The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The Israel-Hamas War and a Vision for the Future with Ambassador Michael Oren

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Michael Oren is an historian, former Israeli Ambassador to the US, and NYT bestselling author. He served as a Member of Knesset and as the Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office. In his new book, "2048: The Rejuvenated State," Ambassador Oren sets out his vision for Israel in honor of Israel's 75th Independence Day 25 years in the future.  His substack is: claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com

Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the world-famous comedy cellar. I am Periel, the producer of the show, and I'm here with Noam Dwarman, the owner of the comedy cellar, and we have a very special guest today who is returning for his second time on the show, if I'm not mistaken. First time in person. Go ahead. First time in person, that's right. We have historian, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and New York Times bestselling author. And he also served as a member of the Knesset and as the deputy minister in the prime minister's

office. Welcome to the show, Mr. Michael Oren. Thank you, Perriello. Thank you, Norm. Good to be here again and in person. Very happy to have you here. Let me put the mic a little bit closer to you. Gotcha.

That's what I say, Perry. That was a very good introduction. Much better than your previous ones. Thank you. It didn't have that public access TV quality that you usually have. Definitely an NPR voice, isn't there? Yes. The New York Times voice.

Definitely. If you live from overseas, you hear it very, very clearly. And an NPR attitude. Right. All right. So, Ambassador Oren, thank you very, very much. Let's get right to it. Tell us about – I've been surprised.

I've been speaking to Israelis. I say, what do you think about the hostage deal? And most people I've spoken to have been ambivalent about it. Things, I guess, they wouldn't say publicly because it feels so heartless in a way. But I was expecting euphoria, but I haven't heard that. Anybody who's not ambivalent is not being honest. You have to be ambivalent. Ambivalence is hardwired into the war from day one, from day one.

So from day one, Israel established twin goals. You're going to destroy Hamas on one hand, and on the other hand, you're going to get the hostages back. Problem is that both those goals are mutually exclusive. They're irreconcilable. And they became increasingly irreconcilable as the war progressed, because the assumption was that the Israel Defense Forces could ratchet up pressure on Hamas, and Hamas would relinquish hostages. But it turns out when you ratchet up pressure on Hamas, they don't give up the hostages, they shoot the hostages. So how turns out when you ratchet up pressure on Hamas, they don't give up the hostages, they shoot the hostages. So how do you do that? How then do you get rid of Hamas and secure freedom for the hostages? In fact, you can't do it. And I always go back to a conversation I

had with my own kids on around October 8th, 2023, where my daughter says, and she was a combat veteran, she was in the Golani Brigade, Dad, Abba, I don't care who wins the war. As far as we're concerned, we lost the war on October 7th. We have one goal and one goal only, and that is to get the hostages back. Because if we don't get the hostages back, I will not be able to send my kids to the army. The covenant will be broken with the state of Israel. Her brother, another combat veteran who was actually wounded fighting Hamas, says, yeah, yeah, but if we don't destroy Hamas, you're not going to have an army to send your kids to. And they're both right. That argument is going on literally inside us. So can I unpack

this a little bit more? Please, please. Okay, so the hostage deal. The hostage deal says, okay, we're going to get 33 hostages back over a period of time. And we, at the end of the day, don't know who is going to walk out of an ambulance and who's going to be taken out in a box. We do not know. And we're particularly concerned about the two children, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who have now been a year and a half in captivity. They're now roughly four and two years old. And we don't know. And in return for those 33 hostages achieving freedom in one state or another, we have to do the following. The IDF has to withdraw from certain parts of Gaza, but that is far from the most punishing, most painful concession. Israel

has to agree to a 42-day ceasefire, And during the ceasefire, we will release something in the order of 1,300 prisoners from our jail, Palestinian prisoners, some of whom have killed people, killed Israelis. I know two people, two family friends whose loved ones were killed by these terrorists, and they are getting out of jail. And they are devastated, devastated. What does this do to our national morale? What does it do to our judicial system? What does it do to the soldiers who risked their lives and in some cases gave their lives to arrest these terrorists? What does it mean?

It's a huge incentive to further terrorism, a huge incentive to further hostage-taking. What message does it send to the region about our inability to actually defeat Hamas, 30,000 terrorists? What does it mean for the situation in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, which is already now going up in flames? The minute you have the ceasefire, boom, huge rise in terror.

