The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Did Israel Win in Gaza? “Yes — Emphatically, and Tragically, No.” Ambassador Michael Oren.

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

With his son Yoav Oren (former IDF special‑forces soldier) Ambassador Michael Oren (historian; former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.) sits down for anunvarnished assessment of the war what “victory” actually means. Highlights: Psychology of war & the IDF: A deep dive into moral erosion under prolonged combat; how rage, fear, and fatigue are managed; why some units choose capture‑over‑kill in close quarters; and the IDF practice of embedding psychologists with frontline units during Gaza operations to stabilize judgment in real time. Oren’s two‑line verdict: “Emphatically yes” on military success; “tragically no” because the fight mutates if Hamas retains weapons and cover. The “Hezbollah model” in Gaza: why a foreign peacekeeping shield + undisbursed weapons equals a forever threat. Hostages, Doha, and leverage: what actually forced movement — and what happens next if disarmament stalls. Gaza casualty math, explained from Oren’s perspective (the 1:1 claim and why the numbers are contested). How Hamas turns humanitarian aid into a war economy; the logistics and the alleged skimming. On restraint under fire: Yoav’s close‑quarters firefight, triage under fire, and the decision to capture, not kill. Anti‑Semitism’s uncensored return in the West — and why, according to Oren, arguments and “hasbara” often misfire. USS Liberty: Oren’s step‑by‑step rebuttal to the “deliberate attack” narrative. The strategic endgame: surgical strikes, cutting aid diversion, and whether disarmament is possible without a full re‑invasion. 00:00 Intro 01:50 Did Israel “win”? 04:30 Gaza’s tunnels and the unique urban fight 06:10 Multi‑front picture (Hezbollah, Iran, Houthis) 07:45 From battlefield gains to regional diplomacy 08:50 Hostages and the “diplomatic shield” 12:50 Why Hamas released hostages (and why it mattered) 15:10 Will Israelis accept another ground push? 15:40 Surgical strikes vs. re‑invasion 16:30 Aid diversion and UN logistics 23:00 Doha strike debate 32:10 IDF conduct under fire; Yoav’s firefight 41:00 Rules of engagement, restraint, and misinformation 55:20 Psych support embedded with IDF units 59:00 USS Liberty — the case against conspiracy 1:09:10 Closing thoughts: victory, vigilance, and what comes next

Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world famous comedy seller. I am here with Noam Dorman, the owner of the seller. Oh, God. Go ahead. I'm going to not do it, and then you're going to have nobody to do it. Go ahead. I am Periel, obviously, the producer of the show. We have a very special guest.

Thank you for making the time to come here today and your busy schedule and a shout out also to Bridget, who is. Always wonderful. Return guest, Michael Oren, writer, historian, statesman, and the former Israeli ambassador to the United States. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show. And his son, Yoav Oren, the CEO of Zug, tech company, tech entrepreneur,

and a veteran of the IDF. You are a combat soldier in one of Israel's special units. welcome gentlemen delightful and i probably said somebody like this before but it's you know i just have to say it every time because it's true and it's how i feel in my wildest dreams the notion that michael oren whose books i read the ambassador to america from israel would show up to do my podcast at a time of um you know historic interest in what's going on in israel is just such a dream come true for me in terms of the trajectory of my life. It's just, it's corny.

I'm telling you from the bottom of my heart. Well, you make me blush. It's very humbling. Now you let me do a stand-up routine. Yes, I'd be happy to. All right, so let's just get to the heart of the matter. I'm hearing. I was at an event last night where it was like a mission accomplished.

We won. We won. And did we win? Yes, emphatically. We meaning... And tragically, no. Okay. Which one do you want to hear first?

The tragically, no. Tell you know is it's because it ain't over. And now we're in a situation where Israel is occupying, Israeli forces are occupying about 53% of the Gaza Strip. Gaza is still embedded in the northern part of the strip. The population there has returned and has restored the human shield. But beyond that, there's now a diplomatic shield. The diplomatic shield is that the United States has declared a victory.

and any occurrence that's going to belie that claim is going to meet resistance from the United States. It's okay, two soldiers were killed this week. It's not really a violation of the ceasefire. And Hamas could keep playing like that. No, this isn't the oldest terrorist playbook in the world. You can go back, I don't know, you can go back to the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympics,

Israeli athletes in Munich, where the PLO under Yasser Arafat said, well, we didn't do it. This organization called Black September did. A bunch of rogues did it. We didn't do it. But of course, Black September was part of the PLO and under the command of Yasser Arafat.

Then in the year 2000, the second Antifada started. And a thousand Israelis would be killed over the next five years. The Palestinian Authority said, well, it's not us. It's the rogues doing this. But we know that the Palestinian Authority was deeply involved in it as well.

So it's the oldest playbook in the world. For Hamas to say, it's not us killing the Israeli soldiers. it's rogues. And once you go down that route of that game, then Hamas can just keep on killing Israeli soldiers. Amos can get more deeply embedded. So there it's not entirely over. So that is the bad news. That's the tragic news. And how we get out of that trap will be the big question of the next couple of days, whether President Trump's team will be Jared Kushner, Steve Whitkoff can make good on the 20 points promise to disarm Hamas, to get Hamas to give up its

weapons. It is no means challenge. So that is, that's under the rubric of no tragedy. Yes, victory emphatically starts with just a military estimate. You say we're all sitting around a table at West Point. What are we going to study about this war? We're going to study that in Gaza, the Israeli army encountered a challenge that no other army in history ever met, in history, never by modern history. The closest examples would be the battles of Mosul in 2016, 2017, the Battle of Fallujah, I worked actually the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. And those two battles, the U.S. military, no small group, encountered at most, at most,

10,000 armed resistance in cities that were almost entirely deserted. and almost no tunnels. There were a couple of miles of tunnels. In Gaza, the Israeli army encountered 30,000 Hamas terrorists, very heavily armed, embedded in 2.2 million civilians who had very little space to maneuver, and 500 kilometers of tunnels. Which is in miles, like 300 miles, something like that?

It's something large in the New York subway system. It's actually twice as large as the path of the New York subway system, if you can imagine this. It's actually inconceivable. nobody encountered anything remotely like this. And that's just Gaza, Lebanon. In Lebanon, Isbullah, which was considered not just the strongest non-government army in the Middle East, but in the world with 100,000 terrorists and almost 200,000 rockets and missiles,

but some of them are very, very accurate. Then you have the Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. You have the hooty rebels. All of them have the capabilities to send drones and rockets and Iran itself. So no army in history comes close to this. and in purely military terms, we as West Point cadets are going to sit around the table and say, okay, how does this happen?

How did the Israeli military turn around and win a multi-front war with, relatively speaking, few Israeli casualties after October 7th, relative even to Israeli wars. Twice as many soldiers were killed in three weeks of the Yom Kippa War of 1973. You want to brag about it, but it is a success. How do they do this?

