The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren - Gaza, Iran, Anti-Semitism, Obama and more.

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Historian, Member of Knesset, Ambassador, and Author Michael Oren joins us for an interview analyzing the current conflict. Takeaways Israel faces challenges in responding to Iran's strike while avoiding triggering a regional conflagration and alienating allies. The concern of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and the potential risks involved. The changing policies of the United States towards Israel and the impact on the Israeli response. The psychological impact of the conflict and the rise of anti-Semitism. The conversation highlights the cultural struggle surrounding the terms 'Israel' and 'Palestine', which encompass a wide range of meanings and ideologies. The Obama administration's worldview and misrepresentation of historical events, particularly regarding the Arab-Israeli negotiations, are discussed. The conversation explores the challenges and complexities of the settlements in Israel and the need for creative thinking to achieve peace. Michael Oren emphasizes the importance of recognizing the rights and identities of both Israelis and Palestinians in order to move towards a resolution. Sound Bites "Courage, a little luck would help at this point." "If they are humiliated or shown to be impotent, that might lead them to the conclusion that we can't put up with this anymore." "If Iran were to break out and have a nuclear weapon, then we might as well just pack our bags and move somewhere." "This war has given us clarity on a lot of issues. One of them is on the nature and extent of antisemitism." "When people say Palestine in America today, they mean many things. They mean socialism. They mean LGBT rights, strangely, because there are no LGBT rights in Palestine, or women's rights. They mean anti-colonialism. They mean anti-nationalism." "His worldview was a democratic worldview, which included respect for international institutions, a strong feeling about Palestinians, a reticence to use military force, and unfamiliarity with military force."

Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world-famous comedy seller. I'm here with Noam Dwarman, the host of Live from the Table and the owner of the world-famous comedy seller, and we have a very special guest today. I'm reading because Dan is not with us, obviously. Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., historian and New York Times bestselling author. Thank you for joining us. Oh, that's that's that's the whole introduction. I can go longer. No, it's OK.

First of all, Mr. Ambassador, I want to tell you, the Dwarman family, that's my family, must have bought 15 copies of your book, six days of war. And, uh, before my father died, he was so taken with this book. He, he, he called it cinematic. He was, he just loved this book so much, not just because of the scholarship, but because he felt like he was watching a movie, like what's going on in Cairo, what's going on in Tel Av movie like what's going on in Cairo what's going on in Tel Aviv what's going on in Washington so um I I'm thrilled to meet you just for that book alone wow and then you promised that book I wrote 20 years ago that's great Norm that's good one of you and then of course that's great anyway I'm delighted to be with both of you and that with the comedy seller I think my greatest claim to fame is I'm the uncle of comedian John Rudnitsky. Oh, you got cut off.

The uncle of who? Comedian John Rudnitsky. Ah, ah. Oh, I know, John. That's my true claim to fame. I don't know. I'm John's uncle. No, I think your true claim to fame

is that you were David Rothkopf's roommate, no? The crazy thing is we were both on Morning Joe two days ago, no? The crazy thing is we were both on Morning Joe two days ago and arguing different sides of the Middle East issue and being interviewed by the daughter of our professor, Mika Brzezinski.

Oh. Can't make that one. So, all right, let's get to, we have a little bit of a bad connection, but we're going to plow through it. So I want to quote the great Michael Oren before I start. The Middle East remains a flashpoint of multilateral confrontation, a source of seemingly intractable controversies, a powder keg that the slightest spark could ignite, demanding of its leaders almost constant displays of courage and caution.

And further, the nature of international crises in general and the manner in which human interaction can produce totally unforeseen, unintended results. And both those quotes rang loud to me as Israel seems to be contemplating what it should do vis-a-vis its answer to Iran's strike. So what's your opinion on all that? Caution, courage, a little luck would help at this point. No, Israel probably has to respond in some way. You can't have a sovereign state in the Middle East be attacked by 350 projectiles, and some of them were incredibly big, 500 kilograms of TNT. If one of those missiles gotten through, it could have killed thousands of people. You can't have that without having some type of response, because that's the way you retain your deterrence power against all

matter of enemies, not just the Iranians. The question is how you respond. Do you respond in kind? Do we fire 350 rockets off of Tehran? I doubt it. regional conflagration. You have to avoid alienating our newfound Sunni Arab allies. You certainly have to avoid aggravating the United States during a presidential election year and perhaps dragging the United States and other Western allies into that regional conflagration. You have to avoid strengthening the Iranian regime. You want to weaken the Iranian regime. So all these things, you've got to thread any number of needles here in order to make an effective, powerful response to the Iranian attack last Saturday night. Now, that's the bad news. The good news is that Iran happens to be a target-rich environment. There are many possible targets. The Persian Gulf is lined up with oil facilities, for example. There are numerous vulnerabilities in Iran. There are cyber

vulnerabilities. There are economic vulnerabilities. There are certainly social and political vulnerabilities. The regime is sitting on top of a volcano as opposition to its corruption keeps growing every year. You see these protests. So there are many ways that Israel can respond, certainly not in kind, but can actually have that type of deterrent power and send an unequivocal message to other enemies we have in the region. So let me ask you this as a kind of a layman here to the issue. I read articles that imply that Iran is at the point where if they chose to, they could assemble an atom bomb. That's one of the things I read quite often. And it seems to me that if they are humiliated or shown to be impotent, that that might lead them to the conclusion that, you know, we can't put up with this anymore. Let's just assemble the bomb and that'll be the end of that. They won't strike us after that.