And what does it mean ultimately for our ability to make peace? Because the Abraham Accord countries in the Middle East, the Arab countries that have made peace with us have made peace with us not because they love us. They do not get up in the morning and sing Hatikvah. They make love. They make love. They make peace with us because we stand up to their twin existential threats, which is Sunni extremism and Shiite extremism. We don't win against these guys.

Hamas is ball up. We simply won't get peace. You know, you got to give war a chance here. Sorry, John Lennon, but you got to give war a peace in order, war a chance in order to make the peace. So there's a tremendous price for this. And everybody knows, everybody knows, even the people who are most in favor of this deal know that as a result of this deal, Israelis will die.

We know from the Gilad Shalit deal back in 2011, we let out 1,027 terrorists to get one soldier back. Among those terrorists were people who went on to kill Israelis on October 7th and Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, the mastermind of October 7th. Somewhere in this 1,300 terrorists are people who could not just kill Israelis but could be actually the commander of people who killed them. Everyone knows that. I don't want to try that, but just to get this little detail, if not for October 7th, did any of those people, any of those Palestinians released for Gilad Shalit, did any of them go on to kill Israelis prior?

Yes, yes. People involved in October 7th had been released under the Gilad Shalit deal, certainly. No, I'm saying prior to October 7th, were there already some deaths or from these people released? Yair Sinwar had killed people. P.S., Yair Sinwar was in Israeli prison not because he killed Israelis, because he killed Palestinians.

Yeah. And he went on to certainly kill. He, by the way, wound up to kidnap one of the relatives of the doctor who performed surgery on him on his brain to save his life. It's all insane. Listen, we saved Ismail Haniyeh's daughter. Certainly, Sinwar gets out in 2011. 2014, we have a Gaza war. 2021, we have a Gaza war.

Israelis were killed. Palestinians were killed. So there's nobody who can look you in the eye and don't think they even have to look you in my daughter said, something fundamental will be broken in the DNA of the state. And the notion that the Israeli society has to remain resilient is actually a strategic concern, not just a moral concern. And we have to be prepared for the next round, should the next round come. And our experience has shown that there's usually a next round. And to do that, we have to get the hostages back. And so literally 10 minutes ago, talking to my office said, let's get out of Gaza right now. Let's give our army a rest.

Let's, you know, let's build up our munitions reserve and go back in the minute we have to because eventually we're going to have to. And next time there'll be no hostages. Next time we'll finish the job. So you would have voted for the hostage deal or not? I personally would have voted for the hostage. You would have. You almost cannot. Channeling your daughter.

And I've also been working with, not just that, I've been working with the hostage families. You cannot look these people in the eye and say, we're going to abandon them. And it's been excruciating up to this point. Everything about this war is excruciating, certainly on the Gaza front. I also spent a lot of time in the north. And early on the war, where people weren't really focused on the north, where you had about 100,000 Israelis who were displaced under constant bombardment. Hezbollah fired 10,000 rockets and drones at northern Israel before Israel responded on the ground, nothing. And so I went up to the north several times. I brought two delegations of displaced northerners to Washington to meet with both houses of Congress. We were in the White House twice, both with President Biden's staff and Vice President Harris's staff. And then at my very

advanced days, I went into the army last summer to serve up north. Wow. I'll show you a picture later. Yeah, yeah. Now, am I wrong that you were one of the people who thought Israel should have gone to get Hezbollah first? Yes. So on October 11th, I published an article in the Israeli press and the Hebrew press saying that we should open on the northern front. And I thought I was being an outlier.

It turns out that then-Defense Minister Yoav Galan thought the same thing. Many people thought the same thing. And here were the reasons. It was logical. Hamas wasn't going anywhere. There's no way they could run away. And we sort of had them surrounded and trapped. And Hamas is a tactical threat to the state of Israel.

As terrible as October 7th was, and it was nightmarish, Hamas didn't threaten the existence of the state of Israel. Hezbollah was a different situation. Hamas, 30,000 terrorists, about 15,000 rockets. Hezbollah, 100,000 terrorists. Very skilled. They'd spent the last decade massacring Syrians. At least 150,000 rockets, many of them long range, many of them accurate. They could take out all of our essential utilities, our airport, they could even take out Dimona. They had a force that could cross the border and take out Northern Galilee. And it seemed to me that at that moment, we had the world behind us. And we had two US aircraft carriers off the coast of Lebanon, and we had no shortage of ammunition, that would have been the time to take out Hezbollah. And the fear was that Hezbollah

would hit us with between 2,000 and 6,000 rockets a day. Now, that turned out to be a little bit exaggerated, as you know. But still, there was that debate. And the Biden administration, I think, along with the prime minister, turned that down and decided to focus on Gaza first for whatever their reasons were at the time. And do you think, looking back on it now, do you think it still would have been better to take out Hezbollah first, given how they've been defanged now and how that might have changed the plight of the hostages? I think in retrospect, if we had taken out Hezbollah first, Hamas would have been weakened earlier. Weakened earlier.