So that is all under the rubric of good news, very good news. And those victories can now be transformed, if cards are played correctly, into peace between Israel and Lebanon, because Hispala has been degraded, peace between Israel and Syria, because the Syrian-Iranian axis has collapsed. Syria is an independent country for the first time in a generation. You could have peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and Israel and Saudi Arabia is peace with the entire Sunni world. It means peace with the largest Muslim countries in the world, which are actually outside the Middle East, it's Indonesia, Pakistan, and maybe even peace with Iran. When President Trump mentioned this in the Knesset,

some people laughed, I did not. I can see a situation where the Iranian population, which enjoyed a very close relationship with Israel before 1979, could get back, just get rid of these Ayatollahs. The entire Middle East looks completely different, or certainly could, next year than it looked three years ago. Really different. And then, the last thing, go ahead.

We got the hostages back. Right. We got 20 living hostages back. And we hope to get the remaining bodies of those passages who are deceased back and reunited with their loved ones for proper closure. So on balance, yes, the situation continues. It is tragic. But we have to look at this war is probably more transformative and in many ways more successful than any other war in Israel's history. I have a few more questions about the war.

And then we also have to get back to how Israel can recover its good name in the world and how that goes on the ledger. But, okay, Netanyahu, of course, said all along that one of the measures of victory was the end of Hamas. Hamas will no longer be in power and no longer armed. So it doesn't look like that's the case, but maybe it's a little snarky. to just hold up that claim because what also wasn't conceived of is that Hezbollah would be gone, Iran would be gone. And much of the threat of Hamas was conceived of because they have these backers, which no one ever thought would be out of the picture, right? So given the fact that Iran is

defanged, given the fact that Hezbollah is defanged, Hamas is not the threat that Israel felt had to maybe had to be defeated at all costs. So talk about that whole, how all the moving parts fit together. Well, we haven't achieved Netanyahu's goal of destroying Hamas, or certainly degrading Hamas to the point where no longer threatens the state of Israel. You know, every couple of days, certainly prior to the ceasefire, Hamas was firing rockets into southern Israel. So as not as if they don't have slept rockets.

And they are not the threat that they were, but they're still a threat. And I don't see, you know, a lot of Israelis moving back to those boards. border areas as long as they have that rocket capability. And so, yes, the key to everything, by the way, the key to everything, that scenario that I just laid out about peace with Israel and Lebanon, peace with Israel and Syria, all hinges on this next step of the 20 points, which is disarming Hamas. For if Hamas is not disarmed, the international community is not going to invest in Gaza. And an international force will not be sent to Gaza. No one's going to send their troops to Gaza to be killed by Hamas or to serve as a shield from Haas while Hamas is busy killing Israelis,

because that's what's happened in the past. Traditionally, peacekeeping forces in the Middle East only work when there's no peace to keep. The minute there's no peace, there's actually a peace to keep, they pick up and leave. People forget that there were European forces in Gaza. Seventy-seven, they moved all the peacekeepers out. In 24 hours.

Or they serve as a shield, is what Unifil did for Hezbollah, which is precisely what Hamas wants. He wants to be the new Hezbollah. Hisbalah has the guns, but it doesn't have sovereign responsibilities, and it hides behind international forces. That's what Hamas wants. And so we have to be very vigilant and we have to work very closely with the Trump administration

to ensure that that next phase is implemented as difficult it may be. And we may have to get to a point we're not there, certainly not with the Trump administration yet, where we have to recognize that this military threat is intolerable and that we can interdict it by creating a situation where every Hamas terrorist who emerges from a tunnel with a gun will never again go back into that tunnel. Okay. So actually, you know, just as an excuse to play something that I once said, I want to play a little bit video, something I said to John Spencer. And then I'm going to use this to set up a question. This was my remark to him a couple months ago. Go ahead. Steve tells me I don't look good in the yellow shirts. I'm not going to wear the yellow shirt anyway. I think you look very handsome. But this is what's dangerous. They don't want Israel to stop. I mean, I asked somebody the other day, well, why doesn't Hamas,

release the hostages. I mean, normally, somebody doesn't release the hostages because the kidnapper doesn't release it because you're going to kill me if I release the hostage. But no, they know very well Israel is going to kill them anyway, right? And they also know that if they release the hostages, it's much more likely that Israel will lose its resolve in the war because the Israeli public is already teetering on wanting to end the war. And if all the hostages were released, we can imagine that the Israeli public would say no more. Hamas knows that. they gain nothing by keeping the hostages, as I can understand it,

except that it provokes Israel to keep the war going. So you have both sides wanting the same thing, which is a very dangerous dynamic. Israel wants to keep the war going, and Hamas wants to keep the war going. Why does Israel want to keep the war going? Because they want to defeat Hamas. And Hamas wants to keep the war going.

Because they feel they're winning. Yeah. Except. This is my concern. You talk about they're going to, they talk about they're still going to, take Hamas's weapons away. They're going to demilitarize Hamas.

And my feeling is the Israeli public has lost its resolve, and I don't see any way they're going to back a new, renewed military action into Gaza now that these hostages are home. And I feel like Hamas knew that, and that's why they gave the hostages right away, and they were happy to get rid of them. That's my fear. Which was precisely the argument used by Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, to Hamas. when they met with Hamas.

They said, these hostages aren't serving you anymore. They're actually a liability. Now, they didn't imply that the Israeli public is tired of war and wouldn't renew the war. But Hamas got, they believed they got what they needed. What they needed is a shield. What is Hamas' goal? His goal is to survive.

Right. Okay. The hostages were not enabled them to survive anymore because Israel had forced the evacuation of a million Palestinians from Gaza City, leaving behind the detritus of Hamas. And they were completely surrounded. They were cut off from arms.

They're cut off from cash. They were cut off even from electricity. They were going to die. So along comes, you know, Deo Sechmachina, the United States of America, is great. And what do they say? All right, for the time being, you can keep your guns. Trump at one point even said that it was good that they had the gun so they could get rid of bad guys in the militias.

He kind of walked that back. And they think they're going to get an international force in there. And they think they're going to get the international community and the United States to hold back Israel, even if Bibi wanted to go back in and destroy them. BBS pledged. And they get what they want. I mentioned it earlier. The way one is a Hezbollah-like situation.

They get to keep their weapons. They have an international force protecting them, and they have no sovereign responsibility. They're not responsible for rebuilding Gaza. That, you know, the Emirates and the Saudis are going to come in and do that. Why, we don't have to do that? Get our hands dirty. So for their perspective, this was not necessarily a terrible deal. Not necessarily a terrible deal.

It required pressure by the Qataris and the Turks, but not necessarily a bad deal. and also they get to retain some of the deceased hostages because Hamas is not just a terrorist organization that gazed in physical terror, it also gazed as an emotional and psychological terror. They love this. They know what this is doing to Israeli society. And I just want to say parenthetically,

as someone who's worked with hostage families of both hostages living and hostages not living, that the agony of parents of not living hostages is in many ways greater. Because there's no hope. There's no hope. And all they want is closure. And so they're not going to get.

get this, all these now, what, 18, 17, 17 families that have not have closure. It's excruciating pain for them. So from Hamasville is not going to go to war over corpses, right? It's just not going to do that. No, we have it in the past. They've had cows in the past. But so here we stand. This is really the inflection point.