Is that a concern? It is a concern. The Iranians have achieved what's known as threshold capacity, the ability to create an atomic weapon within a matter of weeks, maybe even a matter of days. And not just one bomb, but several bombs. And, you know, that is definitely a concern. But the Iranians have long concluded, and they could always change this calculus, that it is better to have the threshold capacity, the ability to make a bomb than to hold the bomb itself. Because by having the threshold capacity, you get all the advantages of having the bomb without any of the downsides.

So one of the advantages are everybody in the world knows you're a threshold nuclear power, and the Russians make an alliance with you, and the Chinese make an alliance with you, and the BRIC nations invite you in a as an honorary member even though you're the world state world's largest state sponsor of terror it doesn't matter everyone knows you're a nuclear power but if you actually have the bomb itself you may come up against uh the oft-repeated pledge of the abide administration and multiple american administrations across you know the political divide that the united states is committed to preventing iran from having a nuclear weapon the Biden administration and multiple American administrations across the political divide that the United States is committed to preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

And the United States has a strategic ability to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. So if there's a breakout period of one week, you know, America could stop that breakout process in a matter of hours from a height of 50,000 feet. And the Iranians have nothing that can reach that height using strategic bombers that can drop payloads that could eliminate the Iranian nuclear power program really in a matter of hours. So the Iranians may have to think twice before doing that breakout. Do we have? Well, I mean, you say they get all the advantages, but one advantage they don't have now is Israel doesn't worry about their bomb as they contemplate bombing Iran. It's such a high stakes game.

Are they sure that they have perfect information that they could prevent this? Is it worth it to risk that? You know, I'm usually a hawk. For Israel to risk it or for Iran to risk it? Is it worth it for Israel to risk triggering that, all the chain reaction that you're talking about? And then, of course, maybe Hezbollah then, what the hell, fires all their rockets at the same time.

Such a scary, you know, I know you said most of what you want to say, but it's just a very scary chain reaction that could happen. And as though I'm usually a hawk. And for instance, Brett Stevens of The New York Times, who's also usually a hawk, has written that he thinks Israel should hold its fire here until it finds the perfect opportunity. Any last thoughts on that? He's saying until he's found the perfect opportunity. I don't know if the perfect opportunity is ever going to present itself. I don't know if the perfect opportunity is ever going to exist in the world.

But, no, if that's the case, if Iran were to break out and have a nuclear weapon, and that would basically obviate any possibility of an Israeli response, then we might as well just pack our bags and move somewhere because we'll not be able to respond to any provocations. The provocations are coming because we're dealing with the regime that has, as it's very raison d'etre, our destruction. Right.

And we'll work to that goal. And they work different ways. You know, the Iranians claim they invented chess. Don't say that to anybody from India. But, you know, the Iranians play chess on multiple levels. And so while they're assiduously building threshold capacity and can make a bomb in a matter of days, there's also been surrounding us on all sides with very large arsenals of rockets. So maybe 150,000 to 170,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah. There were about 20,000 in the arsenal of Hamas,

maybe several thousand or less, but are left. But you have rockets in the hands of Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, rockets in the hands of the Houthis that can reach us here from Yemen. And so what they can begin to do is shoot at us from all different directions. And they have been shooting us at all different directions. And we won't be able to respond because we'll have an Iranian nuclear weapon to our foreheads. And so slowly, slowly, they can whittle away at our edges, make life here intolerable, and eventually we would disappear. So we can't get caught up in that cycle. We have

to break the cycle. How do you break the cycle? By showing the Iranians that should they try to embark on that type of erosion of our existence, we're going to exact a very, very painful price at an earlier stage. Let's move on to something else. I've been reading. Have you ever read Henry Kissinger's book, Diplomacy? I have. I have it somewhere right behind me yeah it's it's it's so good i know people don't like kissinger but this book is really good and and as i'm i've been rereading the the part about the uh run up to the second world war and there's so many little uh paragraphs there that remind me of uh this current situation so i i actually clipped a few of them. One thing it says here, it's about negotiating without leverage. It says the weaker side has the option of playing for time only as against an adversary that considers negotiations as operating according to their own internal logic, an allusion to which the United States has been especially subject. And this made me think that the United States really pulled the rug out from under Israel vis-a-vis trying to get the hostages back.

Because it seemed to me that the only way that they would get the hostages back is to trade the hostages for their lives. And they took the pressure off their lives. So go ahead. You said totally. So go ahead. Totally. It's very unfortunate. And I understand why it happened. You know, the political damage, you know, Kissinger also said famously or infamously that Israel doesn't have a foreign policy, domestic policies. Well, I got news posthumously from Mr. Hughes that America only has sometimes only has domestic politics as well. And you're in the

throes of a presidential election. And it was sort of neck and neck as of this week with former President Trump. And there are states and they have progressive populations and other populations who may take strong exceptions in these policies toward the Gaza conflict, etc. This is all very much known. But the upshot of it was messages that kept on coming out of Washington that Israel was dehumanizing the Palestinians, bombing the Palestinians indiscriminately,

reacting over the top, purposely starving the Palestinians, and strong intimations that the Biden administration didn't recognize the legitimacy of Israel's current government, distinguishing the government from the people of Israel. All these messages are being heard not just by Israelis, but by Mr. Sinmar in his tunnel in South Gaza. And what he would conclude, I think quite logically, is that all he has to do is hold on. Hold on for another week, two, three weeks at most, create a situation where Israel is going to be killing Palestinians because they're being used as human shields by Hamas. The more Palestinians are dying. And eventually, Mr. Sinwa will conclude that there will be a break

between Israel and the United States. And the United States will impose a ceasefire on Israel and a ceasefire that will be permanent and unconditional. And America began taking steps in that direction with twin resolutions in the Security Council, which was the first time distinguished between the release of Hamas and the release of hostages and the ceasefire before they'd always been conditional, one and the other.