Yeah. And we would have had maybe a little bit more leeway in going into Gaza because I do a lot of Israeli press, and it's a very different dynamic than it is in the United States. You go on talk shows in this country, and it's my distinguished colleague from across the aisle, my friend from the Republican Party. In Israel, it's you idiot, you fascist.

You've got to yell at each other. You have to have elbows. It's like us. It's all about elbows. You've got to yell and scream. People interrupt each other. So again, around October 8th, 9th, this was a very intense period. I go on one of these talk shows, a popular talk show, and I said, and everyone is talking about how the world is with us and we're going to go and win this war now.

And I said, guys, we have about two and a half weeks. Yeah. You said that too. Oh, yeah. I said that, yeah. Two and a half weeks. My quote was we're about to see – I compared it to – I said we're about to see a worldwide – how do I put it? It's like you're going to see daily George Floyds being killed on television and a worldwide defund police reaction.

That's what I predicted. Can I quote you on that? That's a great line. Damn, why I had said that. No one would have understood it in Israel, but it's a great line. They're going to switch. They're going to switch from focusing on Israeli suffering to focusing on Palestinian stuff, especially if we go on the ground.

And it's about two and a half weeks for American television, about a week for the BBC. And everyone started yelling at me and saying, you're crazy. No, no. How could you say that? The world loves us. They're on our side. It was almost exactly two and a half weeks. If you remember the Al-Akhli Hospital incident, which was really the watershed when things began to change, even though we didn't do it.

Which didn't even happen. Right, didn't even happen. Doesn't matter, right? Right, and it really almost overnight. And to me, there was a question of time and space. So another position I took that also got me yelled and called fascist and idiot on Israeli televisions, I thought that Israel from the get-go should flood, flood the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid and medical aid. You were definitely right about that. Well, to this day, still, people yell at me.

And you've got to give the devil, I don't want to call them the devil, but the do is that aid, withholding aid was the only leverage, Israeli believed, that we had over Hamas to at least let us know who was a hostage, let the Red Cross bring in medications to the hostages and anything. They wouldn't do anything. And why should we aid an enemy population? Was the United States aiding the Japanese in World War II or the Germans? And we also knew that 60, 70% of that aid was going to right into the pockets of Hamas. And all that was true. Except for one thing, Hamas doesn't care how many Palestinians die.

They like to have Palestinians die. That's how they put pressure on Israel. Except for one thing, Hamas doesn't care how many Palestinians die. They like to have Palestinians die. That's how they put pressure on Israel. So the Yelovich argument wasn't very cogent, I didn't think. But still, for me, it was all about time and space. That the minute the world started shouting famine and starvation, then the time and space allotted to our forces to defend us would be constricted, would begin to fold. And so that was my argument. And I got myself called a lot of interesting names on television by saying this.

And it's been weaponized by the people making this outrageous genocide charge. And that, I feel, is going to be an albatross around the Jewish people's neck for a long time to come now. Nothing makes me more furious. Do you remember that that genocide charge predated October 7th? I don't remember that. I remember a lot of times. They were talking about genocide well before that. The groundwork was laid for that.

Didn't get much traction, though. No, it didn't. No, it didn't at all. And yeah, sure, we're there. Can I ask a perhaps naive question just because— That's the only—go ahead. That's usually the prelude to a perhaps naive question? That's the only question. Go ahead. That's usually the prelude to a very sophisticated question. It's been my experience.

Go ahead. I'm geared up here. And then I want to follow up on that. Go ahead. Is there some other reason other than pure psychological warfare and to torture us that they won't tell us, they'll give us a list of which hostages are coming out, and they won't tell us who's alive and who's dead. Is that just... Hamas engages not just in physical terror.

It engages in emotional and psychological terror. And it works. Oh, it works. Just the fact that we don't know in what situation these Beavis kids are coming back tears this realty society in half. Yeah. In half.