A flexion point where, as I mentioned earlier, I don't want to, you know, browbeat the point is to say that everything could change in the Middle East. But the linchpin is getting these guys to get up their guns and disabusing them of what they think is a good deal. But do you agree that it's unlikely that the Israeli public will have the resolve to send its sons and daughters to war again and for a longer, it's already been how much longer than the longest war in history? You know, the longest was the war of independence. This is longer by over a half year. Yeah. The answer is probably, no, I can't say that. You know, there's really army, everyone, you're hearing again and again how tired the army is,

how mobilization rates are down, and yet the Army is still there in fighting. We know plenty of people who are doing it. I don't think we actually have to do this. I think we can engage now in what they call surgical strides, pinpoint strikes, and create that situation where every Hamas government who walks down the street will not walk anymore.

And that can be done. We have the drone capabilities. The United States has those drone and intelligence capabilities. It can be done. And we'll make it very, very difficult for them to survive. And at the same time, you cut off the cash, You cut off the arms, and the most important thing, believe of this, gnome, is cutting off Hamas's ability to steal humanitarian aid.

As Hamas in the past stole about 60% of the humanitarian aid, nine out of ten drivers of UN trucks are members of the Hamas Union. You can't make this up. So Hamas knew exactly where the trucks were going. What do they do with 60% of the aid? Sell it? No, first of all, they feed their own guys. And then they sell it, exorbit rates on the markets, and they enrich themselves. That's how they pay salaries.

Yeah, but if it's two million people and 30,000. fighters, it's only a small portion that they could use and not have plenty left over if they're stealing 60%. Well, they have sore houses. All that's true. But it's interesting that during the ceasefire negotiations, Hamas's number one demand was for the renewal of humanitarian aid. Not because they care about the people of Gaza.

On the contrary, they like people starving in Gaza. It gets the international community to come down hard on Israel. But no, they needed the aid because that is their lifeline. And their life is money. Their benefactors are gone. Right. So the point of these is to keep their hands off the aid. That's not going to be easy with the UN.

They're really not going to be. As I mentioned, these truck drivers all belong to Hamas. And they would know exactly where the truck was going. They knew where the truck was on the truck. Nine out of those 10 trucks were looted before they got anywhere. And then guess what Hamas did? They said, it's not us looting the trucks. It's a bunch of rogue people looting the trucks.

It's not us. They're great. It's so predictable. So again, this is a good. great, great moment, potentially in the history of the Middle East and, frankly, of the United States. After now more than a decade of retreat from rejecting power in the world, the dismantling of the Pax Americana in the world that was begun, that was established by Henry Kissinger back in the early 1970s, that Paxa Americana is now back. America, no one has any doubt

that the America of Donald Trump is the great power calling the shots. No one thinks Putin's calling the shots in the Middle East. No one thing Xi is calling the shots in the Middle East, it's the United States. And the 20 points, and I say this not, you know, as the former ambassador, I say this as the former history professor of diplomacy, was one of the most elegant and complex diplomatic accomplishments that I can remember probably ever. Because they got not the 20 points themselves, which addressed the situation in Gaza, which would have sufficiently complex, but the entire Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the expansion of the Abraham Accords, And this team got countries that don't like each other.

Turkey and Qatar don't like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and vice versa. And all these countries, let's say, like us, they got them all to sign on this document. I'm sure Carmel Harris and Tony Blinken could have worked. She looked at the maps. She, you know, figured out whether we should go into Rafe or not. And they did it through a combination of two factors. One was the willingness of the United States to use power again, because somehow these previous administrations thought you can use soft power. you'd have leverage in the Middle East, no. People in the Middle East respect the strong horse.

And the fact that Trump used power first against the hoodies, later against Iran with great effect, gave a much tremendous leverage. And the other fact was personal relationships. This is going to come a big shock to you, that diplomacy like anything else in life is 90% personal relationships. And Whitkoff, Kushner, developed all these very close relationships on both sides. Whereas the previous administration, the Biden administration, wouldn't talk to BB for two years, wouldn't talk to the Saudis for two years. And then they come back and think they're going to have the same leverage. It doesn't work that way. I have a question. I heard, and we're going to bring you in a minute, I heard Ari Shavit, the author who wrote that book, My Promise Land, on Dan Cienor's

podcast. And he said something that interested me. And I wonder if you agree, if you know about it. He said that Israel knew all along that Hamas would not disarm. But that the plan in his mind was to set up a kind of East Germany, West Germany situation where the the Ghazans can go to either side that they want and that through the difference in the way Israel would demonstrate one side would be run, the side that Israel is still occupying, and the way the Hamas side would be run, that this would help to de-radicalize the Ghazan people and that somehow, as he said, everybody wanted to go to West Germany

and that's what undermined the Cold War. So, have you heard that theory? I have. There may be an element of truth to it. I have. There may be an element of truth to it. I'm always very cautious about trying to impose Western models, historical models on the Middle East, where people care about different things. They don't necessarily care about a chicken in every pot. And living under Israeli control may be preferable to people to live under an oppressive Hamas control than living under Israeli control. I don't know. And East Germany did not fire rockets regularly at West Germany.

Let's be honest about that. So there are going to be many differences there. However, I write a weekly column in Hebrew for our major daily, The Idiot. And my column that's coming out tomorrow raises the question whether the current status quo would be preferable to, say, a different status quo. And the example I gave was the Oslo process. The Oslo process had what were they called Phase 2. phase two of the asl process was the palisian authority controlled area a of judea and samaria

the west bank and had complete control military and political area b was under Palestinian political control but israeli military control and area c was under military and political control of the state of Israel phase two phase three was supposed to be a Palestinian state which we didn't get there so many Israelis who thought that the ins continue to think the creation of a Palestinian state would pose an existential threat to the state of Israel we're happy with phase two just stay here So what we really have now, and many Palestinians are happy with stage two also. I think they'd rather have phase four, which is the end of Israel. Yeah, I'd rather have phase four.

But we're in kind of a phase two in Gaza, an interim phase. And that interim phase is Hamas is there, it's miserable, they're living in the debris, no one's going to invest there. The area of Gaza under Israeli control will prosper to a certain degree. And we will not have perfect security, but the ultimate. alternative, say, for example, a Palestinian state that could fall to Hamas completely behind an international shield may not be preferable. And so I raised this question in the article.