So that's another indication to the Hamas that all it has to do is hold on. So in that situation, why would Senouar give up hostages? Why would he give up what he considers assets in return for anything less than the end of the war? Why would he give them up for a six-week ceasefire? It's not going to do him any good. At the end of six weeks, Israel's just going to resume the war. And so the American policy has been to greatly diminish Hamas's interest in a temporary ceasefire that will release at least some of the hostages. And that is why Hamas has rejected again and again any suggestion of a further hostage for temporary ceasefire deal.

Apparently, the talks have broken down completely today. If the United States had said something different, I think, Norm, saying, you know, we're not crazy about the way Israel has conducted this war. We're concerned about the civilian casualties. We're concerned about the humanitarian situation. But we are absolutely standing four square behind Israel in its determination to uproot Hamas from Gaza, including from Rafah. We may see we might have seen a hostage deal. Now, what do you attribute this to?

I mean, you don't have to go to the Fletcher School to understand like a schoolyard logic here that you can't negotiate without leverage is it is it that the our experts don't understand what was going on or is it just that the presidential election trumps everything yeah i think that elections play a very big role um i think there's deep personal concern um on part of President Biden and his immediate advisors about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. But I go deeper. I worked with all these individuals, you know, from the then Vice President Biden to his chief of policy staff, who was Tony Blinken, to the head of policy planning in the State Department, Jake Sullivan. These are all people I worked with 10, 15 years ago, and they're now running the show. And I know them to be deeply committed to Israel, to Israel's security, to the historic alliance

between Israel and the United States. I understand that. But they also come from a certain worldview. And this is, you know, here I tread lightly because I'm not actually not a citizen of the United States anymore. I don't vote. I never want to get involved in internal American politics. But over the years, I've identified what I would call a democratic worldview, which is different than a Republican worldview. And in that democratic worldview, there's a deep reverence for international institutions like the U.N. And this administration will quote U.N. sources all the time. I can't remember the last time I heard a Republican quote the U. And this administration will quote UN sources all the time. I can't remember the last time I heard a Republican quote the UN about everything. It's this deep understanding,

sort of internationalism. It very much reflects the educational background of so many of these people. They all come from the same universities. And there is a recoiling from military power, not necessarily, you know, not subscribing to the old von Clausewitz adage that war is diplomacy by other by other means. War is the failure of diplomacy. It's not it's not a tool of diplomacy. So they would very Kissinger would certainly have a problem with them. And and they don't necessarily understand military power. None of them have, I don't think any, I can't point to anybody outside of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who actually served in the military, and certainly who have actually fought in the war. So I think that that whole world is very alien to them.

What it means to fight in a densely populated, totally booby-trapped environment that is Gaza, in which you're fighting not just an enemy that's hiding behind the civilian population, but actually using the landscape as a shield, because underneath the battlefield is another battlefield of 450 miles of tunnels. It's never been encountered by the American military, much by even the military military, so I understand them not being able to understand, I can understand their lack of comprehension. There is a, I don't want to use the word obsession,

but certainly a fixation on the Palestinian issue as it relates to Israel. You know, when Palestinians were being massacred by the Syrians during the Syrian civil war, when Syrian tanks were rumbling through the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus, I didn't see a lot of people being very upset in Washington. I didn't see the degree of distress expressed over the situation in Gaza. I don't see equal even by the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the abandonment of America's

allies there, or even by the massacre of a half a million Syrians during the Syrian civil war. I didn't see major tears being shed there. Over the Palestinians, it's a separate situation. And that's being played out across the United States, not just in decision-making halls in Washington, where the Palestinian issue is becoming a defining issue of the American left and major parts of the Democratic Party. It may even be a major issue in the 2024 elections. So all this is playing into the shifts in the administration's policy. And it's a pretty big shift from the early, the first week after the October 7th massacre, the historic, truly historic

speech of President Biden. I want you to know we all stood in front of our television sets early the first week after the October 7th massacre, the historic, truly historic speech of President Biden. I want you to be all stood in front of our television sets and cry. We had tears streaming down our cheeks. I, you know, decades I've been involved in U.S.'s relations, both as a researcher and as a practitioner. And I never heard anything like that speech. I'd never heard anything like Tony Blinken's first visit here where he went on for 20 minutes about what it meant for him as a Jew to witness the horrors of October 7th. And, you know, I remember thinking about Henry Kissinger, how Henry Kissinger would admit publicly he was Jewish, maybe with a gun to his head. Right. There was Tony Blinken talking about his Jewish identity and the Holocaust experiences of his father, his stepfather, rather, and what this meant to him. And that was also deeply moving. But I was also keenly aware of two sentences that appeared both