Tears me in half. Me too. Each and every one of us. And also that they're sending Emily out in this outfit with her hair braided and they're handing them gift bags. And they've fat've gotten them up. Yeah.

I mean, can you speak to that a little bit? Because as I know it, you know, everybody was watching these girls come out and- It's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's brilliant and evil, but it is, you know, satanic. Yes. And it works very, very well. You saw that, that they handed them gift bags

with merch and logos and pictures, mementos of their time. Yeah, that's what got me. Take photos, like a scrapbook of your wonderful time here as a hostage. It's sickening. By the way, what also sickens

me, although I see everybody doing it, so maybe I'm just missing it, is the use of the word hostage, which to me, by definition, has to mean a living person. They released 33 hostages, 33 corpses. That can't be the release. That's killing hostages. That's not releasing hostages. So, well, some of them were killed on October 7th. Some of them were executed. We know this is a peculiar quality of Israeli society in our culture, which is difficult to explain to Americans.

I'm actually actively engaged in trying to explain this to Americans. Why would we pay a price in terrorists who are going to go on to kill Jews in return for corpses? Why would we do this? And this is deeply ingrained in Jewish thought. Yeah, this is a Jewish thing. It's so deeply ingrained. It's very difficult to explain. It's even difficult to explain to American Jews.

The hostage forum, which represents the family, called me a couple weeks ago and said, help us explain this. And it is not easy. But it's true. And we were willing to pay a price. We have in the past to pay for bodies. You remember there was an exchange for two soldiers killed prior to the 2006 Lebanon war, paid a very high price. By the way, Hezbollah did not let us know that those two soldiers were alive or dead until the truck arrived. And Hezbollah terrorists laughing, laughing, pulled these two

coffins out of the back of a truck. Now this is what we're dealing with. Yeah, I'm making a, I understand that, although I don't know if our listeners do, how Israel Jews value the dead bodies. But I was making a semantic point that the New York Times will say Hamas is going to release 33 hostages when I think the New York Times should say Hamas will release up to 33 hostages.

Some of them might be dead. I don't like the idea that they're still, that's still considered somehow a hostage release as opposed to a hostage murder. They both can might be dead. I don't like the idea that they're still, that's still considered somehow a hostage release as opposed to a hostage murder. They both can't be true. We killed the hostages and we released the hostages. It's a very important point, actually, I think, especially when you're public facing, right?

That you can't call them hostages if they're not alive. I don't think you can. Of all the arguments you have to have in the New York Times over, you know, nomenclature, this could be the least of them. But it does degrade people's ability to think about this because they're actually like, well, they released 33 and it will get lost somehow. Well, no, but they were dead. They weren't. They didn't release 33.

They killed some of them or some of them were dead all along. Don't get me started, as they say. I'm sorry. Go ahead. So getting back to whether they should have taken on Hezbollah first, I just want to say, it's really unknowable, in my opinion. You could say that maybe if Hezbollah

had basically shown what a paper tiger it was and the beepers and all that, maybe Hamas would have been spooked by that debacle. It's one of the points I'm making. Maybe it would have weakened Hamas early on. Or maybe Hezbollah wouldn't have fallen apart so easily that early. A lot of Monday morning quarterbacking here, not just there.

Why did Israel leave Rafah for last? Why didn't you go first? All these questions. I don't know. Was that the Biden administration? The Biden administration. Also, maybe our relationship with Egypt. There are many factors.

One thing I've learned being in government, not being a sort of historian, is that you don't know what the prime minister knows, irrespective of who the prime minister is. The prime minister sees 360 degrees. You don't. You see a slice. And there are big, big, big pictures here you don't see. And so I'm always hesitant. I always take a breath before I second guess. One of the big mistakes made, interestingly enough, Secretary of State Blinken in one of his last interviews stressed this point that 90 percent of decisions made by Israel in this war were not Bibi Netanyahu's.

They were Israeli decisions. You could replace him with Yair Lapid. You can replace him with just about anybody off the street. We would have made probably the same decisions. And his interviewer had a hard time with that. But in Washington, I will tell you, this is viewed as Bibi's war. And it's not. And it's interesting that Netanyahu's reputation in this country is one of being, you know,

very militant and very sort of warmongering. In Israel, he's considered hesitant. Some people even call him a coward. Indecisive. Indecisive and a coward. Yeah. I will tell you from having worked with him for about a decade, he's conflict-averse.