Maybe where we are right now is not ideal. We didn't defeat Hamas completely. It may be preferable to the alternative. All right. Oh, one last question. I have trouble believing the party line, and this was the 60 minutes. the clip that I think is what you're referring to from last night we spoke before the show, that Israel decided to bomb Qatar without consulting the United States of America or letting

them know. I just can't imagine, because the mere fact of, to me, the mere fact of not telling the United States communicates, we know that you're going to be upset with us if we do this. So we can't tell you. I cannot believe they would do such a thing. I think the whole thing is theater. And there's, and one more thing. They say, well, they told us, they told us, but it was too late to call it off. I'm like, it's never too late to call it off. If they haven't pressed the fire button, it can be called off instantly. I have my doubts. What can I say? We're not going too deeply. I have my doubts. But it is very important. Everyone forgets that the state of Israel was created in 1948, with the promise that the state would protect the people in

land of Israel, and the people who try to kill Jews would not be able to do so with impunity ever again. ever again same reason we kidnapped eichmann in south america right and the world made up very big stink about that too if you remember we're called war criminals for kidnapping eichmann and the state of israel on october eighth made a promise that the perpetrators of the massacres would not get away with it irrespective of where they were the prime minister actually said this in canescent wherever they are we will get you this was golden mayor's principle in tracking down the the murderers of the 11 athletes from Munich. The same idea. I think it's a crucial principle. You know, whether the Qataris were negotiating in good faith or not. The fact is, we all know what Qatar is. It's a country

that, yeah, interacts with the United States, interacts with us, but also spends billions of dollars trying to influence American policy, university studies. They play both ends against the middle. It's the Al Jazeera, which is basically a spokesperson for Hamas, just egregious. And so, of course, for anti-Israel sentiment in the world, but also for anti-American sentiment, I shouldn't we couldn't cry too much. I know the conventional wisdom that that somehow this attack on Doha opened up Netanyahu to pressure from Trump.

I think it's more likely, given the outcome, that the Qataris were freaked out and realized that that Gaza could not be contained in Gaza anymore. And President Trump said to them, you don't like this? You get your guys in Gaza to stop shooting and let the hostages go. That seems to me a likelier scenario.

because the 20 points are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. There are very few Israeli concessions in there. There's only one timetable in the whole 20 minutes, and that's 72 hours to give back the hostages. Does that sound like Bibi was pressured into doing that? No, it's not like the Tahries were pressured to do that. So it's just likelier, not having any insight information.

You have no insight information? Yeah, a little bit. You can't find my... I can't find my... Do you watch curbing enthusiasm? Do I watch my... You know, he goes, you have no interest, sir? My nephew, John Raditsky, plays the young.

Oh, that's right. Larry David out of that. That's right. That's right. Can I say one more? I want you to go over to the... Yes, of course, please. The more interesting person this discussion is my son you off. I had to ask you about the liberty. Somebody told me last night that you're an expert on... I am, unfortunately, the world's expert on the liberty.

I'm going to ask you. All right. We're going to go to him for... Wait, I have a question. Go ahead. No, it's okay. No, no, you go first. Go ahead.

Before you lose your training thought. On to the rubric of, you know, tragedy. And I think you intimated it earlier, Norm, is the... the totally unprecedented, certainly since the 1930 outbreak of anti-Semitism throughout the world, the profound loneliness we have experiences the Jewish people, both in Israel and abroad, that we have been accused of the worst crimes that a human being can commit to another crime, which is a typical, by the way, typical of anti-Semitism, the rebirth of classic anti-Semitic tropes. Jews kill children, Jews kill innocent women.

Anti-Semites are no longer ashamed to be anti-Semites. They're not hiding. They're out in the open, so our old tools of fighting anti-Semitism of exposing and shaming and re-educating them don't work anymore because they're out there and very proudly anti-Semitic. And yes, we're going to have to start rebuilding. Whether we can stick this journey back in the bottle again, I don't know. The world is in certain ways rewarded the form that our great-grandparents knew. Yeah, the world hates Jews.

Regression to the mean. Yes. And that, we fought it through hundreds of years by strengthening ourselves, you know. But I want to say this, that we look around you, Periel, people I meet traveling across the United States who stood with Israel throughout this period. They didn't have to agree with everything the Netanyahu government did, everything the IDF did. But they didn't deserve us. And there were plenty of people we know.

I lost some friends who deserted us. It wasn't easy. And I think we have to look at these people who stood with Israel throughout this period and say, from our hearts, right? To Daraba, thank you, thank you, for being courageous. You know, you know what? I was thinking about that. Very well said. And I just, like, I just did what I felt compelled to do. And it's been interesting that I've actually become a small-time player in this debate

because there's so many cowards, actually. But they made, I felt they made my life easier by resetting the debate to be over the existence. of Israel at 1948, as opposed to what it always was previously, the two-state solution. Because if the debate was about the two-state solution, then many of the things that people criticized about Israel could become a harder issue in the context of whether what Israel was doing was good or bad for the two-state solution. So I would have to pause at many things, including settlements and all kinds of stuff. But if the issue is about whether Israel should exist or not and whether it should be eradicated and then the you and the you know rescinded the

UN creation and partition nothing else all this other stuff doesn't matter to that issue yeah Israel did this is so what meaning that not that they should do those things but you can't get from your claims and your complaints about Israel to the notion that a country is going to be rescinded from the map because that's never happened before and it and it's no precedent for that so I found it easier to say, Israel did this, yeah, you know, you're probably right. I don't think they should have done that. And now what? What does that have to do with anything, right?

So they, by overreaching so much, to me personally, I felt they had me much less up against the wall than they might have had. They wanted to focus on, look at what they're doing. How do you expect to have a two-state solution after you do this? How can you expect them? You know, like, how, you look at it. Look what the settlers are doing on the West Bank. You think you're, you know, that way, the discussion was no longer about what we do, but what we are.

Yes. And once that discussion is about what we are, there's no debate. I actually think that for me, the opposite was true, because as, you know, we did a lot of volunteer work with the Kibout team and defensive gear sending to the soldiers. And people kept saying, you know, oh, thank you. And I said quite the opposite. it. Like, I think that we, it's like the bare minimum that American Jews can be doing. Like, it's nothing compared to what the people who are living in Israel have to face on a daily basis. I think that's true of all diaspora Jews, that we wouldn't exist if Israel wasn't strong.

it seems like for the first time maybe since the Holocaust American Jews after October 7th realized that we need Israel as much as Israel needs America that was something that I saw really up close

from people all over the states and it was really kind of incredible I don't know if she's right you think she's right there's a lot of people feel the opposite No, I think she's right, but that is not in any case to diminish the contribution of American Jews and Jasper Jews. Now, the American Jewish community contributed just through Federation, something about $1.5 billion. Wow. Israel bonds, something close to $5 billion. Incredible.

Just an outpouring of support. And I don't think that's to be the person who wore the yellow ribbon on their lapel walking down the street. Yeah. A person who walked unhurriedly to Shul on Shabbat. the person who wore a Kipa, who, you know, wore a star of David. That's an act today. It sounds horrible to say there's an act of heroism. Absolutely. All right? It's an act of heroism.

And just we have to acknowledge it. The people who showed up every single Sunday in Central Park for the hostages. Yeah. I mean, it was these little acts, but it was also big acts. To be perfectly honest, you know that my heart is with you on this stuff. But just as the navigator of the. podcast. I don't like to get into cheerleading stuff about, you know, the Jewish people and stuff like that because it's just not, it's just, but don't, so I'm going to get off this.

Okay, go ahead. But don't think, of course, you know, you know how I feel about this stuff. So, Yoav, so you were an idea of soldier. You were shot in Gaza. You're going to tell us about that. But I want to start with this. We hear stories, and I fear that many of them are true of bad behavior by the IDF, I think it's a fact of human nature enormant that over time your behavior accretes and gets worse and worse and you get comfortable with the worst behavior. This is not bad, any group, nurses in the hospital. The first day of the job, they hop to it when they hear a patient in pain.

