The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Are NGOs an Anti Israel Scam? Gerald Steinberg on Power, Politics and the UN

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Noam Dworman is joined by Professor Gerald Steinberg. Steinberg breaks down the hidden world of NGOs—what they are, how they gained massive global influence and why he believes many have drifted far from their original mission. From organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to their role at the United Nations, Steinberg argues that these groups now act as powerful political players shaping narratives around conflicts like Israel–Palestine.  Gerald Steinberg is founder and president of NGO Monitor and Professor at Bar Ilan University. His research focuses on Middle East diplomacy and Israeli security, and the politics of human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Prestigious grants and prizes include Israel Science Foundation, Bonei Zion Prize (2017) and the Bernard Lewis Prize in 2025. https://x.com/GeraldNGOM

Welcome to Ride from the Table. We're here with Gellem Dorman, the owner of the world-famous comedy seller. I am Periel, the producer of the show. Dan is not here. We have a very special guest today, joining us from Jerusalem, Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, and professor at Bar Ilan University. This research focuses on Middle East supremacy and Israeli security

and the politics of human rights and non-governmental organizations. Welcome to the show, Professor Steinberg. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. Hello, Professor Steinberg. Hello. So we're going to, we're pleased to meet you. We're going to learn all about NGOs today, which is something which, you know,

time in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But, you know, I don't think many people know what NGO stands for or why they're significant. So especially our audience. So can you give us a little primer before we start talking about it? Like, what are NGOs and why should people be concerned about them? Yeah, NGOs are non-governmental organizations. It's a term that the United Nations came up with the late 40s, early 50s. And they thought, okay, this is the after the World War, too, and we got to rebuild Europe,

and we got to worry about democracies going off the rails, like what happened in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. So we're going to create and encourage and sort of register and support. American government was very much behind this, non-governmental organizations, which are supposed to be non-political, and they're supposed to help strengthen what's called civil society. They met in all those terms back in those days. And there were a few of them back in that period, not very many, and they were relatively on the margins. Now, it's a huge industry. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. I mean, multi-billion, if you add it all up, you're in the hundreds of billions a year. But you've got groups like Amnesty International, I'm sure we'll talk about them.

They got an annual budget of about $370 million a year. And there are at least 10 of those that we can name. And they're all political. They're exactly the opposite of what they were supposed to be, and were set up for. They all get, as a general rule, they get tax exemptions because they do good things. They're nonprofit. They are helping society. All those things.

They're often in Europe. They're called charitable organizations. Well, Emmercy doesn't do any charity. Human Rights Watch doesn't do charity. They're just, they're massive industrial frameworks in a lot of ways. they're like businesses. They raise a lot of money, but there are no checks and balances. And we'll talk about all those things.

But I get in too much detail at the beginning. These are very influential political organizations. They speak in the United Nations. They have a, they have status that they can get up in the Human Rights Council. After governments speak, NGOs speak. They hand out material. They hand out what they call reports. They're considered experts.

They get interviewed everywhere. And they have a lot of influence on policy. It sounds like I'm just thinking about it as you're talking about it, that the whole idea is flawed. I mean, you can get some sort of non-political attempt by people who want to end starvation or ameliorate starvation. When you have a hot button issue like Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan, whatever they might be, how could it not turn political? It's going to attract activists who understand that this is an important. battlefield for their cause. And of course,

and there's no objective reality to it anyway. So is the entire notion flawed? Could it ever work? Well, there's people who use the term scam. And there's a wide range. We're talking about tens of thousands that are registered.

I don't remember, at least in the United States alone, around the world, there are many more. So I don't want to be that broad in dismissing them. I do talk a lot about the superpowers. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International Oxfam, which are inherently political. And once you become political and you say you're not, and you have a lot of power and influence, you already got the problem of contradictions, hypocrisy, and everything else.

But there are also, there are organizations that are out there that do good things. These organizations started out as basically they were good organizations. They weren't political. They were advocates. Oxfam is a good example. Right? They gave out, they were one of the first ones way back, and they were already functioning in the Second World War and at the end. And they provided relief, economic relief. They helped refugees. They helped Jewish refugees and other refugees. They weren't political. And they got captured.

They got basically, they got taken over. It was a hostile takeover. And they also, their structure is very, very loose and they're easily subject to these kinds of hostile takeover. So there are ones that are not that haven't gone through that hard for me. If somebody asks me sometimes, what are the ones you recommend? And I try not to do that. I don't want to give out stars like the Michelin Guide because they may turn tomorrow, but also the ones you don't usually hear about. It was the question I was wondering. Is there a model NGO which handles with finesse a very hot-button political issue in the world?

You don't hear about there. There's a group called Human Rights First, which I assume you've never heard of. most people have never heard of it. No. And they do criticism, they do analysis. They also criticize Israel, but it's not an obsession. It's not pathological. They don't invent terms and do campaigns like genocide.

They do reports on many countries every year, but they're a low visibility, low-budget organization. So you probably never, they don't get any, they don't get in the New York Times. They won't get in BBC. They won't get on network television or CNN. So yeah, there are, and there are a lot of those, but they're very low profile. They're organizations that really do aid, not like there's a group called Doctors Without Borders, $2.4 billion U.S. every year. They went off the rails about 10, 15 years ago, but before that, they did what they said they were supposed to do,

which is they sent doctors to go help out in areas where they were needed. Floods, earthquakes, wars, but they weren't political. So there's this takeover process also. That's something that's happened. And maybe that can be addressed independently of closing all the organizations down and saying, oh, this doesn't work. So I'm a little less, I guess, radical in my solutions, but maybe that's naivete. Yeah. In some way, it reminds me of the notion of being an editor of a major newspaper.

We'd think you could find someone who could edit a newspaper and just play it straight. But in reality, we can't find that or almost never. and that's despite the fact that they're heavily scrutinized, highly scrutinized. Some guy, well, let's talk about, for instance, our friend Ken Roth. I don't know if you saw our interview with Ken Roth, but he... I did not. I did not. You do... I'll have to look at it. Oh, well, you have to see. You should curl up with your wife and watch it and get the popcorn because you'll love it. You'll take eggs and tomatoes.

