The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Hamas Attack on Israel with Bret Stephens

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Noam Dworman and Periel Aschenbrand sit down with journalist and editor Bret Stephens to discuss Hamas's attack on Israel. Bret Stephens joined The New York Times as an Opinion columnist in April 2017. He came to The Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor in charge of international opinion and, for 11 years, the paper’s principal foreign-affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. At The Post he oversaw the paper’s news, editorial, digital and international operations, and also wrote a weekly column. He has reported from around the world and interviewed scores of world leaders. Mr. Stephens is the author of “America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder,” released in November 2014. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including three honorary doctorates, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. In 2022, the government of Russia banned him for life from visiting that country.

Welcome to Live from the Table. My name is Noam Dorman. I'm the owner of The Comedy Cellar. I'm here with our producer, Perry Lashinbrand, and very, very special guest, one of my favorite guests, and I'm always honored, actually, I mean that sincerely, to be able to speak to him in person, Mr. Brett Stevens. Perry L has his prepared intro. Go ahead, Periel. Hit it. Brett Stevens joined the New York Times as an opinion columnist in April 2017. He came to the Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor in charge of international opinion, and for 11 years, the paper's principal foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. At the Post, he oversaw the paper's news, editorial, digital, and international operations, and also wrote a weekly column. He has reported from around the world and interviewed scores of world leaders and is permanently banned from Russia. Yes, the one honor I always like to have mentioned. Who banned you, Putin? The Russian foreign ministry.

What did you do there? I think they didn't like what I was writing. Because of what you were writing. They never told me. They never sent me a nice note saying... How did you find out you showed up and they wouldn't let you in? No, I found out in a funny way. I got an email from my boss at the time saying, do you know anything about this?

And it was a kind of an email written in, you know, the Russian version of English, you know, with the articles dropped from a Kremlin affiliated radio station saying, does the New York Times have anything to say about the banning of its, you know, evil, fascist, loving columnist, Bret Stephens? And we hadn't, the Times, nobody had been notified, hadn't been alerted. So I actually sent the notice over to my Russian speaking friend, Garry Kasparov, and said, do you know anything about this? And he said, hang on, let me get back to you. He's like, yeah, congratulations. You're banned. Uh, I mean, he's, he's banned too. So it's, you know, to him, it's like, you know, it's the batch of honor.

I mean, Gary has great honors and I have lowly ones, but that's what I'm proud of. All right. You know, I had so much I had wanted to talk to you about, about Trump and Biden and politics, whatever it is. But I think the Israel thing is crowding out everything in my brain and I'm sure your brain as well. And since you're quite an expert on this stuff, let's talk about that and see how long it lasts. The conversation or the war? Both. Both. Both.

I have this foreboding feeling that this is a time different than any time in my lifetime. I'm feeling emotionally like already, and it could pass, that the Jews are at war now. Not Israel, the Jews.

That we're going to see very soon horrible images of horribly misfortunate people, and we need to really recognize how terrible their situation is, at the hands of the Israeli retaliation. And I feel like the support of the world is going to peel away very, very quickly. And we're going to be left fighting this kind of horrible battle to not be treated as permanent Afrikaners, as permanent racists, and that my children will not be able to grow up with the kind of matter-of-fact, carefree Jewish identity that I did. And as someone else once said that maybe we're regressing, we're returning to the mean, regression to the mean on anti-Semitism in the world.

And I don't really see how that won't happen. And it's really, really upsetting me. I don't know how you feel about it. I mean, this is not new to me. Right after 9-11, I had been working in Brussels at the time for the Wall Street Journal. And very shortly after it, I was at kind of a social event for people who worked for the European Union. So these were not like lowlifes. These were well-dressed, well-educated functionaries of the bureaucratic state in Europe. And the attitude expressed again and again was that what had happened on 9-11,

a viciously anti-Semitic Muslim terrorist organization murdering 3,000 Americans, including many Jews in lower Manhattan, was the fault of Israel. And they said this as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was, you know, almost a cliche. And I remember sitting there listening to it and thinking, maybe it's a good thing my name is Stevens. My grandfather changed it from Ehrlich 80, 90 years ago. I don't know the exact date. to conversations that had my name been Rosenberg or, you know, whatever, Schwartz, Dorman, they might have been less incautious about these sorts of comments. And in fact, it was from listening to those conversations that I inclined to accept the job offer given to me shortly afterwards to become the editor of the Jerusalem Post, because I felt like the story was not just about Israel and the Palestinians.

It was about the Jews and the rest of the world. And I have never stopped noticing, almost to a Woody Allen degree, all of the ways in which anti-Semitism expresses itself just in the most casual fashions. Just this morning, after I wrote a column in The Times denouncing the title of the column was The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself, based on a visit to the pro-Hamas rally in Times Square. I got a note from some guy in Germany that begins with a line, I can understand your emotion at the killing of your fellow citizens. Now, I'm not Israeli, but the first thing I notice is that to this guy who turns out who sounds like sort of some lefty pacifist based in somewhere in germany that well of course he's a jew so he's he's he's an israeli so that the automatic uh default uh assumptions about jews in in the most innocuous

phrases and between this morning and that social gathering just after 9-11 22 years ago, innumerable occasions in which the kind of unthinking anti-Semitism, not of the Charlottesville right, not of the Hamas radicals, but of people who go about their lives thinking of themselves as right-thinking

people without a bone of prejudice, that has been a kind of a constant soundtrack in the back of my mind. And I guess what I've learned over 20 years is I'm not crazy. I'm not like Woody Allen in Annie Hall Hall sort of thinking oh do you hear that you hear you know and so on that that famous joke I'm not crazy this is this is real this is a war not against Israel this is a war against the Jews what we're seeing in the United States is what we saw in Europe 40 or 50 years ago. It's kind of percolating into the mainstream.