After 10 years, they're so used to it, they don't hop to it. police forces, everything happens gradually. So I just imagine that two years at war is very dangerous to the mission of a fighting a war as morally as one would like to fight it. Things break down. The IDF, there's stories all the time. Some of them can't possibly be true.

Some of them might be true. You must take this all very personally. You know, in your own heart, what you imagine is true, what isn't true. So just speak to all this, to people who don't know, including me sometimes, who don't know what to believe, what could be true, what can't be true, what might be true in a small portion,

but shouldn't be used to describe the overall. Such a... It's the most important question, right? Such an important question and probably one of the most complicated topics, okay? So I'm going to give this a shot. move forward okay um you know that you mentioned the complexities of war that that israel is facing right now in gaza and the tunnels and we're doing all this with Lebanon and Iran in the background and we're doing this with our hands kind of tied behind our back because we had 200 plus hostages

in these tunnels and we're committed of these uh awful crimes right genocide and israel which you know any means has probably one of the most sophisticated multifaceted advanced armies in the world right and you're fighting the small terrorist organization and just think that if we wanted to do we wanted to you know finish hamas and you see the devastations of the war in Gaza without risking the lives of our own troops, our old soldiers, it'd probably be possible. I cannot emphasize this enough. We go through incredible measures and means to conduct war in the most humane way possible, which is sometimes impossible. You know that probably some of the most complicated missions that my unit had were missions that we screwed up,

we had mistakes. We accidentally did not capture the terrorists we wanted to capture. We got someone else by accident. Not to say that he had nothing to do with terror, just this was what happened, because they were in proximity or next to that. And the measures that we go and the danger that we put our soldiers in just to save Palestinian lives is unheard of. The mission that I was shot on that I shot at, you mentioned Noam. There's different ways to conduct different missions. When you're going into the center of a very highly populated area, you typically go either with a helicopter or a bulletproof hummers.

We were going after one of the top terrorists, Hamas terrorists in Hevron, the head of Hamas and Hevron, who was in charge of multiple terrorist attacks with dozens of Israelis killed in Bersheva at the time. And because he was living in a house with women and children, we snuck up into the house, three kilometers, basically crawling up of the house, surrounding the house. We were able to isolate the terrorists. I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to have you picture this, okay? The terrorist starts firing at us. When we're in the house, I am in the room with 11 of his children and two wives.

He's shooting from the other room. Most of my team, what you typically do in such as situations, you try to take most of the team out of the house, try to isolate the terrorists inside the house, and then what you do is you create a pressure pop where you start firing the walls, eventually doesn't come out, you start chilling the walls, and this goes, This goes on. Because there were civilians and children in the house, we didn't do that. And I was tasked to go out and see if I can get the terrorists inside a house after a massive gun battle of two hours where he's hiding. We can't see him. Grenades. The house is falling apart. You can't see anything, regardless of night vision and you name it. And he, when I was right outside the room with his children, he just shot at me and my friends.

automatic just went, just shattered everywhere. Bullets flying everywhere. And I had to go back to this room and I remove my clothes and see where I'm bleeding from and take care of myself, take care of my friend. And we were okay. We were able to control the bleeding. And we asked our commanding officer was already outside the house to not bring more forces inside because we were scared that they were going to get. What kind of, what kind of psychological panic do you experience when you've been shot? Ooh, it's a complicated question. The immediate feeling is,

I was hurt. I was like emotionally hurt. Like I was, I was insulted. Like here you are. You're going for like this crazy training and you've done numerous missions and you're 20 years old so you have nothing to lose

and you think that you're Superman. Invincible, 100%. And I would, I, I, I couldn't believe how easy it was and how vulnerable I was physically. How this bullet can do this. You can remember what you were. Yeah, I remember that. You weren't experiencing great pain.

No, not at the time. And then it's just you go into a survival mechanism. Fear kicks in after a bit as well, definitely, because we still have the terrorists in the room, and I have to have the kids are screaming here, and I have to make sure that they're quiet because he's in the other room. And only a half an hour later, they noticed from outside that he moved to a different room.

So I came out of the house with the two, three teammates of mine. We were able to take the women, the children outside the house, and then we were able to capture the terrorist and not kill him. And not kill him. Not kill him.

This is a major differentiator. I'd say that any other army in the world would probably knock the house down. That terrorist came out with his hands out and he surrendered. when I was in the hospital they told me that they captured him and he's going to come lie down right next to me and that was a scary moment

but they ended up taking him to a different hospital but this is this is the Israeli idea why not kill him just excuse my naive question because if someone comes out with this hands up we don't we don't kill I don't kill so we're talking about

and Gaza the the type of fighting that the soldiers in the IDF went through in Gaza, I can't compare it to anything I went through. This is a place that not only is bombarded with terrorists in any, any, from any, any, any building, every, every doll can be booby-trapped. And, and yes, and they are getting, and you see this, they're getting killed on a daily basis. And yet, we go through immense measures to protect lives and not shoot.

and this has happened to me many times in the past and it's happened to these soldiers right now and I have and you know the stories about how the IDF sends leaflets and sends text messages SMSes to inhabitants of of these areas

where we're about to bomb who else does that so someone's going to listen to you and who's not disposed to believe you is going to roll their eyes and say come on I've read the accounts. What's this group of the IDF soldiers who... Breaking the silence.

Breaking the silence. And I see things in the papers. And I've even heard some soldiers say the opposite. What's your answer to those people? How do you convince them that they should believe that you are the actual gist, the representative of what the IDF is all about? And these people are the outliers. First of all, you can read the book of conduct for Tsal.

for the IDF and the morals and what we need to go to in training what it means to carry a gun we have to carry a little attempt like a leaflet in our packets to remind us how to use that gun listen in any situation and again it's it's hard to judge right when you're getting shot out shot at from every corner and every as i said every doll every cupboard can be booby-strapped But, yes, there are different rules for engagement, and they're natural. You know, Dad, you know the statistics better than I do, but I think that the number of civilian casualties to incumbent, to combats in this war are imprisoned. They've never been in the history of warfare that you give the statistic. You have to unpack that.

Okay, so the Palestinians will say, the Palestinian health ministry, whatever that is, that great oxymoron, No one can never tell you who they are. Claimed there are 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in this war. And by the way, every Palestinian death, certainly a civilian death is a tragedy. Let's say this. Play that up front.

But the IDF is killed between 24 and 25,000. Terrorists. We know this. We actually take their pictures to make sure that they're not hostage. Then several hundred to several thousand Palestinians have been killed by Palestinian rockets that fall short.

About 20% of their rockets it's all short. And out of a population of 2.2 million over the course of two years, roughly 4 to 5,000 people die of natural causes. So the Gaza Health Ministry takes all those numbers and put them together. But if you deduct the people who die of natural cause, deduct the people killed by Palestinian rockets, and deduct the terrorists killed by Israel, you're going to get, as Yov said, close to a one-to-one combatant to civilian fatality rate. When the United States fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, at best, it was nine civilians to every combatant killed. And at most it was 26 to 1. So if this is so empirically provable, why are not places

like the New York Times and similar outlets stating this clearly as fact? Why are there so many stories that doubt this? That's a deep question. And the answer is very simple. We are the Jewish state. We're the Jewish state. Roman Bergman works at the New York Times. You have. Well, there's always, you know, throughout history, if you pray in the Jewish tradition three times a day, you do a prayer called the Amidah. And one of the prayers in the Amidah is God protect us from the Jews who are coming against us. And Malasinim, by the way, it's actually in the Amidah. So this is not new. And if you look, I'm dealing with the press.