Because he left, how many minutes in, Periel? minutes in? Oh, he, that's what he walked out on. He left earlier than he was meant to. That's for sure. He left like 40 minutes in. And I asked him very, very basic questions. So tell us about Ken Roth, just so people know who he is. Ken Roth became the head of Human Rights Watch in 1993. He was the second or third, I guess maybe the second guy who was appointed in this job. Human Rights Laws was established in the late 70s by a guy named Bob Bernstein and a couple of others. Basically in the context of what's called the Helsinki Accords, human rights developments involving the Soviet Union, they were involved in getting a Han Cransky out of Siberia, out of Soviet Union and others. They were involved in good human rights activities.

And when Bob Bernstein, the founder, retired, he was in his 70s by then in early 80s when I first met him. And they thought, here's this young lawyer named Ken Roth, who'd been with the organization or a couple of years. R.A. Nyer was the first head of that. He was for many years ahead of the American Civil Liberties Union. Ken Roth came in, and that was a good example of an organization that gets hijacked to kidnap.

Roth had, this was after the Vietnam War, it was 20 years after, but it was still something that was, he was called what we call a post-colonial ideologue, and he has this very harsh obsession with Israel. And over the five or six years afterwards, he imposed that. He used the organization was relatively small then, and he was able to manipulate it.

He brought in some real hardcore anti-Israel activists already in the late 90s. And then took the organization off the rails since then. I started to, he was one of the reasons I started to get into this, to be honest with you. I went to some, I used to be an astrophysicist, and then I used to do arms and arms control and other things as a result of that. And I would go to UN meetings. Basically, I looked back out of those, about 30 years ago or so. I was a kid. And Israeli government was not involved officially in those kinds of discussions.

So I got to go and I got to talk about Israeli security issues. I got to talk about Middle East nuclear weapons proliferation, even in those days. And I would see that there would be NGO activists handing out material. Even if we're talking about the late 90s, early 2000, thousands handing out materials saying Israel is committing war crimes or Israel's violating all sorts of international regulations. And I began to look and say, hey, what are these, who are these guys? And where do they get their support? How do they get into the building? I learned, I did a doctorate in international politics at Cornell University. Nobody talked about NGOs or political power of NGOs

back in those days. And so he began to see that Ken Roth and human rights, he was a human, he given rights watch first was given out these brochures and giving speeches in the u.n about how terrible Israel was and i began i said i'm going to spend three years this was at least 20 years ago i was going to spend a couple of years as an academic and start writing about this and doing some research and some graduate students and then i followed ken ross's career since then i've written many articles i wrote a review of his book which is half fiction and the other half is about how terrible israel is there's a lot more that could be said obviously I'll just add one quick anecdote because there's a lot of it's got to do with money.

Roth is an expert fundraiser. The organization probably had a budget of under $30 million, which is not bad back in those days. It's now up to $100 million a year. And it got hundreds of employees, big staff, and he really made it a household name. He got invited to the White House, testified in Congress, did all the media stuff. And half of what he does is Israel's terrible. shouldn't exist, basically. If you look at almost,

we did look at any 24-hour period and sometimes half of his tweets, half of his post, I guess what do we call them, naxes, or about Israel and Netanyahu, and they're all, of course, very, very hostile.

So I can go on for long, but you interviewed it. Yeah. So, you know, I find that human rights watch, I don't know, do you think that they fabricate? You will,

find on human rights watch and amnesty international criticisms of Palestinian behavior in Gaza, criticisms of the Palestinian Authority. It's not, do they do that just, in your opinion, for show, or are there some pockets within those organizations that are actually fighting to expose both sides? Maybe the second, maybe there were some pockets. I say that carefully. A lot of people left, not a lot, a few people left. Yeah, there was a prominent letter, an op-ed, maybe it was in Washington Post, by a woman who left human rights rights right after October 7th. Danielle Ahas.

Yes, yes. And she worked for them for 14 years. She was a senior editor. She lived in Israel, most of that time. But she's an exception. I don't know of any other whistleblower, anybody who walked out publicly. And she did it because of October 7. And then she wrote about things she saw over the years.

There were other people earlier who were involved that left quietly, and I spoke to some of them quietly off the record. They didn't go public. There were a couple, but these were very small pockets. When you look at the Middle East Division, the people that were supposed to be working on the broad Middle East, and these were people who before they came into Human Rights Watch, people that Roth brought in,

and he brought us a woman named Sarah Leah Whitson, who had a history. This was back in around 2003, 2004. She was already doing boycotts of Israel. She had a history of, as a lawyer, as someone who worked in, she worked, I think it was called Arab American Association, something like that. In New York, she worked for a number of other NGOs

where the main, or a significant focus was how terrible Israel is, and how terrible America is. He brought those people in. Later on he brought in son in Omar Shakir, who just left human rights watch because they wouldn't let him publish a bogus report that called for the, that said the Palestinians have a right to return, you know, the 1948, post-48 to claim that they made. There's no human rights element in that at all.

It's something that the organizations have generally stayed away from. It's a very political issue. anyway he brought in omer shakir and the organization is after ken roth left the last few months is not anti-israel enough for him so i can go through give you a list of other people yeah yeah so so what's the you know i want to get into the where they are in iran as well but what's the what's the but for causation here if there were none of these NGOs do you think that um israel's place in the world would be significantly considered more legitimate? You know, what's the damage that they're actually have done?

I think the damage is pretty significant. They're like the engine that pulled the rest of the train through. They were out there using this kind of language. The Palestinians and their cheerleaders. Soviet Union was used in terms like Israel, genocide, Zionism, 75, the big Zionism, racism resolution. But you go through people who have to do that and go through the transcripts of UN discussions, debate, speeches from the 60s and 70s. And they were already using terms like genocide, the Arabs and the Soviets.