Anti-Zionism has become a respectable political opinion. There are a set of cultural biases in the United States today which are not anti-Semitic on their face, but they are what I call anti-Semitic adjacent. So they lend themselves to anti-Semitic conclusions, even if they're not necessarily anti-Semitic in their premises. Like what? Conspiracy theory. This would be more on the right, but it's everywhere. Americans have become addicted to conspiracy theories. You've been implanted with a microchip in your COVID vaccine. Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

The 2020 election was stolen. Donald Trump was a stooge of the Russian government. People love conspiracy theories. Well, what is anti-Semitism? It's not just a prejudice. It's a conspiracy theory. It's a conspiracy theory about the Jews. So people who believe anything about anything will ultimately believe the worst about the Jews. But it's not just that. It's so many other things. I mean, look, here in America, this term privilege has gotten a lot of traction. And there is privilege in America.

I feel privileged to be an American. But the word privilege is used as a substitute for what we used to call success. So people who have kind of made it through hard work, determination, luck, you know, all kinds of reasons who become successful are no longer seen as successful, they're seen as privileged. And there's an emotional difference between these two concepts. Success is something you earned one way or another. Privilege is something you've got probably undeservedly. The fix was in. Right. And one of the reasons why Jews succeeded in America, I think, in a way that was very different from even ostensibly democratic, you know, liberal societies in Western Europe, is that in the United States, because of our Calvinist ethos brought by, you know, by the pilgrims with the Mayflower, earthly success was seen as a sign of divine favor. So

the cultural bias in America was that if you're successful, we should admire you, not envy you. We should admire you because God must love you that you did well. And that meant that minorities that came to America, and particularly minorities that succeeded, were not met primarily with envy, although of course that was always there. They were met with admiration. It's why, until at least relatively recently, Jews were the most admired minority in the country. It's why our success economically and socially and culturally as this very small minority has not led to pogroms, right? But if success becomes privilege, if people notice, well, you know, gee, if I look at the Forbes list, there are just so many Jewish names, you know, what did they do? You know, why do they get to have all of these

billions? Then something begins to turn and envy becomes the dominant emotion in American society. When envy is the dominant emotion in any society, bad things happen. Well, you're kind of getting close to what's worrying me. So, well, two things at the same time. One, there really seems no hope of a two-state solution or a kind of courtship for a two-state solution, as we saw in the early 2000s, where at least people put things on hold because there was something playing out, which you kind of waited to see how it was playing out. It seems like that's really at a dead end. And the theory of intersectionality makes it virtually impossible to see the Jews ever as in the right.

And intersectionality is growing in the Democratic Party. I think we're seeing these old white men boomers on their way out, and I feel like what they're going to be replaced with is a party enamored with intersectionality, and that is just going to feed hatred of the Jews, and they're going to see every bombing or anything that Israel does to defend itself through that lens. And you saw this also in the Women's March, when leaders of the Women's march um uh you know ostensibly devoted to female empowerment and opposition to trumpian uh misogyny or whatever uh turned out to be saturated with with anti-semitism

now i don't think i maybe am less uh terrified than you are and I'm not saying I'm right, but I'm less freaked out because I don't think that this side of the left is by any means the dominant strain of the left. But is it, you know, Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, goodbye, AOC, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Khalid, hello? Is that the future of the Democratic Party? I actually don't think so. Somewhere in between. I don't know. I don't know. I mean. Well, look at all these universities.

Harvard comes out for Hamas. NYU comes out... Hang on a second. Wait a second, though. My niece, as anybody who listens to this show knows, goes to Harvard, and she... Okay, let me rephrase it. Harvard didn't come out for Hamas.

But a big number of student groups came out vocally for Hamas. But the flip side is that the people who may not have felt that way feel cowed. They don't feel, as I said before, the self-confidence that they should utter how they feel because they're afraid of what ostracism will happen to them. I don't know how that changes. But again, so in June, I was the invited Class Day speaker at the University of Chicago. It's my alma mater. I was really thrilled and honored. of left-wing groups at Chicago, students for the Democratic Socialists, students for justice in

Palestine, a variety of groups all came together to denounce me, to demand that the university disinvite me. And then they issued a petition and a couple of hundred people signed it. I thought, gosh, am I going to get canceled by my own alma mater? And I called up a dean. He's like, yeah, we looked at the list. Half the people have nothing to do with the university. These are like little student groups. The University of Chicago would never consider canceling you forever. That's just not part of the the brand

and then there was a protest when i spoke and it was like i don't know 15 20 people quietly got up put a banner i wasn't wearing my glasses i couldn't quite see it it was probably like no bs from bs or something like that and then they walked away and i was like oh that's a good slogan for you so so so the the you know but before that there had been news stories in the in the campus uh newspaper like there was a lot of buzz on social media i thought like gosh this is like represents a huge number of people and i was expecting this like massive walkout but instead it was like fine they expressed their opinion they have the right to do so and uh and they they left um so good for them they expressed their views they did so respectfully and uh and that was that and And so my point simply is the the the sound of the barking is not commensurate with the size of the dog, I guess, is my.

Well, I mean, first of all, University of Chicago is known to be one of the very best when it comes to a culture of free speech. But we have to note that the president of Harvard was silent for two or three days. Larry Summers finally tweeted out his outrage. And then a statement came. Something is going on there. Something is going on. Yeah, because anti-Semitism is treated like a microaggression in the scheme of prejudices.

Do you think that this might change that, though? I hope so. I mean, but this has been going on now for quite some time. We saw this back in 2021 during the last Gaza war. Jews getting beaten up, you know, just sitting there at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood and people coming up and beating them up. And the way one, I saw one news outlet reported as a Mideast tensions lead to LA fight. Like, huh? Is it going to change? I think people have noted, and to the Biden administration's great credit, it organized an entire task force, high level, to think about what to do about, you know, anti-Semitism.

I thought its conclusions were kind of beside the point, but at least there was a focus on it. We'll see. We will see and and part of it is this idea that well if you're uh well-to-do or upper class or upper middle class and your skin tone is white then what's the problem right oh you're jewish well you know big big deal um and that that's that's a kind of a mindset that has become hugely pervasive. In the context of this ideology, which puts your skin color, even though the Jews aren't actually white, that's been legitimized. 20 years ago, you couldn't say such things. We've heard enough of white people.

This is now the way people talk. And it's perfectly acceptable now to talk about the white colonialist Israelis. And unless that ideology loses favor, I don't mean anything more than the people who are not white will see it that way because that is now the legitimate way to see things. I don't, God forbid, my wife's not even white. God forbid I'm saying anything about non-white people. That just seems to me the way it goes now. Even when you have a Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh was out there, we've heard enough of white men, blah, blah, blah.

