Pod Save the World - One Year of War in the Middle East

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Tommy and Ben discuss the anniversary of the October 7th attack in Israel and how the war has expanded across the Middle East in the year since, they play reflections from a Palestinian journalist in Gaza and an Israeli woman whose relatives were taken hostage, and discuss the heavy fighting this week in both Northern Gaza and Lebanon. Then they talk about how the war has become a major issue on the campaign trail, Trump’s bizarre claim to have visited Gaza and support for Israel attacking Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Kamala Harris’s frosty comments about Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes, Macron’s call to stop arming Israel, and Netanyahu’s ominous message to the Lebanese people. They also talk about Bob Woodward’s new book, the Tunisian election and the end of the Arab Spring, the dangers of the far-right surge in Austria, and a Qantas Airlines experience of in-flight entertainment gone horribly wrong. Then, Ben speaks to Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, “The Message”, that digs into the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and how victims can become victimizers. 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 the Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. I want the listeners to know that Ben just turned off a Mets playoff game for you. I did. So that's how committed he is. Sacrifice. It is one-nothing when I turned it off Mets and hopefully the podcast is good luck. I mean, you know, Tommy, October baseball is like a uniquely painful experience. You know, the tension. It's very high. It can be fleeting. We were in Philly for a pod on Sunday night and the game was happening kind of like as people were filtering in. and it was very clear to us that the shows, whether it went well or poorly, it was going to entirely depend on the Phillies winning that game. So, you know, luckily they picked one off. But I'm not really rooting for any of you. I kind of hate all other teams right now, if that's okay. That's fair.

That's fair. I mean, the funny thing is back in the day, as a Mets fan, I hated the Yankees so much that I would actually root for the Red Sox after the Mets were eliminated. Oh, yeah. Just because it would upset the Yankees, which is kind of a strange, just shows you how much sports fandom kind of breaks. your brain, you know. Makes you crazy, yeah.

To your podcast thing, when my first book came out, I had my big book event in London the same days in England World Cup game. And I've never spoken to an audience of people that were paying less attention to what I said every advocate of contact. Or less sober. Yeah, I don't know. I should like the Mets. I think the 86 Mets beating my Red Sox still hurts on some level.

We should probably get over it because I was a while ago. But it made my parents very sad for many years. You should get over it because you won like several World Series since then. We have not. We've not won a single World Series since then. We are a pampered city and franchise. But anyway, we got a great show for you guys today. We're going to cover the one-year anniversary of the October 7th attacks

and what that tragedy is meant for those most affected in Israel and in the Gaza Strip. We're also going to cover the latest news on the fighting in Gaza and the Israeli ground invasion into Lebanon. We'll also hear some recent comments from the campaign trail from Kamala Harris and Donald Trump that show a pretty stark contrast between the two when it comes to how they would approach these wars and just generally manage relationships in the Middle East. So you'll want to hear that. And then Ben, we're going to sprinkle some fun little reporting from Bob Woodward onto the audience just for fun. There was a little CNN, I don't know, like press release scoop. Maybe they got a copy of the book or something, but they had some of the fun tidbits from the Bob Woodward book out today.

Then we're going to cover the recent election in Tunisia and whether it marks the official end of the hopeful part of the Arab Spring. We'll talk about a worrisome election victory for the far right in Austria, and then the story about maybe the most awkward international flight in history, but more on that later. And then, Ben, you did our interview this week last Friday. Who did you talk to? Yeah, I talked to Tan Hossi Coates about his new book, The Message. I mean, it's fascinating to interview. People should obviously check this out. We talked about, you know, just kind of his thinking, his experience, reporting from Israel and Palestine. And obviously, some of the issues he was getting at in terms of the nature of Israeli governments and society, it's hard to even preview but beyond that because, you know, we really went on a kind of wide-ranging conversation about, you know, how did Israel end up like this?

How should the United States think about its support for Israel? What's been some of the reaction to his book, which I should just say up front. I was a little baffled because, you know, I read the book. Before I did, I was kind of consuming, as Windows Online, like the criticism that he kind of just breathed through and didn't deeply report this, when in fact, this is like the intricate details of how the occupation functions. You will learn, as someone who's followed this issue for, you know, many, many years, I learned a lot from reading this book.

So this is not a drive-by piece of journalism. This is like a deeply thoughtful and reported. book by one of the most important, you know, public intellectuals and murders in our country. So people should check it out. Do you go hard at them like that CBS guy and say it was better suited for a terrorist backpack? Man, I had to like restrain myself from just kind of asking him about that because I'm sure, you know, yeah, he gets asked about that everywhere. I'm sure it's annoying. Yeah, I'm sure it's annoying.

But yeah, that was something else. I'd not seen an interview quite like that. Ironically, that question was crazy and the tone was super aggressive and not something you ever see on a morning. show, but then it led to like a really intense good conversation, I thought. And I was like, I don't know, maybe like all of us getting, uh, getting punched in the face at the beginning of an interview is an interesting tactic. Yeah, seriously. Yeah, first contact. I mean, you're right. I mean, no problem with them being pushed. He should be pushed, right? But, but the extremist back back one, I don't know, that someone needed to workshop that question a little bit more time.

Yeah, that wasn't a question. That was a statement. And that's a different thing. But anyway, I'm very excited to hear that, uh, because he is an impressive person. I've read a lot of his work and look forward to reading this book. But let's start the show today with the one-year anniversary of the October 7th, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 Israelis, and 250 more people were taken hostage. We're recording this on October 8th, so it's obviously the day after the anniversary, but we wanted to cover it today because this was the worst attack on the Jewish populations at the Holocaust. It has scarred the country in ways that will last for generations, especially the families and friends of the victims and of the hostages and of the

people still being held hostage. But also, obviously, October 7th set off this wave of fighting across the region, starting with the bombing, invasion, and now occupation of Gaza by the Israeli defense forces, where officials estimate more than 41,000 people have been killed. Thousands more are still missing, and tens of thousands have been injured. Oxfam, a great NGO, estimates that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children have been killed in Gaza since the war started. And the UN estimates that the Israeli bombing and ground invasion has destroyed 65% of Gaza's infrastructure and has displaced millions of people often multiple times. We also know now that the war has expanded both into Yemen and now into Lebanon, which we'll

get into in a minute. But we did want to just start this week's show by playing for you two excerpts of interviews from two people personally impacted by October 7th. The first is a woman named Maya Roman. She's an Israeli whose cousin Yarden was taken captive by Hamas. Yarden was returned in the ceasefire and hostage release deal that occurred after the first 54 days. But Yarden's sister-in-law, Carmel, was not so lucky. She was one of the six hostages found dead this September.

Maya has spent the last year advocating for hostage families, and we asked her to share a bit about her experience. Here's a clip. We've spent the last year meeting with politicians, of every kind from every party in every country. And as family members, it takes a lot out of you. You have to keep telling your story. And it's most tragic aspects because you're trying to get people to care and to stay engaged. And you're doing this because you believe that they will act.

And the bottom line is that I don't think enough of them acted. And I don't think enough of them were willing to do anything that will cost them politically. And this is true in Israel and it is true in the States and it is true in Germany and it is true in every single other country I've heard of so far. It's been a year I talk to people here. I know how tired, just basically tired everyone is. No one has any emotional capacity for anything. People have been in military reserves for months on end. People have lost people and there was a hostages and then the economic situation. It feels like the country is not going to survive. I feel sometimes.

And yet, you know, Israelis are an optimistic bunched for better or worse. And for some reason, they cling to this, oh, well, we had some sort of achievement in Lebanon as opposed to what's happening in Gaza, which has just been horrific. And so I think everyone currently is focused on that. This past year hasn't made me optimistic in thinking that the war is going to resolve anytime soon. And yeah, I think people here are currently easily distracted. We also spoke with Noor Swirke. She's a Palestinian journalist whose home has been destroyed.

She has been displaced four separate times. But she has stayed in Gaza to document the war even after her two children were able to evacuate to Egypt earlier this year. Here's what she said about what the last year has been like. Living in Gaza in the last year was like living in the hell with all of this. destruction, this killing for the onusant and civilians, and for the shortage of food and water supplies. There is no power, no fuel. So it's like a hell. I lost everything. I lost my town, my neighborhood, my home. I lost the places I like and prefer in Gaza City. And in the There's a strip also.

I don't have anything now. I have only my tent and that's it. I received the bad news of losing some of my family members, the extended family members, some of my friends and relatives. So it's not an easy situation that we are living, losing the people we love and they will never will be back. Even if this war has an end, they will never be back. So the moments that I miss those people, I look to their photos,

and I remember all these memories. So it's hard. My only wish is to have a peaceful and dignified life, to have my Gaza city and Gaza Strip cities back to reconstruction act, to have my family, my children back, to Gaza and to reunion with them. So two, you know, two lives there are completely upended by October 7th in very different, but awful ways.

