Pod Save the World - LIVE from J Street

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

Tommy and Ben record a special episode from D.C. at the national conference hosted by the progressive Jewish organization J Street. They run through news from around the globe and from the Middle East with Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times - and chat with two activists, Maisam Jaljuli and Mikhael Manekin, about progressive solutions for the Arab-Israeli peace process. The episode also includes selections from interviews Tommy and Ben recorded at the conference with five presidential candidates: Michael Bennet, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar and Bernie Sanders. Full videos for all interviews are available at jstreet.org.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Ben is not with me for this little intro piece of the show, but he was with me for the episode because we did a special live Pod Save the World taping on Saturday night at J. Street's National Conference in Washington, D.C. It was a ton of fun. Michelle Goldberg was our special guest host, and we also got to talk with some really cool Israeli and Palestinian activists. So it was a fascinating conversation. I really think you'll enjoy it. And it was a good time given all the ups and downs with the Israeli government formation process and the 2020 campaign heating up to talk about the U.S. Israel relationship and diplomacy generally. We also had the chance to sit down with a bunch of the Democrats running

for president. We spoke with Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennett, Beto O'Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg about their views on the U.S. Israeli relationship. And so we'll run some with that along with this episode. So I think you guys will love this one. It was a little more focused on a really important set of issues and a lot of fun. So here's the show. Hey, Jay Street. How are you doing? First of all I just want to say thank you, Jeremy, Jess, I'm me, the whole Jay Street team. What you guys have built in a short period of time is truly amazing and you should be incredibly proud of that work. And thank you to all the people that decide to spend a weekend talking about foreign policy and diplomacy. It really matters that you care and are in disengaged. So, you know, credit to you

guys for showing up. This is our second ever live Pods of the World taping, and I just first want to introduce and thank our guest host who needs no introduction. She's a Pulitzer Prize winner, an incredible columnist for The New York Times, the co-host of The Argument, a fantastic podcast that you should all check out. Michelle Goldberg. And as always, former Deputy National Security Advisor to Barack Obama and chief protagonist in all right-wing fever dreams

involving foreign diplomacy, Ben Rhodes. I'm just putting this on my lap. You're going to see how the sausage is made when we do the show. Later in the show, we'll be joined by two amazing activists. Mysam Jijuli and Mikhail Manikin. You're going to love them.

We've been hanging out backstage for the last half an hour. But before we get to a conversation about the U.S. Israeli, relationship and a progressive foreign policy platform. We have to talk about a little breaking news because the news won't stop breaking us. Let's start with impeachment. So Watergate, oh, I'll clap for that. Watergate had deep throat. A 2019 star impeachment witness may end up being Rudy Giuliani's butt. Here's a quick recap of the week. So this week alone we heard from the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who confirmed in 15,000.

single-spaced pages of excruciating detail, how President Trump blocked security A to Ukraine in an effort to get dirt on Joe Biden, and to find Hillary Clinton's server, which he seems to think is hiding out in Ukraine like Whitey Bulger or Osama bin Laden. It's good that the White House cybersecurity czar doesn't know what the cloud is.

It's compelling. Lacking any substantive response to this testimony, sentient axe body spray canister and Congressman Matt Geitz led a group of congressmen directly from the fraternity mixer to the House Intelligence Committee's secure room to

try to shut down the impeachment process. We here in Washington are waiting to see whether the former national security advisor John Bolton will be testifying and Rudy Giuliani is deciding who to butt dial next. So, we laugh at these clowns to stay sane

but Michelle, you recently traveled to Ukraine to hear directly from activists about the ways in which Rudy and Donald Trump's actions are harming their anti-corruption work. Can you tell us a bit about that trip? Right. So we can all say Rudy Giuliani and everyone laughs and everyone knows that he's a clown. But if you're in Ukraine, you don't necessarily know that the president's personal lawyer is not someone to be taken seriously. And you can't even really afford to not take him seriously

because, you know, Ukrainians have so much writing on American support. So I did a couple of pieces in Ukraine. But the one, I guess that meant the most to me, was, you know, when Giuliani went over there and started claiming that part of the conspiracy theory, and you can't really keep it all straight because it's not meant to be totally coherent, is that Paul Manafort was framed, right, which, you know, Paul Manafort's in prison for the money that he took out of Ukraine. But the idea is that you remember when they found the black ledger during Donald Trump's presidential campaign, when anti-corruption activists in Ukraine, found this ledger from Yanukovych's regime that just listed all these payments to various people.

And I think it listed $13 million to Manafort. Manafort had to leave the Trump campaign as a result. So part of Giuliani's conspiracy theory, and not just Giuliani, I mean, it's also a Russian conspiracy theory. A lot of people are pushing this is that this ledger was fake and that it was faked by kind of puppets of George Soros. And so Giuliani has been in Ukraine very specifically smearing anti-corruption activists and journalists. You know, one of the most famous investigative journalists in the country was actually advising the new president until Giuliani. Because he had – one of those strangest things about Ukraine, and I've never seen this anywhere else, is how many journalists go into government, right? And a lot of them stay journalists while they're in government, which I think is fascinating.

Like you can be an investigative journalist and in parliament at the same time. Wow. So that's true of this guy I'm talking about, Sergei Lyshenko. So he was advising the new president until all of a sudden Giuliani comes there and says that he's, you know, anti-American, that he's tried to take down Trump by faking this black ledger. all of a sudden he becomes a sort of toxic figure in Ukrainian politics. And the reason that he specifically was singled out is because, you know, a lot of the Ukrainians who are whispering to Giuliani are these corrupt figures with their own agenda. So you could imagine why a super corrupt prosecutor in Ukraine would have a grudge

against one of the most famous anti-corruption activists in the country, right? So the two names that are hard to keep straight are Yuri Lutsenko, who's bad and Sergei Lyshenko who's good. But you have basically Yuri Lutsenko telling and the other guy Shilkin, but both of them telling Giuliani that like they're picking out their personal enemies in Ukrainian society and saying these are the guys who tried to frame Paul Manafort and tried to torpedo Trump's election. And it has, it's both, it's totally disconcerting for them.

You know, Sergio Lyshenko said to me, you know, I would expect I'm used to the mob coming after me. I'm used to like corrupt oligarchs coming after me. I'm used to, I'm not used to kind of United States officials coming after me. Yeah, no, I bet. Meanwhile, they've been at war with Russian separatists for several years.

13,000 Ukrainians have lost their lives in the fighting. It's an ongoing hot war, your colleague at the New York Times detailed really compellingly the stakes for these individuals. But then I noticed you raised your hand as a Soros plant. Do you have anything you want to get off your chest?

I'm sorry I did that because that'll turn up somewhere, I'm sure. No, I mean, look, I think part of what we have to recognize when we look at this, because you're right, it's easy to laugh at the Brooks Brothers Riot at the House Intelligence Committee and the kind of insane conspiracy theorizing emanating from the Donald Trump Twitter feed. But as you point out, like this is a real country that is in the center of a major geopolitical controversy. They've been invaded by a larger neighbor that has annexed already a portion of their territory, has been literally fueling a war that has killed 13,000 people. And when Donald Trump looks at that country, the only thing he sees is his own political

interest. And he's willing to corrupt every lever of U.S. foreign policy. So as someone who worked in the White House, you know, what do you have? in terms of the tools of U.S. farm policy. You have assistance, and they basically turned critical military assistance that the Ukrainian government depends upon into a tool to get them to investigate their opponents. You have the possibility of a meeting

with the President of the United States or other high-ranking U.S. officials, and they held out those meetings as leverage to get them to prosecute or pursue their political opponents. And so literally, they've turned, the entire foreign policy of the United States of America into a vehicle to validate really just crazy conspiracy theories, right? And I don't think we fully can appreciate the consequences of that

because we're in our political drama here, but the rest of the world is just looking at that and saying, well, this is all these people now care about. One place where the stakes of the Trump foreign policy, decision making has been quite clear, has been in Northeastern Syria. So it's been a tragic and, you know, profoundly confusing, I would say, a couple of weeks. So on October 13th, President Trump decided to withdraw our troops from northern Syria, and he did so in such a rush fashion that we were bombing our own equipment with F-15s on the way out so that it wouldn't fall into the hands of ISIS or others. Now we are apparently sending troops back into northern Syria to protect the oil fields in the region. If only there had been

some way to know in advance that there was oil or oil fields in that area. that's the problem with fossil fuels. They just pop up like that, you know? And there's no time to plan. So, Bashar al-Assad got a whole bunch of territory back. Russia further cements its grip in the region. Prime Minister Erdogan is openly talking about ethnic cleansing. So it's pretty dire stuff.