This is the recipe of a majority non-white America plus an indefinitely occupied Palestinian people plus social media plus the world's instinct for anti-Semitism is going to lead to a very, very different America for the Jews 30 years from now than it is now. Unless, you know, nothing, straight line projections, you know, are... Well, hang on, let me push back at that a little forcefully. There's plenty of anti-Semitism among white people, number one. I grew up in Mexico City. I know the Hispanic community very well. There's powerful philo-Semitism.

That is out there, and the kind of casual demonization of people on account of skin color of any tone is awful, and it's become sort of normalized on the left that you can say, you know, you can use white person as a slur. It's obscene and ridiculous. But as concerns the Jews, that's what we're talking about, I don't think that the changing demography of the United States is a problem. I mean, if anything, I can think of, I mean, this is a stereotype, but if I had to guess who the most philo-Semitic people in America are outside of evangelical Christians,

probably South and East Asians among minorities, along with a tremendous amount of philo-Semitism in the Hispanic community. I've spoken at black churches in the South, and the reception I've gotten was incredibly warm. This is not a question of the changing demography of the United States. This is a question of elite perceptions in places like, you know, at elite universities. It's coming, I think this is anti-Semitism that is coming from the top down more than it's coming from the bottom up. I hope so. Go ahead. I have a question I wanted to ask you, Tomi. I should wait and ask Brett. So, OK, so that's anti-Semitism here in America. But my question is, as it relates to what's going on in Israel and my perception, and I would love for you to tease this out a little bit and explain, is to me, it seems that there's a great misunderstanding in America between Hamas and the Palestinian people. And so when people are saying we are for free Palestine,

it seems that they really don't understand that Hamas is a separate terrorist group that is not supporting the Palestinian people and would murder all of these people who I know who are living in Brooklyn and are feminists and are, you know, they would go to their house and murder their entire families in a second also. And so it seems to me that it's incredibly dangerous that these two things are conflated. And I also really don't understand how people sit by and watch these atrocious, unspeakable acts that Hamas is committing

and somehow feel like some justification for the quote unquote other side? So a couple of points. Hamas oppresses the Palestinians in Gaza. It is a despotic regime that had one election once and then threw its political opponents out of windows. That's right. And there have been several occasions in which Palestinians have rioted in Gaza against oppressive Hamas rule. On the other hand, it's not so simple as to say the Palestinians hate Hamas. It's difficult to gauge, first of all,

because opinion polling is all... Benny Morris says if the West Bank were to vote, they would vote Hamas in. That might be. And so, you know, it's a more tangled relationship. It's wrong to say that Hamas doesn't represent Palestinians. It's wrong to say that Hamas represents Palestinians. OK. It's more complex. The people I saw in the protest in Times Square, they were pro-Hamas. a large population were on their way to a failed PhD in semiotics or something like that before they turned to political radicalism. This was an educated...

What are semiotics? You know, study of language. Roland Barthes. Arcane academia. Okay. That's what I mean. So these were not people who had any excuse to have no idea that there was some—that Hamas was not just the Palestinians. I mean, they were hardcore ideologues. that there is a lot of sort of soft support for the Palestinians that kind of emerges from a place of complete ignorance, you know, based on five posters they saw in college

or some news report that that about Israel that that rubbed them that rubbed them wrong. And that is that is a large basis of kind of soft support for the Palestinian side, particularly among progressive Democrats. a cause whose values are antithetical to all of the things they otherwise believe about women's rights, LGBTQ rights, you know, a democracy, human rights, and free speech, and so on. And by the way, you can expect that at least some of those people have been given a jarring wake-up call by the images that have appeared so that that's really the question is how to me it's like watching 9-11 and trying to justify it from the the other side like lots of people did i mean there there was that side of the left of the awful left that uh that that that did that but you're saying that that's actually the minority, that their voices are louder,

but you don't think that that's the pervasive culture of the reaction to what's going on in Israel? The pervasive culture here? No, of the small, like the far left. Like you're saying their voices are louder, but that's not actually the reaction to what's going on in israel i still don't understand i don't know how i feel sorry maybe the question isn't clear is the reaction to what's going on in israel um by whom Israel. By whom? General public. Got it. That this is justified because of whatever

ignorance or lack of information people have, or is the general response that this is horrific and... I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen opinion polling. I'd be curious to see it. And I think it's going to evolve. I think right now the weight, overwhelming weight of public sympathy is with Israel. I mean, you know, other horrible images appear, that may begin to shift. What I hope Americans understand, I guess I hope Americans understand too, Fix, that Israel is a country of 9.3 million people. America is a country of 330 million people. That means, roughly speaking, okay, that for every Israeli, there are 35 Americans. That means that when you had 1,200 Israeli deaths, it's the equivalent of more than 10 9-11s, right? Most Americans watched 9-11 in horror, but very few Americans knew someone who had been killed on 9-11. Very, very few. Even

those of us here in New York City, not many of us knew someone who had been in one of those towers. Every Israeli has a next of kin or a cousin who is gone. And I hope Americans can grasp the scale of tragedy and horror that has hit Israel. The second thing I hope is that Americans remember that when you're hit like that, the best advice is not to tell the people, why don't you turn the other cheek? Because that's not how we reacted after Pearl Harbor. It's not how we reacted after 9-11. And if Israel were to react that way, it would send a signal that will ultimately hurt us here at home, that terrorists can get away with mass atrocities, and we will restrain our response for fear of getting it wrong, overreacting, our own moral scruples. If you can't respond to something like that, you're basically saying to something that is barbaric, the gates are open.

Come right in. Do what you will. So I don't think America will grasp it that way at all. I think people like, you know, if there's a close call on a sports event, people who root for one team see the refs call this way and people who root for the other team see the refs call the other way. It doesn't really matter what they see before their eyes. I think that people are going to process eventually, once they see the retaliation,

they're going to process it through whatever their existing bias is of that conflict. That's what they're going to revert to. They're going to revert back to the way they already feel about that conflict and the way they already feel as the polls show, especially in Democratic Party, is pro-Palestinian.