in the President's speech and in the Secretary of State's remarks was, we expect Israel, as it prosecutes this war, to conform to international humanitarian law. And I remember thinking to myself, OK, we're up against the clock. And that clock is ticking, starting now. And eventually, Tony Blinken would come out and say several times that entirely too many Palestinians have been killed, which is a strange locution because it suggests that there would have been a number that would have been OK. And maybe in somebody's mind, there would have been a number of been OK. But it also it bespeaks a certain worldview where in a war, too many civilians have been

killed. And, you know, if you know the history of america's recent wars whether in iraq afghanistan against isis the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths was many times higher than what it is in gaza but that is that doesn't figure in either right well i i have this feeling and it's a it's a wide issue that I'm talking about, which is the psychology of it all that somehow peopleately are as big as major American cities. And America would not forfeit any of its cities even without a single person dying. If Manhattan Island had to clear out because of missiles coming in, even if it didn't kill a single person, we would take care of it. And again, to this Kissinger book, he talks about how the world felt guilty about the Treaty of Versailles and that eroded the psychological basis for defending it. And I feel like as the world is psychologically moved somehow that Israel is not a good guy in this conflict.

It erodes the psychological basis for them defending, for them supporting Israel defending itself. Is that right? Some button there. I can't take issue with it. For me, the realization is in a certain way starker because I've been involved in public diplomacy, defending Israel for many, many years. And we do a lousy job of it, I got to tell you. Israelis can be very contemptuous of world opinion, not important what the non-Jews think, it's what the Jews do. It's a common adage here. We're bad at it. But at the end of the day, we are the Jewish state. And the Jewish state is always going to be judged by a different standard. I just mentioned the fact that the combatant-to-civilian fatality ratio in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan was between 4 to 1 and 9 to 1,

whereas in Gaza it's closer to 1 to 1. And so it's a completely different standard. I don't see the United States being accused of genocide or of reacting over the top or bombing indiscriminately. And behind many of the accusations, and I say this with deep regret, I hear the resonances of classic anti-Semitic tropes. Just a small example, the Hamas statistic of 32,000 Palestinians dead is repeated constantly by American leaders, including by the president, where even if you were to take that number at face value,

we all know it's inflated here. It doesn't matter. Say 32,000 Palestinians have been dead. And from my perspective, one Palestinian dead is one Palestinian dead too many. It's a tragedy. OK, so understand that. But having said that, Israel's killed about 14,000 Palestinian terrorists. You deduct that from the 32, and you deduct several thousand, at least, Palestinians who have been killed by the 30% of Palestinian rockets that fall short and fall in Gaza itself, like the Al-Ahri Hospital. And then just the thousands of Palestinians over the course of four or six months who would die just of natural causes. And then Hamas will turn around and say that 78% of these 32,000 are children, which is statistically impossible, but nobody questions it.

Why doesn't anybody question the Hamas claim that we kill children? Because a classic anti-Semitic trope is that Jews kill children. It's the massacre of the innocents from the New Testament. It's the blood libel. And I hear resonance of anti-Semitic tropes all the time. And also because, you know, I often interview with people who are a lot less amenable than you are in the BBC, in the Canadian broadcasting company. And a very typical question with how many children does the IDF, how many Palestinian children does the IDF have to kill before it's satisfied? Or aren't you happy to kill Palestinian children? In that, that's right out of the 13th century. Well, you know, you would know better than me that this this i know the blood libel is real i quite you know i question in a in a among a people who barely know who the vice president

is how many of them are really aware of that trope but uh maybe it filters down somehow or maybe it's just this intersectional worldview that the West and white people and colonials kill people. You know, there's so many issues going on. But whatever the origin is, I agree with you 100 percent that that's what's going on. This genocide charge. Now, let me let me just shift to America for a second. The genocide charge, more than anything else, disturbs me greatly. First of all, it's such an outrageous charge.

And just to tell the listeners, just to give an example, I've said it before on the show, the Hutus killed 700,000 to a million Tutsis in 100 days, basically with machetes and their bare hands. That's what, you know, as, as the, the radio blasts were exhorting them to go out and kill their neighbors. That's what a genocide looks like. It doesn't have a one-to-one ratio. And certainly there was no genocide with both hands tied behind your back where Israel has a firepower to commit any genocide it wants. And it's only killed 30,000 people. God forbid, I don't mean to make light of the number,

but compared to what they could do in the most densely populated place on Earth. So having said that, what worries me, even after this war is over, is that, as the Atlantic said, although I said it first, the golden age for being Jewish in America is over, that there's a reversion to the mean of kind of anti-Semitism that my father described from when he was young, and this genocide charge cancels out the Holocaust in some way that I think is a relief to people.

Enough with the Holocaust. We did it to them, the West, and now we can say they did it to them, and both sides are gone. And I've described it. It's like acid rain. I have three young children who don't know the first thing about politics, and this is acid rain on their psychology. It is affecting them. They are aware that being Jewish is an issue in a way that was simply not the case when I was a young Jewish kid in the same neighborhood that my kids are growing up. And this will be, I'm worried, a much more lasting

legacy of this war than what we're seeing. What are your thoughts about all that? It's become much more widespread. We've been dealing with charges of genocide for a very long time. And it's true, my father probably had the same experiences of your father, sort of locking themselves on a Sunday while everyone was out listening to Father Coughlin on the radio, sprouting anti-Semitism. I'm not convinced that anti-Semitism is worse than it was.