So, Ben, you know, I think, like, I remember talking to you about this immediately after October 7th. I think, like, Americans our age, people who live through 9-11, knew instinctively that for Israel, this was like not a wound that was going to heal quickly. And we also knew that the Israeli response was going to be catastrophic for civilians in Gaza, That said, I just have to admit, like, I am surprised that a full year later, the war is not winding down. It's, in fact, expanding. And any hope for a ceasefire that we heard about, you know, six months ago, three months ago has kind of gone away. There's almost no talk about it anymore. Yeah. I mean, first of all, those are two really powerful voices because they kind of capture something about the different experiences, you know, talking to Israelis and Palestinians on the Israeli side. You hear. the agony of October 7th itself and the hostage dynamic. And then the kind of unease.

You know, she references reservists in the economy, you know, the kind of generalized unease about where is this all going. And, you know, I think some anger from the hostage family perspective at the kind of prioritization of the war itself over the recovery of the hostage through a deal. And then on the Palestinian side, to add to the statistics that you covered, you know, what you get from her is that Gaza is completely destroyed, you know, and all of the housing is basically destroyed. Everybody is basically lost everything. And so beyond even just casualties, the level of destruction is something that I think we really don't have our minds around. And frankly, the generational project. Yeah. I mean, imagine just if like a whole city you lived in

of two million people was just completely destroyed. And because no international journalists have been able to get in the ground there, we kind of underappreciate the level of destruction. I think to your question, Tommy, I found myself it was interesting having to, you know, think about the anniversary and experience anniversary and talk about it. Like you, I kind of returned to, you know, right after October 7th, that 9-11 reflection was fresh in the brain. And one of the things I was thinking of this anniversary is the parallels to 9-11 continue to be eerie to me because, you know, as with 9-11, at the beginning, you know, people really focused on the families who lost loved ones on 9-11. And they were the story, rightly so. And then it became what's the U.S.

response going to be. And then it became this question of what's an appropriate response versus an overreaction. And that was the kind of advice, you know, that many of us were trying to share with Israel. Like, hey, don't take this. Including Joe Biden. Yeah. Don't take this and make your own overreaction what this event becomes. And I have to say, tragically, like that that's what happened, you know and and because now 9-11 is about many things it's about multiple wars the war on terror the whole i mean we we you know that we'd have to do a podcast series on what 9-11 did to the u.s and our farm policy and obviously did to many countries in the middle east and north africa and south asia um but yeah here we are and that kind of overreaction that we feared

is manifest in Gaza, but also in Lebanon and also in all this escalation across the region. Something Maya says that I think is very interesting that I've picked up on, it's not hard to pick up on, is that in the absence of this victory in Gaza, you can sense in Israel this sense of like, well, we got Nazrallah and we're kind of getting Hisbola. And so we're going to get our victory there. Yes. And I think that's a very dangerous mindset because I'm not quite sure where that leads. and ultimately your victories have to be about something other than killing people.

Yeah, no, it's, I don't want to always draw comparisons to like U.S. foreign policy and our mistakes, but it's hard not to be like, oh, my God, you know, if you, you're them launching a second war into another country, it feels like us in Iraq and getting Saddam, and it's like, where does that end? Not well for us. But you're right. I mean, there is, there's this obvious frustration with the inability to get the hostages backed or to kill Sinwar, the leader of Hamas. There has been, comparatively far greater success in decapitating Hezbollah leadership in these early days. That doesn't mean the war is going to end well if there's any kind of like strategic plan for what to do next in Lebanon. But it does seem like people are, you know, I think what you hear

a lot when you read Israeli news outlets or listen to Israeli commentators is that the Nizraal operation, you know, the sort of Mossad's pager operation has restored people's faith in the Israeli military and intelligence community and this sort of like, you know, made them look superior again in ways that October 7th completely undercut because they were caught off guard. And it was such a catastrophic failure of, you know, intelligence collection and the ability to repel Hamas in those early hours. Yeah. But one important thing about that is I always thought it was kind of wrong to view October 7th as an intelligence failure, you know, in part because, yes, there were, by the way, there was supposed to be an inquiry into what happened, and Netanyahu's managed to,

you know, punt that indefinitely. But also because it didn't take, you know, a PhD in, you know, Israeli security policy to see that the IDF that had generally been along that border was up in the West Bank because they were protecting settlers who were engaged in incitement in acts of violence against Palestinians and clashes with Palestinians. That's a political thing. failure, not a, you know, intelligence failure, you know. So I'm not suggesting the intelligence shouldn't have been better. Sure. Like, but we've all read the reports about literally intelligence analysts who are like, hey, we're watching Hamas train for a big operation here. And, and the reason I make this point is that it's the same thing about what's happening in Lebanon right now.

The intelligence successes are manifest in the ability to target these, these leaders of Hezbollah and obviously to do something complicated like the Patriot attacks. But the political strategy is what I find to be totally absent. And also the moral, you know, strategy of, you know, is it okay to kill several hundred people to kill one terrorist, which is the same mindset we saw in Gaza being applied to Beirut now. And so to me, what is missing here is a political vision and a political horizon for Israel for the Middle East generally. And that's why it feels like were in this dangerous unchartered escalatory territory. Yeah.

Well, so let's keep talking about sort of how this thing keeps escalating because there is still heavy fighting in Gaza. In fact, the IDF launched a new ground offensive in northern Gaza just recently, which was, you know, an area that was supposed to have been cleared of Hamas fighters months ago. But now they're telling Gazans in northern Gaza to evacuate again. And the IDF has launched heavy airstrikes into the Jabila refugee camp in recent days, including on a mosque that the IDFs had.

with the Hamas command center. And then, you know, on the northern front, Israel has now sent more troops into Lebanon. There continues to be intense airstrikes on southern Beirut. Now, the Israeli government says they've destroyed about half of Hezbollah's rockets. They've clearly decimated its senior leadership, including not only Hassanazerala, but the man who was set to replace him. So they're having enormous success there and sort of collecting on targeting and finding these top people. There's also reports that the ground invasion may include some sort of naval. operation on the coast. It's not clear to be if that's going to be like a full-on embargo of the country of Lebanon. But the IDF is warning Lebanese civilians to stay away from parts of the coast

now. The UN has reported that 160,000 people have fled from Lebanon back into Syria, many of them Syrian refugees who escaped the Assad regime in the first place. It again tells you how unstable things are. Hesbola, despite being under siege by the IDF, has still managed to launch more than 180 rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday, including several rockets that got past the air defense systems and hit the city of Haifa, which is the third largest city in Israel. So there is still a threat to northern Israeli populations. The Lebanese government says that more than 2,000 people have been killed by Israeli airstrike so far, and over a million people have been displaced.

So, Ben, I mean, I was like trying to look for any hopeful signs that there might be a conversation about a ceasefire. The deputy leader of Hezbollah said that he supports efforts by Lebanon's Speaker of the Parliament, who's an ally of Hezbollah, to secure a ceasefire. And that comment from that deputy Hezbollah leader was the first time that Hezbollah said they would support a ceasefire without it also including a ceasefire in Gaza. So it seemed like they had put aside a major precondition to getting to a ceasefire. However, then right as we were preparing the show, Bibi Netanyahu put out a video calling on the people of Lebanon to, quote, free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end and quote, save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long

war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. So that is incredibly ominous because he is calling on the civilian population of a country to somehow defeat like the largest, you know, non-state actor militia in the world in the midst of this war. So that, that is, does not bode well, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, those statements from Netanyahu in English are always kind of chilling to me because they kind of serve to dehumanize the people of the countries that he is purportedly addressing because, you know, he's making these demands that they, you know, changed the regime in Iran, evict Hezbollah and Lebanon.

And meanwhile, there are Israeli bombs dropping on Beirut. and it makes you think, like, who's the audience for this? Because it seems to be the audience is Netanyahu's kind of right-wing hawkish supporters in places like the United States where he can flex and show, you know, how tough he's being. The thing I am concerned about in watching this play out, both the video and Israeli actions and some of the reports about what the U.S. is doing, too, is it appears like, in addition to trying to kind of take out Hezbole leaders and take out as much of the Hezbole infrastructure as they can, that Israel's beginning and maybe the U.S. too, to try to kind of engineer Lebanese politics,

you know, try to find some people that can shove Hizbo to the side, find the right people that can replace this interim government. And the concern I have about this time is there are only like two or three like things that I've learned in 20 years that I have always found to be true in foreign policy. Engineering and Middle Eastern countries' governance and politics with the foreign military never works and usually makes things much, much worse. And so if the goals of the Israeli military operation are beginning, you know, because it started that the goal was to stop the rocket fire in northern Israel so people can go home, I think they could have already achieved that goal because it does seem like people in Lebanon, Hezbo included one of the ceasefire.