You look behind 90% of the headlines, and you're going to see classic anti-Semitic tropes. On the Middle Ages, like, for example, they'll never say the 67,000 without adding, well, Most of them are children, women and children. Why? Because Jews kill children. We kill journalists. Why we kill journalists? Not because it's going to give us better press, obviously. We kill journalists because we enjoy killing journalists. And what you realize with dealing with many mainstream media outlets,

as well as, of course, the BBC, the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, or ABC, Australian, is that the underlying assumption is that the Jews or Israel are fundamentally evil. we wake up in the morning and we think of nothing better to do than to kill innocent children and women. Otherwise, it makes no sense because we're not doing this to enhance our security or certainly to enhance our image in the world. We do it because we enjoy doing it. That's classic anti-Semitism. That's what it's about. And our ability to counter that, it's not zero, but it's far from 100 also. I have to tell you, you know, as someone who knows Israelis so intimately, has known people in the IDF, no, you know, even I have been psychologically knocked off my moorings towards thinking a worse reality is true than what you're describing. And assuming that what you're describing is true and, you know, imagining that even I had trouble staying on, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and assuming that.

that place, I can't even imagine what hope there would be for an average run-of-the-mill person not to believe that Israel is committing a horrible... Especially when you're being inundated, inundated by Instagram, telegram images of starving Palestinian children of war crimes. And we don't always do ourselves as a service. There are Israeli soldiers who acted totally irresponsibly by putting up photos on Facebook and such. Yes, the Israeli army is made of human beings.

Human beings, some of them can be criminals. Some of them can be insane. They're just criminal, human beings. They did things that were very harmful to Israel, but it's not representative of the entire army. But I was listening to, you know, we're not far from NYU here, and I was listening to a valivictorian,

give out an address last year from the graduating class, and he talked about the need to come down on Israel and condemn Israel. But he says, he actually said, we are looking at all day long, we're looking at internet pictures of Palestinian suffering. And that has had a huge impact on the course of this war. So, you know, you say we're all human beings.

That was actually my next question was going to be about that. So, and without being, you know, what, what adjectives did you give? Without being a sadist or without being a criminal, just being a human being, your psychology is fragile. And like, I've seen enough war movies about Vietnam and things like that to understand. and what I referred to earlier, just with my own observations, that it requires or will require a kind of constant indoctrination and a system to do that to keep your soldiers in the proper psychological place

as they are going to war for two years and as they are filled with rage, as their friends are killed, as they see, I mean, we saw Hamas releases a guy digging his own grave, a hostage, right? Yeah. In any normal war movie, you see some people just mowing people down and killing people, not because they're sadists or monster, because they're just human, and this is a natural human reaction. What institutional measures does the IDF take to keep their soldiers where they need to be despite all the magnetic force? And I would just put, I want to sharpen your point a little bit, because the best of my knowledge, there was never any Americans killed by

Vietnamese, certainly not on American soil, nor Americans killed by Iraqis or Afghanis. Right. Israel is a small country. Find me in the Israeli who didn't know somebody killed or captured on October 7th. Yeah. Find me somebody. Yeah, this is why I have these worries. So it's intensely personal. Yeah. And it's not abstract. So the dehumanizing factor, which as you're saying, I think you're making a very valid point, especially where you're in combat for six, seven hundred days, 24-7, is real, but it's compounded by the fact that the Palestinian society that created Hamas, and Hamas didn't fall out of Mars,

was created by the assembly, is perceived by the vast majority of Israelis as a society that wants our destruction, and not just wants it, but acts on it. And that's a big difference. Yeah, huge part. I'd say that when we went to visit Kfarazha, one of the villages, of course,

that were massacred during October 7th. There were two things that are probably the hardest thing for me to deal with seeing the destruction in Qarazam. The first was learning that these are villages that were very, probably on the left side of the political spectrum, believed in peace, employed about 20,000 different Palestinians who would come in from Gaza on a daily basis.

what happened was that they found maps on the terrorists on their vests mapping out every house how many men live in the house what is the daily routine do they have a dog do they not have a dog what hours did they go to shul to synagogue and these were benebite as we say they were welcome into these people's houses they ate with them and as they did this for about 20 years we're collecting data. And that to me was just such a blow, right?

Because as you said, we're dealing not with just Hamas, which is easy to paint, oh, they're them, right? It's a terrorist organization. It's them. But right, this is people who are part of this community who came and ate and worked and lived with this community. The second point was that you had about 7,000 different, you know, civilians

who walked in to these villages with their flip-flops and walked over dead bodies of women and children and just looted. Imagine like heartless walking over and just picking up a bicycle and picking up shoes and picking up a soccer ball and just walking back into Gaza. And that to me because it's in a way if you're saying, oh, it's not it's them. It's a terrorist organization. It's easy to picture a terrorist, right? You picture the green band and the guns and the, you don't see the, the ninja mask, the ski mask, right? Well, sorry, we saw when, was the Shawnee Luke,

was on the back of that pickup truck? We saw all the people come out and, like, this is upset. By the way, we also heard from return hostages that they were held in the homes of a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, a journalist. So you have to keep all this in mind. Keep all this in mind. Plus, okay, and again, we're going to,

keep on being compared to genocide, and we think about genocide, this is the worst, you know, genocide that was done to the Jewish people since the Holocaust. You didn't see, and we had 200 and close 250 hostages in Gaza, you didn't have one, Saddik Bastum, as we say. What's that mean? With Abraham. How do you, how do you? Abraham was negotiating with God. Let me find one righteous man in Sodom and Gomorra. There was no Palestinian. I think it was God. who stood up and saved Jews. Not one.

Not one. And they were families or anything. You had this in Nazi Germany. Not one. And that to me is crazy. And that to me... I don't know if that's true. There are some Palestinians

who have been speaking out against Hamas. But to be fair... I'm talking about saving... Oh, inside. Inside. Saving Jews. Some of the hostages who escaped were captured by civilians

and brought back, beaten and brought back. And that to me is something that it just points to a such a deep doctrine. Well, they've been raised. They've been raised to... They've been raised like Hitler youth. Except that in Germany there was a huge number of people who

were adults or teenagers when the Nazi thing started. But in Gaza, basically 100% of the population has grown up and was born into this Nazi like. And I say Nazi, like if anybody complains about that, even Omar Bartov compared it to the Nazis.