Michelle, you know, you interviewed these folks in Ukraine. You hear this from our European allies. Our friends in Israel are understandably confused as well by these wild foreign policy swings. your colleague of the Times, David Halfinger, wrote a piece where he quoted a bunch of folks in Israel, including former Netanyahu aides, who are worried that if Trump could abandon the Kurds, Israel could be next. How damaging do you think that kind of sentiment is to America's standing, our ability to get things done, or work with others? Well, I mean, it's obviously you would be crazy to kind of stake your fortunes on the support of the Americans, right? That would be madness. I would be a little bit surprised. It's hard for me to think of a scenario in which Trump abandons Israel

just because he doesn't see the Kurds as kind of doing that much for him, right? Whereas he sees his relationship with Israel, I think, as being pretty productive for him. You know, certainly the current government of Israel is extremely obsequious to him. So, I mean, on the one, I can't imagine any kind of, country can't predict what Donald Trump's going to do and kind of can't drop their own strategic plans with any sort of certainty about leadership from the United States. But I actually, I think there's a few countries that probably can count on Donald Trump's continuing support, you know,

Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia. Right. Yeah. Yeah, if I were to summarize, well put, well said, I mean, if you're to summarize the Trump worldview, right? It's like, if Obama did it, it's bad. If you're an authoritarian, you're cool. If you lead a democracy or a power. powerful woman like Angela Merkel, I'm going to be a jerk to you. And then you're right, they carve off little bits that are politically beneficial, mostly in Florida. Well, you know, you said something interesting, right? So the one thing that I think Israel probably could do that would maybe undermine this relationship, and I hate to say it, is to elect a woman. I think when you look at this, though, you know, it's part of a pattern that is problematic.

That's a gentle word. But, you know, because you take the fact that we've pulled out of all these international agreements, right? Which already erodes the capacity of other nations to trust us, because it's not just you pulled out of the Obama agreements, you know, Paris, the Iran deal, but, you know, arms control treaties and other things. But then the Kurds, the reason the Kurdish issue is so important, the whole reason that we initiated this model in the Obama administration is that the American people were no longer going to support large ground operations, you know, large numbers of U.S. troops fighting terrorists. After the Iraq War, that was just not an option.

And we had a terrorist organization, ISIS, that we had to deal with. And so what did we do? We put together this totally kind of new model where you had an American-led air campaign, then you had American intelligence, a small number of American special forces, but we went and enlisted a ground force for this effort. And the Kurds lost 11,000 people fighting essentially as our ground force,

putting aside the complete moral betrayal, what's going to happen the next time America needs people to help us fight terrorism? And part of the issue, and this is why groups like this are so important, the credibility hole that we have to get out of, it's not just the fact that Donald Trump is President of the United States. It's the fact that we elected Donald Trump, the President of the United States, right? And so, like, that means, you know, maybe they'll do it again, right?

And so it'll take a long time, I think, to restore the capacity of other nations to trust us or groups like the Kurds who we want to be our allies in a fight like this to trust us. That, to me, is the bigger issue. Yeah. So consensus winners of this decision Trump made in Syria seem to be Assad, the Russians, Turkey, and Iran. I know it's early, but those are not. Israel's best friends, right, shall we say that. Do you have a sense of what this new normal might mean for Israel's security?

Well, yeah, it's not good. And the problem, I mean, because here's the, if you looked at the way in which the Syrian Civil War was kind of coming to some form of an end, is, you know, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers had kind of consolidated this level of control over the coastal areas, where most of the population is. But the United States really was, you know, the key player in northern and eastern Syria in terms of an external player with the Kurdish allies and with some Syrian Arabs who cooperated

with us. And so therefore, we were at the table, right? And so in discussions about how is power going to be shared in the future, how are we going to deal with the humanitarian situation, how we're going to deal with the repatriation of refugees, the United States was going to have to have to be a country. the United States was going to have a voice in those negotiations. And now we've completely vacated that role. We're not at that table.

That table is now Vladimir Putin and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Taiyib Erdogan, right? And that's not what Israel would want. Where are we? We're at some small oil field that Donald Trump figured out existed in eastern Syria, mainly because there was like, clearly some meeting at the Pentagon where they're like, how can we convince Trump to keep some troops in Syria?

Yeah, yeah. Let's point out the fact to him that there's an oil field there. And he loves to say, let's get the oil. Yeah, Michelle, there was a background quote in the Washington Post story about this, where basically the Pentagon was bragging that they tricked him. Do you get a lot of calls from sources bragging that they tricked the President of the United States?

Is that common? My sources are not the people who are in a position to trick the president. But I mean, I feel like that's the obvious modus operandi right now. I mean, Don Kelly. gave this interview, was it today or yesterday, where he talked about how he told Donald Trump, you know, when you replace me, you need to get someone who's not a yes man, otherwise you're going to get impeached, right? And so the implication is that either you get someone who will stop you

from doing what you want to do or you're going to commit crimes, right? Or you're, so that's kind of the entire government. Well, you had, you know, you had a layer of people whose entire function in government was kind of managing Donald Trump, you know, diverting him, subverting his will. And as those people have been hollowed out, you see sort of more and more rolling disasters. But, you know, I just can't resist. If you listen to the podcast, you know, I have a particular set of views about these people who held themselves out as these grownups, right? I mean, so we've talked about, you know, Jim Mattis, who can't criticize the sitting president as he's on his leadership book tour.

John Kelly was a yes man for the family separation policy at the border. John Kelly was a yes man on a lot of things, right? Just because he didn't happen to be sitting down the hall while Rudy Giuliani was cooking up this particular scheme doesn't mean that a lot of stuff wasn't happening there when he was the chief of staff. We're skipping through a little bit because we've got a lot to cover.

But so let's talk about the Israeli government formation for a minute. So our friends in Israel have gone through two elections. this year with no resolution. I cannot imagine how frustrating that is. Both essentially have ended in a tie between Prime Minister Bibi Danyahu and former Israeli Army Chief Benny Gans's Blue and White Party. Netanyahu was unable to form a governing coalition,

so now Benny Gans says about a month to try. Question for both of you, but I'd love to start with you, Michelle. I'm not going to ask anyone to predict what's going to happen in Israel, because, boy, was I bad at doing that when it came to American politics in 2016. But if we think Gantz forms a government, what might change? I mean, how should we think about a post-Netanyahu political world?

Well, so what some of my Israeli friends have said, including just back there just now, right, is that, you know, Benny Gans is not that great from the perspective of your average member of J Street, right? He's certainly better than Netanyahu, but he also says he wants to, you know, annex the Jordan Valley, right? He also, you know, as a matter of fact, he kind of blames Netanyahu for stealing the idea from him. And so in terms of, you know, foreign policy, in terms of a two-state solution, it's not clear that he would be that much better.

But I guess, well, he would probably, and this is not a high bar, be less overtly corrupt, right? And, you know, and then the thing that's happening within Israel is not unlike the thing that's happening in the United States. It's happening in so many of these democracies that have, you know, fall into authoritarian. leaders, which is that their leaders are kind of waging war on civil society. So if you can roll that back, then you can hopefully have, you know, kind of room for a genuinely, you know, a genuinely anti-occupation politics to grow. And I think that's, look, that's the key point here, which is that, you know, over the, you know, and I saw this, I mean, one of the great what us have,

history, right, is that there was this election in 2009, you know, where Zippy Livni got more votes but couldn't form a coalition, and then Netanyahu becomes the prime minister. And obviously the beginning of a very warm relationship with Barack Obama over the next eight years. And, but what I saw, too, though, is that the politics in Israel were getting more and more kind of poisonous. And you saw this influence of Netanyahu being exerted over the media. And you saw every election season, the rhetoric emanating from Nanyahu becoming more and more

extreme, if ever there was a fork in the road and the choice to make, it moved to the right. And the equilibrium of Israeli politics moved further and further to the right. But it also kind of just became something that revolved around his personality.