Then the goal kind of grew into, well, let's actually take out all of Hezbo's leadership because we have this wind of opportunity. Now the goal seems to be growing to let's try to and Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon and kind of engineer a different government. And I can tell you that the more the goals grow, the less likely you are to achieve them. And the more likely you are to kind of find yourself, as Israel did after its invasion of Lebanon way back in the early 80s, in this kind of quagmire in which, you know, it's ultimately tremendously costly to your troops, to your international standing, and kind of just hardens divisions, ends up being a fuel to the recruitment of the next version of Hezbollah. and I worry that that's where this is all going.

Just this kind of escalation. And at this moment where things are looking like the military operation is going well, you know, the ambition grows and we're going to solve this problem once and for all. I mean, to repeat the 9-11 analogy, never believe that things are going as well as you think they are when you're like killing the, you know, terrorist or dictator the people have heard of because that we've learned does not solve the problem. Whatever the problem is you claim to be trying to solve. not suggesting even that, you know, I'm just saying that like a little humility is in order here.

For sure. But also, I mean, messing with the balance of power sharing in Lebanon is a particularly knotted, complicated task, right? Because it is, it is divided up in very clear sectarian way. Like, the president is always Christian. The prime minister is always a Sunni Muslim. The speaker of parliament is always a Shia Muslim. Parliamentary seats are divided a lot. sectarian lines, which are all based on these old agreements that were put in place to stop wars. And when you start upending these things at any moment, I mean, you could unlock something very frightening that I think will have implications far beyond just sort of the security of people in northern Israel.

Ben, the other thing we're waiting on is, you know, last week we recorded right after Iran launched that massive ballistic missile attack on Israel. I think at the time we learned there were about 180 ballistic missiles fired, which was sort of a category difference from the last Iranian attack on Israel, which included a lot more like kind of low tech drones and slower moving weapons that were easier to intercept. This was like mostly high end ballistic missiles. The Washington Post reported that at least two dozen of them got through Israeli or allied missile defense systems and hit near, you know, intelligence or military installations. So we're sort of. waiting to see what Israel might do in response to that attack. There was, you know, sort of a school of thought that it would not happen this week because you have Gallant. The Israeli defense minister was traveling to Washington. However, I just saw that his trip had been postponed. And then NBC reported that Israel has not briefed the U.S. on their response plans that did make me wonder if that travel change might be connected to something happening pretty soon. We obviously

don't know, but it was worrisome. Yeah, I mean, we'll know by next week. But you're right. when the Israeli defense ministers kind of announced visit is pulled down with no explanation, really. It does make you wonder what's up. And the thing that could be up is the response. And, you know, what we have seen over last week is this kind of bizarre dance where Joe Biden went out and said, you know, they should hit oil fields. And then he said, anyway. And then he went out the next day and he said they shouldn't, you know, hit nuclear facilities. And Joe Biden doesn't have a good track record of telling Israel not to do things and then having Israel not do those things. But the reason I highlight that is this is the thing to watch and we'll obviously maybe know by

next week. Oil fields, nuclear facilities, that is, it's all, you know, this is existential the regime and their response is going to be much, much greater than even those ballistic missiles. So there's a lot of stake here. And this can continue to ask. for the worst. Yeah, I mean, like, obviously we'll get into the talk about targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure in a minute. But the oil fields, I mean, obviously that could have a massive impact on energy prices globally right before an American election, but also has a particular impact on China.

Because I believe China buys more than 90 percent of Iran's oil exports. And if all of a sudden that supply dries up, you might imagine they'll have something to say about that or some sort of response that. that makes their displeasure well known to the United States. Also, Ben, I just wanted to note the Washington Post did an interesting deep dive into the pager and walkie-talkie booby-trap system that, you know, exploded in various Hezbollah members' hands a couple weeks back. So they reported that the walkie-talkies that had been booby-trapped were sent into Lebanon as far back as 2015, and those were primarily used to collect intelligence.

I guess they were wired to basically allow these. Israelis to intercept all communications on them for a long time. So that was an impressive piece of work. And then I guess the pager attack was basically thought of and I think pitched to Israel in 2023 by some sort of marketing official who did have actual ties to a pager company, but didn't know she was being used as a carve out by the Mossad. And they ultimately sent in these pagers that were constructed in Israel. And they had this two-step procedure to decrypt the message that was incoming. So when they finally launched the attack, when the Massad did, the people who picked up their pagers to get the message had to hold the pager with two hands to ensure that basically it blew off all your fingers on both hands. So like a really kind of devious, ingenious, depending on how you look at it, design.

And then those people who didn't set off the pagers on their own by decrypting the message, it just, there was a signal sent by the Mossad to blow them up a minute later. So that's how it led to just thousands of these things going off all within about a minute of each other in Lebanon that, you know, whenever that happened a couple weeks ago. Yeah, I mean, what it tells you, though, is that they are one of the reasons why they're going so aggressively to try to eliminate every leader they could find in Hezbollah is that they literally blew up their intelligence collection tools. So that you had this tool that you could either use to understand, gather information about Hezbollah. once you blow that up, you know, presumably, you know, you no longer have that capability and you're also probably, you know, you no longer have certain supply chains and Hezbole, all these things. And so this window that Israel has that they're taking is, I think, tied to the idea that they made the decision. We're essentially going to kind of sacrifice our ability to collect

intelligence on Hezbollah for our ability to target them right now. And that's, I think, what we're seeing. Yeah. Two quick things before we go to break. So first, The stakes this fall go well beyond just winning the presidency. The future of the Supreme Court is up for grabs and it could impact our rights for decades. But don't stress, strict scrutiny is breaking down the chaos every week. We've got host Melissa Murray, Kate Shaw and Leah Lippman. We'll dive into every case, every big decision and serve up all the legal gossip so you can head to the polls, ready to cast your vote and protect your rights. Listen to strict scrutiny every Monday wherever you get your podcasts and now on YouTube as well.

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This message has been paid for by Votesave America. You can learn more at Votesaveamerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. So, you know, the war in Gaza is also, you know, still a major issue on the campaign trail. I just got back from Michigan where there's a large Muslim American and Arab American population and there was this protest effort against Biden's policies called the Uncommitted Movement.

This was back in the primary in February. Earlier today, Ben, on Tuesday, the Uncommitted Movement released this really powerful video talking about all the ways that Trump has been and would continue to be worse for the Palestinian people. It gets into his time in office and record. It also talks about parts of Project 2025 that call for cutting off humanitarian aids of Gaza into the West Bank. The video includes some clips from David Friedman, the Trump's ambassador to Israel, saying there cannot be a Palestinian state. They've got that clip we talked about a week's back of Jared Kushner talking about Gaza as

waterfront property that he wants to develop. So it's very well done. We'll see if it's convincing because people are, you know, obviously pretty upset. But it's not clear yet if they will blame Kamala Harris for the Biden policies and vote for Trump or stay home or we'll find out. And then Trump was asked about Gaza and whether Israel should bomb Iranian nuclear facilities during an interview with Hugh Hewitt. Let's take a listen to that.

It could be better than Monagor. It has the best location in the Middle East, that best water, the best everything. It's got, it is the best. I've said it for years. You know, I've been there, and it's rough. It's a rough place before all of the attacks and back and forth.

What's happened over the last couple of years? They asked them the other day, would you hit? Well, I don't think you should hit the nuclear. I thought it was the opposite. Okay. I sort of thought it was the opposite. But the nice thing is they're entitled to an attack, and nobody will be upset if they attack,

because they're entitled, because Iran hit them with 187 missiles. Israel has to do one thing. They have to get smart about Trump, because they don't back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody, and it's not a reciprocal, as I say.

I think your numbers are rising with Jewish Americans. They may not say it out. law, but I think they're rising, Mr. President. But we did have 100%. And I'll never hit that, but we should have 100%. So, Ben, to be clear, Trump has never been to Gaza. And then when I think Maggie Haberman,

the New York Times, asked his staff why he said otherwise, the campaign said, well, he's been to Israel. Gaza is part of Israel. Therefore, he's been to Gaza. Sure. You should add that to the video for the Uncommitted Movement. I know. I'm saying Gaza is part of Israel.