Doesn't like it. He puts on a very sort of pugilistic demeanor, but he's not. So this was... Most Israelis think that we should have reacted much more forcefully. Your old roommate, David Rothkopf,

who I used to be friends with, finally blocked me on Twitter because after there was that accident where the aid workers for the – From the kitchen. The chef. Yeah, the kitchen. He tweeted out – they murdered him and that's what you wanted all along about Netanyahu. That's not true. I said, David, how could you, you know, we got. It's not just that.

It has the fog of war, okay? That's part of this, my resume you don't read out. I spent a long time in the army, fought in a couple wars. War is total fog and confusion, especially in Gaza. And some of my friends who have fought in Gaza tell you that, you know, it's anything that moves, you basically shoot because you don't know. Kids are terrorists. Women are terrorists.

Dogs and cats are booby-trapped. And we have killed a great number of our own troops and three hostages who managed to escape by accident. That's a terrible story. In a war, it's known roughly 20% of an army's casualties are friendly fire. I've seen more Israelis killed by Israelis in war than I have by the enemy, and I don't want to go into detail about that. It's true. It's very common. It's tragically common. And yes, aid workers also are killed accidentally. I have to deal extensively with this notion of who gets killed and how in Gaza. So right now,

looking at just in the last week of programs on 60 Minutes CBS or PBS NewsHour, they will repeat ad nauseum slash infinitum 47,000. Israel has killed 47,000 Palestinians. That's a blood libel. It's an absolute lie. I cannot – I can't emphasize this enough. It is a lie and it is one of the little lies that open the door to the big lies. Why it's a lie? Let's unpack it. First of all, the source. They'll say

it's the Gazan health authorities. Nobody knows who they are. But no one can actually say, oh, it's X. No, they're the one who told us that 471 precisely people were killed at the hospital that never happened. Nobody knows. Nobody in PBS, no one in 60 Minutes can tell you who they are.

Okay. They are clearly Hamas. But even given those statistics, and there's a wonderful professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Adi Wiener, who will show you statistically how Hamas' statistics are statistically impossible. He wrote an article that got a lot. I saw it. It's great. There's other research to show you. If you look at Hamas' statistics are statistically impossible. He wrote an article that got a lot. It's great.

There's other research to show you. If you look at Hamas' statistics, there are no men in Gaza. It just doesn't work out statistically. But leave it at that. Let's say there are 47,000 people have been killed in Gaza. 47,000 Palestinian people. And I'll tell you, any Palestinian casualty is one Palestinian casualty too many. I'll say that right off the bat. But we have killed 20,000 terrorists, and we have pretty good accurate information about that

because usually we have to take pictures of the terrorists to make sure that they're not hostages. 20,000. In addition, out of a population of 2.5 million, over the course of a year and a half, roughly 6,000 people die of natural causes. And several thousand Palestinians, as we know, we've just discussed here, die from Palestinian rockets that fall short.

About 12% of the rockets fall short. You take all that together. You deduct it for the 47,000. And you've got a combatant-to-civilian casualty rate of one-to-one, which no modern army in history has come close to. John Spencer has written very eloquently about this. Exactly. And it's true. So the 47,000 figure that they keep on mentioning every night, and I'm on TV almost every night, and they keep on throwing this number at me,

is a lie. And it's a lie that has very dark roots. Because along with the 47,000, they'll almost always say most of them are women and children. And what is it? Jews kill children? What does that come out of? The 13th century. Jews are vengeful? Comes out of the 12th century. We are the religion of vengeance as opposed to the God of love.

And they have very dark roots. And that opens the door to some of the anti-Semitism that you've seen skyrocketing over the last year and a half. How come nobody cares? This is a cousin, by the way, of the argument about the word hostages because Hamas doesn't distinguish between combatants and civilians, so the press dutifully, well, you killed 47,000. We don't need to distinguish what they are, right?