We're dealing with something very similar in the United States now, obviously with Trump. And I don't think you can discount the value. I mean, Donald Trump and BB Netanyahu have sent a lot of toxins, toxins, a lot of toxins into the body politic of their respective countries. And so while it doesn't mean every problem is going to be solved as Beneghant's next prime minister, I do think just the capacity to start over again in terms of the political debate inside of Israel and the capacity to get beyond the psychodrama. You know,

So with Nanyahu, it's always their enemies here. And look, it's not like Israeli politics is this kind of gentle place. It's always been rollicking, right? But I don't think we can overestimate the importance of if you want to deal with the problems that people in this room care about, like, we have to move on here, right? And so just the step of saying we're going to get beyond Netanyahu, I think would be very, very important and constructive. In the same way that getting into Trump is going to solve all of our problems, but it's

certainly a necessary step. The 20 elections coming up. I think it's safe to assume it's going to be, as bad as you think it's going to be, it's going to be worse. And Israel will be one of the many political footballs kicked around. Trump so far has tried to argue that being a Democrat

is somehow antithetical to the concept of Judaism, which is an interesting, very cool, very not dangerous thing to argue. You guys may have heard of a pushpole before. So a push poll is when you pretend to call voters as if you're doing an opinion survey, but your actual goal is to say awful things about an opponent or an issue in an effort to influence that individual's opinion. It's very effective and very unethical.

We actually, the crack team at Crooked Media, got our hands on a Republican push poll about Democrats in Israel. So we're going to give it a listen. Hey, this is John. Hi, my name is Sarah, and I'm contacting you about some important developments in the relationship between America and our greatest ally in the Middle East Israel. Do you care about Israel and America's relationship to that country? Yes. Great. Do you have a moment to answer a few questions?

I thought you were postmates. Did you know that, according to the president of the United States, any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty? I mean, I know he tweeted that, but I don't... Do you agree or disagree? I disagree. According to a well-respected U.S. Senator, House Democrats hate Israel and hate our own country. Wait, what's Senator?

It's not important. It was Lindsay Graham. It might have been. Respected. Do you support House Democrats despite their showing such hostility to Israel, a democracy, and our greatest ally in the region? Or do you support the democratic view that Israel can, and I quote, eat it? You can't just say something as a quote.

Who said Israel should eat it? Do you believe that Democrats and Iran, who together have formed the anti-Israel supergroup Barack Medinajad should be stopped from selling off the Golan Heights to the highest bidder? Okay. I'm pretty sure that's not happening. I think this is a pushpole. No, it isn't. Yeah, it is.

Fine. Fine, it is. It's a push pole. All day I call senior citizens in places like Scottsdale and Boynton Beach and terrify them. Yesterday, a woman cried. And you wanted more from your life. Agree or disagree. Agree.

And it's not only possible but necessary to support Israel while criticizing its failures because to believe in a Jewish state is to believe in a state that lives up to the moral and humanitarian values at the core of Judaism itself, Even if that might not fit on a bumper sticker and mainly to unfair and partisan attacks, if you make the mistake of telling the truth with all the nuance and everything that requires. I should have gone to law school. So obviously that was fake news, but I'd like to thank Nar Malconian and John Lovett from our team

for lending us their acting chops. But that could be real. Michelle, can you help us prepare ourselves for the attacks that may be made under the guise of supporting Israel? How worried are you about how nasty this campaign is going to get? Well, there's no bottom to how nasty is going to get. To me, one of the things that makes me sometimes think that, you know, contrary to Jewish theology, there is a hell and we are in it, is that not only are, not only are the fascists back, but the fascists are back and they're accusing the Jews of anti-Semitism, right? I mean, like, so you see this like, like, like,

Like, you know, Sebastian Gorka, Sebastian Gorka's, you know, a lifetime member of this Hungarian not-de-line group is going around calling all these Jewish Democrats anti-Semites because of their opposition to Israel. And it works a little bit. Like he singled out this one Elizabeth Warren staffer. And I was talking to a friend of mine and he was saying that, you know, his mom, who I think is, you know, kind of relatively well-informed but not super news obsessive, that she heard some. that there's an anti-Semite on Elizabeth Warren's campaign, right? An anti-Semite named Max Berger. And so, but that's this, but that's, I think, where we are.

You have this, it's happening, it happens over and over again. It's so bizarre. There was this one group, this one evangelical group that accused the ADL of anti-Semitism because the ADL had criticized something that Trump's, you know, one of Trump's kind of white nationalist's, And so I think you know, so that's what we're going to be up against and I really, really hope. And it's what makes that kind of rhetoric possible has been the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Right? Because only if those two things are the same can a, can a Gentile accuse a Jew of anti-Semitism because the Jew is to the left of them on Israel. And so I think you have to kind of disentangle that in order to inoculate against these kind of attacks. Yes.

Thank you, Facebook, for enabling this. So, yeah, Ben, Trump literally said, if you vote for Democrat, you're being disloyal to the Jewish people and disloyal to Israel, because apparently he kind of understands the dual loyalty trope, but not well enough to avoid it. So, like, obviously, he's shameless. He's going to lie, he's going to say whatever. But, you know, to Michelle's point, I mean,

how do you think progressives should or can criticize Israeli government policies without making people in Israel feel singled out unfairly? Well, yeah, first of all, Trump gave us kind of a, you know, after all of the, I think at times, obviously, either willfully disinformed debates about various comments made by Democratic members of the House, it was very useful of Donald Trump to literally show us exactly what the problem is with accusations of dual loyalty. I mean, that's exactly what they

were criticizing members of the House, Ilhan Omar in particular for. But, you know, I think there's a couple ways to answer this. I mean, one is, you know, and I kind of alluded to it earlier, frankly, which is that a lot of the things I would be concerned about in Israel, like I'm even more concerned about them in the United States. This is not a matter of signaling out Israel. It's a matter of having a set of principles. But I also think the really important thing to try to do is to frame what your positive vision is.

Instead of it just being about, you know, thus far, we've been pretty negative. But I believe that progressives have a vision for this country in the United States that is a much more inclusive and prosperous country and much more secure country. And I also think that what we want for Israel is not something that is punitive.

It's not about just heaping criticism on Israel. It's about the fact that we believe that a progressive vision of the U.S.-Israel relationship and a progressive vision of the future of Israel is going to be better for Israel. Right? So it's, you know, and this is not about wanting to make them, you know, the foil for Democrats.

It's about the fact that we believe, that a two-state solution is in Israel's interest. We believe that an Israel that can count on a progressive partner in the United States to make a case for an Israel that we want to stand behind because it's not engaged in certain policies that are very difficult to defend. That is in the interest of the United States-Israel relationship. So I think that constantly you have to make sure that you're framing not just your criticism of current Israeli policy, but why you believe that there's a better future for both the United States and Israel in this relationship. Well put.

Let's talk about some of the Democratic candidates and where they may or may not differ on policy towards Israel. And unfortunately, a lot of this is quite literally punitive. I mean, so Mayor Pete, who will be here this weekend, has criticized the Israeli human rights record and said that his president he wouldn't let U.S. taxpayer dollars be used to annex the West Bank, which suggests some sort of conditioning of aid. Elizabeth Warren has suggested that freezing aid is on the table as a possible pressure point to stop settlement construction. Bernie Sanders has talked about leveraging USA and what he calls racist policies by Netanyahu, but he doesn't, I don't think, gotten that much more specific.