De facto annexation, because you're too stupid to admit you misspoke. And then clearly there in that clip, and then another public events he's done recently, Trump is telling Bevaninand Yahoo to bomb Iran's nuclear infrastructure, something Biden, as you mentioned, said he should not do. So I guess, you know, maybe it's too late, but I do hope that these clips get to people who somehow believe that Trump is some sort of like anti-war dove. Yeah. I mean, I think that that was very well done. And I'm sympathetic to the people in the uncommitted movement because to be honest, and we've all been very, I think, excited about Kamala Harris and different aspects of her candidacy. I think they could have done more to try to make this an

easier process of reconciliation inside of our coalition. You know, not having a Palestinian-American speaker at the DNC, I think was a mistake. She did meet with some of these leaders, which I think is a good step forward, and I think that should continue. Friday on Michigan, yeah, she had a meeting. Yeah, and so that's good. And the key is to have a dialogue about, you know, what she would do as president. And it's less, it really is less about what she says in the next month than what she does if she wins, you know. Now, I think that one thing that has bothered me, I just want to say about, and this is more about the, I guess, the Biden administration, you know, there are tons of Americans in Lebanon. And there are Lebanese Americans who've been killed in Israeli air strikes. And, and. we just kind of don't hear about them in the same way, you know, if a single American gets detained in Russia, that that becomes a household name, you know. Now I get why. And I'm not trying to diminish, you know, what happened to those people at all. But, you know, I'd just like to hear more about the fact that there are Americans that are being killed in these conflicts, because we hear a lot about

it in other circumstances. And that's just something that I think, you know, needs to be addressed and adjusted. On the broader point, Trump positioned himself as, yeah, like the anti-war guy, and we've talked a lot about how he gets currency out of saying, I'm not like these people who got us in all these wars. Again, to be clear, the problem with bombing Iranian nuclear sites is, number one, it doesn't, quote, unquote, destroy the Iranian nuclear program, because they have a scientific capacity in that country. We did these assessments in the Obama administration. Maybe you'd set back the program by a year by blowing up some facilities, but guess what that would happen then? They'd go underground and they triple down on trying to get a nuclear weapon as fast as possible.

And you have to kind of keep doing it again and again and again if you're Israel. And then meanwhile, Iran, there reports that they launch attacks against, you know, potentially even terrorist attacks against Israeli critical infrastructure. They might launch attacks against Gulf oil fields just to kind of create a sense of chaos on the region, raise the cost. To your point, the Chinese get involved and say, wait, what the hell is going on over here? This is not a good idea, you know. and for Trump to kind of cavalierly have like a, you know,

tortling conversation with Hugh Hewitt about it, while, again, repeating his deeply anti-Semitic trope that all Jews care about is Israel and all Jews care about with respect to Israel supporting Bibi Nanyahu and his security policies. I mean, like, this is literally like the most anti-Semitic thing, you know, imaginable. And he just does it every time. And people like Hugh Huard, who cast themselves as, you know, opponents of anti-Semitism, just sit there and say nothing, you know, So there's a lot to unpack there and none of it good.

Hugh also asked Trump about anti-Semitism on college campuses in the U.S. And basically, like, what would you do about it? Would you send in the DOJ? And this is part of what Trump says. He says, quote, you know a lot of the people in that? A lot of those people are Jewish people. You know that? They're Jewish kids.

So he's blaming Jews for antisemitism at college campuses. Great. And he was like, he just like kind of cleans up for him. Like, he either recommends for him the right policy or he just like mops up after his fucking wildly anti-Semitic statement. So more great work. Ben, so Kamala Harris was asked about the war in Gaza, U.S. influence over Israel and about Netanyahu as a partner during her interview on 60 minutes. Here's a clip. Do we have a real close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu?

I think, with all due respect, the better question is do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes. Now that answer I like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, not subtle, you know. Settily give that guy the Heismund, give the middle finger. Which is true. I don't know why everything has to be so personalized. I mean, the Republicans like the personalization around Nanyahu because Nanyahu is basically a Republican, you know. So I saw some outrage about this. What could you disagree with in her statement if you were a support of Israel?

You know, you should... Why do you care more about BB Nanyahu than the people of Israel? Also, the Israeli people hate Nanyahu. He sucks. Also, I guess there was a bonus scene in this 60 minutes interview. Yeah, well, like 33% of them like the guy. So she was also asked who then to America's greatest adversary is to which she responded, quote, Iran has American blood on their hands.

And then she also pointed to the ballistic missile attack against Israel as evidence of Iran's capabilities saying, quote, what we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be nuclear power. That is one of my highest priorities. So it's just an interesting answer. And you saw a lot of people kind of getting worked up that she didn't say China. But I don't know. I didn't know if you had a reaction to that. I didn't like the answer, just to be honest. Actually, my mind went to Russia. You know, China's the geopolitical competitor over the long term. but if you're just talking about like a country wreaking havoc and endangering, you know, everything that America is supposed to be invested in in terms of global order, like I'd do Russia.

The reason I got a little uncomfortable with the Iran answer is that Iran is not nearly as powerful as Russia or China. And by the way, I welcome all the people that will dunk on me for the Obama 2012 debate. Oh, I know. I know. I can already hear it. Go ahead. But I just don't think Iran is our biggest adversary. And I worry that at a time when we're on this kind of escalatory ramp into potential conflict with Iran, Ehud Olmart, former Prime Minister of Israel, said just recently in interview, he thinks BB's trying to drag the U.S. into war with Iran, which is, you know,

not an extreme viewpoint to have, you know, that he may just be kind of continuing to, to to poke it Iran until they do something that draws us in. That's why I worry about we need to stop and think about the rhetoric very carefully unless we want that and I don't think we do. Yeah. It's a kind of a it's a tough question too because you're like it's a tough question. Ranking things never ends well. No, it does. Last, last thing on this. So a French president Minam Macron was, has been openly calling for weapons shipments to Israel to be halted. This is a quote from a press conference. He said, if we call for a ceasefire, the consistent thing to do is not to supply the weapons of war, adding that those who provide such weapons,

quote, cannot stand by our side each day and call for a ceasefire while continuing to supply them. As you'd expect, Ben Netanyahu did not love that. Here's a quick piece of his response. As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel's side. Yet President Macron and some other Western leaders are now calling for an arms embargo against Israel. Shame on them. So I thought that was an interesting quote from Macron because it's clearly a shot at Netanyahu,

but also a massive shot at the United States. Yeah. I mean, what are they going to rename the fries and the Knesset's Freedom Fries now? I mean, you're showing things they're happening here. I mean, first of all, I just want to say about that statement, because this is a man who knows language, English, American-speaking, you know, political language.

civilized countries, you know, by there's a dehumanization happening. It's implicit in his rhetoric, right? There are civilized people and uncivilized people, you know. And it's kind of part of everything he does is meant to kind of cast kind of all these countries where Israel has bombed Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. I think they've taken shot. I think they've taken shot. into Iraq, certainly Yemen, and kind of uncivil. I just don't like that paradigm. It's worth naming because it kind of shapes how he wants you to think about it, you know. Now, at the same time, you know, Germany, France, the UK's taking steps to restrict arms. We're reaching that tipping point where the United States is literally like kind of the last, you know, person picking up

the bar tab for Israel. And, you know, if Kamla, Harris, wins, that's what she's inheriting, you know. I mean, there is no international consensus for this anymore. There's very broad and intense international opposition to what's happening, particularly in Gaza. And that's why Netanyahu is ratching up the rhetoric. That rhetoric, again, is for American politicians, you know, picking on the French, you know, typical target for right-wing American politicians. That's all that is, I think. Yeah, I agree. It was just notable. I mean, good for Macron for, like, up a little bit. Last, last thing just domestically, I just want to note that Biden's postponing his trip to Germany and Angola because of this awful Hurricane Milton that's barreling down

on Florida. So just something worth noting. Ben, last thing on the political section here. So Bob Woodward's got this new book out. I think it's called war. I feel like every one of his books are named war. War. Bush's War. Obama's war. And shit like that. Yeah. CNN got a bunch of excerpts. About war, you know. Loves the war. Yeah. So some of the excerpts are out today in CNN. It's a lot of rehash and things like I remember us talking about at the time. A couple of things just worth noting that jumped out at me. Woodward writes that Biden's national security team at one point in late 2022 believe there was a 50% chance that Putin would use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, a tactical nuclear

weapons. So that helps you understand why they've been so concerned about escalation. Woodward reports that at the height of the pandemic, Trump sent a secret shipment of COVID tests to Putin for his personal use. So when Americans couldn't get their hands on tests, when none of us knew if we had this thing, when none of us knew if we could visit our, you know, dying relatives, because we might put them at risk, Trump was sending tests to Putin for his personal use. Woodward reported that a Trump aide says there have been, quote, maybe as many as seven, end quote, calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left the White House in

2021. We'd love to know more about that. There was also this interesting anecdote, Ben, where Lindsey Graham is in Saudi Arabia meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And Graham says, like, hey, let's call Trump. I guess that's how he shows off. And MBS has his, like, goon bring over a bag of burner phones. And one of them is labeled Trump 45. There's another labeled Jake Sullivan, which was just an interesting window into, I guess, how MBS is avoiding intelligence agencies.

He just has a bunch of burner phones that he rolls through to call various leaders in national security types. And then this one quote was amazing to me. I guess Lindsey Graham's a huge intelligence risk. The size of Lindsey Graham's mouth is a huge intelligence risk for MBS. Because that guy just dishes on whatever the fuck room he's in. Whatever you say and do. And then last thing.

