Pod Save the World - Vaccine diplomacy and Kushner bashing

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss the intelligence community's new report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, America's role in getting the whole world vaccinated, why Jared Kushner's new op-ed is a joke, the Biden administration's posture towards North Korea and China, crackdowns on dissent in Uganda and Myanmar, the fight for women's safety in the UK and Australia, the surge of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southern border of the US, and more. Then Ben talks to Merav Michaeli, a member of the Knesset and leader of the Israeli Labor party, about how she's building back the Israeli left and the politics of Israel's upcoming election.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include which podcast you would like.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, March Madness is here. We're going to have a tournament this year. Have you filled out a bracket? You know, I have not, and I have to admit that my knowledge of college basketball has gone over something of a cliff, but I will do that. Yeah, that one fell fast for me, too. My plan is to wait and to binge today's episode of TakeLine, the amazing new podcast from Jason Concepcion and Renee Montgomery so that I could be entertained, informed, and filled with hot takes before I do my bracket. But so, you know, you might want to do that as well. That is a great segue. I don't even need another reason to want to check that out because I love everything about Take Line and Jason Concepcion.

Today's guests are Jeremy Lynn and Dan Pfeiffer. I don't know that I could actually design an episode better tailored to you. It's like made for you. If you told me a decade ago that there was going to be like a form of content, that would involve Jeremy Lynn and Dan Pfeiffer a decade hence. I would not have believed it and I would have been very excited about it. Yeah, Dan Sanity. Subscribe to take line wherever you get your podcasts. Also, we have lots of new merch in the Cricket merch store, including items specifically designed to denigrate the filibuster. We know our audience here. So you can only get that at Cricket. Go to Cricket.com slash store now to shop. We got a great show today. We're going to cover the intelligence community's brand new assessment about efforts to influence 2020 elections. Jared, Kushner has come out of hiding. We'll explain why and what that moron has to say. The secretaries of the defense and state are in Asia this week. We'll get into what their agenda is.

We'll talk about major protests in the UK and Australia about women's rights and women's safety efforts to vaccinate the globe, the situation on the southern border, and a new segment that I've tentatively titled why Tucker Carlson is a dick now. I don't know if we can workshop that. Maybe the world does can weigh in. Sounds good to me though. We could do one of those on Jared Kushner too. Yeah, that's a good point. And then, Ben, you did our interview this week. Who did you talk to and what do we get to hear? I did. It was a great interview with Mejav Micha Eli, who is the chair of the Labor Party in Israel, a woman who's breathed new life into the labor party. We talk about the upcoming Israeli election, what she's trying to do to rebuild labor,

you know, the necessity of getting Netanyahu out and why that's been so hard and how she looks at issues like the Palestinian issue and the U.S. relationship. So definitely check it out. I mean, Tommy was nice to not just talk about some controversy of involving Israel, but to really hear from an Israeli about how she's looking at the state of politics in her country and in this upcoming election. I'm really excited to listen to that. There was a great piece in New York Times recently about her. I was shocked that she wanted to come on the show because normally people just pluck out things you and I say about Bid Mnayn Yahoo and Brandeus anti-Semites in Israel. But it's nice that they want to just engage in a policy conversation. What a crazy idea. Well, one of the things that she said

that was so telling, right, because it relates to both labor and to the debate here on Israel is part of what the left has lacked for decades since Yitzhak Rabin's assassination is confidence, right, is the sense that you can take positions and not be afraid of being called names. and she, you know, check it out. She has some really interesting insights into the psychology of a party like labor standing on its own two feet again and proclaiming that they're willing and ready to govern. That's great. That's great. Okay. Speaking of elections, let's talk about the 2020 election and the latest news about efforts to influence it from bad actors abroad. So the OD and I, the director of national intelligence's office, just released this report. Here is,

some of what they found. Importantly, there is no evidence where they found no evidence that a foreign actor tried to mess with the voting processes themselves, right? There's no evidence someone tried to switch votes from Trump to Biden or Biden to Trump or to mess with voter registration, stuff like that. So that's good. But the intelligence community does believe with high confidence that Russian president and Vladimir Putin authorized a whole bunch of propaganda efforts designed to denigrate Joe Biden, to denigrate Democrats generally to prop up Trump and then undercut the political process generally. Russia did this through a network of, you know, useful idiots, basically in the U.S. media and, you know, prominent political figures, some of whom were

close to Trump. The report names Constantine Kalimnik, who is a former staffer for Paul Manafort, also linked to Russian intelligence, and it names a Ukrainian politician as people who specifically laundered Russian disinformation to the U.S. media, presumably places like OAN and two idiots like Rudy Giuliani. The report also says that it's a lot of people. Iran carried out a covert influence campaign to denigrate Trump and to undercut public confidence in the electoral process. They also found smaller scale efforts by other groups that weren't really significant sounding. Oddly, to me, at least, Ben, the report says that China did not try to influence the election. I thought that was curious that they mentioned that. I don't know,

Ben, I felt like we knew most of this, but did anything jump out of you from this report? No, I mean, I think we knew most of this. I do think that, you know, the couple notable things are, it's like normal now that this happens, right? Like this would have been like a blockbuster thing in 2012, right? But after 2016 and 2020, the idea that Russia tries to influence our election and mounts these kind of information warfare campaigns, that's what happens. And again, I think that the main message here is less, you know, the genius nature of some Russian troll farm and more the willing nature, whether because they're idiots or whether because they don't really care about American democracy, you know, the right-wing media and political figures, including people in

the United States Senate, like Ron Johnson, who is basing whole investigations on Russian disinformation. It's like normal. It's not even going to make a ripple, I think, in our political discourse, that the Republican Party and people around Trump were like willing collaborators with Russian disinformation. And again, it doesn't really. matter if they knew that they were talking to like a Russian spy. They clearly knew that a lot of this information was bullshit and they ran with it anyway. So to protect ourselves against Russian disinformation, it's not about like going to war with Russia. It's about not having insane conspiracy theories that drive our political and media discussion. That's something we have to do

at home, you know. Yeah, the trolling is coming from inside the house, guys. This is the symbiotic relationship between Russian Intel and the Republican Party in many instances. Exactly, exactly. Not ideal. Okay, well, we dispatched with that quickly. Let's talk COVID. Because I think, I imagine, all of us were excited last week when President Biden announced that he was directing states to make all adults eligible to get a COVID vaccine by May 1st. Now, Biden is able to do that because the Trump administration pre-purchased a bunch of different COVID vaccines as part of Operation Warp Speed, even before they were approved by the FDA. And the Biden administration has done a really great job of ramping up that process and distributing those shots to people and states.

But vaccines are scarce, right? In many countries, especially poorer countries, haven't been able to get enough doses for their population. It's not even close. And that's bad for the people in these countries. It's also bad for us in America because the more COVID spreads, the more it mutates and it can put us at risk again. So the whole world needs to get vaccinated. And the question is, how do we do that? So one important piece of the puzzle is called coax, which is a, a global coalition working to distribute doses to lower income countries. There's another debate about whether the U.S. should be sending some of its surplus doses overseas because we purchase way too many. But then there's another idea that's really not getting discussed enough, which is this request from 57 countries to the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive patent

protections for COVID vaccines. So Bernie Sanders sent a letter to President Biden asking that he come out in favor of this proposal. on the house side, I saw Reps Jan Czakowsky, Rosa DeLoro, Earl Blumenauer. They sent a similar letter in support of temporarily lifting certain restrictions on the manufacturing of like COVID-related diagnostics, treatments, vaccines. Then I don't have a clue how vaccine manufacturing works. But oddly enough, like, this is what you and I have been talking about on this show for months.