So this is not a wake-up call? This is what I feel. I think it's people were like, it was kind of like the Will Smith thing. So this is not a wake-up call. This is what I feel. I think it's... People were like... It was kind of like the Will Smith thing. People gave him a standing ovation at first, even though he just slapped Chris Rock. And then afterwards, they were,

oh, no, that was terrible what he did. But they couldn't come to that conclusion on their own. And I don't... Very few people think for themselves. And I just... We'll see. I believe that people are going to say, yeah, that was terrible what they did, but it doesn't excuse what Israel is doing now. It is difficult even for me to contemplate what Israel has to do and how awful it's going to be for these people caught in the middle.

I mean, it's just, there's nothing more horrible you can think of, right? And, you know, if somebody made the argument to me that the best thing Israel could do is actually nothing, or just sit back and do targeted assassination, look at all the other times we've gone to action, and it's all blown up in our face and nothing actually great came from it. I would listen to that argument. Sure. And some Israelis, some Israeli friends of mine are making it. And what do you think of that argument? I think that, well, first of all, it's a plausible argument because we don't know what Israel's planning and how it will work out in the

dense warren of streets and underground tunnels of Gaza. So it's not, I don't discount it, but I think it's a grave mistake on a couple of fronts. The Middle East plays by very hard rules and those rules also involve questions of personal and national honor. And what Israel has gained diplomatically, especially in recent years, has not come about because suddenly the United Arab Emirates has decided that the Talmud is their favorite book. They've decided that Israel looks like the strong horse. Israel looks like a competent and capable and strong power, especially in the face of a rising and threatening, menacing Iran. If Israel gives them the sense by not responding that they are weak, that they are going to allow an atrocity like this to go unpunished, I think it's going to seriously diminish Israel's standing in the region. I think it could end what began with the Abraham Accords. Whatever the Saudis are saying in public

now, I think privately they're looking to see if Hamas really, if Israel really destroys Hamas or essentially just bombs a few buildings. So contrary to the conventional wisdom that a strong Israeli response will end the prospect of peace with the Saudis, I think it's exactly the opposite. A weak Israeli response will end the prospects. Hamas is destroyable? Of course Hamas is destroyable. It's not Nazi Germany.

I mean, it's a militia of 10 or 20,000 people, right? Hardcore militia, probably with additional supporters, with relatively rudimentary weapons in a territory with its back against the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, right? And that may be destroyed, but it'll be a work of generations. But is it destroyable as a military and political force? Of course it is. And for too many years, it was convenient to Israel to allow Hamas to remain in power in Gaza. That's what really has to change. Now, is it destroyable at a cost that Israelis are willing to bear? We'll see. We'll see.

I mean, it depends on the nature of the campaign they conduct and a whole bunch of other factors. But the idea that you cannot destroy Hamas or that you shouldn't destroy Hamas is, I think, extremely short-sighted. And I say this, by the way, mindful that I've always tried to respect that Israel knows its security interests better than I do or all the pundits far away. Respect that they're also sending their own children into battle, not just an army of mercenaries or volunteer army. But my broad sense, I've thought about this argument, is that even if Israel can't achieve an unconditional victory,

like the North in the Civil War or America against Japan, they can achieve an unequivocal victory. And it's only through an unequivocal victory that there's a hope for wider peace. You know, after 1973, despite the initial setbacks for Israel, they did achieve an unequivocal victory. The third Egyptian army was surrounded in the Sinai. Israeli tanks were 20 miles from Damascus. The Golan Heights was completely retaken. There was no question about who had won that war militarily, and it was on the basis of

Israel's unequivocal victory that they could then get the Camp David Accords four or five years, five years later. Israel fails to get an unequivocal victory now, and they will be met by contempt with their potential peace partners in the region. All right, now tell us what you know about, because everybody's asking, how could this have happened? How did a bulldozer go through this high-tech and monitored wall for what somebody told me, I don't know if this is true, four hours or something they were there before it was responded to? How did something like that happen? Do you have any sense for that? It seems impossible.

No, it seems entirely possible. I mean, look, there's the tactical answer that Hamas had clearly studied Israeli tactics quite well. They understood, among other things, that if Israel was listening to all their phone conversations, they just wouldn't have phone conversations. They would do everything by whatever, you know, pigeon courier or word of mouth, that they could destroy the guard towers in a relatively low-tech way. It seems that they learned some lessons from the way Ukrainians defeated the Russian invasion at its beginning. So that's part of the story. And then they could infiltrate very rapidly across relatively short distances against Israeli targets. Second part of the story is Israel has just emerged, hadn't emerged from a nine-month, no, more than nine months, 11-month entirely futile argument about something that no one was asking for, which was judicial reform.

The country was divided. There were repeated warnings from Israeli military leaders that readiness was being degraded. I heard a story, and I'm retelling it, but I'm caveating it by saying I need to check. It's not something I would write. But I heard a story that a helicopter pilot training had essentially degraded to nothing at the Palmahim Air Base, which is just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. So you ask yourself, why couldn't they have lifted a couple of Apache helicopters to stop some of the— these are attack helicopters— to stop some of the incursions, because military readiness had degraded, you know, massively. And part of it is

simply when you don't think, you know, you don't think you're going to be punched straight in the face, right? You're going to be punched straight in the face. Like, I mean, often the most amazing surprises are the ones that seem so obvious that you don't even bother to plan for them. It's a little bit like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the guy is, you know, brandishing swords and Harrison Ford is like, but I've got a revolver and I'm going to shoot you. So I hope that, and this will happen for a long time, there will be no chance that the current Israeli leadership survives after this war, because there will be accountability. After every major Israeli debacle, there have been extensive commissions of inquiry to look into what they did wrong. That will take place as well.

I don't think Israel is going to make this particular mistake ever again. But the mistake was made, and it was a combination of political divisiveness, degradation of military readiness, inattentiveness, and not giving your enemy the credit for having strategic imagination yeah i get all that although the part about them being able to put a bulldozer through the wall without some notification system it really i mean i mean i know it's true because it happened right but it just seems i guess my understanding is that the government was given several warnings and they ignore it from from the army and they ignored it. Well, I mean...