Beto O'Rourke is called B.B. A racist and has generally talked about restricting the way USA can be used. I'd say that Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Corey Booker, a fairly traditional democratic opinions. Question for both of you, how big or important to you? you think those distinctions are? I mean, to me, I actually think Bernie, you can kind of single out Bernie in a certain way, because Bernie's position, and I don't think any of the other candidates have articulated this,

is that the threat that the world faces right now is that there's an axis of authoritarianism, and he puts BB in it, right? And so he kind of sees, you know, kind of authoritarianism in the United States, in Turkey, in, you know, all of these kind of backsliding countries, and he sees Israel in that context, whereas then you have these candidates kind of in the middle who still talk about Israel in the very traditional way as our most important security partner in the Middle East

and still kind of praise it in the most traditional ways, but are willing to tipto over on some sort of aid conditionality, right? And with Pete, it's pretty specific. It's not even about settlements, right? It's just about U.S. funding for annexation. What I think is interesting is that this is going to be, I could be wrong, but I think that this is going to be the first presidential primary where some candidates will pay a price for being too pro-Israel, right? And that was never a thing before. And that could potentially change politics if there's a price to be paid for being too far right as well as to being too far left.

Do you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I think, and the first of all, you know, I think it's time for this kind of conversation. I mean, the Israeli government, you know, the current Prime Minister of Israel is, like, actively opposed the Democratic Party himself in the last couple elections. You're not a fan? Well, I mean, you know, he's not a fan. Yeah, fair enough. But I think Michelle said something important, which is that, you know, part of what this is about is there's like the old talking. points, you know, and like we could all recite them from memory, right, you know, about how do you talk about this? There's a frame within which politicians in the United States

just talk about Israel. Like there's the first page in the debate preparation document, you know, the first page that is in their heads in their interviews, and the fact is it's out of date. I mean, because, like, just take two-state solution, you still have politicians. You still have politicians, in this country who are like programmed to talk about the two-state solution as if it's something that the Israeli Prime Minister is committed to and they haven't even updated it for the fact that he has said it will not happen on his watch and that he has said that he wants to annex the West Bank and so you can't go around and say that you know unconditional support for Israel and I remain very committed to a two-state solution those two things don't match up and so when I look at the you know, when I look at the candidates, what I see is there are a set of candidates who are

still operating within kind of the traditional frame. They're still talking about this in the same way. And then there are candidates who are trying to find what is the new way to talk about this issue. And certainly Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, and interestingly, Buttigieg earlier in the primary Beto, you know, have been looking for that, that language of how can I articulate support for Israel while recognizing that we're in a new reality here. It's a new reality to have a government in Israel that is openly committed to the annexation of the West Bank. I think there's another thing happening that's really important here, though, which is bigger than Israel, and it gets to your previous question, which is that the central question kind of in our time right now

is this authoritarian trend that we see happening around the world. And I think it makes it incumbent upon the next president to try to be more consistent in terms of how do we support our values around the world. That I no longer feel comfortable giving this kind of open spigot of military assistance to a government like the government of Saudi Arabia that is chopping up journalists and propagating a famine in Yemen. Right? And it gets your point of like, are you singling out Israel? No, I would not want to give assistance that is about a certain kind of treatment of the Palestinians that I wouldn't want

to see anybody treated that way anywhere in the world, right? And so it's a matter about, it's a matter of having consistency. And now the incredibly complicated thing about the U.S.-Israel aid relationship is how do you then examine that, right? Because which you're not, I don't think anybody saying, like, let's just stop all assistance. We're saying, like, how do we make sure that we're not aiding and abetting the most extreme policies that are doing the most extreme damage to the prospect of there being any possibility for self-determination and dignity for Palestinians? But I think part of this has to be seen through a frame of we have to, as Americans,

be more consistent in our foreign policy around our own principles. Because in this world, a world of this kind of mounting authoritarianism around the world, that is profoundly in our interest. We have to get to that place where we can defend with pride what we are doing in terms of our relationships and our assistance relationships around the world. Well said.

Okay, when we come back, we'll be joined by Maasam Ja'Ijuli and Mikhail Manikin. Okay, I would like to welcome MySam Jajuli and Mikhail Manikin to the stage. Mysam is a member of the national leadership of standing together, and Mikhail is the director of the Alliance Fellowship. Please give it up for them.

So we all just hung out backstage for about 45 minutes and nobody stopped talking the whole time. So I'm going to ask one question, which I assume will be it to you guys, and we'll just go from there. So you just went through two elections. Sorry about that. You must be exhausted. Really excited for a third, I bet. When it comes to effective activism, what approaches worked, what didn't, and how worried are you about a potential third election? Okay, that's a 45-minute question.

There you go. Well, I would say what worked probably most between the two elections is get out the vote campaigns for Palestinian citizens of Israel. So we have 20% of our, yeah, 20% of thanks. I wasn't really connected to it, but yeah. So I would say 20% of our voter base are Palestinian citizens of Israel and our, very relevant to what it means to be a progressive in Israel. And the vote went up from 50%. I know these numbers are very high compared to American standards,

but they're low compared to Jewish-Israeli standards. So Jewish-Israeli's vote at around 70%. And in the April election, Palestinian citizens of Israel voted at 50%. So there was a raise from 50% to 60%. And that really had a huge effect, both on how the elections turned out, but also on progressive language,

what it means to be a progressive in Israel? I know. Yes, I think, yeah, this is the most important thing. And if I take the election on April and the last election, I think that the key word was influence. Influence. Do I, as a voter, can influence politics in Israel, or I cannot influence political in Israel?

And I think that the Palestinian-Israeli citizens really understood in these three months that they are influence. I think that the declaration of Aiman Oedi, that we are willing to sit in a coalition, was very crucial. And people understood that they may have influence. And you know what?

I think the other parties, especially Kachol, Lavan, blue and white, learned a listen from the April election. They learned a listen, you know, to, let's say, not attack the Palestinian, the Israeli citizens, representative in the Knesset, not attack the Palestinian Israeli citizen community in Israel, and that worked. I mean, one of the things that's interesting about watching this play out, when we were talking backstage, and I hate to invoke my mother.

But I was saying that, like, you know, my mother's like, you know, an American Jew who follows these issues, and it was like, well, Israel used to be Golda Meir, and then it was Yitzhak Rabin, and now it's Bibi Netanyahu and you don't see, you know, as the parties a fracture, right? You know, it used to be, oh, it was Labor and Lucude. And, you know, I know what team I'm on in that equation, right? But now it's such a fractured landscape. And it's like every election there's some different coalition forming. We're here in a room of, you know, American progressive, you know,

supporters of Israel and supporters of peace. What is it do you think Americans need to understand about what the Israeli left is today? And how that is different than it was 20 years ago? You know, what is the Israeli left? If we can no longer identify it with one political party or one or two leaders, who everybody knows their name, as activists, as people trying to build this movement,

how would you describe who the left is, who the parties are and where you see the future of progressive politics in Israel emanating from in addition to what you just said about the get out the vote effort. You want me to start? Okay. Actually, I would have said that, you know, when we think about the left in Israel,

it's time to think about Jews and Palestinian-Israeli citizens. Or you can use the term Arab Israelis. You know, till now, tell now people, when they thought about the left, they never took into consideration, 20% of the population in Israel, the Palestinian-Israeli citizens, and it's time to change it. We are a part of the left,

and 70% of our citizens, of our population, represent themselves as leftist. And you know what? They're never been taken into consideration. They were taken into consideration, you know, when we need them for Akual, you know, for supporting, coalition, not being in a coalition, and it was once in the

Robin government back in the 90s, and this should be changed. We are leftists, 70% of us say that they are leftist, and we should be a part of the left, not alliance to the left, a part of the left. Thank you. And you know, and when I, you said the left 20 years ago, I have a years ago, I have no nostalgia for that lift. Really? I really don't have any nostalgia.

I think that we have more liftist people now than we did back there. I think a lot of people from the Labour Party 20 years ago are much more right wing than the Labour Party now. And yeah, I think that we are building a new platform for progressives left in Israel. And yes, it's not the things that we used to be. This will be interesting, you know, to see how it's going to develop. And which issues would, you know, we talk about the left. What are the animating issues to that participation and that change?