Clearly, the world would benefit from essentially open sourcing everything we know about COVID, as well as the ways we can stop it. It seems like a no-brainer to be, what do you think is holding this up? Is this just like lobbying from pharma? Like, what's the impediment here? Well, I think it's a no-brainer. From a humanitarian perspective and a global public health perspective, you want as many people to get as vaccinated in as many places as possible, as fast as possible. If you want to advance that to self-interest, too, by the way, you know, the U.S. standing in the world, let's just say it's taking a bit of a hit over the last few years?

Fair. What better way to try to, you know, Joe Biden keeps saying America's back, and that's great. But like, what better way to actually demonstrate that than to have America lead the world in getting billions of people vaccinated? We have the resources we have, you know, through so many of the vaccines, you know, being developed here in the United States. We have the innovation here to having, you know,

created a bunch of the vaccines in this country. to make that happen much faster than what otherwise. So I think it's a no-brainer. I think there's two potential constraints, right? One is the perception that, you know, America is helping to vaccinate people in other countries, you know, particularly maybe before everybody in America has been vaccinated. But look, as long as Joe Biden knows that the vaccine is not being slowed down and reaching Americans through some effort to reach people globally, I think you can make that case.

that, you know what, this is not some America-first ideology administration. This is an administration that sees our fates as tied together with people around the world. And no, we're not going to slow down at all getting the vaccines to as many Americans as fast as we can, but we can move on a parallel track to get the vaccine disseminated globally as well. And then secondly, I'm sure that there's some, you know, profit motive in Big Pharma or some precedent that they don't want to set. But, like, this is an unprecedented thing. is a once in a century global public health emergency pandemic, like just bulldoze right over

those concerns. And there has to be ways, you know, I'm sure that the pharma companies are being compensated for all the vaccines they're being purchased to begin with. This is one of those cases where there's just a right thing to do. And so you figure out a way to do it. And by the way, doing the right thing, I think will go a long way towards the United States once again, putting itself forward as a country that is a leader in the world, not just because we say we are, but because of the things that we do. Yeah. God forbid, we set a precedent that everyone has access to medications.

Life and death in the middle of the pandemic, right? Yeah, I mean, like, I can understand the concern about, look, we bought like two or three times more vaccines than we needed, doses than we needed. I could see how easily it could be demagogued if Republicans were to say, oh, Joe Biden's sending your vaccine overseas. That's why you can't get one yet. sure, but that's not even what this proposal is. They're saying let manufacturers in like South Africa or India or other places make the vaccines by by lifting restrictions on the intellectual

property. Like, again, I don't know what it takes to manufacture an mRNA-based vaccine. Like, I don't know if these countries could do it, but it seems like an idea we should consider. I don't know. Yeah, no, I think we absolutely should, you know, pursue that idea, frankly. And But even on the surplus vaccines, right? Like, you know, you don't live in fear of those arguments, those kind of America-first arguments. As long as you know that you are doing everything you can to, if an American wants the vaccine, you're moving it as fast as possible to reach that American arm. There's no, again, no reason what we have to toss out a huge amount of surplus vaccines

because we're afraid of, or sit on them because we're afraid of the perception that people in other countries might get them. I mean, we have to break out of that psychology here. And there's a real opportunity on both these scores. And yeah, on the second one, you know, it's funny. Like, I was talking to British friend who was watching the Megan and Harry interview and was like jarred because she doesn't usually watch American television by the fact that all the ads were for drugs, basically. Oh, yeah.

Because they've socialized medicine there, right? So the idea that, you know, you know, like there's like, you know, like there's, Like, there's something already uncomfortable about the profit motive attached to life-saving drugs in this country. Yeah. I get it. We don't have socialized medicine. Okay.

But for this, for a pandemic that is killing people, that is putting the global economy at risk and global supply chains and the capacity for Americans to travel the places, there are plenty of self-interested reasons. If you want to, if you don't buy into the kind of global humanitarian argument, which I think we do, you can mount plenty of self-interested reasons. reasons around American standing, around the global economy, around the capacity for Americans to be safe in other places, that you'd want to get as much vaccine to as many places as fast as possible. And this feels like a very good idea to do that. Yeah. And also, just to listeners

know, I mean, this isn't a challenge just for low-income countries. Europe is in a really tough spot right now because a bunch of the countries in Europe, Spain, France, Italy, have stopped vaccinating people with the AstraZeneca vaccine because of fears about that it might potentially be creating blood clots. Hopefully they sort that out quickly. But, you know, a lot of places are way behind us. Cases are spiking. So we got to move on this. Ben, you want to talk about Jared Cushner for just a little bit? I think it would be fun. Yeah, we, you know, National Treasure, Jared Cushner. Let's give them what they want. Okay, so apparently he's writing a book about working the Trump White House and why Jared thinks that he is a hero for negotiating peace agreements

between Israel and countries that they were not at war with. Of course, I'm talking about the so- called Abraham Accords. Jared must now have a ghostwriter on retainer because he started publishing op-eds. This one was in the Wall Street Journal. So we could go through some of the quotes and just talk about his genius. So this is how it starts. The geopolitical earthquake that began with the Abraham Accords hasn't ended. We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Quite a bold statement there, Ben. Let's see what evidence he has to back that up. Quote, every time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweets something positive in Arabic about an Arab leader, it reinforces that Israel is rooting for the success of the Arab world. Does it? Okay.

Okay. Good enough. It reinforces the fact that they're rooting for the success of a small number of Arab autocrats who are brutally repressing their own people and cynically turning their backs on the Palestinians. But I digress. No, that's, yeah, look fair. Here's another big block quote, and then we'll pause for discussion. One of the reasons the Arab-Israeli conflict persisted for so long was the myth that it could be solved only after Israel and the Palestinians resolved their differences. That was never true. The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel's relations with the broader Arab world. It will ultimately be resolved when both sides agree on an arbitrary boundary line.

And let's pause there. Can you think of a more condescending way to refer to the desire for the Palestinian people to have a state besides calling it a real estate dispute? I mean, that is mind-boggling. Yes. I mean, you know, imagine being Palestinian in your entire national identity, your entire individual identity, your experience of occupation or life and refugee camp has been shaped by this conflict. And then some guy who's like the scion of a crooked, oh, pardon the pun for the competition. Yeah, don't call him crooked. A synonym for crooked real estate family from New Jersey whose main experience in life was buying the New York Observer for his own edification and entry into certain New York media social circles somehow becomes the second most important person

in the United States and then tells you that your whole identity is essentially real estate deal. It's basically akin to the kind of real estate deals he was probably in where you displace people to make way for a gaudy and ugly skyscraper, paying them no compensation, and then telling them that life is just one big real estate deal. I mean, it's a metaphor for how we approach the whole thing, which is this is a conflict in which the Palestinians just need to be dictated to what their terms of surrender are. and then he has to be celebrated as a peacemaker, you know. It's just incredible. Yeah, a real estate deal that has also impacted a lot of Israeli lives

as well. But, you know, look, Jared read a Tom Friedman book on the flight over to Tel Aviv. So, you know, he learned something. So Jared takes like a little odd swerve in this op-ed. He then writes, quote, the Biden administration is making China a priority in its foreign policy. And rightly so, what of Mr. Trump's greatest legacies will be changing the world's view of China's behavior. Apparently, America found China when Donald Trump got into office. But then Jared gets to the Iran deal. So I'm going to read another long quote, see what you think about this. The Biden administration, however, has one asset that the Trump administration never had, a relationship with Iran. While many were troubled by the Biden team's opening offer to work with Europe and rejoin the Iran deal, known as the JCPOA,

I saw it as a smart diplomatic move. The Biden administration called Iran's bluff. It revealed to the Europeans that the JCPOA is dead and only a new framework. can bring stability for the future. When Iran asked for a reward merely for initiating negotiations, President Biden did the right thing and refused. So Jared thinks he's being cute here, right? He's pretending to compliment Biden, but really what he's advocating for is abandoning the entire Iran deal and making it exponentially more complicated. Ben, do you like this advice? Do you think maybe Biden should have him into the Oval for a chat, get his advice? I mean, again, like, first of all, there's so many, this guy, like, okay, nobody was aware that the Chinese Communist Party had some complications until Donald Trump came along and launched a trade war to get them to buy some more soybeans while devastating huge sectors of the American economy at the same time, right?