But they didn't get much beyond that. Has human rice watch used genocide? Yeah. Now they put out, in December 2024, they put out 100-something page report extermination and genocide. It's a bogus report. It's a word salad. It's an international law, word salad, and you read it carefully. Yeah, I remember now.

They talked about changing the, but we have to revise our understanding of the legal definition of genocide. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah. That's right. And it could be genocidal intent. It could be inter all sorts of other garbage that was in there. But they built on this.

You asked me what to make a difference if they weren't around. I'm not talking about just 2024, because there's this whole buildup. Durbin conference. That's where the NGOs took over from the Soviet Union was gone in 1990. There was not much of this activity. In fact, the infamous UN resolution in 1975, Zionism, racism, was repealed in 1991 and reactivated and with much stronger frameworks. It was really a classic hijacking by an NGO forum that took place in Durbin in a UN conference. You're talking about 5,000 people for 1,500 organizations in a stadium in Durban, South Africa,

supposedly cheering the end of apartheid. What's their main focus? Israel genocide, apartheid war crimes. So you got since then 2001, September 2001 in the house or almost 25 years, you got this constant drumbeat led by NGOs of apartheid, of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Genocide became, it was lower level, lower volume for a number of years, and then last, after the Gaza War, after October 7th, it became a dominant theme. So I think if the NGOs didn't exist or they weren't hijacked, and this wasn't their common obsession and pathology of really trying to erase Israel,

de-legitimizing Israel, then I think that the world would be less obsessed with Israel by a significant degree. It goes from there to the UN, and you got this Francesca Albanese. Without the NGO stuff, she wouldn't have any footnotes. Right? She just,

in some way, it all grows out of university campuses, right? And progressivism all over the world. It's a merger between the truth. That's who fills these. I mean, I just imagine that if I were to take a close look at the people that you're referring to,

I would see in their college background, And, you know, it's probably like a pretty typical profile resume. Okay, people who are hearing this conversation so far are going to say, correctly so, that the whole conversation seems built on the assumption that you and I have that Israel is not the bad guy in this story, at least to the extent that these NGOs claim it is. but where are you actually on that? To what extent, I mean, it's not zero, right? It's not that none of these articles about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is ever correct.

Some amount must be correct, no? Yeah, I'm not going to tell you whether it's zero to ten or ten to twenty, but it's somewhere we're not perfect. Not every Israeli soldier is perfect, not every Israeli politician is perfect, not an Israeli decision is perfect. I'll try to answer that with a short story of my own experience, and I've had this a number of times. I used to, and I still occasionally give talks in military frameworks

to young soldiers. Part of my military service was to do that after they decided it was too old and not exactly fit for combat duty back in those days. And I would talk about international law. I would talk about the United Nations. I would talk about human rights as a concept, as concepts. And these kids who are 18, 19, 20 years old, and they've buried their friends who've been blown to bits and bus bombings

way back in the days of Arafat in what was called the Deity Fata of the late 90, 2000, 2001, 2002, all that period. And they say to me, you know, whatever we do, we're going to get condemned. Anything we do, we're going to be called war criminals. So why bother? and that's a very hard case to respond to. Why is that hard to respond to? I talk about morality.

I say, look, the principles are Jewish principles that are very important here. I talk a little bit about the implications if you go out and you do things that are going to be filmed. Now you see them. And you do things that you're wrong, which are against army policy, which can be considered to be violations of privacy. when you, you know, you've got to take out a Palestinian terrorist, do the job, but don't torture people, and I mean that figuratively, but not psychologically or otherwise, do it with a minimum amount of damage to people who are not involved in combat, who are not part of the terrorist framework.

And that's got to push hard to get them to understand that. Those are important principles. So, yeah, there are, and we see violations, and in a war situation as we're in now, these are filmed there there there's not even a question about the evidence it's there now israel has a large number of soldiers fighting and if you have a dozen two dozen three dozen you have the what are called the settler violence incidents that are going on it's a small percentage but it still shouldn't happen so yeah i agree and i think sometimes in a combat you're doing war making war you know the question let's go let's talk about gaza for a minute specifically October

seventh happens. The atrocities, I'm not going to go through them again. I think most listeners probably know that. And then Israel Army goes in and how do you prevent this from happening again? And you see that there's a 500 kilometers, what is that, miles, about 350 miles, with concrete line tunnels under every building, every house, every mosque, every hospital, everything, schools with entrances and exits, thousands of them all over Gaza. how do you destroy that infrastructure that's been built and every UN official, every NGO official that's been in Gaza, everybody in Gaza knew that was there before the war,

how do you destroy that without causing all the rubble, all the disaster, what we see in the pictures of how bad Gaza looks? So maybe there's a better policy way to do it. Maybe in southern Lebanon, we're doing the same thing now. How do you prevent Qizbala from coming to? back and building, rebuilding those tunnels. Those are tough decisions.

The ones, by the way, the NGOs completely ignore when they say Israel is violating international law. There's no military examination. You had Andrew Fox on. You're a great show, by the way. Thank you. And Andrew's an amazing person, and it came out. I don't have any stories like he's got.

But he talked about the fictions of covering Gaza and the number of casualties. That was just cut and paste by, by. journalist across the board so you want to say israel's doing something wrong go ahead and but what's the alternative what policies should israel adopt and i think that's where we should be focusing on but not everything israel does is evil then you you lose you lose all of us yeah of course although when you when you tell me that you had difficulty and pushback from young israelis about well we're going to be called a war criminal anyway so what's the point that's the That's a worrisome argument that you're...