Yeah, I mean, I think there are, I mean, definitely talking from sort of like the Jewish Zionist left side. There are a lot of issues. I mean, obviously security is a big issue and the identity of the country, which is maybe a bit more vague, but probably the, the central issue of sort of how do you imagine Israel is an issue that the left cares about. But you know, Israel is a place where people live and have housing concerns and have economic concerns

and have concerns on education and in health and it's not just a battle of sort of like Jewish ideas. They're actually sort of very basic life issues which people are dealing with church and state issues, which played out very big in the last election. And I wanna echo, In that sense, what Mysam said from sort of a Zionist left side, that while it's true that the country is more fragmented

than it was in the past, I think there's definitely in our generation, there's a search for coherency that wasn't in the past, meaning what does it mean to be a progressive, and that forces you to be a progressive on many issues. And that's an issue that sometimes doesn't get translated to an American audience. I mean, ultimately, if we're interested,

interested in democratic reform in Israel, even radical democratic reform in Israel, you're going to need to find people to do that. And that means those political alliances need to start being created in a more serious way, and not just sort of bypass that to a conversation about this is bad because of X and this is bad because of Y, which is important, but we also need to talk about who are the political actors who are going to fix things. I just want to add to this that we need to mobilize people. We are really the left, I think, ignored the people in the

field. You know, they ignore the daily life of the people and this, that what we need to do our best in order to convince people that our way and our vision is the right vision. And when I say lift, I say left peace ending the occupation, equality and social justice. This is what is the left should be about. And I think that nowadays we have also platforms, political platforms, not party platforms, who are trying to mobilize people toward this vision. I'm a part of standing together, Omdimbi Akad, which is really doing this job in the field in Israel. And I think that our job is to increase the participation of people, to mobilize people, to struggle, because the struggle will give us hope to change the reality in Israel.

We should not wait for politicians. We should do it. So can I ask, I want to ask you guys, because I mean, the right in America and the right in Israel are very good at working together. What could, you know, either the left in America or the Democratic Party in America do to buttress what you're trying to do? Well, first of all, I think it's understanding that it's also has to be a conversation about politics and power, meaning the relationship ultimately is a political relationship. I think liberals and progressives on both side like to imagine a time which never really existed of a bipartisan relationship between both side

and there's like we need to go back to this bipartisanship and I actually don't want to go back to this bipartisanship I want to work with progressives. And I think understanding, I feel I have a great sense of admiration and relationship with Jewish progressives and non-Jewish progressives in the U.S. I'm interested in learning. Sometimes we're interested in teaching. We're interested in having a

conversation, but making sure that that's a conversation on politics. So in a way, we actually need to politicize ourselves more on this relationship and get out of this conversation, which sees politics as something which is problematic or fearful or something that we want to stay away from. So to that end, a bunch of Democrats who want to be president are coming to this conference, what do you want to hear from them when it comes to U.S. policy towards Israel or support for the PA or Middle East peace? Like, whatever you want. What should we ask them? We need some help. We have to figure out some questions. Yo, me as a Palestinian, Israeli citizens, I have so many questions to ask them because I really never understand the American politics

toward Israel. For me, it seems to be, you know, that this is, it was a one-way, you know, relationship, a one-way relationship which supports Israel and new, anything that Israel does, it has the support for Democrats and also Republicans. But for me, I all the time say, why they don't come to us, why they don't come to ask us what is to be to live in Israel, you know, as also as a minority, as a big minority, 20% of the population, does it, you know the relationship between we are a part of the israeli society and you know we will never been there so i would have want to see more engagement to um to the real life in israel not only the high politics i don't want the candidates to come you know with a list that their advisors wrote for them

i want them to learn more and to be engaged to you know to a wider range of israelis and yeah this is um and then i will ask a question first of all Let them learn more about it. I want to add, I mean, yeah, it's maybe a bit more sort of wonky, but I think the issue of two states is not enough, meaning saying we want two states means so many different things to so many different candidates and so many different people. I mean, it's been said by anywhere from Netanyahu

and to the left of that, that the question of frameworks and the question of what does that actually entail And are we talking about a full end to the occupation or a more moderate sort of control over the Palestinian people? I think it's really important for Democrats to speak about in a more serious way, especially now when the conversation in Israel, maybe sadly by the center, is like presenting this version of, well, we're ending the occupation, but we're not really. I think Democrats need to give a stronger line on the two-state issue, and definitely in terms of the political frameworks of that. And I would also add that, and this relates to the last point, that Israeli progressives and liberals need to be held accountable to Democrats,

and Democrats need to be held accountable to Israelis, to Israeli progressives. And it's not enough for me that they criticize Netanyahu. I actually want them to say what they'll be working on as an opposition or as an alternative to Netanyahu. I think that, you know, that's important. Well, one of the, I mean, you mentioned the two-state, the language around the two-state solution, which I was saying before you guys came out is kind of routinized in a way that it means nothing. It's just something that people say to sound like, you know, they're reasonable. And what I was struck by, too, is, you know, I feel like, you know, I feel like, you know,

like in the Obama administration, we should have been clearer about our own positions in terms of final status issues, for instance, much earlier. I mean, John Kerry gave his speech towards the very end of the administration in which he laid out our positions on not just security and territory, but Jerusalem and refugees as well.

And part of this is because, you know, when Obama, you know, because you get attacked, Obama, what he gave a speech in which he just put out positions in 2011 on just borders and security, which were the widely known U.S. negotiating positions dating all the way back to Bill Clinton. It was, first of all, Bibi Nanyahu came to the Oval Office and lectured him, completely mischaracterized what he'd said. He said it was just 67 lines, ignored the fact that there could be any swaps.

Do you remember the little, like, so Obama does that meeting with Nanyahu, these Israeli team leaves, we come in to prep before the press came in? Do you remember the little, like, chat we had with him? He's like, how'd you think that went? You could tell he was, like, pretty pissed, but trying to decide if he was going to be publicly pissed? Yeah, he was pissed. He was publicly pissed pretty quick.

He got more and more pissed as he thought about it. But, you know, part of this is that there was always something, and this gets to your point about the weaponization of the anti-Semitism issue, it's like everything else in our politics. There's always going to be something that they say you're trying to, you know. I remember one time there wasn't a photographer in the meeting, and it became a six-year thing, that there was this one meeting

where there wasn't an official photographer. I'm going down in tandem here. What I'm trying to get to is Palestinian recognition. And just the idea of taking positions on these issues, obviously, has been this third rail, we've prostit. But we've been talking, you know, a lot of the debate here has been about conditioning of assistance. What about the possibility of American recognition of a Palestinian state?

And how would that, how would you look at that? I think, you know, being in the opposition, as we both know at this point, is not that great. But one thing it does allow you to do is to be more coherent about your positions. And it seems like even though we're in the opposition, we're still sort of like in a negotiation mode. Even though, like nobody's negotiating with us, we're still like, well, maybe we'll take this out, we'll leave this in. We can allow ourselves to be much more coherent about endgame. And when I say endgame, it's even on the ideological side. So I remember the use, I don't think they use this phrase anymore in the U.S.,

but we used to talk about a secure Israel and a viable Palestine. And it always sounded weird to me because if you flip it, it gets everybody nervous, like a viable Israel and a secure Palestine gets every. And it says something about the lack of parity and the lack of fairness coming from a position of negotiation. And now that we're, at this point at least, sort of looking at things from the other side, I think it's a really good time to clear our head and to be more. more honest about where we want to get to in the end. You know, when we'll be in power, we can start negotiating,

but let's talk about where we actually want to end. And from our perspective, it's a maximalist two-state version in which both societies are equally free and independent. Yes, I think that the solution is that really what we should aim to. But we need, we need really to take it, you know, seriously, not only by declaration. And what happens to now, it's only declaration.