In the same way that nobody, it had occurred to nobody before that that you would try to make normalization deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And it does matter that this guy is an odious character who contributed to the death of 500,000 Americans in the near death of American democracy. I mean, if he's wrong about all those other things, it may be worth, you know, subjecting his opinions on these matters to a bit of scrutiny here. Because what he's trying to do is he's trying to launder his reputation, which is, you know, belongs in the complete garbage dump of history through like a handful of normalization deals that he basically purchased with arms, you know, with the Emirates and with Bahrain. And, you know,

this tough on China stance that is now like in vogue across like the political spectrum so that, you know, he can somehow come out on the other end of the historical accounting of the Trump years as like a thinker, you know, as like a junior Henry Kissinger here, right? Yep. And like, that's fucking bullshit. But it shows you cynically how much he thinks that's going to work. And you know what? He might be right because look at the response to the Abraham Accords.

Like, you know, look at like how much everybody's rushing to define themselves in the most hawkish possible terms on China without, you know, even pausing to consider nuance along the way. I think on the JCPOA, if I were the Biden people, I would wonder why Jared Kushner is praising my policy at this point. That would bum me out too. It would bum me out because I think he sees the writing on the wall, which is that the Biden people appear tentative to reenter the JCPOA. And he wants to set up a framework wherein he can say, well, look, they decided that all this leverage we gave them with our sanctions and decision to lead the JCPOA was better than

returning to the nuclear deal, which had actually solved the problem. problem here. And so I would actually take this in the Biden White House as a shining, blinking red light that maybe what I'm doing is not right because Jared Kushner is finding words to praise it. Yeah, this is a, this is a PDB on George W. Bush's desk in August of 2001. So, so remember before we were a little hard on Joe Biden for not, you know, punishing Muhammad bin Salman himself, the crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in any way for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post journalists. Jared Kushner was the person actively covering that up, right? So Joe Biden, they put out the fact that MBS, Mohamed bin Salman, was directly responsible for Khashoggi's murder. Jared Kushner was

WhatsApping the guy all day long, apparently, according to reports. So later in this op-ed, Jared starts to shill for the Saudis, surprise, surprise. And he writes, normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel is insight. Relations with Israel are in the Saudi national interest and can be achieved if the Biden administration lead. So again, I don't think anyone's arguing against some sort of the fact that normalization between the Saudis and Israel would be good. But it does seem like he's dangling it out there in an attempt to get the Biden folks to overlook all the other terrible things the Saudis are doing, both to Khashoggi and in Yemen, you know, et cetera, et cetera. No, and this, again, this is the whole problem, you know, that we identify with the Abraham

Accords, to begin with it, it's not that we think normalization between Israel and Arab states is anything but a good thing on its face. The question is, to what end is that being put? Right. And to me, it seems like, you know, whether you're Maham bin Salman in particular in Saudi Arabia or you're, you know, the royal family that governs the UAE or Bahrain, it's being put to, reinforcing their autocratic rule to getting tens of billions of dollars in arms, which was promised as a part of the Abraham Accords. And by the way, to also fortifying the Israeli right, because it's a win for Netanyahu, in a way that, yes, you accomplish something that people wanted, which is normalization, but is it worth legitimizing Muhammad bin Salman for that goal? Isn't there a

better way of making peace than this kind of get out of jail free card, literally? for a guy who chopped up somebody in a consulate. And so it's not subtle. You know, what Jared's doing here is not subtle in carrying MBS's brief and saying, you know, the Abraham Accords don't happen without this guy. I know the next one could be the Saudis. But I'm sure that the price of the next one is, you know, no scrutiny of those arms sales to Saudi Arabia, no scrutiny of aspects of Saudi foreign or domestic policy here.

And is it worth a normalization deal with Israel to do that from Mahab bin Salman? I don't think so, in part because I think that for a normalization deal to be meaningful and lasting, you know, you have to make peace not just with autocrats, but with the people in those countries, you know? True peace has to be among not just a handful of right-wing leaders. It has to be amongst the people who live in Israel and the people who live in the air world. And, you know, I worry about this. And I also want to see what kind of business Jared is going to be doing Maham bin Solomon in the years to come.

You know? Oh, yeah. Me too. You know, you already saw Steve Newton, you know, launch some kind of investment venture capital fund or something in the Gulf. He's got to be able to afford his wife's movies that he's bankrolling. How do you think those things get, those pieces of garbage get made? So, I mean, like, like, watch this space of what Jared is going to be doing with MBS because, like, you know what American foreign policy shouldn't be for sale. like the quote unquote peace should not be put up for sale, nor should the capacity of an

autocrat to act with total impunity, which is what MBS wants. And I think the play here has been to basically launder the golf out of the penalty box that they felt themselves getting in with the Democratic Party, launder MBS out, get Jared a pathway to the most lucrative arrangement he could have post-Trump presidency with MBS. And, you know, lo and behold, like, Palestinians get screwed. I think the Israelis don't get the true peace that they deserve. And people who live in Saudi Arabia certainly don't get the freedoms that we would want for them either. Well, listen, we're all just, we're grateful that Jared stopped the bloodshed and the ongoing Israel-Morocco war with the Abraham Accords. And, you know,

listen, our commitment to you, the listener, is that we will read things written by Jared Kushner so that you don't have to. And you don't have to give the Wall Street Journal a click. The good news, Tommy, is that by the summer, this country should really be rocking. It's just the summer of 2021, not the summer of 2020. Yeah, another great Jared Kushner quote. Okay, let's turn it to Asia because there's a lot going on, especially with North Korea. So Reuters reported over the weekend that Biden's team has tried to initiate talks with North Korea. They did so in mid-February, but the North has not responded. This news leaked

just before Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, hit the road. They're traveling to Japan and South Korea for meetings. I think then they go to Alaska to meet with the Chinese for a summit there. North Korea was not thrilled about their visit or the decision to proceed with a scaled-down version of joint U.S. South Korean military exercises later this spring. in response, Ben, Kim Jong-un's sister put out a classic North Korean statement. Here's a bit of it. We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration, trying hard to give off a powder smell in our land.