I grew up in a working-class Sicilian neighborhood and I experienced anti-Semitism pretty much every every day i had big influence on me influence on my moving to israel like it you know someone beats you up and telling your christ killer you want to be able to defend yourself um and but what october 7th did was to remove the veil from anti-semitism and to go beyond that to actually endow aspects of it with virtue. And that hasn't happened for a very long time. That hasn't happened. Certainly in this, in the United States hasn't happened, perhaps even not even the 1930s. There was a level of anti-Semitism, which was still whispered around tables and not,

not broadcast along with Father Coughlin. He was sort of the, he was an exception. Sure. Can I just interrupt you there for one second, just to say that Tucker Carlson gave a speech, or a podcast recently, where he was, yeah, and that was reminiscent of Father Coughlin, of the Jews are responsible for the prosecution of Christians. This was I looked up some of his speeches. He was almost as if Tucker had investigated this and decided to pick up the same effective

line in the entire Middle East. And at a time when Christian populations are being decimated throughout the Middle East here, it's growing. And it's really Arab Christians are per capita more affluent and better educated than Israeli Jews. So the whole thing is a libel. But it's true. So the veil has been lifted from anti-Semitism. It wasn't like people woke up on October 7th and said, oh, wow, I'm an anti-Semite. What they did was they could feel that they could be they could give voice to those feelings, to those those prejudices, that hatred. And not not only not be penalized for it,

but in certain ways be valorized by it. I mean, that is the big difference. And that's the new world. I don't know if we can stick that genie back in the bottle. I don't know whether we actually have gone through a sea change. I have a sub-stack called clarity. Clarity is my great goal, is to get a clear view. This war has given us clarity on a lot of issues. One of them is on the nature and extent of anti-Semitism.

Clarity is sometimes clarity plays in our favor. been asked by Columbia alumni to respond to today's testimony of the Columbia president, Shafiq, testified in Congress on the same issue that felled Harvard's president and Penn's president several months ago. And what was interesting about that testimony was that it ostensibly was about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel fervor on campuses. But it was really about the soul of America. It was something very deep. And it reminded me of the Dreyfus trials of the 1890s. And I've written about this on my sub stack in an article called Mein Kulturkampf. Mein Kulturkampf, because it seems to me in the 1890s also,

the Dreyfus trial was ostensibly about anti-Semitism, but it was really about the soul of France. And for some reason, Jews find themselves on the cutting edge of these Kulturkampfs again and again. And it's happened throughout history. It happened in the Roman and Greek world as well. It's just a strange destiny that we have. And it's being played out in America because when people say Palestine in America today, they mean many things. They mean socialism. They mean uh anti-nationalism they mean many different things

when they say palestine and uh and that doesn't necessarily refer to even the geographic palestine they say you know from the river to the sea but the river to see actually doesn't include gaza look on a map the river stops north of gaza um it's and And even Israel's come to mean different things. Israel's come to mean traditionalism. It's come to mean a certain brand of maybe of conservatism. It's come to mean patriotism, religion, family, different things. So there's a great cultural struggle going around these terms. And what is ostensibly about Israel and Palestine,

Palestinians is about something much deeper and wider. Sorry, yeah, cut off there for a second, the very end. So let me go back to this democratic worldview. You left the the ambassadorship, that's how you put it, in 2013, is that correct? So you dealt with the Obama administration. And so I was looking at Obama's memoir and I was reading his, I have it here, the way he described some of the history of the of the Arab-Israeli negotiations.

And it it left me slack jawed. I couldn't believe the way he put it. I'll read a little bit of it to you to get your comment. He says, and I'll read it maybe a few sentences at a time. After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East. So far, so good. Including outlining a two-state solution

that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. This is how he puts the way, you know, demanding the total right of return, refusing to entertain any end of the conflict and walking out without a counterproposal. He just chalks it off to, you know, Arafat demanded more concessions and talks collapsed. And it says, and then meanwhile, one day in September 2000. Now, September is before the meetings in Taba, right? Which were in December,

if I have my timeline right. It says, but in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam's holiest sites in a stunt to assert Israel's claim

over the wider territory. Obviously he's setting up why the second intifada started. He blames it on Sharon's stunt, ignoring the fact that the most far reaching proposals came afterwards. I mean, I could go on with this. How do you explain that kind of tendentious? I mean, I don't even think it's a defensible narrative. It also clashes with Bill Clinton. How do you explain that? Where's he coming from? that kind of tendentious. I mean, I don't even think it's a defensible narrative.

How do you explain that? Where's he coming from? Arafat simply picked up and left. And, and Clinton said to him famously, you know, I'm a failure. You've made me one. And.

It's, it's classes with every memoir of anybody who was in the room, including, including Nabil Amr, who was a Palestinian who wrote a letter complaining about the fact that Arafat didn't deal in good faith. September also happens to be the holiest site in Israel, in Judaism. It's the third holiest site in Islam. And, you know, the notion that that a Jew visiting the holiest site in Judaism should trigger a terrorist war that will claim a thousand Israeli lives is a bit of a stretch. But let me say there's nothing that is surprising about that for me.