Even though, you know, in the Obama demonstration, it was a big declaration, but me, as a Palestinian, I didn't feel that action were done toward really having the two-state solution. You know, I think that a politician in the United States and also the presidents of the United States, they don't have this courage to say, to say it's not only about Israeli security, it's about the Palestinian people

who wants their freedom, they want their own country, and it's time. God, it's time, it's time. You know, afterward, when establishing independent state, Palestinian independent state, we can also talk about other solutions that they will make come, you know, people now talking about the Wednesday's solution

or confederation, but what we need to do is to declare and to work forward to set solution soon, soon, soon. When you, when people talk, I mean, because people talk about the one-state solution here, you know, the BDS movement is, you know, if not kind of mainstream, it's popular in college campuses. Is that helpful to you to have pressure coming from the left or do you feel like that undermines you? I kind of think it's always good to have pressure from the left.

I mean, it's, it's, I have my position. And my position is based on, you know, and I said in the beginning that I'm coming also from a certain place. You know, I believe in many things. Part of that is Jewish right to self-determination. So obviously that puts me in a certain camp, but I think sort of trying to police the conversation

happening from the left definitely is counterproductive. I think it sometimes points you in directions which you're unaware of, and you see that on issues of, you see that on issues of Israel, see that on other issues as well. I don't think we need to be constantly sort of looking over our shoulder and getting worried about, you know, I'm, I have, again, I have my own positions, but I'm not, but it's fine that other people have other positions. We don't need to, like, freak out about everything that's, like, not what we think. You know what? Every pressure from the left,

from everyone will be good. The question is that, meanwhile, we are talking, 70 years, we are, more than 70 years, we are only talking about these issues, and nothing has. been done yet and this is our problem you know I think that a lot of the Palestinians who live now in in the West Bank and Gaza are desperate I talk to a lot of you know my people and they say that they're desperate that they have no hope and we should return the hope to these people and returning the hope to these people meaning means that negotiating now so I think I think this has to be our our last question because we're running at a time but

We, you know, the conversation about the U.S.-Israeli relationship can often feel a little too negative, right? We talk about how Trump has gone all in on Bibi and Bibi's corrupt and people feel like the two-state solution might be dead. But you guys were telling us backstage, so there's actually a lot more to be hopeful about and excited about when it comes to progressive parties in Israel. Can you relay that conversation we had backstage to this group? Well, it was more convincing backstage that we heard. Well, I mean, to be fair, I think a position, like the disposition and temperament of activists tend to be optimistic. And, you know, we're all in this business because we have this sort of odd notion that we actually, if we're like more professional, if we're more serious about our work, we can actually change like reality around us, which is obviously sort of a stretch. I mean, that being said, I think I think progressivism around the world, but definitely in Israel from our vantage point, has a lot.

lot of new trends and tendencies that I at least don't know from the past. I mean, we've been working a lot together in the Alliance Fellowship over the last two years. In the past, the Israeli Jewish left and the Israeli Arab left, Palestinian left, just worked in complete parallels. It's not that we were against each other. It's not that we were for each other. We just didn't work with it. Now, we're talking about like double the size. This isn't a small like half mandate conversation, like 40% of the people who self-identify as left in Israel are Palestinian citizens of Israel. And just that understanding is so optimistic and hopeful in what you can add. You can double in size if you work more seriously and also more honestly,

but this isn't only a question of tactics and strategy. It's also a question of how do we perceive our identity. Maybe just to close that, I mean, I think like we're the first generation, definitely from a Jewish perspective that was born, I was born in a safe and secure and powerful Israel. And so Israel existed before I was born, but people still had this fear of non-existent. Now I was born into a military, a regional superpower. And that allows for more listening and more responsibility and sort of restructuring that element and actually a huge amount of potential just in terms of sort of who do we talk to, How do we engage? How do we perceive ourselves? What risks are we willing to take?

I just want to give example why I am optimistic. I'm not taking you far away. I'm taking you only for last year, 1918. You know, we were in the streets. We are progressives. We were 10,000 of us in the streets in so many struggles. Let's count together. We were in the struggle against the national state law. We were in the struggle for the LGBT community. We were in the struggle for the disabled people in Israel and we were in a huge struggle against you know deport to the asylum seekers in Israel and we succeeded and we also held the biggest women demonstration and strike that ever take place in Israel for the first time women Jewish and Arab women shoulder to shoulder went to this

streets and, you know, are demonstrated against the domestic violence against women in Israel. You know, it was fascinating to see to see 10 of thousands of women in Kikar Rabin in the Rabin Square shouting together with in Hebrew and in Arabic, Dai Daedai Lerat Shem, Kafalikatle Nisana, stop killing women. And we succeeded, we succeeded in these struggles. And this is, you know, the example, the example that lead us to conclude that we conclude that we're We can do it. We have the power, and we can do it. All right.

I think that was a. I think one thing is important is you can kind of learn, it's interesting to look at the strategies of people like Trump and Nanyahu, which is that really they depend on two things, more than that, but two that I'll focus on. One is apathy, that you will believe that this can't change. So it's not even worth trying. And we're going to make this look so ugly and so cynical or so inevitable that you just have to give up. And the other thing is it's not a surprise when you look at

the disinformation efforts that come in to right-wing politics, far-right politics, it's meant to divide progressives. That's what it usually is about, you know, try to sow discord. And what we have to remember is the corollary to that is, one, we have agency. We have a lot of agency. The people in this room have a lot of agency. I met you when I was 29 years old and moved out to work for Barack Obama, and I was the oldest guy working for him. I don't even know how old you were, Tommy.

But, like, there was just a bunch of 20-something-year-old kids in Barack Obama, and look what happened there. And I never forgot that lesson of agency, but the agency only works if people build coalitions and are united by their common values. And we just have to remind ourselves this person, progressives in the United States and Israel and around the world at this really existential moment for all of us that if we claim our own agency and we build those coalitions, we will win.

That's right. Before we wrap one sort of point of personal privilege speaking of agency Yeah, I was teeing you up for that. We're in D.C. very very effectively. We're in D.C. right now. There's some really important elections in Virginia that are happening real soon. We win two seats in the House. Two seats. seats in the Senate, we take back the legislature right before redistricting, so it's a big deal. So if you want to get involved, go tovotesafeamerica.com. We have all kinds of information there. Thank you, my sum. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Jay Street for having us. Great for you all. Here's Senator Amy Klobuchar. So let's talk about the U.S.-Israel relationship. So the first piece of legislation the Senate drafted was S-1, which was a whole bunch of

legislation that sort of squeezed together, funding for Israel, something of Jordan, I believe. And And then it also included the Combating BDS Act, which was designed to give states legal cover for laws that they had passed that forbid state entities from contracting or investing with entities that boycott Israel. It basically lets states punish companies that participate in BDS. Some of your opponents in this race, like Bernie Sanders, have said that S-1 violates the First Amendment rights. the ACLU has taken no position on BDS generally, but has said that they believe that boycotts our protected speech. Do you disagree with that argument? Well, first of all, as you know, I voted for that bill, and I did it because it included the $38 billion of aid to Israel. And when I voted for the Iranian nuclear agreement,

which I thought was very important, to the security of our world, And I know Ben and I talked about this at the time as I also talked with President Obama. One of the things that was most important to me in that I publicly stated at the time is given that Iran was going to get some funding release and money released out of this, that we made sure that we continued the funding for Israel. So that was my primary reason for voting for that, as was a number of other senators that I think you like in this room, including many J Street endorsed senators when they voted for it.

Now, the BDS portion, while it did say that it would not violate the First Amendment, I think that it would have been much better to use some of the negotiation that was going on at the time, involving some other bills and other things we could have done. And to me, that vote, while it was a difficult one for a lot of people, it just showed to me what Mitch McConnell is trying to do all the time. Instead of bringing people together for support of Israel and a bipartisan basis, he and President Trump are always looking for those wedges, a way to do things that creates wedges instead of bringing people together. And I think it has been very negative. And I'm not just talking about one vote.