If it wants to sleep in peace in the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step. They are about to bring a biting wind, not warm wind expected by all in the spring days of March. I mean, Ben, that's the good shit right there. I admire the dedication to the metaphor. whatever you want to call it, the smell analogy, you know, very, very, very consistently drawn there. Yeah. Look, it works. It's good stuff. So look, the good news is North Korea hasn't launched more

ballistic missiles. They haven't conducted another nuclear test. The bad news is that North Korea continues to build and now conceal, based on some new satellite imagery, where we've seen that they're starting to conceal places where we think they're hiding their nuclear stockpile. So, look, this whole policy area feels like Groundhog Day to me, right? Like, same problems, same people. same, you know, conversations with the same allies. How do you think the U.S. can break this cycle here with North Korea, so we've avoided another four years of, like, stern statements from the U.S. sanctions that result in, you know, that hurt the people of North Korea. But at the end of the day, the North has more nukes and more missiles. Trump's diplomacy, it failed miserably. But at least

he tried something new. Like, do you have a, any pitch for them here on a path forward? Yeah, I actually think that, look, recognizing that this is nobody. has succeeded at this and everything therefore is a long shot. I think the path forward is to try to to get small steps in the right direction. For a long time, you know, under Clinton, Bush, Obama, it was like, we don't accept North Korea having nuclear weapons, and that's the right thing. You don't want to accept that. They cheated their way to get them. But that was getting us nowhere. And then Trump tries this kind of big bang approach, right, where we're going to make friends with them, but that didn't get us anywhere either.

I think just kind of like very intricate, hard-headed diplomacy that works with South Korea hand and glove that doesn't acknowledge the legitimacy of the North's nuclear weapons, but just does say that while our goal is denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, you know, can we have small reversals of North Korea's program in certain areas in exchange for certain kinds of sanction relief just to kind of start moving this in the right direction, you know, and to stop the kind of the more nuclear weapons they have, the greater the proliferation risk, the greater the risk that they can put it on an ICBN that could reach the U.S., right, which is a huge security interest for us.

So I'd like to see them try to pursue diplomacy that just at least tries to claw back in the right direction of, you know, certain parts of their North Korean program moving in reverse instead of, you know, moving in exorably forward here. The one thing I'd noticed, and some other people noticed this, is that the Biden people were using the phrase the denuclearization of North Korea when they were speaking publicly about what they wanted. It was unusual because, you know, the formulation that, you know, you put your name on a bunch of times and me too has always been the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Right, right. So it's a more hawkish frame. And obviously we don't support South Korea getting

nuclear weapons, so I don't know exactly what it counts for it. But again, it may be they're trying to reassure the South Koreans in Japan. But like, you know, a lot of things in the early Biden team, it's, it's a pretty hawkish. I'd like to hear them explain why the change, I guess, because it's something that, you know, just a whole bunch of people like me noticed without much explanation. Yeah, also not a not a topic where, you know, little phrasing changes like that go on notice or don't have a lot of meaning. One, one loop worth closing here, Ben, is, you know, you and I talked a million times about how Trump would try to threaten and bully allies like South Korea to pay the U.S. more to cover the cost of U.S. military presences in places like

the Korean Peninsula. And it got really ugly. There was one point Trump reportedly demanded that South Korea pay the U.S. up to five times the amount we were getting paid for our troop installation in South Korea. It's like 27,500 troops, I think. But over the weekend, the U.S. and South Korea cut a five-year deal that will increase payments next year by 14 percent. above the deals Trump negotiated in 2019 in 2020. So I guess Biden read art of the deal also. And it said, don't be an asshole to your allies and you will get a better outcome. Yeah. It just shows sometimes in life, particularly with your friends, right? Being an asshole to your friend, usually doesn't get to you as far as being a nice to your friend. I think more broadly,

like the success of this trip, right, is that this is not subtle. It's like the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense going together on the first overseas trip, which, you know, normally would be to Europe or to North America, to South Korea and Japan, who are both allies who, you know, were treated poorly, to say the least, under Trump, but also obviously a critical part of any long-term U.S. strategy towards Asia or towards China, right, in terms of countering China, containing China's ambitions to some extent. So they're not being subtle in the prioritization of the Asia Pacific and the prioritization of Democratic allies. And I think that's to the good. And look, this isn't a new idea, like the Obama administration famously pivoted to Asia,

rebalanced Asia. But I think people should take note that they're planning a flag in Asia, first of all, in South Korea and Japan specifically. And that message won't be lost on the Chinese. I imagine China is even more so the audience that's intended versus North Korea, even if North Korea smelled something. So you flag this. So one other flag this being planted is so the U.S. and Chinese officials are going to meet on Thursday in Alaska. According to Politico, one of the top agenda items is Taiwan. U.S. military officials are reportedly just increasingly concerned that China might invade Taiwan and create a new pressure point for the U.S. to respond to something militarily.

Taiwanese officials were understandably concerned during the Trump administration and about his commitment to their security when he reportedly told a Republican Senate. back in 2019. Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they evade, there isn't a fucking thing we can do about it, end quote. Ben, is he wrong? What do you think Biden's team can or should do to show their commitment to Taiwan security to brush China back a bit? Is that possible at this point? I think this is a huge issue that the world's got to watch very carefully because there are very few places where there could be a real large-scale conventional war in the world, and Taiwan is one of them, right? And why do I say that?

Like first of all, you know, the Taiwanese like are, the Taiwanese were always split between, you know, wanting to have closer ties to mainland China and wanting to potentially be independent. The Hong Kong protest, I think, changed this whole calculation because the people in Taiwan saw Hong Kong just get swallowed up, right? And the promise that Hong Kong got was one country, two systems. Well, that would be the promise under which Taiwan would come into a union with the people. People's Republic of China. And who's going to take that deal after watching what happened in Hong Kong? So there's an increasing likelihood that Taiwan could move in the direction of independence. You have an increasingly assertive, if not belligerent leader in China and Xi Jinping, building up his military. You have a U.S., which has longstanding defense ties with Taiwan. It's not a security guarantee,

but there's been this kind of implicit, unspoken thing that, you know, we are fortifying them, We sell them arms. We have defense relations because we don't want them to be invaded and taken over by China. And so this despair is watching. And when I saw that, it's not usual for U.S. officials to kind of background that we're worried about an invasion of Taiwan. I didn't necessarily think that means that that invasion is imminent. I took it more as the U.S. and the Biden team kind of signaling, hey, we're worried about this generally. You know, the issue of Taiwan is going to be, you know, we're going to these talks of the Chinese,

like this issue of Taiwan is going to be more prevalent and prominent and more of it probably a source of tension in our relationship. And so that, that I think bears real watching here. Yeah. Let's turn to Uganda and just do a quick update because a couple weeks back, we were lucky to have a guy named Bobby Wine on the show. He is a 39-year-old Ugandan musician turned politician who's the leader of the Ugandan opposition movement. Bobby Wine and And a lot of the country, citizens of Uganda, are frustrated with President Museveni, who is beginning his sixth term as the president of Uganda, comes after several disputed elections. Frankly, he's the leader of a military dictatorship at this point.

On Monday, Bobby Wine said that he and several members of parliament and some activists attended or led a protest against, quote, the abduction, torture, and murder of his supporters, end quote. And of course, they were arrested protesting the arrest of their supporters. So the good news is that Bobby Wine and those with him at this protest on Monday were released, but hundreds of Ugandans are being held in military detention. So I just wanted to flag this story for listeners because, you know, very notably in our interview, Bobby was clear that one of the things he thinks keeps him safe is continued international media attention to Uganda and to his story.

So flagging that one for everybody. Yeah, no, keep an eye on it. And like these people are showing enormous courage. And look, you know, and this will apply to, you know, Myanmar if we talk about that. Like some of these movements don't succeed the first time around, you know. But if you look at this, if you look at how old Museveni is and how old Bobby Wine is and how old Bobby Wine supporters are, they're fighting for democracy right now. Hopefully they win it.