First of all, they should understand exactly why they shouldn't do it, regardless of what they're called. And secondly, just as a common sense, that if that's their attitude, then, of course, that implies very strongly that X number of them are going to do things, which they shouldn't do, because you don't get to talk to every one of them, and some of them you can't disabuse. If that's their gut, it's going to show up, especially under stress. And, you know, Benny Morris wrote a column, like, a year ago, I don't know if you saw it about just like the inevitable dehumanization of the enemy that happens in war. And I think he wrote this, but I believe it. And the longer that it goes on, just the more comfortable you get with killing. This reminds me of the thing I used to say about Barack Obama, you know, that Senator Obama thought that it was.

nobody should ever get killed, right? And then President Obama, the first time he probably had to authorize a drone strike, probably waited and waited and on one hand, on the other hand, he probably took him, you know, 48 hours to sign the order. And I imagine at the end of his, you know, eighth year, Mr. President, we want to draw out, I'll just go ahead and do it. I'm watching the game here, you know? Like, what do you bother me for?

Like, you just get used to it, right? I'm sure that's the dynamic. Well, I'll give you a counter for that one. I don't remember what year it was in the Obama presidency, but it was the Syrian uprising, it was a second term, rebellion, mass killings in Syria. And the regime, Assad regime, used chemical weapons and bombed places where rebels were but with lots of civilians around, bombed them with chemical weapons and repeatedly. and Barack Obama said if they do it again, red line.

Yeah. We're going to respond full force. And actually, there was a camera crew ready to interview me when Obama stepped out, came down a carpet in the White House to respond. And the response was, well, we're not going to find a way to dismantle the chemical weapons. We are not going to bomb that we're not going to use wet force against them. That was a huge lowering of American deterrence capabilities. Oh, it's tremendous mistake.

I don't mean to think that Barack Obama actually took it as flippantly as my example, but I'm sure that he just got used to it. Yeah, you had trouble, but I think he had trouble. And that was, you know, you live in Israel, or even in the United States, we can get to the Iran war in a minute. But there are times when you've got to defend yourself, and you've got to be prepared for that mentally and structurally, physically, in every other way. Again, go back to Andrew Fox. That's what he's been doing all his life.

So turning the other cheek is not exactly the response. Take a little digression. So much of the criticism of the current Iran war from a certain quarter revolves around the kind of, well, you didn't like the JCPOA, and now you're trying to get something similar to this kind of thing. But one of the things, and I discuss this with Andrew Fox, about the JCPOA negotiation is that it was clear, I think it was clear to the Iranians that we were desperate to sign something. And how could the Iranians who saw Barack Obama back off his red line in Syria

ever imagine that this same guy was somebody to worry about if they didn't agree to his terms on enriching uranium or funding proxies or whatever it was that was being discussed? So, okay, so how, let's fast forward to the Iran situation. How do the NGOs figure into this? So you don't have to limit the conversation to the NGOs, even though that's your expertise for this particular interview. We can just have a general conversation about your opinions about the Iran war as well.

Well, the common response that opposing the war, from what I go, NGOs, members of Congress, all sorts of pundits across the board, is the international law argument. Some law or constitutional law or international law. The president declared war didn't consult with Congress or international law. It was a violation. The terms that are always used are very ambiguous.

Why it's this a violation of international law? It was the UN charter, which one can argue about is really international law. But the UN charter certainly emphasizes the right to self-defense. and the focus tends to be on the word imminent. Is there an imminent threat to the United States? You hear that across the board. These things, there's an echo chamber. And I'm not saying the echo chamber is only on the left.

There's echo chambers on the right and in the middle and up and down. But the echo chamber against the war, and a lot of it is just if it's Trump's war, if it's Netanyahu's war, we don't want to deal with it. But in terms of attempting to come up with a coherent argument, they talk about, well, there was no imminent threat to the United States. Well, Iran has been building nuclear capabilities, building nuclear weapons for over 20 years and lying about it.

And I won't go over the JCPOA. You covered it before. If you want to, I was involved in those days looking at a, looking from an Israeli perspective. I wasn't a fan of it you can imagine in those days either for the same reasons. But the word imminent, if you're building, if you have tens of kilograms

of hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium, bomb making, there's nothing else you do with that but make bombs. And you've got those, and you're doing all sorts of tests and R&D work on bomb and explosives. These are relatively difficult, relatively difficult to make them explode so you don't what's called pre-detonation

and kill people around you. Iranians have been working on that. The regime has been working on that continuously. JCPOA may have slowed them down a slight bit. We don't know what they did. They didn't do. A lot of the stuff was hidden, but we got all this nuclear archive material.

We know they were trying to develop bombs. When has it become imminent? 30 seconds were they drop a bomb? Two weeks before? the argument about imminent which they claim is the basis both constitutionally and for international law you only have the right to self-defense of this

imminent threat is just completely bogus that's my my interpretation I think that yeah well the whole concept of international law is really something which smart people are going to have to revise in some

there's something there's a rot within this whole notion of international law it's been reverse engineered as a shield for the worst actors in modern history to use to tie down and paralyze and then bring the weight of the so-called experts and diplomats and NGOs to bear upon the good guys in the world who are trying to figure out a strategy

of how to defang this threat to civilization, whether it's suicide bombing, whether it's Gaza, the tunnels, or something as big as Iran being an atom bomb. Every one of these groups with evil intentions hides behind international law, and the academics, the dumb academics, back up their opinions.

There is a, I'll use the word naive, that's charitable, right? Let's say it's naive and not deliberate. I think it's a combination of both depending on, but there's a whole group of people that are, academics, who are, think that international law is the way to solve everything. You can, you outlawed slavery, I've heard this a thousand times. We outlawed slavery, we sort of outlaw discrimination against women, And now we're going to outlaw war. We've got to work at it.

And if we stop having wars, then other countries who are not as powerful as us, the global south. And that term is used a lot of time that used to be called third world. The victims of colonialism, Palestinians are number one on that list. One of the reasons that this whole community and NGOs are part of that, all the rest of them, are hostile, our critical, opposed the war. Iran as Iranians. They're responding to victimhood. The regime is responding to victimhood and they're under threat and all this other stuff.