I'm talking about how the Prime Minister's visit was handled, as everyone remembers that. I'm talking about how President Trump has supported some of the prime minister's moves and claims during the election that I disagreed with. And I think all of this is resulting in a loss of support for Israel that's very bad. As someone that views Israel as our beacon of democracy, as I said, in the debate, in the mid-east, in an incomparably tough neighborhood. I think it is important that we build support in the U.S. And the way I would do it as president is to not only focus on a two-state solution, but also to emphasize and bring in some of the good work that Israel has done when it comes to climate change and renewable energy,

when it comes to women's rights, in a neighborhood where a lot of those other countries are not respecting women's rights in the same way that Israel does. And I think it's really important to bring young people into this discussion and talk about this in a different way. And it has been just heartbreaking to me the way this president has responded and has actually whittled away at support for Israel

while he claims that he's trying to support Israel. I would be a much different voice, and one of my major policy priorities would be to bring back that kind of, support for Israel that is so important for the future of Israel and our relations with Israel. This is from our conversation with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Would you also consider conditioning U.S. aid to Israel as leverage to stop or slow future settlement construction? Well, I'll say this. The U.S. law framework for security cooperation and aid to any country has very specific

expectations about how that will be used. This is built into the Arms Export Control Act. This is built into Leahy Law. And we need to make sure that any such cooperation and funding is going to things that are compatible with U.S. objectives and with U.S. law. And if we continue to see steps that are potentially destructive, I think it is a reminder that we need to have the visibility to know whether U.S. funds are being used in a way that's actually not compatible with U.S. policy and US policy should not be promoting this kind of settlement construction precisely because it is incompatible or at best detrimental to what we want to see happen I think the bigger picture here too is about what this relationship means

what this friendship is like in the same way that in the US you can be and we are deeply patriotic and committed to our country thriving without that in any way meaning that you have to support the current U.S. President and his agenda, by the same token, you can be committed to the U.S. Israel Alliance without that entailing that you are supportive of, for example, any individual policy choice by a right-wing government over there. That doesn't have to entail that. And again, you know, if you look at the bigger picture of the vacuum of U.S. leadership right now around the world, Certainly it has emboldened adversaries.

I mean, you look at the way that Russia throws its weight around, the way that China is behaving, and it's a real concern in terms of what happens with our adversaries. But I think actually the heart of the matter, in terms of the U.S. abandoning her leadership role, is what's going on with our most important allies, with our neighbors, with our allies in Europe, and with allies like Israel.

So when I think about what could continue in terms of these settlements and certainly something like annexation. I think about it the way I think of a friendship where your friend is acting in a way that you think might hurt your relationship, might hurt them, and might even hurt you. And what you do in that situation is you put your arm around your friend and you try to guide them toward a better place. And I think that's our responsibility with respect to these policies. Mayor Pete to Israel, stop texting your ex.

It's basically the messenger. Got it. Not sure I can top that. One of the difficult challenges, of course, that the next president will inherit and seeking to approach those issues is essentially the blow to U.S. credibility from withdrawing not just from the Iranical agreement, but from a whole slew of agreements, and by the way, not just Obama agreements, well beyond that. Not to mention just the shifting currents of international politics.

kind of authoritarian trend that's been building. So as you have to re-engage on January 21, 2021, and address an issue like Iran specifically, where you need to build international consensus, you need to work with our European allies and Russia and China, how do you restore the currency of American leadership? What would be the approach for an incoming Buttigieg

administration to rebuild our credibility with allies and partners that we need on certain issues, in order to get something done like restoring the Iran nuclear agreement and building on it. So job number one in terms of global affairs for the next president is going to have to be restoring U.S. credibility. And it would be hard to overstate how costly the loss of credibility has been. When I was deployed, I could feel in ways I can't even fully explain the power of the flag on my shoulder and sensed that just as much as my body armor and any military equipment, part of what was keeping me safe was that that flag stood for a country known to keep its word.

And our allies knew it and our enemies knew it, and that mattered. Losing that is unbelievably costly any place in the world where we are counting on alliances in order to protect American troops and American interests. The moment that has really stuck with me, even before this horrific betrayal of our Kurdish allies, was the president's appearance at the General Assembly. And his speech, by Trumpian standards, was actually not memorable, which is good. Grading on a curve here. But what was memorable and what hurt...

was seeing the faces of the world leaders watching the president speak. Not as a Democrat, but as an American. It hurt to see the leaders of the world who usually look at the American president for leadership, looking at our country's leader with a mixture of, I think, pity and contempt. I never again want to see an American leader looked on that way by the leaders of the world. So how do we do something about it? But beyond just saying do no harm, obviously there are a whole bunch of things that we need to reverse or not do. I think we need to look for areas where American values, American interests, and the aspirations of people around the world are all linked.

Because this has always been America's strategic edge. The fact that many people, either publicly or privately, anywhere around the world, sympathize with what we stand for. And I'm thinking about the desire for democracy, the desire for religious freedom, providing at least moral support. For, for example, the people of Hong Kong who have not heard a peep out of this White House of support. I'm thinking about some of our biggest problems as a global community. Anytime there's a problem that the U.S. can't solve alone and that the world can't solve without us, that's an opportunity for leadership, which also means it's an opportunity to earn credit. I'm thinking about climate.

Imagine if global climate diplomacy were a thing. If global climate diplomacy were something that mattered deeply in geopolitics, it would not only be a sign of hope for this global security crisis, but also an example of how we might be back on the front foot with China. And so the biggest thing I think needed to really answer the core of your question to build up U.S. credibility is for the world to see the U.S. to see the U.S. meaningfully advancing things that the world needs and putting our resources and our whole toolkit of diplomatic, economic, and security resources behind those values

and behind getting something done. Then we can recover some of the trust that has been blown up by this administration. Here's Hulene Castro. So I just want to push you on this a little bit because I think, you know, Ben and I have been fairly clear about our beliefs on Prime Minister and Yahoo versus Ben. But I think, you know, there's a sense that on the peace process question, they won't be as different as people might hope. And, you know, historically you've seen aid be conditioned in many places, including on the Palestinian Authority, to pressure them into incentivizing behavior. The American taxpayer is doing, I think, $3.8 billion a year in security assistance to Israel because of our boss.

President Obama signed this 10-year MOU. why isn't it appropriate to sort of normalize the way that aid is treated and to use it as, you know, a carrot and stick approach towards pushing for policies that we think are for in the security of Israel and in the U.S.? Well, I mean, the fact is that in so many different ways we do have a carrot and stick approach, whether we're dealing with money that's domestically granted or with foreign assistance, including security assistance. And so I think that that framework already exists, the intensity of it or the specificity of it may be something different. That's what I say. I would not take that off the table. I do think, though, that we need to use

this opportunity that we have, hopefully with the new Israeli government and with a new administration, I believe, in 2021, to do everything that we can to get Israel to go back in the direction of pursuing a two-state solution so that we can avoid having to condition our aid on that. I completely agree. with you that I believe that Netanyahu has been counterproductive to say the least and has partisanized Israel for a lot of people here in the country, which was a terrible mistake that was made a few years ago, and that we need an administration over there, a government over there, that I think, I hope will be more productive and engage in getting back on a track of a two-state solution because it's very clear that Netanyahu, you know, not only has rejected

that, but has actively campaigned for his own political benefit far away from that. And I disagree with his approach. I reject it. And I hope, even though, as you point out and others have pointed out, that Ben-I-Ga-Ga-Gauntz may not be very different, you know, I still hope that there's a way that we can avoid the path that Israel has been on under Netanyahu. Another question is, you know, how do we engage the government of Israel when the new president comes in?

Another way of looking at this also is how do we engage the Palestinians who, you know, have seen the United States embassy move to Jerusalem, have seen their own diplomatic relationship with the U.S. essentially downgraded because the consulate, they used to be the representation towards them, has now obviously been subsumed by the embassy, seeing efforts by the Trump administration to cut off assistance to them.

And frankly, even to Palestinian citizens of Israel, there's been a prime minister of Israel who's been fully embraced by the U.S. president who's used very derogatory language about Palestinian citizens of Israel. What would you do coming into office to try to set a new tone with the Palestinian people?

people as well as the Israeli people? Number one, the Trump administration has made a mistake in putting its finger on the scale so much in line with Netanyahu and his administration. And I am glad to see in this Democratic primary that the voices of folks who are concerned about the rights of Palestinians has emerged, has risen stronger than before. I think that's a good thing.