But they're laying the groundwork to win the fight at some point, you know. And you would like to see Bobby Wine stay free in that struggle. Yeah, absolutely. And so, Ben, you know, I've been reading about the protests in Myanmar from over the weekend. There's some really scary reports that half a dozen people at least were just murdered by the police and by military forces in response. Is there anything you're seeing sort of jump out of the situation there? Anything hopeful, anything dire, anything the U.S. government should be doing? Well, the hopeful thing is this civil disobedience movement is much broader and deeper than anything we've seen in Myanmar to date.

and it's not just support Fong-Seng-Suchi. It is that next generation of people getting involved like we've talked about. The tragic news is that the military is clearly calculated that they're pivoting to full crackdown. And they're using live fire ammunition to break up protest. They're killing dozens of people and hoping that that sends a message. It's not worth protesting because you might get shot. I'll say anecdotally, Tommy. I have friends in Myanmar, many from our activists who, you know, were protesting for the first few weeks.

some still are, but increasingly I'm hearing from them, I'm getting visited by the security services. The security services are outside my door. You can kind of feel that, you know, the walls closing in, if you will, on this movement. And as with Bobby Wine, like you said, like they care about the world. Watch any image of a protest in Myanmar and you see English signs. That's not because they all speak English. That's because the audience is the international. media and the rest of the world. And they find solidarity and motivation in that support. But they also feel like the only potential accountability for the military through international justice, through international sanctions, through international pressure is from that attention. So I think the U.S. just needs to stay focused on it, not drift. And one of the things I'd like to see, you ask concretely, when they sit down with China, that this be on the agenda. Because I think the Chinese are tacitly supporting what the Burmese military is doing, we tend to not raise

this, you know, it's far down the list of other things. But I think if we care about human rights, we should be, you know, pressuring the Chinese about this because the Chinese have a lot of economic interest in Myanmar. And by the way, the case I'd make to them is that this entire place just implodes and collapses because the economy collapses and there's like a de facto civil war. It's not in anybody's interest either. So speaking of solidarity for protest movements and protesters, let's talk about two very important debates that are happening right now about women's rights in women's safety. The first is in the UK, where last month, a 33-year-old woman named Sarah Everard was abducted and murdered by an off-duty police officer. And it sparked this broader conversation

about women's safety in Britain. Sarah was just walking home at like 9 o'clock a night to her flat in London when she was taken. And it was just this horrifying story. And over the weekend, there was a vigil for Everard in London. And people around the world were horrified and furious when images started to emerge of police arresting these women who are just attending a vigil. And then on Monday, the British Parliament started debating legislation that could mandate prison sentences of up to 10 years for protesters. So that's fucked. And then in Australia, last month, a woman named Brittany Higgins came forward to tell her story about being raped by a colleague inside Australia's parliament building when she was serving as an aide to the Australian defense minister. that sparked a conversation in Australia about misogyny and government, specifically in Prime

Minister Scott Morrison's conservative coalition and really shockingly high levels of sexual assault in Australia writ large. So Ben, you know, again, in this situation, it is so frustrating and infuriating to see governments failing these women, often compounding the problem, often so far behind in, like not advancing solutions, but making it harder for people to fight for their So I wanted to raise these two stories and, you know, basically just show solidarity from, you know, the show to people in the streets were protesting. Yeah, and everybody should check out the videos of the British police breaking up that vigil because it's a totally horrifying. What are you thinking?

Just kind of young women peacefully protesting violence against women, you know. And I think to, yeah, and just to reiterate your solidarity point, I mean, we've seen in this country, right, when Black Lives Matters, started, it was this kind of, it was treated as kind of a fringe movement in some ways. And it failed in some ways and succeeded in others. It succeeded in getting like a wholesale reckoning for the Ferguson Police Department, right? But it failed in some of its other objectives. But over time, because that movement sustained itself, now a lot of its positions are mainstreamed. And they've shifted the discourse on these things. And hopefully Joe Biden is signing serious police reforms that will still not be enough to a lot of activists who are pushing. And I think the

message there is, if you have this kind of global solidarity among different movements and those movements are sustained, you may not see the results you want in the British Parliament today, but you're much more likely to see them in three years or five years. So these are long-term fights, and we shouldn't be deterred by short-term setbacks or short-term kind of horrible images. Those should resolve us to kind of connect these movements around the world and carry them forward. Yeah. In fact, sometimes those short-term setbacks like the images of the cops breaking up that visual can spark a huge advance. So let's hope that's what happened here. Two more issues. This one, you know, is something you're hearing about a lot lately, which is the number of migrants

arriving at the southern border. So that number is drastically increased, especially unaccompanied minor children. It's been increasing since last year. And at this point, the number of individuals arriving is starting to overwhelm the government's capacity to safely house these individuals, especially the children during a pandemic. By law, the U.S. government has 72 hours to move unaccompanied minors out of customs and border protection facilities into foster homes or the custody of a vetted sponsor, like a family member. But that's not always happening because they're overwhelmed seemingly. Biden's team is scrambling to do a bunch of stuff. They're trying to open up beds. They're trying to increase their capacity to house these kids. They're also trying to

to unwind Trump's immigration policies, while also simultaneously sending a message internationally that is designed to dissuade migrants from traveling north in this moment. So that's obviously very, very complicated and hard to do all at once. Republicans have already started blaming Biden for the influx of asylum seekers, that insufferable moron, Kevin McCarthy, the congressman from California. Do you see him at the border? He did the thing they always do, which is they claim that terrorists are crossing into the country, even though there's literally no evidence that's ever happened, right? And McCarthy said people are coming from Yemen, Iran, and Sir Lanka. I believe he meant Sri Lanka, which is a country and not a dude named Mr. Lanka. Just proving that he's also an idiot,

you know. Look, correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe it's Mr. Lanka. So look, you know, Democrats are pushing Biden to move faster, understandably. But Ben, last week, you know, Biden's White House coordinator for the southern border, Roberta Jacobson, really accomplished diplomat, outlined this plan to provide $4 billion in aid to Central American countries that will also agree to fight corruption, the idea of being make life better and El Salvador, Honduras, et cetera, so that people don't want to leave those countries. But that approach is a long game approach. What do you think Biden should do here, right? Because he's getting pushed to acknowledge that this is, quote, unquote, a crisis, which feels like a bit of a political trap because I don't know that policy solutions exist

to solve the problem at crisis speed, like whether or not you acknowledge it. But What do you think he should do? Yeah, I think that the political discourse around this is particularly dumb. I mean, because it's treated as like this like Washington, you know, whose fault is it? Who gets credit or, you know, what is Kevin McCarthy going to, the midterm elections, right, which aren't for a year and a half? And I get that that's why it's covered. But like this is like a really complicated, you know, policy challenge with enormous human

elements and stake here. And at the end of the day, they're going to have to align a whole bunch of pieces, right? What is the support that we're providing in terms of assistance to Central America that might improve circumstances there so there's not these kinds of flows? What is very importantly the messaging that we are doing in Central America to kind of warn people off these smuggling networks and to make clear to them that just arriving at the border is not a guarantee that you're going to get into the United States. What are the facilities that are available to particularly unaccompanied children that reached the border?

How do we speed up the asylum process so that we can adjudicate claims more effectively? Like, I'm sympathetic to the administration here that solving that complex piece of business, oh, by the way, when you're also trying to untangle all these Trump era regulations, that's going to take some time. I think, though, to give themselves that time, they're probably going to have to speak more clearly about what the whole endgame is here in the coming weeks. They have to tell people this is where we're trying to get to. This is going to be the different elements of our policy and how they fit together.