You know, I wrote a memoir of my time in Washington called Ally. And there's a chapter there which turned to be quite controversial. It's called Obama 101. And this is going back to 2008, 2009. Nobody really knew who this person was. It was very, very cipher-like. And they'd only spent two years in the Senate. And so I sat down in a truly, you know, it's an academic way and decided to study who this person was. I read everything he had ever written several times, every interview,

every speech, and I came to some very fundamental conclusions about his worldview. His worldview, yes, was a democratic worldview, which included respect for international institutions, a strong feeling about Palestinians, a reticence to use military force, and an unfamiliarity with military force. All of that was there, plus ideas that were taken directly off most, you know, your typical Ivy League campus. There was nothing particularly outrageous by any of this or certainly alien to me because I had spent a lot of time teaching in these campuses and studying in these campuses. And I and I say this not, you know, in any self-aggrandizement, but I reached a point where on almost no occasion did he surprise me. And there were, you know, there are many people that surprised many other people, but it didn't surprise me.

It just fit in with the worldview very well. Which, by the way, was a big asset for an ambassador. I could say with certainty that the president was going to do a certain thing. I'll just give a random example. This is actually after I was ambassador. I was already in government. I ran for Knesset and I was the deputy to the prime minister. And in 2016, President Obama suggested a 10-year memorandum of understanding to give military aid every year to Israel,

and with a significant increase. And I said to the prime minister, this was in September of 2016, I said, well, you can sign this thing. But I guarantee you that come December, when the Security Council meets to discuss settlements, President Obama will condemn Israel on the settlements. You should know this. This was his M.O. to give us aid, but then to condemn us. And that's now accepted the 10 year memorandum of understanding with Obama. And two months later, Obama condemned us in the Security Council. That doesn't make me a prophet. It just means someone who did his homework.

So where's he? Is it I mean mean can we talk about it bluntly where do you where does his worldview come from does he he doesn't seem to have a problem with no and i choose by the way i had a very high still do have a very high regard for him as a person as an intellect uh he's an extraordinary human being in so many ways um and here you are in the comedy club he has one of the best comedic timing of any human being I've ever met. He is really funny. It's really. He's fantastic.

He's fantastic. Those cars. He's outrageously gifted as an individual. But his worldview is very different than certainly that of many Israelis. And we had to respect that. This is the person who the American people had elected twice and quite decisively. And so you deal with that. There are certain benefits to having a leader who is predictable and it's not predictable. And. But can I just push back for one little second on Obama, just because I get a worldview and I understand like a third world, third world oriented view and an anti-colonialist worldview. misstating the facts in your memoir he knows certainly that it wasn't just that arafat

demanded more concessions as a matter of fact it's good i just remembered there's a story um in the new york times from i guess it's i think it's 2014 maybe after right after you left um where it was where the carry framework had fall apart. And it says in a March meeting with Mr. Abbas in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama tried to sell him on Mr. Kerry's framework. The Palestinian leader, officials said, did not respond, preferring to reiterate his rejection of the Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Quote, the president was skeptical about a deal after that

meeting the official said abbas was more comfortable pivoting to public grievance than focusing on a private negotiation so he had his own little taste of exactly what uh they went through and yet it's got to fit he pretends it didn't happen once you once you get the world view everything everything you know you're going to get a couple of uh square pegs trying to get into that round world view and you're going to have to bash them in with a hammer. And that's what you see. You can almost hear the hammer bashing here. You know, it can't be that that Arafat just picked up and left the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000. There had to be some kind of differences over opinion and the talks collapsed. The talks collapsed, that passive, the

talks collapsed, not that Arafat brought them down. And there has to be some kind of cause and effect because it cannot be that the Palestinian Authority led by al-Assad had been planning an armed revolt before October 2000 and just happened to be ready, happened to be ready with this massive terrorist onslaught at the beginning of October, because Arash Sharon visited the holiest site in Judaism. It can't be. There has to be something that's going to get the Palestinians off the hook. And that's what binds both of these stories that you just read me, is that it's letting the Palestinians off the hook. And part of the worldview that I mentioned earlier was this fixation on the Palestinians. And also, I would go further.

Who are the Palestinians? They are victims. They are the quintessential victims. And in that democratic worldview, victimhood is also endowed with virtue and a certain amount of their type of, that also has got to evoke certain classic anti-Semitic tropes, but they are the immaculate victim of rather, what can I say, less than immaculate Jews. So these are

deep-seated trends and that have many, many causes. One of them is just being on an American campus from the 1980s onward. You would you would imbibe all of these ideas. And there are people would say that President Obama got them from his pastor in Chicago, who was notoriously anti-Israel slash anti-Semitic. Many ways. I never found him remotely anti-Semitic. And I didn't think he was anti-Israel, by the way. He just had a different concept of Israel.

And, you know, I always think that he seems to say, I admire the Israel of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan. And I didn't want to, like, remind him that this was an Israel that was very prejudiced against Jews from Eastern origins, prejudiced against women, not pretty nice, very nice to its Arab population. Even that was kind of a campus image of Israel in the 1960s. Israel today, for everything we've gone through,

in spite of this very right-wing government, which I will not, elements of which I cannot defend, is far more democratic than it was in the 1960s. Far more open, far more accepting. And it has come a very long way, but you'd have to actually have an understanding of the realities of this country to reach that conclusion. So, I mean, I could go on and on about Obama, but on the issue of people, you know, kind of massaging the facts to fit as pegs into their own worldview,

what's your view on the settlements? You sound like you are sympathetic to the settlements. Is that right? I would say I'm sympathetic to most settlements. The settlements have, we tend to lump them all together, settlements.