So that's the naive perspective, right? That you can use international law to solve problems. I also call it legal imperialism. International criminal court, which was, again, Ken, our friend, Ken Roth campaigned for that 25 years ago because he knew that was a way

of catching Israel. of using this international law artifice to put Israel on the dock. But how are these judges chosen? How is the prosecutor chosen? Not by any democratic process. It's basically the same. It's the UN type of process. You've got 190 countries of which the vast majority are dictatorships.

There's no legitimacy there. You didn't vote for that. You can argue about the Supreme Court in the United States, or the Israeli court or any other court. But if it's in a democratic process, the citizens choose consciously. This is the process that we endorse. It's got legitimacy.

You don't have that international law. It's all bogus. You make it all up. It reminds me as you're talking to, and by the way, I don't always disagree with the people I'm going to describe, but the people who became so sympathetic to the plight of the underclass,

let's say, in cities, that they couldn't bear to enforce criminal laws anymore. They just couldn't bear it. And I get it because on a case-by-case basis, you could look at something and feel that it's very tragic that this person winds up in jail, was born there through no fault of his own, was marinated in certain antisocial attitudes,

and, you know, finds himself criminal. I mean, you can spin it out for yourself. But at some point, you reach a tipping point with that, and then the entire city just goes to shit. And nobody can walk the streets anymore, and everybody's mugged. And you realize, you know, you can't live this way. And I think this is where many of these people are.

Their sympathies are to the tragic narratives that they see. And they're not wrong. These are tragic narratives. And then they can't bear to take the side of the superior force over the underdog. And then they fall into a spiraling trap and they can never break out of it. And I don't know. It's just, it's a psychological dynamic. I don't know how you feel.

I've forgotten who there. There have been a few people who have written about this recently. And then it was sort of a response to Pope Leo's kind of. commented, there's good and there's evil. There's a lot in between, and I don't claim that it's just a straight binary or difference between the two. There's lots of gray areas. But, you know, I'm an Israeli. I went to a number of funerals after October 7th, and I went to funerals of soldiers who were tragically killed.

And anybody who doesn't consider October 7th, again, I'm not going to go through the details to be a representation of VEval. and the people who committed that as a form of absolute evil. There's no conversation. And when I have to slog through hundreds of pages of NGO reports, amnesty, human rights, rock, darts without borders. And sometimes you'll get a footnote saying, yeah, this was in response to the October 7th attack by Hamas. And then 300 pages of why Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. No connection between the two.

Human rights watch and amnesty international, like a year after October. 7th, I think Amnesty, two years after, did one report, you ask me about this the beginning, one report about October 7th, and even there they managed to get in condemnations of Israeli responses. One report, I call it file and forget. So they can say, hey, we did a report, but then there's no campaigning, you know, social media. You know, that's evil. And it's got to be confronted. It's got to be recognized. It's evil. But they will, they will forgive it but they'll forgive it

in the way, actually Norman Finkelstein did this on day one and they'll forgive it in a sense of a of a slave rebellion that gets out of control or if the concentration camp was liberated. I think there were actually stories of Jews who got out of the concentration camp

who then, you know, wreaked havoc on Germans. So in some way it also comes down to their particular view of what's actually going on in Gaza and who the villains are there. And in that story, there's so much misinformation that we heard for years. I mean, you can go on YouTube and see videos of Gaza malls and people and restaurants. And you can look at the, Coleman Hughes did this.

You can look at the stats of life expectancy and standard of living. and find all pretty like, well, actually some good stats and some stats, which are like right in the middle of the entire Middle East, right? And, but they would have us have thought that these were people living in a modern-day concentration camp. And, of course, if you're living in a modern-day concentration camp, what are you supposed to do, right? Of course you're going to break out. And, yeah, some people might kill a few people, but you're still directionally the hero here, right? That's their psychology.

You hear this term that's used. Again, everything I say is, I got basis evidence. I see it in the NGO stuff, reports and tweets and everything else that goes on there in submissions. The right of resistance is what they say. Okay, these guys, Palestinians are suffering and they have a right of resistance. Now, there's no such legal concept. It is entirely ideological. It goes back to all the things you talked about.

These are people who suffered, who are victims. And you look in 1948, if you erase history, you can manipulate anything. Right. In 1948, 47, the UN said, okay, we're going to divide the baby, we're going to have two states, you're two, all that other stuff. And the Arabs unanimously said no. They can call them Palestinian Arabs then, but that's what they were. Palestinian Arabs would have a state. Palestinian Arabs would have a state.

And Palestinian Arabs joined with the Arab armies and said, no, we're not going to have any Jewish state under any circumstances ever. And the conflict has been going on since then. If you erase that history or you reinterpret and invent a different history, it says, well, Zionism was always a colonial movement, then you can justify just about anything. And you get to the right of resistance. So where's morality?

If morality can be justified, can be twisted in any way you want, then I think that the fundamental basis, I come at the whole issue of human rights and international law and NGOs as a U.S. raised, California, raised liberal, Jewish liberal, who woke up to reality. It was fundamentally shaken by seeing how that same framework was abused to justify extremely illiberal actions. And that's still the case. What's interesting to me about it, okay, 1947, the partition, as much as I wish the Arabs would have

accepted Israel, I can understand at that particular time in history, especially within the context of all the wars and the killing that were going on at that time in history. Who are these Westerners coming, telling us to divide this land? We don't want Israel and we're going to fight. And they had some more than reasonable expectation that they might succeed. I mean, Israel was a tremendous underdog, and so it wouldn't be the first time some more powerful group did something which we might think they shouldn't have done. Okay, that's almost 100 years ago.