So I guess Bush, George W. Bush was talking to Joe Biden about Afghanistan. And he called him, I guess, and said, oh, boy, I can understand what you're going through. I got fucked by my intel people too, which I was like incredible. I assume he's talking about the Iraq War. I mean, there's no real other option here. But wow, what a way to phrase it. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, a little rich, too.

I think Bush kind of assigned them to go find the conclusion he wanted. And now he's blaming them for giving him the conclusion he wanted, which is that Iraq was developing weapons destruction. Yeah, you also pick the VP that helped us for this. He's no, no, some, we, as a supporter of us, anyway. Well, and I kind of, when I'm actually going to defend the intel community on Afghanistan, too, like, because the reports that came out were that they predicted that Kabul would fall. They just said it would take a few months, right?

So, I mean, it's not. like they didn't get it right. I mean, they just didn't pick the date, you know. These books, don't you feel Tommy like they have less and less relevance as time goes on? And it's not just a Bob Woodward commentary. It's like the whole idea of like stringing together a bunch of usually self-interested anecdotes that add up to revealing something in the post-Trump world, they just don't, I don't know, they're just kind of not where the zeitgeist is, you know, like you're not as interested in some anecdote that took place nine months ago or someone, you know, said, uh, fuck the intel community or something. Right. Or the BB, BB's a motherfucker or something.

Yeah, Biden's, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of passages in this book of Biden saying what a motherfucker BB is. Yeah. Well, great. How many times can we read that privately they're mad of BB, you know? Yeah. I think also like, I don't know. Maybe I don't know if the internet is catching up to the kind of woodward process, which basically was like, Like Bob Woodward would basic, you know, he did a couple of things. One, he would bring top officials, you know, national security people, the senior staff, whatever, the chief of staff to his house. You'd show up in like a chauffeur car. You'd park in his garage.

You'd get out. His chef would make them a meal. So it was this kind of like very, you know, cloak and dagger process that also, I think, made people feel like their egos were being stroked by the guy who reported on Watergate. We had one of our battles with Dan because I revealed on this podcast. once that I went to Bob Williams house. Oh, you had the soup. And I had the soup. That's right. Because he does a multiple course meal that trap you in his house.

And Dan was right. Dan was right to win that fight. I should not have had the soup. Well, listen, mistakes were made. But he also will like say, you know, okay, you know, Vice President Biden, the Secretary of State said that you said the following things in a meeting and you were wrong about this and that and, you know, gets them to respond. So it gets people kind of taking shout to each other.

Well, I'm just sort of winding up to the fact that a lot of the best. and forth in the readouts and the kind of TikTok-type stories now end up in the newspaper way before Bob Woodward puts out his book, including that big Frank Four piece that we all talked about two weeks ago, three weeks ago in the Atlantic that had kind of the whole like, you know, post-October 7th Biden view of how things went down and what went south and Gaza, yada, yada, so yeah, I just don't know that they have the impact. Yeah, yeah. It's probably not the worst thing. Yeah, probably not the worst thing. We are going along. So we'll go through a few more things here, Ben.

So Tunisia had an election this past Sunday in the incumbent Kai Saeed won re-election, but it was not a Democratic success story. According to Human Rights Watch, since the start of the electoral period on the 14th of July, authorities have prosecuted, convicted, or detained at least nine prospective candidates. And just over 28% of the population voted, so very low turnout as compared to recent elections. Since Saeed was first elected in 2019, you've had a bunch of opposition figures detained. that there's been a crackdown on the media, and he has been dismantling the country systems of checks and balances. That includes changing the Constitution in 2022 in ways that weaken the legislative branch, put the judiciary under the president's control, and made it so that the president cannot be impeached. What makes this, I think, especially depressing is that Tunisia was considered a relative democratic success story.

It was the birthplace of the Arab Spring, which ousted a former authoritarian leader named Ben Ali in 2011. he had been in power for 23 years. And Saeed was elected with huge support in 2019. He was a former constitutional law professor who promised to clean up corruption, but instead went in this very autocratic direction instead. So I don't know, but I read this story, and it just made me wonder if this was kind of like the last hopeful element of the Arab Spring being extinguished. Yeah, I think I'd just say Tunisia's been going in this direction for a while.

this guy's been governing as an autocrat. So it's kind of a coda to Tunisia tipping this direction. And one quick plug, we have an episode of this election series coming out later this month, where I talked to Greg Karlstrom about the regional dynamic in the Middle East. And one of the points that Greg Carlstrom makes is it, the conditions are kind of ripening for another Arab Spring, that you've got this Israeli war, which is, you know, inflaming publics. But you also have, like, a very brittle autocratic regime in Egypt that is suppressing dissent, a lot of corruption, a lot of economic hardship, Jordan, a lot of anger at King Abdullah over, you know, the Palestinians, given how large the Palestinian population is there. So interestingly, I think you're right that

like Tunisia represents the kind of ultimate failure of that whole Arab Spring process, but it may come back again. And the mistake that these autocrats always make is to think that, oh, the counter-revolution worked, it's over. There could be people in the streets, and this is something I think over the course of the next presidential term. I would not be shocked if there was unpredictable political instability in one country or another beyond the countries that are directly at war right now. Yeah, it's always just a question of whether people feel like the last protest movement was so recent and feel like the outcome was so bad for them that that might impede them

from supporting another. You never know, but you're right. I think things have not gotten better for a lot of these people who are on the streets and it doesn't mean their grievances have gone away. We also have some pretty grim news out of Austria. were the far-right Freedom Party or the FPO. It's actually pronounced F-P-E-U, because there's an umlaught, but I'll say FPO because we're Americans, which was a party literally founded by Nazis, won the most votes in Austria's parliamentary

elections. They got 29.2% of the vote, which is up from 16% in 2019. And second place was the center-right OVP party. They got 26.5%. And the center-left SPO party took third place with 21%. So this is the first time since World War II that a far-right party. party has come out on top in Austria. The FPO ran on creating what they called Fortress Austria, which is this platform heavily focused on restricting immigration and promoting the

idea of remigration for asylum seekers, in other words, deporting them. Some people would call that ethnic cleansing. The party is also very pro-Russia in anti-vaccine or anti-vaccine mandate. There's this famous picture, Ben. Remember this of Putin dancing with the then foreign minister of Austria, who was an FPO member at her wedding back in like 2018. So that's how close these parties were. The FBI is not shy about their Nazi roots. Its leader Herbert Kickel told voters he wants to be the next people's chancellor, which is a title Hitler used in the 30s. A couple days before the election, there was a funeral for an FBI politician attended by several members of the party and the crowd sang a favorite anthem of the SS. So again, not subtle stuff. Kickel was interior

ministry from 2017 to 2019. His tenure was a mess. He got forced out of office by a corruption scandal, but now he wants to be chancellor. So the center-right OVP party has said they're open to working with the far-right FPO party to form a government, but the current chancellor, the leader of the sort of center-right party OVP, said he will not work with Kickel, the leader of the far-right party. So it's just not clear if these far-right guys will end up in government. We spoke with Maria Meyerhofer, an Obama Europe leader based in Vienna, and executive director of Austin, a nonpartisan advocacy organization to get a little more context on this election. There's a rift in society that we all feel already, like they are at nearly 30%.

Everybody in Austria has members of their family, former friends, still existing friends, who voted for the FPO. And it's very, very difficult also on a very interpersonal level for many people. There's no typical FPPO voter anymore. Like FPO voters used to be predominantly male, wide, lower class, lower income. We still slightly see lower levels of education but all of that is not really true anymore for the FPO. The F.PU is recruiting from all from a broad range of society and They definitely benefited over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the COVID pandemic. They have also built on worries about migration.

And that brings together a very broad mix of people who voted for them in these elections. So similar drivers in Austria that we've seen in Germany, America, a lot of places of support for the far right. The far right in Austria has been around for a while. But, I mean, its recent success does seem like not just a threat to democracy in Austria itself, but also to the European Union, because if you get the FPO into government and you combine a government, a far-right government in Austria with Victor Orban in Hungary, with, you know, the far-A government in Slovakia, that adds up to a pretty big, you know, ethno-nationalist far-right pro-Russia block kind of mucking stuff up in Brussels at the European Union. And then, Ben, if you layer on like a Marine Le Penwin in France in 2017 or the AFD in Germany next year, I mean, like, suddenly that's a lot of political power in Europe for these far right parties. Yeah, I think, you know, the thing I look at is Austria is a bellwether for Germany, right? Because Germany is obviously the big, most important country in Europe.