Because right now there's a bit of a vacuum and kind of understanding what they're aiming for, and that's allowing the Kevin McCarthy's of the world to turn this into some. DC political, you know, competition of narratives, which it's always going to have a component of that. But but but so for me, if you're in a circumstance and you know this time, Ben, as well as me, like, if you're not done yet in cooking the policy, sometimes you have to buy yourself time by telling people what the end result is going to be, you know, and I think that's the solution here. Man, the reporter's pressing Jen on whether it's a crisis just reminded me of all the times we were told to like say radical Islamic terror or, or, you know, and I think that's

error or these like lexical definitions around word choice that just mean nothing ultimately. It's like, yeah. Gen Zane crisis doesn't change what's happening. And it's, by the way, the reason it's not a crisis is this happens periodically at the border. You know, this, unfortunately, the tragedy is it's not totally, I mean, the numbers are particularly high. It's like an annual thing.

Yeah, the numbers go up a lot. And, you know, and I'll tell you, we've underfunded a lot of things. You know, we don't have enough money for asylum judges to process the claims, right? We don't have enough money to figure out how to house people in humane way, in part because we're pouring all this money into border security and enforcement, including under the Obama years. And so there's a lot more money in the government that goes towards that than goes towards dealing with the human beings who are affected by this. So hopefully they can change that. But that's in their, you know, that takes budgets too. This takes time, you know.

Yeah, it's going to take some time. Okay. Last segment before the interview is, you know, Look, I teased it. It's an evergreen segment called Why Tucker Carlson is a dick. I guess we could do this five days a week. So last week on his show, Tucker put up a photo of a U.S. military flight suit designed for pregnant women. By the way, it was designed during the Trump administration. And then he went on some rants about how the U.S. military is getting more feminine

and about how gender roles are being erased. You know, like this is the new Republican thing, right? Yeah. Complaint about gender. The response was it was swift and it was. brutal on Tucker. Countless members of the military took to social media to let him know that he's a moron. Women from all branches of the military posted about how they have served in combat zones and they've raised families at the same time. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, herself,

a wounded combat veteran, I think put it most succinctly when she tweeted, fuck Tucker Carlson, while he was practicing his two-step America's female warriors were hunting down al-Qaeda, improving the strength of America's women, end quote. And she included a quick video of Tucker and like a frilly shirt, like clicking his fingers when he was on dancing with the stars. So, you know, not the best look for Tucker. Anyway, it's fun to see Tucker get roasted, right? I actually think he inadvertently kicked off a good and important conversation about the critical role that women play in the U.S. military.

We should be talking about the great work that women do in the U.S. military more. More generally, Ben, tell me if I'm overthinking this. I do worry that, like, over the last few months, with Trump gone from Twitter and social media generally, Tucker has become the troller in chief, right? There's a whole group of well-meaning, good people who like capture, share and amplify almost everything Tucker does every night, which is exactly what he wants to happen. He wants outrage ratings, right? He wants libs, mad at him. I don't know that this is a world-o problem as much as a, you know, me spending too much time on Twitter and worried about disinformation and right-wing propaganda getting amplified

problem, but, you know, there's something I think about a lot. No, Tucker Carl's, Sean Hannity is this kind of buffoonish guy who just takes his cues from other people, really. Like, Tucker Carlson, there's malevolence there that is alarming. And I guess the world-o angle that occurred to me, when I saw General Austin and the DoD response swiftly, yes, it's an important opportunity for them to highlight the tens of thousands of women's who served in the U.S. military since 9-11, you know, and in increasing increasing roles, including in combat, and we lifted restrictions on women in combat in the Obama

administration, the increasing leadership role that women play, including the two four stars that we talked about. But I think they responded swiftly, too, because Tucker's messing with the cohesion of the military. I mean, let's be honest here. Like, I've traveled to a lot of military bases. Guess what news station is usually on in U.S. military? It's Fox News, right? They're clearly, you know, probably mostly white men in the U.S. military who kind of agree with Tucker Carlson. And when he stirs the pot like this, he's literally probably causing, you know, lack of cohesion in, like, units and stuff. You know, people deployed in places like Afghanistan. And for the military to react like this, it tells me that they were worried. And look, they themselves

have said they also think they have an extremism problem in the military. Why wouldn't they? Like, the rest of America does. So he's playing with real fire here, right? By just taking his culture war into the institution that fights real wars and stirring that pot, you know, that's going to cause problems down to like the unit level here because, you know, you're going to have some women in a unit and some Tucker, you know, viewers in the unit. And it's good that the military knocked that garbage down. I'd like to see them keep doing that. They can't help being in the circumstance of an America that is dealing with this nonsense. And so they should stand up for what's right. Tucker, we all need to be a little more worried about Tucker.

I think so. He's not just a, he's a smart guy. He's a very good writer, right? He's intelligent enough for this to not be just an act. It is, it is malevolent. He's a real demagogue. He worries me a lot. I worry about him running for office, frankly.

I mean, Donald Trump has showed us there's no real limit in terms of what a demagogue can do in this country. Yeah. And look, you know, we've joking. right about Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo like they have no charisma so why would the people pick up the Trumpist mantle but like Tucker Carlson has some charisma and again he's no dummy and a platform and he's got the biggest platform in cable news except you know and so you know this is this is not just a joke you know like I share your worry about this sometimes you know yeah yeah okay when we come back we will have Ben's interview about the future of the labor party

in Israel so stick around for that I'm very pleased to be joined now by Nehrav Mikhaeli, who is the chair of the Labor Party in Israel. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Good evening. I mean, good day. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Good, good evening where you are. So I wanted to start, you know, you became the leader of the Labor Party a few months ago. And, you know, for our listeners who don't follow Israeli politics closely, the Labor Party, you know, has had, you know, this huge history, iconic prime ministers, but has been in the place. political wilderness for much of the last decade or two. What was the state of the party, you know, from your perspective when you took over?

And what was the state of the broader Israeli left when you took over this position of leadership? So first of all, I'm the chair of labor for only a few weeks. Okay. Yes. It's really quite incredible because I was in. engaged in this fight for holding an election, something that was supposed to be given and that is written in the party's constitution. And it was a long fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court in which I against all odds and everyone's expectations I won.

And then we held the primaries. And it was already in the midst of the campaign. I mean, everybody else were like already deep into their campaign. and then I had a week and a half before the closing of the lists, actually. So I held another primaries for the list. And here we are in, I don't know, like three or four weeks of campaign. That's all. I found, I mean, I didn't find.

I was part of the party ever since 2012. I came to the primaries in 2012. And the party then was already recuperating from another crisis. that Eud Barak caused when he in 2009 joined Netanyahu, of course, against all of his promises in the past, and then broke labor into half, leaving half of it inside the government and the other half started to rebuild itself. And then I came in, and then we had yet another opportunity with Buzi Herzog as chair who went with Tipilivni, the Zionist camp,

we had 24 mandates. It was already almost. We were almost there. And then the crash. And then anyway, so when I came into the party after having Amir Peretz and Ittik Shmuri, the last leaders, joining Netanyahu's government again,

despite and against really repeating, repeating convictions that they wouldn't, the party was very, very close to being erased completely. was below 1% in the polls. Below 1%. And nobody, I mean, the situation was so dire that no one, I mean, they hardly even covered my fight for primaries and such, because they said it's not going to, it's not going to work anyway.