It just degrades clear thinking. By the way, on this issue of vengeance, can you give us a scholarly answer to this Amalek argument? People are so outraged that Netanyahu exhorted people to go kill Amalek and people, this is another thing that's fed into the genocide thing. I don't know, I take, I'm ashamed of it, but I don't know my Judaism well enough to understand the reference or to understand what it means. But you do. Amalek in the Bible, in the Torah, is the people, the tribe that tries to kill the children of Israel after they've escaped from Egypt. And in Jewish thought, there's a new Amalek in every generation. And we say it at the Passover Seder,

in every generation, there's someone who's going to rise up and try to kill us. And that's why they associated with Amalek. And so we associate Hamas with Amalek. I think it's a very accurate association, by the way. It has a strong resonance with sort of Hebrew speaking or observant Jewish ears. Having said that, there were some remarks made early in the war which were completely understandable, but in retrospect, regrettable, and were used to, you know, where adduced as exhibit A, B, and C in these trials against us for genocide. You know, Israel basically in a morning lost 1,200 people. In American proportional terms, that would be about 44,000 people.

Imagine 44,000 Americans being killed on a single morning. That's like 14 times 9-11. What do you think American leaders would say? We're going to kill these guys. We're going to massacre these guys. And this is the way Israelis reacted. Some, it was really, I forget who it was, maybe Galan called them animals. I, at the time, thought it was insulting to animals.

I did. Animals wouldn't do that. But he was referring to Hamas, right? I guess, yeah. People tried to say he was referring to Palestinian children. It was adduced as evidence in the trials against us that the Israeli government was genocidal in its intent. And that's taking away the simple human reaction, not the Israeli reaction, the human reaction to the fact that we had experienced horrors of horrors.

And in retrospect, it's regrettable. At the time, perfectly understandable. And the ecstasy with which they killed them, too. It's just, you know, I don't know if you saw, I saw those GoPro videos. I had never seen, imagined I could see anything like that in my life. You know, just pure.

And that voicemail that the son had called his father, you heard that one? I killed six Jews. Dad, Mom. Yeah. I'll explain it from my perspective from two points.

One is that it's understandable given the fact that Palestinian children in Gaza, before they can walk, are taught that the most praiseworthy thing they can do is take off a Jew's head or eviscerate them or burn them.

And it's in their Sesame Street, it's in their playbooks, it's in their schools. At Hamas Barney. At Hamas Barney. You see the Sesame Street's a really good one. Elon Musk did a whole speech about this very thing before he did the Nazi salute. Yes, I was in Knesset. I was the head of a classified committee in Knesset. We looked at very sensitive issues.

And one of the issues we looked at was the Palestinian Authority education in the West Bank. They don't teach their kids how to kill, you know, that they should kill a Jew. They teach you how to kill a Jew, like where to stick the knife. This is the PA. Wow. And I used to come out of there sick, and I've seen a lot. You know, in wars, I came out of there sick to my stomach. Okay, so that's one perspective.

It's the education. What do you expect? These kids have been raised to do precisely what they did on October 7th. And the other factor, and I got myself a little bit of trouble in an earlier podcast, so I'm already in trouble as I can say this again. I said that what happened on October 7th to us was shocking, but not surprising. Because this is precisely what they do to one another. You look at Syria today. Look at the pictures that are coming out of Syria. It looks exactly like Gaza. You think Assad didn't do this to his own people?

I was in Lebanon for a very long time as a soldier. I saw what the Lebanese did to one another. It was exactly what Hamas did to us on October 7th. Mass rape, mass beheading, burning the bodies. I saw it up close, but not of Arabs doing this to Jews, but what they were doing to one another. So it's sort of a medieval Middle Eastern way of waging war. And if you look at the chronicles of the Mongol invasions, this is what they look like. Except we're not in the 13th century, we're in the 21st.

My nephew was in Lebanon and his job was to basically rescue the Lebanese that had been tortured by Hezbollah and bring them back into Israeli hospitals. My question is, is how come the world at large, are they're not interested in these facts? Like the things that you're saying and these truths that have nothing to do with whether you support one side or another, like these are material facts. How come nobody is interested in any of that? Racism. Right, anti-Semitism.

Not just. I think it's as bad as anti-Semitism is that the anti-Arab racism is worse. It's not the racism of low expectations. It's the racism of zero expectations. All right. And this is what Arabs do. What do you want? We can't expect them to act like us because they're somehow lesser human beings. They're going to say, that's what the racists are going to say. And so even during the Obama administration, with all their caring about human

rights, didn't care that Assad massacred a half million of his own people. All right, where was the hat? And you can't even call it out. You can't even call out the racism because you get called the racist. That's been my experience. So it's actually much worse. And yet, just because I don't want you to be misconstrued and definitely not me. I've known Arabic people who spoke more openly in anti-Hamas ways than the typical American liberal has. Talk to an Iranian Muslim American what they think about the regime in Tehran. They'll be more emphatic than we are. Yeah, sure. Yeah, of course. But right now, Thomas Friedman called in his column today for creating a Palestinian state in the

West Bank and in Gaza, and we're going to bring in Salim Fayyad as the prime minister. I know Salim. He's a great guy. I used to get him annoyed by calling him a Palestinian Zionist. Why? Because he understands that states have to be built from the bottom up and not from the top down. You have to build transparent and stable institutions. And because he thought of that, because he's incorruptible, they got rid of him. He's a great guy.