And, you know, the exact same dynamic that she describes and re describes has shaped the rise of the far right in Germany. what I think needs to happen is I would like to see all of the 70% or 65 to 70% of other parties, just link arms and say, we're not going to form a collusion with these people. They're not going to get in power. Now, the risk to that is that people then think, oh, my voice is not heard, but I'd rather keep those people out of power. I could be persuaded that I'm wrong. And, you know, listeners let us know what you think about that. But I just don't think you want these Austrian Nazis, you know, anywhere near the, you know, holding the keys. I'm with you there. Remember back in 2019 there was a scandal when the deputy chancellor of Austria, who was the leader at the time of the FPO party, this far right party, got busted in this kind of mysterious sting operation in Ibiza that got linked to some German newspapers. Basically, like, they had a woman pretend to be a Russian oligarch's niece. And she said she was going to buy like a big newspaper in Austria. And then the FPO party leader said he would get her government contracts.

and was all recorded, and then it got leaked out two years later. It was a very interesting story that, like, I don't think we ever got to the bottom of who did it. It's called the Abiza affair, I think. More Abiza affairs, I guess, you know. Yeah, a lot of those happen in Abiza. Final story, Ben. So I think we all know how stressful it can be if you're on the hook to kind of choose a TV

show or a movie for a group, right? You got to account for varying tastes. You feel responsible if people don't like it. So it's stressful. Now imagine for a second that you were, a flight attendant on a recent Quantus Airlines flight from Tokyo to Sydney. The entertainment system that lets everyone control their own TV screen was busted. So the flight attendants had to pick one movie that would play for everyone on all their screens at the same time. So they ended up going

with the obvious choice, which is an R-rated indie film called Daddio, starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. The film takes place almost entirely in a taxi cab. Sounds thrilling. And according to common sense media features, quote, a brief but clear photo of an erect penis on a phone screen, photos of a woman's naked breasts, explicit sex-related diaclog can't text texting. One report I was listening to about this flight said you could hear parents throughout the plane just gasping.

They're trying to hot their children watching it. And they somehow left it on for an entire hour before they switched to Inside Out too. I'm just trying to imagine a more awkward, flight. I don't know that one could exist where you're basically watching soft porn with like 300 of your closest friends. What was the flight attendant meeting where it's like, you know, we've got

this list and daddy is the one that jumps out to go. I don't know. The reason I'd sympathy for them though is on a middle school trip, I remember like the teachers let kids bring movies to play in the VCR and some kid brought like Eddie Murphy raw

or delirious and the teacher didn't know what it was and they put it on for like 10 or 15 minutes. And it was a very similar vibe. So I got three quick things on this. One is I'm old enough to remember when there was only one movie on plights, you know, like we're so spoiled by screens, but it was never daddy. It was never that, I don't know, intriguing. The second is when you have kids and you fly, you start to suddenly become very cognizant of the screens around them. Because it is the case that you're sitting there sometimes and your kids, you know, usually staring at an iPad. But you look over and there's just like some bare nudity or some serious violence happening

on the screen next year and like you're kind of positioning your body to like, you know, obstruct the view. The last thing I'd say is that in fourth grade, Ms. Fywell let me bring in a movie to show to the class. Like we had this movie thing where every month somebody could pick a movie. And I brought in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Great movie. Which got me in big trouble because Why? Yeah, she found some themes inappropriate. I guess a movie about skipping school and he makes out with his girlfriend and he basically humiliates all the school administration.

Apparently that wasn't the message she thought was going to the fourth grade class. So I've been there. Me and that Qantas flight attendant had been in the same boat. It was more of a meta beef. The other story I have like this, I was at my friend's house, kid Ian Boone, he's like my best friend in seventh, eighth grade. And we tried to rent a couple movies. One of them I think was like, I don't know, the.

karate kid or some shit like four and they put the wrong movie in the like case and my Ian's mom puts it in sits back down we all watch together me him his family's mom and it is a hardcore porn exactly what you expect to happen starts happening it's the movie's called lucy had a ball um and I just remember his mom leaping over the coffee table to run to the fucking BCR to hammer the thing grabs the tape put puts it in the box, runs back to the store, and just lit the kid who worked there on fire. That's amazing. I've never laughed about it for two and a half years. That is one of the great things that could ever happen, you know?

Yeah, it was amazing. We're just like, oh my God, that was so funny. Okay. With that, we're going to go to Tanaasi Coates. Take a quick break first. I hope Tanaasi doesn't listen to the bridge. Yeah. I hope he doesn't either. He's better than that intro. So stick around for the interview because you're going to enjoy it. Okay, we are really, really pleased to welcome to the podcast. someone who really doesn't need much introduction. Tanahasi Coates,

who his latest book, The Message, is incredibly powerful. I recommend everyone read it. You'll learn more from the book itself than anything you'll hear on this podcast even. But I just want to begin by thanking you, Tanasi, for writing the book as well as being here. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. And to be here with you, somebody who knows.

Yeah, no, it's just... I've been looking forward to this. Well, I want to start with the question of language. You know, one of the things that I've thought a lot about since I've been out of government and as someone who's both had to use the language of government and really the language of power and then kind of think about it after I left is that this conflict in particular has a whole language to it, you know, two state solution settlers, you know, statements of deep concern about things that the U.S. is not going to do anything about.

Civilian casualties, area A, B, and C, you know, occupation. and you've got this great analogy that occupation is like a medical procedure, but it doesn't tell you that it's a colonoscopy. My question for you is, as you kind of went into this journey and you visited Palestine, what was your awareness of that kind of official language that is used? And how different did you find the reality from the words you heard used to describe it? Yeah, that's a great question, man. I think what I was aware of was these kind of slogans.

almost like this kind of, I don't know, like things like Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel has the right to exist and how necessary it was to say these things. Like I understand them as things that have to be said, you know, in order to proceed further in a discussion between states or between state officials or. And I always wondered why. And I didn't actually really have an answer to that. Like I didn't know. but it was said so much that it felt a lot of it felt almost ritualistic and you know maybe it's just my

journalistic training or my training as a writer am I thinking about language when you start hearing like that hearing language like that there usually something else behind it there's a politics behind it and a reason behind it and as you're correct and then when I got over there I was you know you know I found it you know area A area B area C you know and all these other sort of you know green line you know buffer zone, you know, all, you know, this extra, you know, vocabulary that I, that I heard. Yeah, I mean, I want to, we're going to focus most of this on, on your, the section of the book that deals with Palestine. But the, you know, you set it up through other journeys. And to get at this point about policy interacting with what is happening on the ground, I thought it's very

interesting how you talk about your experience of engaging with some of the school boards that are banning your book, which I think is often cast as, you know, people having genuine debates about what is appropriate for kids to learn or even the kind of expropriation of the language of, I guess, the left, you know, you don't want to be triggered, you don't want to be wounded as a young person by having to encounter, in this case, you know, accurate or, you know, raw. depictions of race. But you kind of connected to the executive order that the Trump administration passed after the 16-19 project that is very specific in its language about, you know, preventing and prohibiting certain kind of discussion of certain topics, mainly race,

that could be uncomfortable to white students. And that's used to ban your book, among others. I mean, because it connects to this issue of language and where we're going to go on the discussion of the Palestinians, when you look at people, like at the school board that you visited in South Carolina, how aware do you think they are, the people that want to ban your book, you know, of the larger structure that is kind of compelling them to have these views versus how much they kind of just naturally want to go in the direction of kind of suppressing your speech because it makes them feel better, you know, how aware do you find people to be that they're kind of participating in a deliberate political project that is about power and supremacy.

That's a great question, man. That is a really, really good question. So I'll say on one level, the speed with which people move from cause to cause, for instance, like go from, you know, vaccines to DEI, you know, which don't seem to have, you know, much to do with each other. And then from over there to, you know, whether a kid, you know, can use the right approach, is using the appropriate pronouns or not, makes me think that on some level there is just this kind of ambient negative energy that can be directed somewhere for political ends.

And it's not completely thought out that maybe politics is not as always as rational as we would like it to be or as we would think it to be. At the same time, in terms of books, I thought that they understood the power of, you know, of culture. And I think there's certainly an element of the right that this is true of better than a lot of people on the left. Maybe because we take culture for granted.