It's dead already. It's not revivable. So there's no point even covering the fight for it. Thankfully, I was proven right. were proven wrong. Let's see. I mean, we're still sort of not out of the woods, I would say, but we are between six and seven mandates in the polls right now, relatively steady. Labor was the leader of the central left camp in Israel. As you said, the history and the prime ministers, but history in Israel changed in 1993 when bin Laden Tanya was elected, a chair of

and became the chair of the opposition and started his campaign of incitement and delegititimization against Ihtrabin, Prime Minister of Labor, against the Oslo Accord, against the left, against peace, against the Arabs against democracy. And this is a campaign that's been going on ever since then. The things that we are dealing with now are the same that started then. It's the narrative that Netanyahu specifically and the right in general are good for the Jews and that the left is good for the Arabs at the Jews' expense. And the other thing was that the next sort of level was saying that the leftists have forgotten what it means to be Jewish, meaning it's no wonder that they prefer the Arabs because there's Jewishness as fluid.

This is what we've been dealing with ever since now. I think Americans, after four years of Donald Trump as president, can relate to what we've been living with. Only we've been living with it, every time. 93 and now 12 years in a row. And just imagine, just think that you were to live under Donald Trump for 12 years in a row. What that would have done to your society, to your media, and Israel is smaller and more centralized. and we have less pluralism in the media. So the hold that Netanyahu has over the public sphere in Israel is really huge.

And even so, one needs to say very clearly, Israel is not Netanyahu. There is a clear differentiation between him personally, the whatever agenda that he has, and the majority of Israelis, the majority of the, The majority of Israelis, and you see that in the, for instance, the institution for democracy in Israel, the majority of Israel believe in equality. They want pluralism. They want freedom of religion, a welfare state, and more than anything, even after 28 years of incitement, there is a tiny majority for the two-state solution. the only thing they do not have now is a political tool with a political power to turn all of that into their day-to-day reality. Well, and I've been impressed, you know, like you said, it looked like labor was going to be shut out of the Knesset altogether, and now it seems like you've turned that around and

at least have some momentum here. And one of the ways I've noticed you've done that is by bringing your background as a feminist into your program for the party. how central is that? And is there a way to kind of galvanize some of the trends we've seen in other parts of the world where you've seen women leaders essentially revitalize the center left? I mean, how do you incorporate your background as a feminist into your party chairmanship? Well, first, I think there are two things. One is that we actually have programs that relate to the family that relate to violence against. women that sort of deal with issues, okay? But it's more than that because I am, you know, I'm in politics only for eight years,

but I had a very, very long public career before that. I was in the media, in primetime television and radio, ever since I was 19 years old. And for the 20 years prior to my getting into former politics, I was engaged heavily in public activism for women's rights, minority rights, peace, workers' rights, etc. So like in Israel, I am kind of the synonym for feminism. It's like I don't have to say anything about the issues. People know. No, seriously.

So everything I say is from this kind of prism. It's true when I speak about Iran or Jordan. or the Palestinians or about economy or about whatever. It's like it's sort of embedded in it. It's really there's no need to mention it. So, you know, it's kind of nice that so much work for so long is somehow putting off. Yeah. We'll get to the U.S. relationship and the Palestinians in a second here.

But from your sense is now, you know, leading a party into an election. what are the issues that Israelis are voting on and what is drawing them to labor? And what is, you know, for Americans, we have audience all of the world who may not be following it day to day. How would you describe the issues that are driving this campaign?

I think it's a very tricky question, you know. One would think it would be coronavirus and the failure, the really overwhelming failure of Nathaniel, to deal with it. We have 6,000 dead, which is really, it's just, it's horrible because there was no reason on earth we should have had so many dead. It's a small country, it's very centralized. It could have been handled so much better. And of course, the economy. So I think the number one thing that really bothers people is the economy. And the way, the fact that's almost a

a million people lost their jobs and that there's this insecurity, this economical, financial insecurity. But do people vote on that? No. Still a majority votes on BBS or no. Are you with or for Bibi or against BB? And a lot of the center-left voters are willing to sacrifice many of their values and the things that they want to see and their day-to-day worries just in to be able to replace nataniao so

since the central left camp is so crushed politically speaking people vote to giddon sao who's an extreme right-wing politician or to um beny guns who have already who has already joined nathaniel but they somehow believe he will not join him again so yeah so it's all scattered and fractioned, and it's really difficult to try and anticipate what the outcome of the election might be. Well, and I want to, this has been interesting for me to watch from the outside because, you know, I remember Barack Obama saying to me once, you know, we'd get frustrated with Nanyahu, and I said something like, you know, he's not building a legacy, and he's like, yes, yes,

his legacy is, you know, breaking apart the Israeli left. And actually, that was resonant because he said that on the way to Shimon Perra. his funeral where Obama was going to give the eulogy. But when I watch this from the outside, you've seen Benny Gans go into the government. You've seen Zippy Livni go into the government. You've seen Lapid go into the government. You've seen Ehud Barak going to the government. This keeps happening over and over again, where Netanyahu looks like he's about to be voted out, and then he manages to take a hard-right coalition and peel off somebody from the center. why is it so hard to, given that he does not win majorities, right?

I mean, this is not someone who's winning, you know, in 50 plus percent. Why has it been so hard to remove Netanyahu? And what is your case for why he needs to be removed? Why, even if, you know, there's another center-right figure, Israel just needs to move beyond this Netanyahu era. So first and foremost, when you asked me what draws people to labor, today, one of the reasons is that I did not join Netanyahu. I stayed out even when the rest of my party went in.

I stayed outside with the risk of, it was a genuine risk for my political career because they could have blocked me in many ways. And still, I didn't even hesitate because what you have just described, I am so frustrated. I keep telling this to people in Israel. But the convention here is that BB is like this magician, you know, who managed to win over the people. And I keep telling people, no, he does not win over the people.

He has a quarter, he had at all times the maximum of a quarter of the Knesset who votes for him personally. The rest, okay, so maybe you can argue that even a little bit of a little bit less of a half or voting for him, even if they are doing it through other parties. But yes, you are so correct. And most of Israelis do not get that. The only reasons why Netanyahu had governments ever since 2009 is thanks to votes of the center-left camp, either through their leaders, as you said,

El-Barak, Zipeliv, Yair Lepid, and Betty Gantz, or through voters who voted, for instance, in 2015, to Kachlun, who they thought, you know, he's like, in Hebrew the word is chavrati. He's like social, okay? He thinks about social issues. And people don't realize the fact that they have to build a political power and not to give their political power to the other side. I think it stems from the fact that the central left camp in Israel,

ever since the assassination of Izzhak Rabin, is behaving like any other victim of violence. You know how a victim, this, you see, feminism. Yeah, yeah. And you were good at that. What happens is that you take in the blame and the shame that is inflicted on you constantly, and you become certain that what the oppressor is saying about you is true,

and you are trying to constantly please and prove that it is not true. It's not true all the horror, but you are not a traitor. You are not a self-hating Israeli, whatever. You are not a not good enough Jew, et cetera. And you believe that if you only are nicer and if you are only something, I don't know, doesn't matter, then everything will be okay. And I think there was a loss of self-confidence and identity. And there's a, we lost the ability. ability to see ourselves as the government.

So the concept of influencing from within became dominant. It's like you don't have any, it became like a really such a cliche that you don't have any influence in the opposition. What will you do in the opposition? It's a waste of time. You better influence from the inside. And there was an addiction to this concept. And somehow people fail to see what you.

from the outside have described so accurately. And what I have been trying to tell, sometimes my chairs, okay? This goes for when Buzri Herzog went to the negotiation, when he negotiated with Netanyahu on a unity government, so called, which brought labor down, even though we stayed outside, but we paid all the prices of as if we were in the government. And then, you know, parents, when I tried to convince him not to go in. So now we came to a point where you don't have a rival.