Now, at some point, you would think a moral obligation of their own leadership has to kick in to accept the practical, to accept what's possible, rather than to continue to subject their people to generation after generation after generation of death and squalor. And this is what really,

bothers me. I can forgive them 1948 because they thought they might pull it off and strangle the baby in the crib. That is not going to happen now. Israel is not going anywhere. Every reasonable person understands that and even the process

of getting rid of Israel is going to be millions of deaths. And yet the world and this is I think the very heart of the problem and it's the one thing nobody talks about, barely ever talks about. The world does not hold the policy movement to account for the fact that there's not a single leader among them who says,

we want two states side-by-side with Israel. Let's sit down and figure out how to make that happen. There is no onward Sadat to be found. And the West overlays and projects upon these people their own version of what we assume they want, which has nothing to do with what they actually want. And as soon as you understand that they are in a forever battle to never accept Israel, then you can begin to see Israel's point of view differently. What happens when they get 50,000 drones on the West Bank

that cost them 100 bucks each and completely overwhelmed Israel? That is Israel's future if they don't take control of this situation. and there's no diplomat, they can re-offer the Ulmer map to Abbas, and he is going to walk away from the table just as he did in 2008. But the world doesn't understand that. The world thinks, oh, Israel should just sit down with them and make a deal already. This really disturbs me. And I would just continue, I talked a lot, we, American Jews,

and I guess reasonable Jews, you know, English-speaking part of the English-speaking debate among his Israelis have not done a good job of making this simple point to the world. Most people don't understand this. I had a debate just the night before last with an important Israeli political philosopher. And I say, okay, but what would they accept? And he started quoting me, history that was wrong and arguments that were wrong. And I fact-checked him. You know, this is a very important person.

He's like, oh, oh, oh. He didn't understand. It's very, very upsetting. So go ahead. I'm not I don't know that I don't have any answers for that I we live in the same world and we get the same frustrations I won't ask you who the philosopher was I have I have a couple of guesses sounds like conversations that I had but look I got I distinguished between different categories here like and I don't claim to be able to I don't try to take on all the categories you know one of the

reasons that I said okay this was again 26 25 years ago I'm going to do NGOs because nobody else is doing them. There's a whole bunch of pieces in the puzzle. I don't know if you've ever interviewed Hill El Noyer from UN Watch. No, I know. I know. Highly recommend him. He does the UN agencies.

And it's a mirror image. And there are good people doing work on media bias and all and other stuff, violations of basic journalistic ethics like publishing Hamas figures of deaths in Gaza, which have absolutely no means of checking them independently. I decided I'm going to do the NGOs. I'm going to do that piece of the puzzle because nobody else was doing it. It needs to be done.

It's as important as the rest of them. So when I look at those, this is most NGOs that they're not based in Palestinian, there are Palestinian NGOs and they feed into the process. A lot of them are linked directly to terrorist organizations. But they got budgets of $3, 4, 5 million a year. They're out there.

but it's the big ones that are the ones that mold public opinion. When you get Democrats, a large number of people who vote Democratic, Wendy Sherman yesterday came out with this. Wendy Sherman, who was in the State Department, who was part of the JCPOA process, chairing leader. She's Jewish. She's identified Jewish. She says, I have trouble with Israel doing things that look like genocide. Where did she pick that up from?

So I focus on those aspects. Not Palestinian Arabs are going to, I call them Palestinian Arabs, by the way, because my grandfather was a Palestinian Jew. And I have his passport, and I have all the Palestine. And he was part of Palestine. I would respectfully suggest that you should drop that construction. It's counterproductive. It's not going to help.

But I believe it there. Okay. The point is I'm not going to change them. I don't know who's going to change them, if at all. But it's the cheering section, all those people that we talked about, that adopt that narrative. That, yeah, you're right, they're going to be, as long as they keep this philosophy, and it's not just Palestinians. Palestinian, it's not just Hamas, they go to the Muslim Brotherhood, you make the circle wider, and you get to Iran, and you get to Fisbalah, and they have this image that if we just put the pieces together right, October 7th, we can destroy Israel. We can weaken them so badly that they won't survive.

And you got this countdown clock. I don't know if it sounds like it's still there in the center of Tehran, so the destruction of Israel in 2030. Why? Because then we're going to have nuclear weapons. And they have scenarios, ballistic thousands of ballistic missiles. Why is there a cheering section?

Why is that cheering section claimed to be working in the framework of human rights, the framework of international law, of good versus evil, all those other things. I'm not going to claim that this massive industry, and that's what it is, it can be taken down in the short term. But if I can raise enough questions, and I'm saying me,

but I got 15 people, actually close to 20 now working for NGO monitor. It's a drop in the bucket. We work with a lot of other groups, a lot of other frameworks that are doing good work out there. And if we can show people, in a broader sense, that all the things that you've talked about,

all the twisted morality, the using international law to justify the most unjustifiable resistance mass killings, the horrible what we saw on October 7, then it wasn't unique that just in the scale was much bigger. You know, there's, I'll just, that's what I want to focus on.

Before I let you go. Go ahead, sorry. No, I think that by focusing on the Ken Ross, of the world, not Ken Roth, but the people who support him, people, his board of directors, you know, Ken Roth, I'll use this term,

other people, just be bullied his way into a fellowship at Harvard. And I know enough about the process, enough of it was released. Originally the dean said, no, you can't. It's something called the Carr-Ryan Center now for Human Rights at the John

Up Kennedy School. But Ken Roth is not an academic. He has nothing to teach students. He's an activist. who got $100 million from George Soros back in the day to do these campaigns. So I want to see. Before I let you go, there is something here. It's very dangerous to talk about because, before I set it up, I give an analogy to global warming.

You know, I think most people accept that global warming is real. And yet in any particular hurricane, you don't know whether it's because of global warming, because there's always been hurricanes, there's always been bad hurricanes, right? So you can make the overall point when you want to actually be specific that a particular detail is part of that point, it becomes almost impossible to make that case. So I'm going to make an overall point, and I can't say with each individual case if it's true. But there is a phenomenon that is very real of Jews psychologically cracking under the pressure, of being Jews and turning to the other side as the leading, you know, tip of the spear of the other side in a war on their own people that I think is a psychological thing.