I don't know. But I think it was pretty clear that they, you know, feel like books and, you know, certain movies and certain pieces of art and culture are making for a world that they just don't want their kids to live in. I always have to go back to the fact that you unite the right, to unite the right rally began over a statue of a dude that had been dead for over 150 years. You know, like that was the incitement, you know, a statue, not a particular policy, not a bill, not anything. I mean, just a statue. And, you know, I think a lot of times we look at this and we say,

why are these people acting so crazy about this? Why are we spending all this energy, you know, on this? And one of the theories behind them, is that, in fact, it's the culture that bounds the ends of what the politics can actually do. Yeah, so you know, you take that, you know, kind of prism and apply it to Israel and Palestine. And, I mean, I want to start here. I mean, because I want to come back to kind of what supremacy does to the people engaged in it. But there's something, it is, what is distinct there is, and you capture just the beginning of the section,

You start at Yad Vashem, and you kind of juxtapose this, and I've been there, this kind of overwhelming memorial to an unimaginable trauma, you know. And, you know, I had family, as my mother's Jewish, had family in that trauma, but the kind of overwhelming sense of victimhood in a way that this was done to Jewish people. But you juxtapose that with the presence of kind of heavily armed Israeli security forces in and around the God Vashem complex, but just kind of it's omnipresent while you're there. And it's kind of this juxtaposition of Israel as a manifestation of the kind of almost permanent victimhood of the Jewish people, but also Israel is a symbol of this kind of powerful

force that is able to do what it pleases, particularly when it comes to the Palestinians, but we're seeing now that applied more broadly across the region. And I'm wondering if you think that that is that. is that a distinct you know that juxtaposition of an insistence on victimhood and an insistence on power? Did you find that to be different

than kind of power structures you'd encounter in other places? Yeah. Or is that similar? I did. I did. And there's a great historian by the name of Amy Kaplan who wrote this book called Our American Israel and her framing for that was the invincible victim. Israel is the invincible victim,

which is to say you have the power to do great violence. And yet somehow you have the kind of moral high ground, obviously having been the victim of existential violence at the same time. I did. I did. I don't think I've ever seen that before. But I think the scariest thing was it didn't take much for me to imagine it not being, you know,

just unique to Israel. I mean, that really, you know, and I've tried to stress this as hard as that critique is on Zionism, as hard as that critique is on Israel. It's not an essay about a particular unique Jewish era. or unique Israeli era. On the contrary, what it is, as far as I'm concerned, is a warning. You know, for those of us who somehow believe that oppression is ennobling, that oppression gives, you know, this great moral wisdom about right and wrong.

It clearly does not. You know, in fact, you know, sometimes people can derive the wrong lessons, you know, from oppression. And so I, you know, without, you know, dulling the criticism, you know, that I had in a book, it was very, very important to me that, you know, folks be able to see themselves, not just in the Palestinians, but in the Israelis too. Yeah. That leads to a question I really wanted to ask you, which is kind of strange because I

should know better than you as someone who's had, has been in positions of, you know, political and governmental power. But, you know, there's, there's, you have so many stories of what the occupation does. one that stood out to me that it's nowhere near as extreme as, you know, murder and even bulldozing houses. But it was an Israeli told you the story of like a Palestinian father wanted to take his daughter to the bathroom. And they were, you know, a man, an Israeli soldier was pointing a gun at this guy and, you know, kind of trying to control the situation. And this, the daughter, you know, peed in her pants. And the guy, what the fuck are we doing, literally, right?

And that sense of, as a father of a daughter, I thought of like, oh, my God, what if I was that man? And what if that was my daughter? But then I started thinking of these Israeli soldiers pointing the gun. And the question I wanted to ask you is, what do you think that does to people? Because we're all, we're complicit in it too. You know, we Americans, you know, white Americans have done that. We support Israel in doing it. We pay for those guns, you know.

So when I asked the question, not just saying, what does it do to that? what do you think that degree of supremacy and the layers of rationalization to make it possible does to us collectively? So there's a complicated answer to this question because I think it's layered. There are two things that happen. I don't know how you inflict that kind of violence and don't lose some of yourself, like some part of yourself, you know, in that degradation. Now, one way that you prevent that loss is actually through a rhetoric and through stories and through narratives and through, you know, a culture of dehumanizing other people.

And that really is like what the message is obsessed with. It's, you know, obsessed with like stories. It's obsessed with books. You know, it's, you know, why I spend so much time on Exodus, for instance. It's obsessed, you know, with representation because if you can view people as subhuman, then, you know, you can blind yourself to that kind of violence. it takes a lot of work to do that. It is a resource-heavy, intensive, or resource-intensive task to dehumanize people.

It requires an entire, you know, literature of dehumanization. The flip side, though, of that, too, is you also become ignorant of those people. And so you can find yourself in a constant cycle of violence. and you believe the lies of justification that you've actually created, if that makes sense. You know, and you may genuinely yearn to get out of the cycle. But you've created this literature. You know, it says these people are crazy. These people are naturally, you know, violent.

The only reason why, you know, they oppose us is clearly because they want to kill us. They want to kill us because of, you know, who we are. And that's it. I mean, we saw this, you know, in a war on terror, right? They hate us for our freedoms. Like that kind of simple, which at its root, is ultimately ignorant. You know, like, and I don't mean that even as a slur, but like, it's like you literally

do not have, you are making a decision in abeyance of information, you know, and I just, I think if we, and maybe this is too optimistic of me, but I think if we had more information, we would make more choices. I read a recent report by, you know, this gentleman by the name of Josh Paul, who used to work in the state department. Yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with them. He co-wrote this report with this Palestinian-American law professor, Noura Aetakot.

And I can't believe I just learned this, but I was shocked to find out that every single fighter plane that drops a bomb on Gaza comes from America. Every single one. And it's like, oh, this really is ours. Like, people are not being metaphorical when they say it's yours. Like, it really, really is yours. And, like, I just think if we had a... Like, if we understood this in a more direct way, like not in a metaphorical way, I have to believe we would make different decisions. Well, yeah, and you kind of analogize, you know, because the analogy is obvious, the treatment of the Palestinians to the kind of racial apartheid that has existed in this country.

So it's viewed through that paradigm, not through some kind of foreign policy paradigm. What do you, what do you, because it's so confusing to watch the kind of reaction to your book, and I don't want to dwell too much on it. But there are clearly people in this country who think of themselves as liberals who support civil rights and they're anti-racist and have an entirely different paradigm for how they look at the Palestinians. Yeah. You know some of these folks, you know, some of the, how do you think that, how do you make sense of that rationalization, having gone through the experience of both writing this book and then obviously seeing the reaction to. So I think like a sympathetic reading of it goes something like this. There really is, you know, centuries of attempts, you know, to murder, ethnically cleanse, humiliate, destroy the Jewish people. Like that, that's a very, very real thing. And even like, like before the Holocaust, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Before, you know, like it didn't start with the Holocaust, right? And so I think like having that in mind, it is easy to, and maybe even natural, to conclude, you know, the world wants us

dead. The world wants us not to exist. And I could see how like your state craft, even your state construction could extend from that supposition. The problem is there are people who may or may not believe that, you know, who can benefit, you know, and profit off of, you know, that, that, that, that notion. That's the like the generous interpretation of it, probably the less generous interpretation of it is it's very, very hard to part with the moral high ground, you know, to accept that, you know, you suffered something and it like didn't make you a hyper-moral human being. It really just made you somebody that suffered through something. And the meaning of it is really up to you. It's what you name. There's no like divine thing that's going to happen. You know, because there's

something beautiful about the idea. And the Jewish people, you know, in Europe specifically wandering and, you know, outcasts everywhere they go. Holocaust happens. This horrible thing happens. And then out of it, finally we have a home. We have this beautiful modern home. You know what I mean? It compete with any Western country in the world. It is as advanced as any Western country in the world more advanced in some respects. It is as badass. You know, we got killers. You know what I mean? Who will, you know, destroy anybody that messes with us. And you have to part with. that. Man, that's hard. That's really, really hard. But it's also like, you know, as with,

you know, the America is so big and obviously has so many complexities, the other thing that's so hard is that the Jewish people also contribute so much to theories around law and justice and universalism. I mean, could, you know, that there are so many, particularly in the, you know, earlier 20th century. And even like at the early days of the kind of pre-independence Israel, you had some of the deepest thought being done on concepts of universal humanity and law done by Jews, including Jews in Israel. I mean, did you feel that at all in your time there? You know, I had to be honest to you. Like, I was aware of that. And it would kind of come through in some of like the literature. I read this book by a gentleman on Sasha Polakall-Somransky, I believe,

his name is. And it's about the relationship between South Africa and Israel. And one of the things, he quotes like numerous officials from Shimon Peres all the way up to Netanyahu saying, you know, a Jew, effectively a Jew cannot be for apartheid. And it's talking about South Africa, not the accusations of Israel, but that, you know, meanwhile, you know, obviously there's a lot of support for apartheid going on in Israel. But I say that not cynically, you know, with a cynical It was clear that in their minds it offended some notion of what Jewish identity was. You know what I mean? And so I was kind of aware of that in the background.

But, you know, as much energy as I put into that essay, it really is the beginning of me, like, understanding certain things. So, like, I hear what you're saying and I kind of vaguely know it's true, but I couldn't, like, you know, articulate it, you know, in a real sort of. a scholarly way in a way that it could be written, you know, or something like that. It's a thing I've heard before, you know, obviously, like I said, I don't doubt it. It's just that I didn't know enough, you know what I mean? But I kept, I'm glad you raised that, Ben, because I kept, like, one of the limitations that her essay was I felt like, and maybe this is where your question is, I felt like I really was in a kind of existential crisis.