I mean, it was similar to what happened with 9-11, right? I remember Fred Barnes answered that argument one time about 9-11. He compared it to the last chapter of a mystery novel when looking backwards, all the clues become the obvious thing. So you'd have to tell me how often there are things, warnings out there, chatter, as they used to say, that people are supposed to react to. You know, this is also part of what happens when you start to believe your own propaganda.

Putin believed his own propaganda that he had the second most powerful army in the world. He was going to roll right through Ukraine. Turned out to be wrong. I think there was a myth of Israeli invulnerability, not only invulnerability, but invincibility, that Israelis were always like at the cutting edge, the most ready, the most this, the most that. And, you know, in life, as in politics, it's bad to believe your own bullshit. What did I tell you? You said that arrogance is the Israelis Achilles heel. Like any of us who really know Israelis, this is the one, I mean, not supposed to say that any culture is different than any other culture, but among Israelis, we will talk about that kind of a, I got it, I got it, I know better.

Although it is fair to say, is it not, that Netanyahu has developed a pretty cantankerous relationship with the military, right? I don't know. Well, that is, Netanyahu always distrusted the military. He was a commando during his service, and he always distrusted what he called big army, just kind of the bureaucracy of a conscript army, you know, with tanks. If you look at Netanyahu's record, he always favored kind of the smaller operations, very precise. He made a lot of use of his air force, a lot of use of his intelligence services, much less, you know, the usual, you know, tanks and APCs. But, you know, it's also the case that he also believed his own bullshit.

You know, eight or nine years ago, during one of his political campaigns, he played in an ad in which the conceit of the ad is this couple is getting ready to for a night out and uh there's a baby and they're waiting for the babysitter to show up so they can you know go have dinner or whatever and there's a knock on the door and it's not the babysitter it's the babysitter and the babysitter is the guy who's going to make sure your baby's okay you look back on that ad and uh you see in Netanyahu a guy who really believed his BS. Did American policy vis-a-vis Iran lead to this in any way? No. No. vis-a-vis Iran, but look, the moral blame for the attack has to fall always on Hamas and its supporters, which includes Iran. The blame for the failure to prevent the attack falls on these

really policymakers and commanders who screwed up like never before in Jewish history. And I know that, you know, we always want to dump on Biden. But as far as I'm concerned, I am at this moment in time, very happy to listen to President Biden speak in clarion moral tones, who's right, who's wrong, to expedite a thousand bunker busting bombs to Israel to send the Ford carrier over to the eastern Mediterranean. Like this is not an occasion in which I'm going to quarrel with this or that aspect of Biden policy. I think it it doesn't serve anyone's interest. And by the way, you know, when I think of some of the alternatives uh i i feel relatively happy that that he's in charge in this crisis yeah biden's been pretty good on israel all along right since he's taken off he was a senator when when when golda meir was in office i mean he was a senator

during the yom kippur war so he's the guy has been around yeah i mean i don't know i i i also have a very difficult time wrapping my head around how something like this happened despite all of these explanations as anybody who knows everybody that's been in the military most of the people who are watching that border are actually women that's who they usually put along that border. And every single one of them will tell you, you do not take your eye off that border for a millisecond, no matter what. And they just blew in.

I mean, it took hours. And everybody in Israel is like, what happened? How does something like this happen? Look, you know know one of the ways it happened is that the guard posts were bombed with drones from above right um now you think well where were the redundancies you know surely they didn't get every camera when when the camera goes off don't you say well what the hell has happened i think uh it's it's it's feckless to comment on that. We'll find out soon enough.

I'm definitely not going to blame Israeli women soldiers for this failure. No, absolutely not. I think quite the opposite. Go ahead. No, no, no. To be very clear, I'm saying the opposite of that. God forbid. That's not what I'm suggesting at all.

Were they watching soap operas when they were supposed to be watching the wall power you can't let girls be in charge of anything right i have a sense that when when when when we know the full story the weight of blame will fall for what it's worth mainly on the male sex not that it's that's usually usually belongs exactly all right Exactly. All right. Failure of Israeli intelligence. This is the thing that's really bugging me when I hear it. Not when I hear it from certain people. But am I wrong or right here that if Israeli intelligence had been on its game and had gotten wind of this, the process of getting wind of it and thwarting it would have been exactly the kind of things that they call apartheid, meaning that everybody blames Israeli

intelligence, or the people on the left will say, how did Israel let this happen? Where was their intelligence? But when Israel intelligence does act, this is exactly what they use to criticize Israel. Will they have to go in there and surveil people, bring people into questioning? I don't know all the steps. What would it take to have stopped this if Israel had gotten wind of it? I don't think you would have needed

to do anything differently except do what you're supposed to do, which is surveil the border every millisecond. They would try to act preemptively, right? They would try to arrest people. They would try to bomb the...

There have been, I've heard reports that the Egyptians had in fact warned the Israelis. I saw that. I mean, we're just going to have to wait and find out what actually happened before piling on the speculation. Anything else you want to add to the Israel thing? Yeah, I hope Israel wins.

What does winning mean, getting rid of Hamas? Winning means an unequivocal victory which ends in the complete destruction of Hamas as a military and political force in Gaza, and leading to a profound setback, not just for Hamas and the forces of Sunni extremism and radicalism but above all profound setback for its masters in tehran why do the the sunnis and the shiites get along so well on this we always heard that they couldn't get along but the iranians are shiite and the hamas is sunni well they have a common enemy they hate jews more than they hate each other my enemies enemies my friend but in the past that

didn't always bring them together, right? Something seems to have changed. You don't know. I don't know. I don't know. All right. Where are you on what Twitter should and shouldn't be doing vis-a-vis silencing anti-Semitic tweets? First of all, I'm not on Twitter or X or whatever.

X. I feel strongly that free speech means free speech and that even private companies that are providing what essentially amounts to a public utility ought to respect free speech. But they are able to either amplify or minimize the reach of any given tweet, right? I mean, as far as I know, that's a question. It's a question of, someone said, the issue is not freedom of speech, it's freedom of reach. Greenblatt uses that. Well, I think it's a good line. And I think actually Elon Musk has taken up that line. So making sure that you don't provide any way for as much bigoted commentary as you can find to find wider dissemination is the right response. You're not preventing someone from speaking on the platform just as you can't prevent someone from ranting against Jews on McDougal Street.