85% of the settlements are in blocks adjacent to the 1967 border. And in any negotiations, and I participated in negotiations, the assumption is that Israel was going to retain those blocks, that we may have to compensate the Palestinians with other land swaps. We're going to retain them because those settlements thicken out Israel's border, which pre-67 were eight miles wide and they were undefensible. And that's why the United

States put that line into Resolution 242 from 1967 that Israel should have to have defensible borders. So that's one aspect of the settlements. Eighty-five percent of them, these are the big communities along the border. There is also certainly a religious and ideological dimension to it. I'm sitting here in Jaffa, and the same justification for my presence as a Jew in Jaffa is the same justification that a Jew will use living in an outlying settlement in Samaria or Judea, in the settlements of Bethel or Shiloh or Eli, because we believe that this land is the ancient homeland of the Jewish people.

People very religiously believe that God gave us this land, but it's certainly our ancient homeland. The exact same justification. You can't divide them. In fact, the guy living in Shiloh in Hebron in Bethlehem has much more justification than I do because Tel Aviv is not in the Bible. Haifa is not in the Bible, but those places are. Okay, so they actually have more. They actually say, look at the Bible, they have more justification. So it's very difficult for a Jewish state so constituted to tell a Jew that she or he can't live in their ancient homeland.

Think about that. That's like if you say like taking a Native American and saying, listen, you can't live on sacred Sioux land. You know, it's beyond you can't live there because it's too problematic. No one would say that there and no one said don't say it here the only reason for in any way qualifying the jews right to the land of israel is that there's another people who also claim that light right and that uh you don't have to actualize all rights doesn't mean you have to make a settlement in downtown ramallah or downtown to carm or jan Clearly, there's another people there who claim the same right. And if we're ever to end this conflict or simply even get to a better status quo of the conflict,

we're going to have to have mutual recognition of that right. Our problem is that what I just said I think is acceptable to a very large number of Israelis. It is not acceptable to any Palestinian leader I've ever known or read about. As a matter of fact, I participated in the last round of negotiations with the Palestinians, and I'll never forget what one of their lead negotiators told me, because it made me realize I wasted 20 years in university studying all this. All you had to do was hear this one thing. It was worth 20 years of American education. And he said to me, you want us to recognize you as a Jewish state. That is, recognize you as an indigenous people endowed with an inalienable right to self-determination in your homeland.

But you must know that in asking us to do that, you're asking us to negate our identity and suddenly i realized all this talk about territory and borders and jerusalem and settlements and security is all crap what it's really about is that the negation of our identity is essential to palestinian identity uh they wake up in the morning and they're palestinians not because you know because they're not us we have a whole different source of identity as jews and israel. And that ending this conflict in a way that really ends the conflict would be a type of identity suicide for the Palestinians. And that's what they were basically says, what this leader was saying to me. And that is why you will not find one. And I stress not one Palestinian leader ever who will sign sign onto the formula of the United States,

which is two states for two peoples. Because no Palestinian leader has ever recognized the existence of a Jewish people with historic roots in this land. All the archaeology stuff we dig up is all fabricated. There never was a temple, never a first temple, never a second temple. first temple never second temple and uh and they'll never sign on a dotted line that says end of claims or end of conflicts

because they see a two-state solution as an interim solution before the refugees return and you know turn israel into a de facto palestinian state so that's their position. So let me ask you, yeah, just so people listening who hear me not jumping in, we have a bad connection. You do eventually come through it, I'm hearing, but it's hard for me to, not that I want to be rude and interrupt you, but from time to time people will notice that I don't jump in like I normally do. But let me just ask about a question. And I understand it's the ancient Jewish homeland. Two questions. First of all, doesn't that become extinguished at some point in time? What if there were people there before the Jews? I mean, that's my first question, is that doesn't that become extinguished when

another people has lived there for many, many years? You can't just come back and reclaim it. And number one, number two, this recent annexation that we read about a few weeks ago, was that in the part of the West Bank that everybody expects would stay Israel in a settlement? Or was that jutting out into territory that would probably— I don't know of any annexation't know that many people would want to be palestinian i don't know it's news to me honestly you mean it's a program to build settlements or you know there's no it was a big news story about build a number of settlement uh settlement houses and i'm sorry you know you're right i didn't mean to use the word annexation i'm absolutely

but they but they took land. Maybe expropriation. I don't know what the term is. I can look it up. But you know what I'm referring to. Okay. Expropriation, yes. If it was state land, not state land.

Yeah, I know. These are sources of great controversy. The controversy in Israel also. It's not just in the world. I gave you a general overview of the settlements, the security justification and the ideological religious justification. It just is. But I also said something that would be very controversial, would probably put me on the left side of the spectrum in Israel by saying, I recognize that there's another people here that have, you know, have

those rights. And by the way, um you know if the jebusites and the hittites were to show up tomorrow and may lay claim to jerusalem this was jerusalem was a jebuite system maybe we'd have an issue with the jebusites they don't happen to be around anymore um but one of the reasons that the jews are around after four thousand years is because of our connection to this land and the connection to the land is actually instrumental to our identity. It's not incidental. And in any section of the land, the Bible, beginning at the very beginning of the Bible, the Bible says, I'm going to make a covenant with you guys,

and I'm going to seal that covenant with this land. And, you know, we'll be celebrating Passover in a couple of days, and it's all about getting out of slavery and coming into this land eventually. And this is where we get freedom. And to me, it's actually not just an ideological one. I think that this is the only country where Jews as Jews can be completely free. Because freedom for me means accepting responsibility. And only here we can accept responsibility for ourselves as Jews.