You know, I was witnessing somebody else's existential crisis, you know, when I talk to people. But I could not analyze it. Like, I just didn't have the basis to really go into it too far. Well, and there's a couple more questions that will get to your kind of role and voice and what you're doing with your voice. Part of what's so frustrating, particularly with the connection of the United States, because the United States makes it possible for this to happen, as you said, every plane. And you can apply that to other things. And yet it's never, even for people who are concerned and don't like the direction of Israeli politics to the far right,

it's never the right time, you know, Kamala Harris isn't going to shift positions before an election. Oh, then Kamala's a good election. We're like, she's got to pass her agenda, not the right time to take this on. I mean, my experience of this is it's never the right time for people to take political risks on these things. And you're kind of, you're not engaging in that, really. You're saying, in my role, I'm a writer. I'm a writer of prominence that you've acquired through hard work. And now I'm just going to shine a light on this.

How do you see that? How would you like that to interact with what people in positions of power do? Because you're not writing an op-ed laying out a two-state solution. But I sense that you're trying to send a message, you know. How do you see your role in kind of shaking up a status quo that has allowed such injustice to perpetuate? So I'm concerned with two things primarily. First of all, I'm concerned with my field, with journalism, and I'm concerned with writing. and I am concerned with the near complete absence,

and I would go so far as to say banishment of Palestinians themselves, in prominent places in that field. I do not remember, except with one exception. Well, let's just say in general, if I turn on CNN, if I turn on MSNBC, you know, if I turn on Fox, whatever, it is extremely rare to never see a Palestinian journalist giving in analysis on what's happened in that region. You know, you almost never see an Arab journalist, you know, giving really analysis on,

that is absurd, you know, and like criminal. Like I just, I can't imagine us, well, I can't imagine us because we did this at one point in our history and it was bad, saying, okay, we're going to cover racism, but we're not going to have any black journalists to be a part of it, you know? And so, like, I think the first thing is to, you know, just across the board, get more voices involved from the Palestinian side. And so I think we as journalists, like, we got to fix that. We got to fix that.

It just cannot be that there's no Palestinian journalist who is a bureau chief for a major media organization. That is, you know, in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem. That's absurd, you know. And it's part of it. It's part of why this is happening because that feeds into the dehumanization that allows, you know, for the moms and everything. The second thing is that I'm usually not this direct. And I guess I generally stay out of this. I just, I was at the DNC and I was watching all the symbols and the figures that were, were you out there?

No, I didn't. I was not there this year. My mom got a hip replacement, so I was dealing with that. Got it, got it, got it. That's way more important. Yeah, no, she's doing good, too. Good to hear it. Good to hear it.

What you would have seen, though, Ben, was, I was on the phone though, by the way, Tana Hassee, with some of the folks who were trying to get a speaker. So I know a bit about what you're on. Got it, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, she's trying to get a Palestinian-American speaker. Okay, okay. So the visual that I saw every night was like I've never seen, you know, a greater embrace of the civil rights movement, you know, or black figures. I mean, I saw, you know, they were honorifics for everybody from Fannie Lou Hamer to Shirley Chisholm to Jesse Jackson, you know, his runs and a number of speakers.

I mean, just so many, you know, indigenous. speaker, so many, you know, black folks, you know, just a range in there. You know what I mean? And so, okay, where this party that, you know, recognizes, you know, the importance and the significance of democracy and putting aside the fact that there was no Palestinian-American speaker, if Kamala Harris powers her way to the presidency like this and then continues to participate, you know, and give the bombs and the weaponry to. perpetrate the killing of more than, you know, at this point, two percent of the population of Gaza. And what I consider a genocide, to further what I consider apartheid, there's something

cosmic in that that has broken. Because you're using the energy, you know, of democracy and freedom struggle to inflict pain and suffering on other people. And I just, that's hard for me. Like, I don't, you're right. I usually don't like to get this directly involved in this sort of way. But that is a, that's a lot. You know, you talk about what you lose. That will be a huge loss. That would be a huge loss.

And I guarantee you, like, should she win this year, you know, next time, it will be very, very hard to turn to people and, you know, say, I mean, look, there'll be some section of people that just don't care, right? But there will be some of us that will say, look, it's going to be, like, how do I go to my son and tell them to vote for you? Are we now saying, you know, yeah, our abortion rights at the expense of this? You know, well, we've been on the other side of at the expense of it. So what do we learn?

It just sucks to be on that side. Is that the lesson? I mean, that's tough, man. That's tough. Yeah. I mean, is that because it's easier to just talk about something? I mean, in the past, you know, you, I mean, one of the things that surprised me, and this is a question I want to ask you about the reaction to your book, is I,

before I'd read it, you know, I tried not to read too many reviews, you know, but, you know, there's a lot of discourse around your book, right? And one of the things was, you know, oh, you didn't really engage in what's, you know, the complexity or something like that, right? And which, you know, you're right to kind of reject generally. But then I, I read this and it's actually a much more detailed piece of journalism. I mean, intricate details of how the holy sites are managed, how the water is apportioned, license plates, number of houses. You got Herzl and, oh my God. Jabininsky, Ben Yuda, the bureaucracy of settlements, right? And I kind of had, do you have this line that you use elsewhere in your book,

which is you talk about when you stand up against kind of dissemblers, and you're in the pit, right? You're trying to dig your way out of a pit, both as a writer, but also as someone, you know, obviously comes from the background of people who've been suppressed. And you have this line we say above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, you're doing it wrong. And I kind of feel like that's what's happened to you from some quarters about this book, you know?

But is that because when you write about reparations over slavery, that's safe because that's in the past? But when you write about this, it's harder because it's in the present? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this just indicts everybody. Like, this really is. There is no escape from this. There is no, you know, and that's what I mean about like that DNC.

I mean, this is a very, very black D&C. So the bones will be very black bombs. I mean, that is the logical conclusion of it. You know, so there's, I don't know, man. There are people who are really, really split, you know, like in their heart because they want to see a black woman, you know, as president to say nothing of being utterly and rightfully, you know, terrified of Trump. You know? And at the same time, if this continues, you know, you. You know, I'm usually one of those people that says, and I am right now, like in this election, one of those people that says, look, lesser evil or whatever, look, you know, that you don't get, you know, your dream world, you know what I mean? Like, you have to, you know, choose.

I just wonder if there's limits. Like, like, at some point, you know, are there, like, do you really, you know, cross over the line and not become the person that is choosing between lesser evil, but actually part of an evil, you know, or, you know, maybe not put it in those terms, you know, like making a compromise. and you actually become the doer of the thing. I hope she has the courage, you know, and not just the courage. I hope she has the belief and the conviction, you know, to not continue this. I don't expect a wholesale change in policy. But this is too much, man.

This is just too much. Well, the last question here is just, you know, part of what I think you've done here is you've approached this issue of the treatment of the Palestinians, in the role of the United States, and not as a kind of foreign policy issue. It's a, it's a who we are issue, right? It's a who we are. Yes. Yeah. It's entirely connected to the executive order from Trump, you know, banning your book, right? I mean, is that, you think you'll, I mean, I say this,

you know, with some desire to read more. I mean, is that a new paradigm for ways of writing about things in the world and connect? Because Americans sometimes shut that out, you know, and there's like, you know, you either go read like Tom Friedman and Dave Ignatius about foreign policy or you're focused on stuff here. I mean, do you see yourself staying in this space of truly globalizing these questions that you've been wrestling with throughout your writing life? Yeah, I do. As a journalist, I do. I do. I mean, one of the things that became clear was that I was missing certain things because, you know, I was just doing an American context. One of the shocking things, and this is in the essay, is the extent to which the indigenous experience in

this country became a prototype for so many experiences globally. I didn't know that. I didn't know the extent to which Hitler cited it. Frankly, as uncomfortable as it is to say this, but it's true. You know, the Israelis cited it up to this right day, Benny Morris citing it. You know, like, I didn't get the extent to which it had been exported, you know, like the idea. And so understanding the connections, you know, and really until about, I don't or maybe 10, 15 years ago, I just didn't understand the footprint that America had, you know, itself, like in the way, it's gigantic. And so you kind of have to, you know, you really do. Yeah. And, and I, you know, sometimes you can see it clear from the outside in, you know.

Well, look, I really want to thank you. Everybody should, everybody should read the message, pick it up, read it for yourself too. Don't, even if you are inclined to agree with Tonasi, you have to read the book because it's still going to challenge you. It certainly challenged me. And I think you've accomplished that thing that like an Orwell and a ball went, you know, the ability to take political writing and just there's no bullshit. It's all stripped clear of bullshit. So congratulations. I know that's not something you even do through one book.

That's something that you probably had to evolve to and over your life as a writer. So thank you for that. Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you, five. Thanks again to Tanahasi Coast for doing the show. Thanks to all the Qantas Airlines flight attendants out there. Yeah, keep thinking big. You need you on that wall.

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