But you aren't giving them anything like a soapbox, a microphone, and so on. I mean, you're not on it, but I don't really understand how that works on Twitter. You see the tweets of the people you follow, and I guess there's some algorithm to also present you with tweets that people assume are up your alley. So maybe they don't want to present the anti-Semitic tweets to the people who already express an interest in anti-Semitism. On the other hand, what harm is there in that? They're already into that stuff. No, I disagree. There is real harm i mean uh you know guys like uh robert bowers the

the murder of uh the pittsburgh synagogue um was you know very active i mean you know he was like gab right gab right um but on social media but you know what social media allowed made happen was it allowed uh people crazies in a thousand different places who might not ever have met each other, virtually much less in person, to discover that there was a community. And to the extent that social media companies can make that more difficult, they should. I agree with that i'm very uncomfortable with you know heavy-handed censorship particularly when the censorship goes as it almost inevitably does beyond like the people we all agree are awful awful people to include you know some guys saying masks are useless you know um uh to include entirely legitimate and normal expressions of speech, which is why I think the standard should always be you believe in free speech, you believe it's absolute, but it doesn't have to be amplified.

And to the extent that there are technical means to prevent the worst speech from gaining that audience, that's something Musk should do. And so firing all of the content moderators, I don't think was a particularly good thing for him to do because there's just so much speech on Twitter. Well, thank God he's not Jewish. They'd be attacking him for that. I'm pretty skeptical about that stuff. I'm more along the lines of what Jamie Kirchick says.

I'm actually not, I don't, I'm not, just not that bothered when I read these hateful tweets. I look at the number of impressions they get. They're pretty low. I don't know that they move the needle in any way like the people who were tweeting about how the Zionists are slaughtering innocent Palestinians for their moneyed interests. Well, that's anti-Semitic. Right, but you're not going to stop the reach of that because that's squarely within a political point of view. No, that's nakedly anti- political point of view. And I couldn't define that. That's nakedly anti-Semitic. To you.

No. And here the issue is we have to... Not to Tucker Carlson, it's not. Yeah, but we have to do, we, those of us who care about this stuff, have to do a much, much better job than we have in explaining that anti-Zionism is the 21st century version of anti-Semitism,

just as anti-Semitism was the 19th century version of Jew hatred. It's just this... That's very good. That's really the thing, though, right? Is that people are saying anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, and I think that that is a very dangerous narrative, because it's not true. Of course anti-Semitism. And I think that that is a very dangerous narrative because it's not true. Of course anti-Zion is.

Look, anti-Semitism is not just a racial prejudice, okay? It's a religious prejudice. It's an ethnic prejudice and it has been a political prejudice, okay? And anti-Zionism, by the way, anti-Semitism was a political prejudice. The guy who coined the term anti-Semitism, Wilhelm Marr, started the League of Antisemites because his point was we need to oppose, as he saw it, the political interests of the Jews, right,

in taking over German culture and politics and society. It was a political movement as much as it was a prejudice. Well, anti-Zionism is a political movement. Just think about it this way. Why do we have the term anti-Semitism? We have the term because Wilhelm Marr wanted to persuade run-of-the-mill Germans or Austrians in 19th century Middle Europe that Jews, despite claiming to be patriotic Germans, were in fact Semites, meaning they weren't from Europe, they were from somewhere else, and that they were trying to swindle hardworking Germans out of their patrimony or their money or whatever. What is an anti-Zionist

saying? An anti-Zionist is saying, the Jews who claim to be from here are actually from somewhere else, and what are they trying to do? They're trying to swindle Palestinians out of their patrimony. So the only difference between an anti-Semite and an anti-Zionist is the anti-Semite says the Jews are from the Middle East, and the anti-Zionist says the Jews are from Europe. But otherwise, the entire... But not all anti-Zionists say that, right?

I mean, it sounds... The anti-Zionist argument is that there is no right for the Jews to have a state in what is now the land of Israel. That is the anti-Zionist position, right? That the Jews are from someplace else. They're colonialists, right? The Zionist says we're not colonialists. We're actually the native inhabitants of this place. We have an unbroken connection to this land.

And if you go back 2,500 years, you'll find inscriptions in a language called Hebrew, which we continue to speak. So the Zionist claim is we are the opposite of colonialists. The anti-Zionist claim is, no, you're colonialists. You're from Galicia or Poland or whatever. That is what anti-Zionism is. But, okay, when you say that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, I take it to mean that if not for the fact that you hated Jews, you wouldn't feel this way.

And I think that's quite often true, and I feel funny taking this other side with you, but I don't, I mean, I don't think that's true. I think that even people who, if you could remove anti-Jewish feeling from people, there would still be plenty of anti-Zionists, just like

there's plenty of people on crazy sides or sides that we think are just indefensible of so many conflicts in the world. There are people who support communism to this day, despite all the empirical evidence we have that communism is ridiculous. For whatever reason, the arguments reverberate with them. And the arguments of these people who had their land, now they're displaced from their land, or whatever it is,

the underdog, just the underdog alone, is enough to move people. I just think that's just not right. Look, Israel is what you call a post-colonial state. We have most countries in the world are post-colonial states. When the UN was formed in 1945, there were, I think, about 50 or 52 countries who were signatory members of the UN Charter. And then within about 30 years, you had 170 now, I think it's 192, 193 countries. Okay, lots of countries that became post-colonial states. All of them had, not all of them, but many of them had ethnic divisions, territorial disputes with their neighbors, questions about where borders should be drawn. I mean, just name your state. And I can, you know, is modern day Pakistan,

does that represent liberation from India or oppression for Balalochis, okay? You know, well, Ethiopia is not a modern state, but look at so many—Nigeria, you know, what about Biafra? You know, should that be—okay, but none of these countries have sustained the kind of endless animus that Israel has. Why? Why? I mean, if Israel is just another country with another ethnic problem in which the overdogs seem to be unfair to the perceived underdogs, then you'd be like, okay, well, then it'd be just like, I don't know, Turkey and the Kurds or something like that, or Sri Lanka and the Tamils. But no, the vehemence, the focus, the demonization, the relentless obsession with Israel cannot be explained except as a function of a longstanding hatred of which anti-Zionism is merely the most recent name.