And I can give you some nominees like Norman Finkelstein, Peter Beinart, Omar Bartov. I asked Omar, and, you know, when I was debating with him about this whole genocide thing, I'm like, come on, you know, if Ghaz, if Hamas, if, um, Hamas would simply release the hostages and take safe passage out of Gaza. Everybody knows Israel would stop. The Israeli public has no stomach for this killing beyond that. And he says, oh, we don't know if that's true.

I say, you mean to tell me you think Israel would go on killing Palestinians, even if the hostages are released and Hamas took safe passage? He says, yeah, it's possible. Now, this is sick in the head. And of course, Israel stopped the killing. even without them taking safe passage, as soon as the hostages were released. And Ken Roth, you know, I don't know if this is fair to say. I didn't bring it up during the interview, but, you know, he's married in a church.

I said, isn't that something? What a coincidence that this guy who's obsessed with anti-Jewish things is married in a church? Now, again, that could just be like, you know, I'm sure there's plenty of pro-Israel people who were Jews who were married in a church just to you know because they don't really care that much it makes their wife happy whatever it is I really can't say whatever it is but the overall pattern

it sickens me it sickens me and I and I see it all the time these people's like it's like a relief to them a psychological relief to them to be able to take their place on the other side as the good ones you know I'm not one of the good ones there are like I'll add a couple of things

to that. Ken Roth specifically, and then the broader issues, Ken Roth very often writes about, sometimes he takes it off when I go after him in various places, but that he got into the, he focused on human rights because his father told him stories as a child being brought up under Hitler in the 1930s.

Well, my parents were both, left Germany as children on their own. It was called the Kindertransparent. sport. They lived in England without their parents for during throughout the war from 1939 to 1945 as refugees children. My mother was 11. My father was 16. That's a personal issue. When he uses his father's experience as an excuse to bash nation of the Jewish people, the refugees, the people who survived and built a state, a country, we didn't have to have a country. We didn't the wars we're thriving, but we'd be thriving much more if we didn't have these wars.

Fighting for our lives. That sickens me. And every survivor and every child of a survivor in second generations and everybody else has the same reaction. That he uses, he as a shield to protect himself, his father's experience growing up, and then completely abandons the Jewish people, gets married in the church, which, okay, he's got his private life to do, but there's something in there that happened much earlier. And he's a total, I hope you'll watch my interview with him. It's not very long, as I said. You'll love it, but he's really exposed as a fraud because I set up, I don't remember the details, but I set up certain hypotheticals that were based on the, you know, the news reports of that time.

And I said, okay, I'm the Israeli prime minister and you're my chief advisor and this is my situation. And can I, what can I do? Can I do this? Can I do that? And he would not answer any question. question. I said, well, you know, you can criticize, but you have to be able to at some point be able to say, well, that would be okay, or what would be okay, and he refused, which just

to me demonstrated clearly that he just wants to be a critic. He doesn't want to roll up his sleeves. I've talked to people who knew him, who know him years ago, and there's something that happened in his personal family background, they think. But I want to go to the broader issue. I don't want to give Ken Roth

all that much time in, all the other people you talked about, and it's a growing phenomenon. First of all, yeah, there's this Yiddish expression. Svets of Zainer Yid, it's hard to be a Jew. When you were constantly being attacked, switching sides, back in, I think it was the 13th century in Barcelona, there were a guy named,

I forgot what his original Hebrew name was, but he became Pablo Christiani, and he was one of the greatest, he became a Christian, part of the Dominican, part of the Inquisition, including, I don't think they burned Tom would, because of him, but they certainly censored them. And that's a phenomenon that comes in different generations.

There's someone who is a friend and a colleague by the name of Edward Alexander, unfortunately died recently. He wrote a book called Jews Against Themselves, which kind of captures this whole phenomenon. And I think it includes Bartov and there are different reasons for it. And I think there is a fire that burns, part of it is self-promotion, A part of it is, okay, how do I escape this? Not consciously. We must be doing something wrong to be given so much grief by so many people.

It's awful. So Finkelstein and Peter Beinart, all of them, I think, in different ways, fit that category. They have these NGOs called Jewish Voice for Peace, and if not now. And it turns out they get funded by people like the Rockefeller brothers. And this was something that was articulated specifically by the Rocker, for the brothers in funding these groups. They're not Jewish. I've got named

a guy who ran it for all these years, but they said, in order to, we're going to get peace. It was called their Middle East peace program by driving a wedge between American Jews and Israel. Well, they've succeeded in a lot of ways. And that very much

makes me nervous. There's an NGO angle to that as well. So, unfortunately, I agree with you, and I can add more to that. Well, you know, I guess this is how well then I, you know, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the people of my role their eyes here, but I am actually

I would love nothing more than for the Palestinians to have their state. I would like them to have 101%. You know, like there was always like this land swaps will give them 98% or less. I was like give them whatever they want if there's actually going to be peace.

But, you know, I don't see any prospect of that happening. And I blame them because I don't think they want it. I wrote a piece. Wait, let me just finish. But back to what we were saying, you know, so many people, I and so many people like me, who are not religious, and I envy you that you have the religion to ground you.

We have children, and this is all, like I've said, an acid rain upon their psychology. And I'm terrified. I'm just terrified of how, this battle within the brains of my children will play itself out over the course of their lifetimes. Will they bond so much with me as their father that that will ground them and to whatever extent Judaism remains important to them or will they take the easy path, which is to just join the zeitgeist and be the good one. ones, you know, who just take the other side in this conflict and cut ties psychologically with their past, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, and Israel. It's all very emotional,

right? Israel might be very fine on its own, regardless if every American Jew turns against them, Israel might persevere and probably will, but it's very, very painful, painful fear that I have. What I was going to say is probably not relevant. I'll say it anyway. Say it anyway. Yeah, then we'll go. Yeah. You started talking about supporting a Palestinian state. People like the

pigeonhole, everybody, including me. I'm labeled his right wing and Netanyahu's supporter and it was not true. And I wrote a column in Jerusalem Post I'm guessing five or six years ago. In the magazines, so it was

widely read and given a lot of a nice picture with it, saying, okay, we really have to decide what our borders are and decide what's Israel and what's not, not have two sets of laws and not have, this was before they were talking a lot about settler violence and the hilltop youth and everything else. But there was a little bit of that there.