So it's a huge job. It's a huge challenge. And I think the thing that we need to do in this society and every commander in the IDF is to paint that picture of what we're not, really, and put that in front of us and say, this is what we're not. And in order for us to not be this, we have to remain and sustain on our moral high ground and to continue practice, at least striving for that oliguan. right and do this time and again because i agree with you it is scary and it is and you've seen that it is a slippery slope in some occasions and as you said that we're not people are not perfect and people make mistakes and the fact the matter is as you as you hinted in new york times we're going to be judged by different standards different moral standards regardless

and that is one of the biggest challenges for the israeli population because They said, listen, it doesn't matter what we're going to do. It doesn't matter if we're going to, you know, send over those leaflets and if we're going to, you know, do whatever we can. We're going to be condemned whether we, you know, whatever we do. So listeners are very good at emailing me that somebody you asked him. He didn't answer. So just, just are there methods that the IDF has,

counseling, you know, periodic meetings where they try to reinforce your psychology so that you don't fall prey. to all these horrible things that you're describing. Psychology is a huge topic, right? It's the psychology of war, and you see a lot of, like, PTSD. I mean, it's a very, it's a big topic. I could tell you that when I was wounded a long time ago, the IDF was not well equipped in the psychological kind of support

that the soldiers went to today. Today, in Gaza, you had psychologists accompany the forces inside Gaza and help them deal with the hardships of war as they were fighting. I'm happy I approached you to answer. Which is crazy. So, yes, so they're always, they're not only waiting for the soldiers

to come back and go into society. As they are fighting, they are dealing with the psychological impacts of the war and making sure that they stay not only, you know, I guess whole in the best possible way, but also how to, to make sure that on the moral level.

This is what the American public and the world public needs to hear. They need to see Israeli a human face to Israelis explaining what it's like, not saying we're perfect. Instead, you see the Israelis. Israel's the most moral army in the world. And the people say, oh, really, this is not convincing anybody. I have such resentment sometimes when I see the ham-handed strategy that the Israeli government has

in order to convince people who don't know any better that they're above it all and then anybody who questions it's because you're an anti-Semite. This is such a backfire strategy and they have to dig themselves out of it somehow and I'm telling you just seeing

somebody like, Yoavs speak and you take the measure of him you see how he's choosing his word. You see it in his face that this is not a murderer. Like, you know, that's what they need to see and not arrogant and not, you know, a con man.

So anyway, I'm very happy that you came in and that you're saying this stuff. Anything you want to add to all this? I love him. He's my hero. You should be very proud of him. What was it like for you when you heard that he was shot? Well, you know, he was already. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.

Because you knew he was okay. Because for two years before that, he was going. I was in the paratroopers. And we did an operation maybe, you know, six months. he did an operation every night every night and i would wander around the neighborhood all night and never slept never slept and at four o'clock in the morning he called and said you know ob i've been shot i'm okay i'm an ambulance going to to mount scopus meet me up at the atadasa and i walked in and i saw his uniform on the floor all bloody and full of holes

and the doctor told me where he had been shot in the groin but he has three kids he's got three kids a little lower than the groin. And we said he has balls of steel. The doctor said they're going to leave it in there because it's like piercing. And so he's, you know, carting these things around. And why does the viewer show? This may be TMI for this broadcast,

but we are on the comedy seller. And the minute I looked at the x-rays and saw he was going to be okay, that was the first night I had slept in years, really? And it was amazing. We have to think about what does really parents go through. and I know parents who are parents

whose kids have been in Gaza and I know exactly what they go through they do not sleep and they won't get enough acknowledgments those parents really well you know

one of the things I argued with Norman Finkelstein about two years ago was that you know you're all about the psychology of the Palestinians you're creating more terrorists

and you know you go I said nobody ever talks about the Israeli psychology Israel has a psychology too in and out of bomb shelters being killed

what you're describing about the parents Ask my kids if they endured in the last couple years. Nobody cares about the Israeli psychology. It's not relevant to any consideration of the issue. And the Palestinian psychology is extremely important. And what did Finkelstein say? Well, you were here, I don't know, you know.

Nothing because he's morally bankrupt. That's why. You said not to let you forget that you wanted to ask a question about. The liberty. Really? So, so. Really? This is not the insurance company.

No, not the insurance company. So going around Twitter, which I hope you're not on Twitter, but going around Twitter, you know, you see this list of, and it gets longer and longer of all the things that the anti-Semites, the bill of it, the bill of particulars against Israel, the Livon Affair, the liberty, the this,

that 9-11, you know, and it has the effect, you know, when you hear a guy has 30 accusations of sexual harassment, you just believe some of them must be true. Sure. So it can't all be wrong. They can't all be wrong, right? and this is a problem.

But anyway, the liberty is one of them, and I always assume that it wasn't true. I still hope it's not true. I'm going to find out what you say, but I was gobsmacked by a letter that Dennis Prager, very strong Zionist, wrote to Candace Owens where he said the following.

Dennis Prager, terrible mistakes happen in every war. A few months ago, Israeli troops mistakenly killed three of their own hostages in Gaza, for example. And for a long time, I thought the Israeli attack on the liberty may have been one. But I am persuaded that the strike on the liberty was probably deliberate. For reasons I do not understand and wish I did, both the American and Israeli governments covered it up at the time and have never since explained why it happened. If everything said about the attack on the liberty is true, the attack seems to me to have been criminal.

That is shocking from Dennis Praker, my friend, Daniels Praker, who was shocking. It's not true. Not true. I would, and I say this with all full modesty, certainly on the Israeli side, I'm the world's expert on the liberty because I had to write about it several times in my book about the Six Day War.

And everything that relates to the liberty has now been declassified, both on the American side, on the Israeli side. And I could spend an hour and a half talking about the incident, how it happened, because a tragedy like the liberty doesn't happen because of one mistakes, it happens because of a series of mistakes on both sides.

And he's in... Should we just tell people... Like what the liberty is, I just realized. It was a spy ship that didn't belong to the U.S. Navy, actually belonged to the NSA, the National Security Agency, that was sent to the battle area of the Six-Day War on the 8th of June, two days after the war started. I'm sorry, three days after the war started, starting June 5th, and was sent from Rota Spain to the Middle East to spy. On board were no Hebrew translators, only Russian-Arabic translators. America had spy planes in the air that did have Hebrew translator. It had a submarine in the area with Hebrew translators so much for allies, not spying on allies.

They were spying us from all different ways. But the liberty was designed to spy not on Israel, but to spy on the Russians and the Arabs and the Egyptians. And it rived off the Gaza coast on the morning of June 8th and was struck first by Israeli planes and then by Israeli torpedo boats. And let me get this number right. I think 71 American sailors were killed, about 181 wounded, and the accusation has come up. It comes up every couple of years, like clockwork, that Israel did this to liberty. No one can ever find out the reason why.

So we have all these different generations of people saying why the liberty was attacked. Liberty was attacked because the liberty was on a frequency used by the Demona nuclear reactor, and Israel was planning to use a bomb. or Israeli soldiers were massacring Egyptian prisoners of war and somehow this got onto the radio and Israel wanted to cover it up or the United States learned of Israeli plans to attack the Goan Heights the Syrian go on heights the next day and wanted to foil it and that's why the Liberty was there's all these different reasons

none of them are backed by any evidence whatsoever what the evidence of the Liberty overwhelmingly shows was that there was a whole concatenation of mistakes made on both sides It's not the least of which, that the United States sent a armed spy ship into somebody else's war zone without telling anybody. They didn't even tell the U.S. Embassy. There was a naval attache in Tel Avivans. I didn't even tell him. Nobody knew.