Well, you know, I'm not trying to say that there's not tremendous hatred of the Jews and that it doesn't drive this issue. I just don't know if I'm ready to make the blanket statement. And we have people saying ridiculously supportive things about Russia right now. They don't hate Ukrainians. I don't know. Right, but that's the point. They don't hate Ukrainians. Right, but know. That's the point. They don't hate Ukrainians.

They do hate the Jews. But if there was such a thing as anti-Ukrainianism, that's the thing we'd say. There's no such thing as supporting Russia without anti-Ukrainianism. But actually, no, there is. People somehow do latch onto these things. The Arab... I spent the

last few days watching memory videos, M-E-M-R-I.com, and just seeing the way these children in Gaza are just marinated by Hamas Barney teaching them about the Jews this. And I mean, what's more important? What's worse? I can't remember the statements, but just the most horrifying stuff. Wait a second. What is Hamas, Barney? It's like some character.

I don't remember if it was a dinosaur or not. And he's, are the Jews good people? And a seven-year-old, no, the Jews are terrible. Would you kill a Jew? Yes, I'd kill a Jew. You know, this kind of M-E-M-R-I dot com. Yeah, this is a very important site. Last question on that matter, actually.

You know how we... I'm playing devil's advocate on a lot of things. Yeah, why? Because that's how you test your arguments in a way. So you know how we are, at least I am, reluctant to judge slave owners outside the time and place that they existed or anybody in history. And some part of me wonders if, because they're raised that way in Gaza from the time that their children... Do I have to discount in some way what's going on there by the fact that

in their time and place, even though it's the present, it's no different in a sense than what we saw of slave owners. It is such a brainwashing from the time that they're born. It doesn't mean we have to tolerate it or protect ourselves from it in every way, but just as a matter of judging them compared to, for instance, the Nazis understood philosophy and human rights and all these things,

and then the Germans, despite everything they knew, allowed themselves this kind of behavior. Is there something different when a population which grows up as they grow up there behaves this way? Or is that, let the record show Brett's looking at me like I'm out of my fucking mind. I'm glad it's not just me. I think, uh, um, look, uh, the way in which Palestinian institutions educate their young to hate Jews

is horrific and it's well known to those of us who pay attention and utterly unknown to most of the people who think they pay attention to slaughter babies is not about you can't say

well they were educated to think this way it's a level of inhumanity that cannot be justified as some kind of I don't mean to justify it but explained even I don't know how to explain well then how do you account for it

I mean how do you account for people flying into 9-11? How do you account for slavery? Hang on a second. Well, I do account for it by relentless education and the demonization of another group, which is how the Nazis were able to get their willing executioners to march Jews into gas chambers. That's how I account for it. But you began this riff by saying you're reluctant to judge slave owners because that was just the way in which things were done. By the way, I do judge slave owners.

Look at Thomas Jefferson, who in his more lucid moments says, you know, God is just. I forgot the exact quote, but there's a just God and slavery is tyranny. And, you know, I fear the judgment. He says something like, I fear the judgment of a just and wrathful God. It was no secret, particularly in America, that was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, that there was something obscene about slavery.

So I don't, for a second, excuse slaveholders. I didn't excuse slaveholders. I'm saying that we—well, I don't know, maybe you are a person who judges past times by today's standards. way in which people live that they let their moral judgment uh slide or disappear or overthrow it uh uh entirely but um um the the the slave owners have to be judged uh you know this was not just like well everyone in in 19th century early amer America just ate, you know, something disgusting as a matter of course or, you know, whatever it was. This is the problem with that, that I believe that a great man in any era is not defined by his ability to see things as we do in 2023. He's defined by his ability to see things on tippy toes, a little bit above the heads of the people around him.

So Lincoln is not a great man if we want to judge his ideas by 2023. No, he is a great man. But there are beliefs that Lincoln, I'm sure, held, which today are not acceptable. Which ones? Attitudes about race that—I mean, I've heard. I don't even know what's true. Isn't it true that Lincoln felt that the races should be apart?

Wouldn't Lincoln have supported separate but equal— Lincoln did support at some point. It is true that Lincoln thought that maybe the best solution was ultimately repatriation of slaves to Africa, which had been an effort there. That's absolutely true that there were some of his beliefs, but the core of Lincoln's teaching is all men are created equal, and that

that is a belief that extends to all men of whatever color, a point he made insistently in the teeth of some bigoted audience. But you do accept my point that the incremental insight in relationship to the time is usually what we define as somebody being ahead of their time and greatness. So, you know, lots of Palestinians have interacted with Israelis. 17,000 up until October 6th were working every day in Israel.

They could see that the Jews were not animals, the Jews were not slave owners, that they were human beings. And so there is simply no way of saying, well, you know, what can you expect of people who've been marinating? The education, the indoctrination, the entire—or it helps account for this, but there's nothing by way of the explanation that amounts to any kind of mitigation, moral mitigation for what happened. I know. I'm not, I guess I'm speaking philosophy. Look, I I've spent my whole life around a lot of Arabic people who were you know, not only very close

with me and my family, but very, very giving and loyal and dear. And yet, on so many occasions, I would speak to them about Arab-Jewish stuff, and the stuff that would come out of their mouths was right out of the...

I mean, they wouldn't tell me they were happy about somebody being killed, but they had horrifying views. And I learned to just say, well, you know if it was somebody my college roommate said that I'd be like get the fuck out of here I never want to see you again

but I learned that that would not be a fair way to judge them I've never really come to a theory of it all that all holds together. Maybe it's just that humans are complicated

and can hold very, very conflicting views. And I'm really just meandering now, speaking off the top of my head. But I had a long conversation on Zoom with a very close Palestinian friend of mine the day before yesterday. And the kind of things he was saying were really troubling to me. Like what? Well, you're not saying his name, so.

Just saying, well, you have to understand, you know, they kill our children, too. And I say, yes, but they were turning fire. It's the same thing. It's the same thing as beheading a bunch of babies and cutting open a pregnant woman's stomach. Well, this is why I didn't want to tell you what he said, because I know. So tell me what he said.