It was not healthy. Right. Do that. And I got huge flack from everybody, because I said, these are the conditions in which we should do it. Now I agree with you. There's no way Israel is going to give up territory and have all those drones and missiles and everything else being shot at us.

The bigger question of how do you deal with the pressure that your kids, everybody's kids, are going to be under. And I don't think that it would certainly, we don't want to see half the Jews live in the diaspora, mostly in the United States. This is what's happening now is just extremely frightening to see this happen as a Jew, as half of the Jewish people are being subject to. this, we have to find a way out. I think that's something that

the types of statements and the declarations you hear from Israelis are often, Israeli officials, Israeli government people, are often not helpful. I say that in a understated way. Yeah, yeah. It's to be much more focused on this. I don't have a,

I don't claim to have a solution. It's a subject that my kids are young adults, my grandchildren. These are Israeli kids. But they know what's going on. They're the ones who are in the 30s and 40s. They know what's going on. They see what's going on. And they're also frightened. And they used to go back and forth a lot. So this is part of their communities, part of their families. They've got to find they reunite. They're making. Yes, yeah. They're making Afrikaners out of us. And the irony is, the irony is that the Afrikaners had way more latitude to undo their situation. than the Israelis do. And people don't realize that.

The Afrikaners was a system based on racial superiority. But actually, well, you know, the book hasn't been totally written yet, but, you know, they were able to unwind that situation. At some risk, some risk to their hides, but it was morally right to do, and they were able to unwind it. There is no path that I have been heard or that I can see, that allows Israel to unwind this situation. I don't know how they can...

So that's... It's very, very dispiriting. Anyway... I want to end on a somewhat more positive and back to the focus where I claim to have something to contribute. These issues are existential. I know a lot of good people who deal with this very broadly.

I have a much narrower focus. The other things... They're out there, but I'll stick to the issues of trying to restore. Let's just take values like human rights. And those are Jewish values, and they're important values. Within the community of, I think you go back to you quoted earlier, you went back and you quoted Benny Morris. And what it does to us, the corruption,

that was part of my article back there five or six years ago. that serving as soldiers, I had a brief military career, not very exciting, not Andrew Fox, but I know you don't have to have a military career, and my kids have served them, everybody I know,

serving in a place where everybody hates you, and where you have to be tough and you have to do things that you really don't want to do. That is corrupting. I want to find a way, and I think it also greatly damages are image the way in which other Jews

in the diaspora in the U.S. and elsewhere see what's going because they only see the pictures which are so disturbing. We have to come back to embracing those values of human rights, morality, good versus evil. And I have to be able to say, not just me, but everybody else to the soldiers, what's important is what we do and not how other people judges and what we do has to be the right thing. That has to be a value that has to be re-established.

It can't be treated as just a political form of a battering ram, the way that it's been taken by the human rights organizations for the last 30 years. If I can contribute to that, Diana, we've done something at least. So I leave it that that's the most I can try to do. And even that, that's obviously going to be that's a longer struggle. By the way, it's funny, you made this point.

I hadn't thought about it in many years, and then we really are going to go now, about the debilitating psychological effect that you're described, or people who have to serve and lured over people, for lack of a better term, and do things that they don't want to do and be hated and become inured to the daily brutalities. Thomas Jefferson, I don't mean to compare what's going on here to make the Palestinians into the slaves in this analogy, because that's obviously 100% the opposite of what I believe. But he did write, and the irony is that Jefferson was a slave owner,

he wrote about the fact that owning slaves damaged the psychology of the slave owner. And I happened to have the quote, I was able to find it in my Gmail, and leave out the first part. He says, our children see this and learn to imitate it for man is an imitative animal. He's talking about the harshness of slavery. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the liniments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny cannot be but stamped by it with its odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved

by such circumstances. That last line, that you must be a prodigy to remain his manners and morals undepraised by such circumstances. This is what Benny Morris was getting at. This is what I think you're getting at. It doesn't even matter if you're on the right side of the conflict.

At some point, it destroys you. It's a cancer to live that way, psychologically. You ended on Thomas Jefferson. I'll end on Menachem Begin. I wrote a book recently about the history of the negotiations for Saddam.

How did they get to peace? But it was about from Began never wrote a book and he didn't do interviews after he left the office and it was, but I traced the changes that he went through it and he gave lots of speeches and did a lot of writing and lots of documents where

it was, he said, I'm going to take risks. There were lots of criticism for him for giving back Sinai and he said, I'm going to to take risks because peace where our soldiers don't have to go out and kill and be killed is the ultimate value. He said it much more eloquently than that. He said it in Hebrew, quoted from Psalms. But that comes down to the same type of issues, which is that you have to have that broader

moral perspective. And he was able, considered to be a right-wing fanatic who wouldn't give up an inch, to reach an agreement with Sadat, who was considered to be a Nazi supporter. and would never make peace with Israel and did all these wars, including the terrible Yom Kippur-73 war. And then six years later, four years later, Began received him coming into Jerusalem against the advice of a lot of other people. Six years later, in 1979, signed a peace treaty and gave back land for peace.

If we had a Palestinian leader who would do that, and you said that earlier, we would be in a very different and much more, I think, justifiable position. We could do a whole show. Maybe we should at some point to just explain how misunderstood the typical right-wing Israeli is in terms of their attitude about wanting peace and why they're hard line. They're not hard line because they don't want peace. They're hard line because they feel that they will be killed if they take the wrong policies.

All right, sir, it's very an honor to meet you. I kept you seven minutes over. I apologize for that. But you know, we Israelis, we like to take a little bit more. more than we're supposed to have. So I appreciate. It was great to talk to you and what would you contribute in terms of sane public discussions, rational discussions like complex issues is rare and extremely important.

So thank you. Thank you, sir. So long. Bye. Bye-bye.