do you think are going to be homeless or displaced? How do you begin to think about the resources that are going to be necessary to both meet immediate humanitarian needs, but also just provide shelter for people while Gaza hopefully is

rebuilt in a process that could take years, if not decades, given the scale of destruction. Look, Ben, the level of destruction is unbelievable. I just got some footage from a visit of our teams who finally managed to have a breakthrough and go to the north of the Gaza Strip. And they went to Jebelia, which is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza, one of eight, by the way. So they managed to get through to that camp. And they sent us this footage of, I mean, the place looks like it's been hit by an earthquake, except it's manmade. The level of destruction is just humongous.

And I've been in places like Iraq during the ISIS operation. I've been to Libya during the war. I served in Libya. I served in Syria for many years. I visited Aleppo after the war there. I've seen destruction. I was in southern Yemen, in Houdeda during heavy, heavy military operations. This is huge.

This is just driving through kilometers and kilometers of destruction. And I know Gaza and I know Gaza City. I've been many times before the war started. It's unrecognizable. And so I can't even. begin to assess the damage or what is going to be needed after the war is over. How much longer will people continue to live in our shelters? The impact that this has on schooling as an example because the vast majority of our shelters are schools.

So the impact on children and children's education, the impact on a whole generation of Palestinian children in Gaza. And the cost, the cost of all of this and who's going to be responsible to reconstruct. Is there going to be anything to reconstruct? And this is why it's absolutely fundamental that this pose, which is very welcome and very positive, turns into a longer-term humanitarian ceasefire for also to do assessments, to understand the level of destruction, to see, you know, can anything be fixed and how? And yes, it is very, very different than previous wars that Gaza has been through in the past 16 years alone.

They've been through five or six conflicts already. And obviously, if the military operation resumes in the South, this just gets much harder and the scale gets much worse. What is your message to the, you know, the relative, I used to say international community. I'm not sure that that's something that exists anymore. But to the United States, the Arab states, European governments, what would you like to see the relevant international players doing to both try to bring the border an end, but also to begin to address this humanitarian challenge in Gaza

and to try to offer some long-term hope for the people, especially the children of Gaza? To put more pressure on parties to the conflict to bring an end to this war, there are no winners in this war. And there's no, there shouldn't be any competition in suffering. There's been 14,000 people who were reported dead. We do know, according to reports and estimates that the vast majority, in fact, 70,000, 70% are women and children. According to a latest media report, the number of women and children killed in just over 50 days in Gaza is more than the number of women and children killed in Ukraine in two years of war.

Not, of course, comparing suffering to suffering, but just to give a context on the volume, the velocity. and the levels of destruction in only 50 days for people in Gaza. And it's also about pushing this region further away from any prospects for peace, for stability. The longer this war goes on the wider the gap between people is going to be, the farther away we are pushed from any solution, any process. respect, the deepening of this dehumanization that we're seeing or we've seen in the context of Gaza, the more isolated people are going to feel in Gaza. So the shorter this war, the better for everyone.

and the urgency to reach a humanitarian ceasefire as a first step after this pose is absolutely critical. And until then, the use of food, water, fuel as weapons of war should come to an end because for two whole weeks there was a hermetic siege on the Gaza Strip where nothing came in, not one drop of water, not one bag of flour, let alone fuel. And so for two weeks, people had nothing. And that actually posed additional challenge to UNRWA because we ran out of supplies very, very early on, because the number of people coming to our shelters continue to increase. we had to give supplies, we had to give whatever supplies we had in our warehouses,

but we ran out of supplies because we were not able to replenish. And so while this pose created an opportunity to bring in more trucks, it's by far not enough because before the war, 500 trucks used to come in, including commercial supplies and humanitarian supplies and fuel. Right now we're talking at best, and this is during the polls. at best we're talking about 200 close to 200 trucks so whatever efforts are put in place

they're very welcome they're not enough there needs to be much more and there needs to be commercial supplies coming to the markets well look thanks so much for giving us this overview and thank you for everything that not only you but obviously your colleagues are doing and we will continue following UNRWA's work

and hope that the pause does become the lasting ceasefire you're talking about. But thanks again for joining us and hope everybody can stay as safe as possible. So wish you all the best. Thanks so, so much, Ben. Thanks again to Julia Tuma for joining the show. Thanks to Anor, Harzine for checking in and telling us how you're doing and just, I don't know, being a badass reporter from the Gaza Strip. And thanks again to Alana Curiel for sharing that update on how Abigail's doing. Yeah, I have a plug, Tommy. Please. If you've made it this far in the podcast,

and you're Slovakian, I will be in Bratislava. What? What are you doing there? I'm going to the Impact Summit. What's that? We have some Obama Foundation leaders that are hosting like a summit on democracy in Bratislava.

I've not checked out Bratislava. I've chosen December to check it out. But please, by all means, if you are Slovak, if you are in Bratislava on Tuesday, come check it out. I don't think I've ever been to Slovakia. Neither of I. I actually readily agreed to this in part

because there's some wonderful young leaders that are helping to put this on, but also because I've been to Prague several times, but I've never been to Slovakia. What you always hear about Prague is that they avoided some of the worst bombing of World War II, which is why it's such a magnificent city. I don't know if that's true in Slovakia or if I'm just making that up. I, you know, from what I've seen, I think, you know, I'll report back. Okay, but I mean, Bratislava seems pretty, pretty lovely to me, but I will let you know. It'll be a little brisk, I think, this time of year.

Yeah, it's going to be real cold. But nonetheless, I will be there. Also, if you're still listening, you probably did listen to the climate change episode. But if you haven't, you go back and listen to you. You people tell us you want to hear climate. And then those downloads do like dog shit. So, you know, practice what you preach. Okay, that's it this week.

Sorry, we went long. We had a lot to talk about. But we'll talk to you next week. Pots Day of the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Reed Churlin. Our producer is Alona Minkowski, 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.