Yeah. I'm less comfortable. I'm not comfortable with the religious justifications. I understand the historical realities. I'm offended when they don't want to admit that the jews um have a history there but uh you know anyway um all right that's that's uh my own theory on it just before i let you go i i don't really understand the identity erasure. Someone else told me that. I see it as having to agree to what is a national humiliation. To accept this 22% is so humiliating, especially given the atmosphere that is cultural and the way

they're raised, that they prefer the status quo. The status quo is preferable in my opinion, to agreeing to this humiliation where they finally had to take this small piece of land. That's, I don't, I, that's just the way I see it. Maybe you don't agree. I don't think it's a decision that's easy for the Palestinians. It isn't, you know, the question is, do, do, at, do, at some point do they want to emerge from victimhood and take responsibility for themselves as a sovereign nation

and not not just as a not as the victims um yes zionism's great victory i believe was was to to really take the jews out of victimhood now we still talk about the holocaust certainly and you know you can visit yad vashem when you come here, but we don't see ourselves as victims anymore. And I think that's absolutely crucial for moving forward in history. That's how you get, you certainly, you can harness the past, but you're not a prisoner to the past. And the Zionist movement had to make some very painful decisions too.

Palestine, as it was defined by the British mandate and defined by the League of Nations, included what is today Gaza and the West Bank and all of Jordan. And when the British began to chop that up and made a kingdom called Transjordan and then lopped Gaza off and then they lopped the West Bank off, Israel was left with a, the Zionist movement was left with a small part of what they regarded as Palestine, too. It was a very painful decision. It broke apart the Zionist movement in the 1920s. As a matter of fact, the Likud is a descendant of that party that rejected the British, you know, carving up of Palestine. It wanted it all. Their saying was that there are two banks to the Jordan, the West Bank and the East Bank.

But labor Zionism made the very hard decision of accepting that reality because they realized, listen, if we want to just get out of this idea of being stateless and have our own sovereign nation, then we're going to have to make some very painful compromises. And the Zionist movement made it again and again. They did it in 1947

with the partition resolution. The sad history of it is that every time the Palestinians reject that two-state solution, the next deal gives them actually less land every time. I didn't know you cut off there i'm not going there oh yeah so yeah yeah i'm sorry with the bad connection but you know as what you're saying

i just brought up one of the things so talk about the democratic worldview and all this stuff. And, you know, Thomas Friedman, who apparently has the president's ear, he had a line in his column months ago. He talks about the Palestinians reaching, quote, dream of independence in their homeland, in a state next to Israel. And this is this goes to what you're saying from the from that worldview. They they they overlay on the Palestinians, the psychology of their dreaming of a homeland, peaceful side by side next to Israel. If only that were the case. Right. Gaza is I got some bad news for for Tom Freeman. Gaza actually is in Palestine and they have an independent state there. And they did not live in peace. They did not. OK, so the West Bank. So the argument doesn't quite hold. I wish it were true right now. Eighty five percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank support Hamas.

And they are not a they are not advocates of the two-state solution, believe me, by any stretch. So it doesn't mean, though, that we can despair, that we can give up trying to reach a solution. And I personally believe that there are other venues, other paths we can take. There are federal solutions. There are cantonment on the Swiss model solutions. There is extended autonomy. I'm not here to plug my book, but I have a new book out. It's called 2048, which is interesting. It's my vision of Israel on its 100th birthday. 24-8 is our 100th birthday. But the book is in Hebrew. It's in Arabic. It's in English. It's all in one book. Plug it. Okay, here it is. 2048. Plug it by all means. I'm sorry we didn't say it at the top of the show.

It's about health care. It's about education. It's about relations with America, relations with Jews, and relations with our Arab citizens. But it's the largest chapter about the peace process. And in that, I really discuss my own experience. I started off as an advisor to Yitzhak Rabin in the early 90s. And I've gone through this whole process for over 30 years, and I've reached some fundamental conclusions. And one of the conclusions is that this constant harping on the two-state solution actually does a disservice not just to Israelis, but, just service to Palestinians. Cause it's, it's, it's preventing creative thinking on other ways of moving forward.

And, and that, that formula has failed again and again and again. And yet people seem very beholden to it. And I actually know, I know that there are people up in the democratic party that understand what I'm saying and believe what I'm saying and wish we could move other ways. But, you know, again, as Kissinger said about Israel, you you know we don't have a foreign policy all we have is domestic policy yeah well i think i think the democrat i i can't imagine a pro-israel democratic party in uh 20 32 let alone 2028 i think this is biden is the last gasp of it. All right, sir. It's been a it's been an absolute pleasure to meet you finally after 20 years of wishing that I could meet you.

I know you came to the comedy show the one time. I think you did. And I wasn't. I was a great comedian. But didn't you? Did you ever come there? I thought that I heard that you came one time. You never came.

I came to see him. He is a very. You came to see him. By the way, it's terrific so um i love him very much so so uh when you come to new york next i hope you you'll come again and i want to thank you very much for your time and i'm going to get your book immediately on kindle i'm assuming it's on kindle as well i read everything on kindle now and uh be safe over there and thank you very much for your time