Right now in Israel, there's only one ruling party, which makes it a very fragile democracy, to say the list. And this is why I'm so invested in rebuilding labor as the ruling party for the central left. It will take time. It's a process. But if we don't start doing it, then it will never happen. And the Palestinian issue, obviously, you mentioned that there's still, you know, support for two states, but there's also a sense that, you know, that's impossible. B.B. is kind of suffocated, you know, very skillfully in the bomb years. You used, you know, an endless

peace process that led nowhere to essentially create an impression, I think, that this is just not going to happen. And meanwhile, settlements continue and you have, you know, this kind of brink of annexation. What is the path back to, I mean, you know, do you still believe in two, States, and what is the path back to some glimmer that that could actually happen, you know, given the fact that, you know, as you said, it's not the domination selection by any stretch, but security is always in the backdrop in terms of how Israelis are looking at things. What next for people who actually want to see Israel as a secure Jewish democratic state next to a sovereign Palestinian state?

Well, not only me, but labor, first of all, labor with. me as chair and one of the things that I constantly say is that I'm taking a labor back to the Rabin path, to its Hakk Rabin path, who realized that in order to stay in itself, in order to ensure its existence and its security, it's a primary Israeli-Israeli interests to figure out a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to have a border. I believe in a peaceful border. So we believe in finding a way to find a solution for the conflict, preferably, and this is my take, and I was a supporter of the two-state solution forever before I came to the Knesset. So we believe in a regional sort of accord of some sort. Now, to answer your question, what we need

in order to get back to this path is a political will in the Israeli prime minister's chair. This is number one thing that is required. This is so obvious because where there is a will, there will be a way. And there have been a number of ways that have been explored in the past. And the fact that it did not succeed does not mean that it cannot succeed. and especially not if you bring in major partners, not only Egypt and Jordan, who I see as extremely important partners,

but also now we have countries from the states from the Abram Accords. I would have preferred that we would have had, you know, the whole deal of the Arab Peace Initiative, but it's still in this way or another way, can certainly be on the table. So there's huge potential there to leverage all these relationships into a new way with the Palestinians, which should be done. But it cannot be done without a political will in the prime minister's chair in Israel. So this is the number one thing

to work on. It's interesting, you know, because I was going to ask you about the U.S. relationship, and it actually ties into the Abraham Accords in a way in the sense that you mentioned the very beginning that Israel and Netanyahu are not one of the same. And one of the concerns I've had with U.S. policy for a long time, particularly under Trump, but even under Obama too, is that, you know, in supporting Netanyahu and his priorities, it was not necessarily always didn't feel like the best thing for Israel because it put a two-stage solution further away. But it also, as you said, Israel's democracy was kind of eroding before our eyes. And even with the Abraham Accords, which obviously the normalization of relations with additional Arab states is positive,

but in doing that without bringing the Palestinians into it, you know, the Arab states kind of contributed to a sense that the Palestinians are out of the picture. The question I want asked by the U.S. is, what is a way for the U.S. to be supportive of Israel, but not always giving Netanyahu essentially a blank check? You know, how do you strike this balance between And what would you like to see the U.S. do to have a, I'd say, more mature relationship where it's not just channeled through this one person, B.B. Netanyahu, but it's about, you know, interest in shared values, which would suggest a meaningful effort to pursue peace, a meaningful effort to promote democracy in both our countries, by the way, the U.S. has our own democratic problems. How would you advise the U.S. to have a healthier relationship here going forward? Well, I see the complications, but I would suggest that the administration or whatever formal representatives meet not only with Netanyahu, but also with the other side of the map. Because maybe in order to make it clear that they really,

realize that in Israel there are two sort of Israel's even, I would say, and that they acknowledge not only that Netanyahu, given that he's legitimacy is so not accepted. He's not really acceptable as legit. It's for so many Israelis. I understand that it's in a formal sort of way, it's problematic. I mean, Governments deal with governments, obviously. But I think this is the most effective way to also, first of all, to really help build back the camp that believes in democracy and equality, in peace, that has these shared values. And also to sort of signal to Israelis that really Nathaniel is not the only one that can speak to. because he managed, even though the relationship with the Democratic Party, he has compromised it so terribly and has caused so much damage for the average Israeli is very hard to see, obviously, because at the end of the day, he's the prime minister he deals with, you know, the U.S. So I think if people realize that he's not, it's not only about him because what he constantly says is who else but me can, you know, talk. to speak to the American president. Who else but me can deal with Iran, who, and et cetera?

So maybe if they see that, well, you know, others can too, then, of course, this make a difference. No, it's an interesting, it's a really interesting, important point because he's managed to equate Israel and himself, not just in Israel, but very much in the U.S. But the last question for you is, as we approach the election here, what? How would you, what is a successful outcome for you? What, what should we be looking for as a, as a, as a hopeful scenario? This is election number four in rapid succession. But, but, but, but, but what would you like to wake up the day after the election and see as a, as a possible political path for both labor and, and for Israel generally? Well, the, the golden question is in this election again is, will Nathaniel manage to get, 61 mandates for a government which will no doubtly be the most dangerous that he has had so far or will there be 61 mandates to replace Netanyahu? This is a very big question because

right now, Naftali Bennett has not, I mean, he will, you know, he will go with Netanyahu if he thinks that it suits him. He doesn't even hide it. So it's really a very big question. But if this thing happens that we have 61 or more mandates to replace Netanyahu, then it's crucial that labor is as big as possible in this puzzle, because then we will have the ability to influence the agenda of this weird, very, very weird coalition that will be created. So for me, the most important thing is really, getting the larger number of mandates that I possibly can because I see this as a phase as a

phase that as a first step in rebuilding a genuine party with real values, the values that we believe in and turn it back into a political power that can not too long take over and be the government and start rehabilitating Israel, taking it back to the Zionist vision, which speaks about a home for the Jewish people, but with equality and with a just society and with security that is obtained by striving for peace. Well, look, it was great talking to you. That's a great note to end on. We really wish you the best.

It would be so great for the health of Israeli democracy and the world, and I think the U.S. Israel relationship to have that kind of strong, confident center-left for so many reasons. So we wish you the best in this election, but also with the maybe even more important project of revitalizing labor and this extraordinary tradition of, you know, a center left in Israel that it stands up for equality. So thanks so much for joining us and good luck. Thank you, Ben. Thanks to Mara for joining the show.

Thanks to the crew at Take Line, a fantastic new podcast. for helping us fill out our brackets. Thanks, Renee. Thanks, Jason. And that's it for this week. Thanks, Jeremy Lynn, for one of the most exciting two weeks of my life. But that was a long time ago. Lin Sanity is the coolest couple weeks. Like one of the most unique, weird, interesting moments in sports. The whole city went completely berserk and this guy, like, couldn't miss, you know? Has a player ever gone off like that for a more defined period of time? No player has gone off that far above his own abilities. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And somebody should make a good movie about that.

There has not been like a, like a, I'd watch a dramatization of insanity, you know. Oh, absolutely. That's a great idea. Okay, cool. Yeah, maybe we should edit that and take that one to the execs. Just kidding. Believe it. All right.

Talk to you guys next week. See you. Polkonian and Milo Kim who film and share our episodes as videos each week.