Right. But, but is that the same thing? No, it's not the same thing as far as I can tell. No, I'm not suggesting that. And he would,

he would talk around that. Okay. And, um, it's just it's emotionally it's difficult for me and it's troubling i don't mean to excuse hamas in any way but there is something about the the the brainwashing of the way they're raised which i somehow want to integrate into the way I judge it all. It's not the same thing as Putin bombing the Ukrainians. Somehow I think that is somehow different, just as unacceptable, just as necessary for the victims of it to protect themselves from it and do whatever it takes to stop it. But somehow it's different to me.

I don't know. Look, I mean, there is the ADL does global surveys of anti-Semitism and the highest rates of anti-Semitism come from the Middle East and North Africa. And so it saturates the culture and I think it harms the culture. And I've written this, that cultures where there are high levels of anti-Semitic attitudes are cultures that are also saturated with conspiracy theories, and yet, well, one of my very closest friends is Egyptian, Muslim, and more clear-eyed and, by the way, philo-Semitic than just about anyone I know. So, you know, I'm not even sure what we're talking about here. This is an emotional time. It's the kind of thing I've been thinking about.

So just I'll give you one other example, and then we have to end. You know, black people have a terrible time with the police being pulled over, often questioned, questioned arrogantly. And many of them will even offer, or certainly do understand, well, I understand the crime rates in New York. I understand why I'm going to get more attention from the police. And

yet with all that intellectual understanding, the resentment they feel is real. And how do you, you can tell the people, the other, everybody, the 2 million minus the 20,000 Hamas people in Gaza, well, you have to understand, the reason you live this way is because of these 20,000 people. It's not really Israel's fault. They bring this on you. They're firing rockets. What would you have the Israelis do? And I'm sure many can understand that.

But the anger and the resentment is not going to respond to that. It's just human. The rage, that rage is going to be real even if they're not anti-Semitic, just the way the black rage against society is real, even if they don't hate anybody. They just cannot stand living this way. I can't stand comparisons like that that because you're you're comparing totally different i'm comparing a human a human

i don't know maybe i listen i called you here to tell me i'm wrong i you know i i um you're wrong and in some way i i sense i mean i i i have to say just just straight out, like, you know, I mean, if I was constantly being pulled over and harassed by the police, as so many Black Americans are, for no reason, I I feel rage about the anti-Semitism that, you know, is so pervasive in educated corners of American life. Notice that, you know, the African-American, the black response to it is to demand fuller civil rights participation, better standards from policing. It's not. And some riots. Which are trivial next to firing rockets. Yes. The whole way in which the discussion about race in America is constantly transplanted to what's happening in the Middle East is not productive.

I think it obscures much more than it illuminates. But, you know, I'm not really trying to compare the race to that. human who is—checkpoints is similar to what we're talking about, that humans just don't respond to rational reasons. If there is a comparison, okay, if the Palestinian response to Israeli security measures, checkpoints, restrictions on movement, right, if you're going to make that comparison, then you should look to Black America as an inspiration that the answer to that is protest, not killing, participation, not, you know, quote, resistance with genocidal intent. But again, I think the comparisons are always misbegotten when you're trying to look at American stories and just kind of lay them on to Middle Eastern stories.

Different culture, different circumstances. I didn't mean to do that. Maybe I'm not making myself clear. But would you listen? The solution to this problem... There is no solution. Well, it's a psychological issue. The Arabs do not want to make peace.

And that is a psychological issue. And until that psychological issue is cracked, it will never change. So I'm trying with an open mind not to excuse or to do any of the things that you might think I'm trying to do. I'm trying to inhabit the psychology. That's all. I'm just trying to inhabit the psychology because unless I can inhabit the psychology, I'm going to be a jackass trying to throw up answers. I have to inhabit the psychology. That's all.

I'm trying to inhabit the psychology. I mean, you know... Nothing more than that. I think the tragedy of the Palestinians is that for five generations, since the Mufti of Jerusalem, going back to the 1920s and 30s, who became an ally of Adolf Hitler, the tragedy has been that they have had leaders, self-perpetuating leaders, whose

idea of glory has been the destruction of another rather than the elevation of themselves and their people. And if you look at successful Arab states like the United Arab Emirates, they have turned that concept on its head and said, we want to prove how much we can do, not by tearing someone else down, but by attracting talent, capital, opportunity, initiative. UAE is far from a perfect state, and that's a subject for another time. But the basic thinking behind Mohammed bin Zayed and that family that revolutionized the UAE is that the way towards empowerment is by offering value and progress and civilized norms to your people, not at someone else's expense. They decided that politics should not be a zero-sum game, that foreign policy should not be a zero-sum game, and their peace with Israel was of a peace with that kind of mentality. And I don't think we should discount the possibility that in the future, the Palestinians will ask themselves on a political level,

what kind of society do we want to have? Do we want one that looks like the United Arab Emirates on one side of the Arabian Peninsula, or one that looks like Yemen on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula? Do we want a future Palestinian state to be small but beautiful, like Singapore, Switzerland, lots of small countries are outperformers on multiple levels? Or do we see ourselves as the tip of the spear in a historic fantasy about destroying crusader states, Christian or Jewish or otherwise, on this

piece of land. And I think what matters is that the international community say to the Palestinians in a clarion voice, we want you to have a state, we want you to have a future. But if that state is Hamas-tan, if that future is genocide, you're never going to get it. And that's a message that has yet to be made, I think, as clearly as it should be. Palestinians ought to be presented with a choice, that there is a bright and prosperous future, that it happens when you look at your neighbors as assets, not enemies. And there is a dark future that happens when you look at your enemies as your implacable foes whom you must kill and destroy. And this, you know, this is hardly a moment when you want to start thinking about, like, what good could come of

the horror that has unfurled. But from the horror that unfurled in World War II, you got a Japanese state that is known for producing great cars and, you know, interesting food and has a pacifist constitution. Germany was a byword for militarism for a hundred years, and that ended with the end of the Second World War. So maybe there is an opportunity, and it's very difficult to forecast, but maybe there's an opportunity to say that this is a moment when Palestinians will have to choose a different idea of who they want to be in order to have any hope of statehood or honor or respect. All right, let's hope. Brett Stevens is a must-read in the New York Times and is a big North Star for me. I read you and I admire you

and very, very thankful for you to come down here. Thank you, Brett Stevens. Thank you.