There's a fog of war. There were reports that an Egyptian battleship was off the coast, shelling Israeli soldiers. There was an ammunition dump that went off. You can't make this stuff up. Went off the, went off on the shores of then. By the way, by the time the liberty arrived, Israel had already defeated Egypt. by the way. It arrived late. An ammunition dump went off the shore.

Paratroopers looked out in the sea. They saw it an Egyptian what they thought was an Egyptian boat. And he said, this ship was shot is shooting at us. And so the planes were sent. The planes were actually coming back from a bombing rate along the Suez Canal. They didn't have even the right bombs to attack a ship. And attack the ship. They did several sorties over the ship,

overflights, did not see a flag. And they did not see markings on the ship from the first time they flew over. And they proceeded. to shoot up the ship. At the same time, at the naval headquarters of the IDF in Stella Morris and Haifa, you've seen it in the movies they have a, like a board where they're moving ships with little sticks to show where the ships were. They actually knew that the Liberty was there in the morning. But according to the protocol of the U.S. Navy, the Israeli Navy, at 11 o'clock

when a new shift in, they clear the board because it's no longer accurate. And the next shift came in, didn't know the liberty was there. So it didn't appear on the board anymore. No one of the of the Israeli Navy knew where the liberty was. And there was very breakdown of communication to the Israeli Air Force and Israeli Navy because the Israeli pilots began to see finally, finally, that there were markings on the side of the liberty that were American art markings. They weren't Arab markings. And they called out the attack, but the Navy didn't know that, in which case then the torpedoes. Most of the casualties on the liberty were caused by torpedo boats. Interestingly enough, a disproportionate number of people on the liberty were American Jews,

because this was an intelligence ship during the Vietnam War and if you were a nice Jewish boy going into the Navy you were probably going to go into intelligence somewhere no kidding and before the Navy boats, the torpedo boats got close enough to see a flag and once they saw the flag everybody called off once the Air Force saw the markings on the ship

once the Navy saw the flag they called it off if the US if the Israeli army which had just defeated four lavishly armed Arab armies in six days, if it wanted to sink an American boat that had two 50-calorie machine guns on it, they could have done it. They could have done it very, very quickly. They didn't. And they called it off and offered to help. I personally have seen, in my military career, have seen more Israelis killed by Israelis than Arabs, including an incident outside of Beirut in 1982, where my column was struck by Israeli aircraft

and killed 25 paratroopers, right in front of me. And I once asked a paratrooper, a pilot, you know, how can you not see the panels on the top? We had these bright-armed panels on our vehicles. He says, well, you're traveling at six, seven hundred miles an hour. You can't see an orange panel. And I asked about the flag on the Liberty. He says, imagine you're going on a train

at six, 700 miles an hour, and out in the countryside, a little flag passes you. Do your eyes register the flag? And the answer, of course, is no. That's where you're not looking for it at all. But again, I want to go back to something I said earlier. I know if this is going to be in the same podcast, is that the accusation that Israel deliberately attack the liberty

comes from a place where of people who believe that Jews are inherently evil, that we struck this American craft because we enjoyed doing it for the sheer joy of doing it. Because why else? There's no other reason for it. that anybody can prove or document it any way, remotely in any way. Was it a horrible tragedy? Horrible tragedy.

Does it happen in war? Absolutely. By the way, this has really been a good podcast. I didn't expect it to be exactly this conversation, but this is one that would be very memorable for me. This notion, and I've made this argument to some friends recently, it's something like 20% of Israeli casual deaths are friendly fire. Absolutely.

And if you integrate that fact into your worldview, many things that you couldn't conceive of become much easier to understand. How did Israel kill so many civilians, let's say? Well, if you can understand that war is so challenging that 20% of the people they kill are their own people, then obviously that's your baseline for understanding what would be possible in terms of not killing. other innocent people. I use that all the time. I say, we killed 20% of our own people. Except our people are wearing confusion. War is fog.

But the Israelis are wearing uniforms. They know the protocols. They're on this side of the line. They're not acting suspiciously. So if you take all those things and add into it, yes, of course. Many innocent people are going to get killed in war, even with every good intention. We presume the Israelis have pure intentions about killing their own people. Tens of thousands of Frenchmen were killed on death.

D-Day by the American Air Force. Tens of thousands. This is a very important fact. And again, it's another one of these facts, which Israel could easily explain to people because actually, whenever I tell to people, you see them get, ah, yeah, I hadn't thought of that, right? It's a very easy fact to digest, but the argument is not often made. Anyway, unless there's anything else you want to add to this, I feel like I've kept

your, I'm guessing, probably longer than was planned on. Go off, over to you, son. super insightful thank you for having us of course very deep conversation um yeah a lot to think about anything else you want to say about the you feel you feel that israel has won are you happy with this outcome someone i think that as a first of all i think we owe a great deal of gratitude to this administration to this president um i really do i don't think we would have come to the point where we are right now without without uh president trump even His enemies are conceding this, yes.

It really is, as an Israeli that was conflicted, right? I'd go to the demonstrations at the beginning, and the Israeli demonstrations were difficult, right? Because they were all actually against our own government. And for me, that was a challenge, right? Because I, in a sense, we weren't looking at the other side. We're kind of removing the responsibility of this terrorist organization, of these people who conflicted, who had this, who had this. crazy event in our lives, have changed our lives in the last couple of years. And that was difficult

for me. I think the fact that we arrived at this point is something that I don't date for granted. It is not over. We still have our dead hostages there. And there's much more work to do. I think that yet on a net basis, net positive, it's amazing. I almost did not believe we'll get the live hostages back. So I think it's a huge, it's a monumental. victory, and there's still a lot of work to be done. And I think the West owes us a great debt of gratitude. Well, you know the pattern. They opposed the action, and then 20 years later,

say, oh, thank God Israel did that, right? You know, true about the Iraqi nuclear actor. They owe us a tremendous amount of debtitude. Did we fight this war perfectly? We did not. Did we make mistakes? We may make. Find me a war where mistakes are not made.

Of course. The entire Italian campaign of war. War, too. It was a huge mistake. Okay. A civil war. It was a huge mistake. But we stood up and did what really no other Western

country was ready to do. I probably said this on this podcast before, that close to 400,000 Israeli soldiers picked up guns and went out to fight for their country. Knowing full well what the price could be. Left their homes, left their families, left their job for hundreds of days.

400,000 Israelis is roughly the equivalent of 21, 22 million Americans. That's five or six million Americans more than fought in all of World War II. Show me a country in the world where this happens. Anybody willing to pick up a gun and fight for Belgium today? Spain, Italy? No. We showed the West what it means to stand up and fight for our civilization.

That should not be forgotten. All right. Yov-Aaron. Thank you very much. Good night, everybody. Good night. Thank you for having us. Wow.

thank you wow it's moving thank you very very people need to hear that and I haven't really heard anybody speak like that very good no great guys thank you thank you thank you it takes the wind out of me and it's hard to get the wind out of me really