And I hope that that also figures into our approach in the future. Under me, it would. So here are a couple of things I would do, and you mentioned one of them, which is that we need to reestablish a U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem and make clear that under a two-state approach, that would be the embassy under a Palestinian state. In addition to that, we need to ensure that they have the opportunity to restart their mission here in the United States.

I would also restore the UN funding, UNRWA funding, that was stripped by the Trump administration, which was a mistake, to provide aid that is desperately needed. Those are the kinds of things that I believe the next president could do immediately to regain some trust, rebuild trust and confidence among Palestinians, in addition to taking a different tone. This is Senator Michael Bennett. It sounds like if you got to the extreme case of a potential annexation, you'd evaluate these different tools. The other way of looking at this too, though, is you mentioned the domestic political context in Israel, for example. One of the things that we admittedly struggled with was, you know, it's interesting. By the end of the Obama administration,

Barack Obama polled at 70 or 80 percent in almost every country in the world, with the exception of Russia, Israel, and probably other countries in the Middle East. And we tried to communicate to the Israeli people. Obviously, we were dealing with the prime minister who was very actively working against President Obama, particularly in the last few years. If you were president, given your long history on these issues, what would you try to do to reach Israeli public opinion? I would go to Israel, and I'd spend time in Israel,

and I'd meet with students, and I'd meet with families, and I'd do whatever I could do to encourage a people, people-to-people relationship. The politicians cannot be relied upon here. You know, I really, we have a president who ran for office saying, I alone can fix it. Do you remember that? That's what he said. There's almost nothing less American or more unpatriotic, you could say. And we were very careless with our democracy. We gave it up. We are each of us responsible for that, and it's never going to get back to where we needed to be unless each of us acts as citizens in a republic. to make sure we restore the Democratic Republic that's being eroded and taken away from us for a whole variety of reasons.

I think we need to do the same thing in the people-to-people relationship between us and Israel. We have a Prime Minister of Israel today who refers to Donald Trump as the best friend Israel ever had. And we have never had, I don't think, as anti-immigrant a president as the one we have. We have never had as anti-refugee a president as the one we have. had as anti-democratic a president. We have never had a president who didn't believe in the separation of powers, who didn't believe in freedom of the press, who didn't believe in all the things that make us a pluralistic society that we hope someday, you know, we will continue to be, and that Israel will have the chance to be. And it says everything I think you need to

know about how he views what's important about the relationship between the United States in Israel, which is that you have a president that supports his specific, you know, domestic ambitions. And that can't be what the United States stands for. I just want to zoom out a bit for a second. I think in Washington we often talk about the Arab Spring as in the past tense. But I think if you look at Iraq, you look at Lebanon right now, you look at Sudan recently. These are ongoing protest movements and the structural challenge that led to these protest movements, whether it's corruption or economic inequality or, you know, a hunger for universal rights and freedoms of expression, for example, that, you know,

those challenges still remain. How would you view your job as president to try to push those countries to loosen up or deal with corruption to try to let off some steam before these protest movements topple governments or create more instability or any of the things we've seen in the last decade. I think the most important thing for us to do is be able to set an example for the rest of the world. I don't think it's necessarily to lecture the rest of the world, and we're not, which I'm not suggesting what's the implication of your question.

But I can't tell you, I mean, a lot of people in this room know that my mom and her folks were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust in Warsaw, and then they spent two years there after the war was over. My mom was separated from her parents during the war. And so she called me when America was separating kids from the board, your parents at the border saying, what are you doing about this? I see myself in these kids. And they went to Stockholm for a year after that, Mexico City of all places for a year.

Then they came back here to America to rebuild their shattered lives. And I have met immigrants all over America. Never have I met ones with as thick an accent as my grandparents said. And yet they were the greatest patriots that I've ever known. They truly were. And so personally, I know how important it is for us to set a moral example of a free society. Not that we've been perfect. We've never been perfect.

But the whole world is still waiting for us to set that example. And in the Middle East, people are waiting for it more than anywhere else because that's where the sectarian violence is. I think we have an opportunity, if we can find it, to support those little pockets here and there of civic engagement in the Middle East, where there are universities and other organizations to help build some green shoots there. I mean, I think we should not be overly polyanish about how difficult it's going to be. And the other thing about the Arab Spring

that we sort of never struggled back to, and it's interesting because there's implications for how we think about it in our own country, is the role social media has played in the end propping up tyrants more than helping people organize and galvanize for change. This is something that that generation, of Colorado college kids out there and people like it are going to have to figure out how to

process because we are still 10 years later, 10 years after the Arab Spring sprung, dealing with effects of social media that I don't think any three of us would have ever predicted back then. And last but not least, Bernie Sanders. You mentioned Gaza where, you know, their projections, you know, the UN and others, that it's essentially becoming unlivable. You know, it's a place where people are living in such dire and destitute circumstances that basic needs cannot be reached. How would you approach trying to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza,

trying to lift pieces of this blockade that catch stuff that clearly has no military uses? What is the approach of a President Sanders to the situation in Gaza? My understanding. my understanding is youth unemployment in Gaza, what, 60, 70 percent, water situation, dismal. People literally cannot freely leave the area. And my solution is to say to Israel is you get $3.8 billion every single year. If you want military aid, you're going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza. In fact, I think it is fair to say that some of that $3.8 billion should go right now into humanitarian aid in Gaza. Look, I don't, when you have an unsustainable situation, who is going to deny that when youth unemployment is 60% when people have no hope, when people cannot literally leave the region, who can think for a moment that you,

you're not laying the groundwork for continued violence. So I think for Israel's benefit, not to mention the Palestinians, we need a radical intercession in Gaza to immediately allow for economic development, to allow for a better environment, to allow for better education, to give people hope there. And that is something that we must do as soon as humanly possible. One more question. It's really interesting to think about the potential.

Here you talk about the need for, again, a movement to change things. One of the things that we've noticed around the world is the coordination, frankly, among right-wing leaders with authoritarian tendencies. Bibi Netanyahu has quite a close relationship with Victor Orban in Hungary. Donald Trump and Netanyahu obviously have a close relationship. Putin and Trump, who knows what's going on there, right? Would you see part of your effort as president to build not just a progressive movement in this country, but to try to, not by intervening in other countries,

you know, picking candidates, but would you see a role in saying there needs to be a global progressive movement to counter this nationals trend? And does that include, you know, in Israel, trying to reach out to young people as you do in this country and say, you know, here's what we need to do together.

Absolutely. Okay, now Ben raises a very, very important issue. I am not into conspiracy theory. I really am not. But if anybody thinks that there is not a coordinated effort among incredibly wealthy and powerful authoritarian leaders around the world,

then you don't know what's going on. You got Putin, who is trying to destabilize American democracy and European democracy. You got MBS in Saudi Arabia sitting on, God knows how much money. And by the way, oil has a lot to do with his access as well. And you got Trump here. And I think when democracy and human rights are on the defensive, all over the the world that of course we need a president to bring people from around the globe together fighting against oligarchy and a handful of incredible wealthy people controlling a lot of our

world's economy and standing up for human rights whether it's in Hong Kong in China, in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Hungary, the idea that the leader of Israel would be, be in collusion with an anti-Semitic leader in Hungary is beyond belief, but that speaks to your point. So we have an enormous amount of work in front of us, and again, none of this stuff is easy, and I'm not making any promises to you that on day one we solve at all. But if there is anything that our country proudly has stood for, it has been a beacon of hope for my father who came to this country at the age of 17 to flee anti-Semitism and extreme poverty. But it has been a beacon of hope for people all over the world who looked at America

because of our democracy, because of our belief in human rights, because of our belief in opportunity for all. That is the America we once were. And as president, I want once again people from all over the world to see. say this is the United States of America. That is the country we want to emulate and become. Senator Bernie Sanders. Thank you to the team at J Street for putting on an amazing conference.

Thanks to everyone who came and spent their weekend engaging on a critical set of issues about the U.S. Israeli relationship because, I don't know, kind of feels like it's important right now. Everything's a little fucked up in this world, so let's talk about it. See you guys next week. Potty of the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.