It'd be great if he was the prime minister of a future whatever, whatever you want to call it, autonomy state. But does Tom Freeman ask the question whether Salam Fayyad is elected? Or is he imposed by the United States? That to me is a very subtle racism of low expectations. Because what we're saying is, okay, we're going to have a Palestinian state, but we really can't expect these people to be democratic, God forbid, because they're not up to it. And it's very subtle. And, you know, I'm sure, you know, Tom Friedman, my buddy would deny it to the high heaven.

But it's right there. He's not saying let's educate this society about democracy and have them elect their own leader. Let's impose one who works for us. Do you think it's possible to educate the society and have them become democratic? Not overnight. Not overnight. This was the great, you know, the great era made by the neoconservatives and who backed the Iraq invasion. I got a lot of credit in Washington before I became ambassador because I opposed the Iraq war.

Oh, I didn't know that. So I was called into – it was a testimony I gave. It was an interesting episode before the Foreign Relations Committee on the eve of the invasion with my former professor, Bernard Lewis, the late, great Bernard Lewis, who was in favor of the Iraq War. So here I had to argue, debate my professor, to whom I still owed work, and say- A great, a revered figure. Oh, my God. And just a towering, tower of intellect, really. They say that you want to take out Saddam Hussein, blow up his palace, do it, but don't get involved in state-making in the Middle East, I said.

The British had tried. They left. The French had tried. They gave up. You're going to try it. You're going to give up. You're leaving. You're going to create a situation where the Iranian border is going to move 800 miles to the west.

You said that at the time. I said that, yeah. Not many people did. Not many people did. Not many people did. Unfortunately, there's only one thing worse than being a false prophet, let me tell you. Being right. Being right. And it did.

It worked out. But these, you know, Bernard Lewis and his neoconservative friends, I just believe that through military might, you could bring about democracy in Iraq. It worked great on paper. And once Iraq became democratic, it would be like a domino effect and other countries would become democratic and the entire Middle East would become like the Middle East of the United States or the United States of the Middle East. But it didn't work. And you don't have 800 years of democratic thought

behind you. There's no Magna Carta out there somewhere in the Middle East. And what you have to begin to do is educate. So I launched a program in 2004 to translate classic works of democratic thought, particularly American democratic thought, into Arabic and disseminate it. Thomas Paine, the Federalist Papers. And I worked with a young woman who was in charge of a— They're boring enough in English. I'm kidding. No, I'm not talking about the Federalist

Papers. No, common sense. Great lines. I worked with a young woman who was in charge of a State Department operation called MEPI, Middle East Peace Initiative. And that young woman's name was Liz Cheney. And she was a pioneer in trying to introduce democratic ideas to the Middle East.

But it didn't hold. A lot of these books just sat in some consulate basement. Beautiful books, though. So does that mean that if you had your druthers, Israel would reoccupy Gaza? Because you're not going to be able to get them to educate and have an impact on the culture if you can't control the schools and all that. It's so true. But you understand, this is a generational change.

It's not going to happen overnight. What we lack in our diplomacy is patience. But it'll never happen without- Everyone wants peace now, but peace can't be now. Peace could take 20, 30 years to really sink in. Would you reoccupy Gaza if you could make the decision? Oh, I wouldn't. You wouldn't.

It depends how you define reoccupy. All right. Ideally, Gaza should be reconstructed, rebuilt from scratch by an international force with a large inter-Arab component, some type of Palestinian administration. I care much less than the government does, whether it's the PA or somebody else, but certainly Palestinians running the place on the daily day basis, it's problematic

because Hamas is going to knock them off. They're going to knock them off in 48 hours. We've tried a couple of times to put in Palestinian administrators. They get assassinated. There's going to be an insurgency and then there's going to be Arabs killing Arabs. And is the Arab...

Worse, it'll be Arabs, it'll be Palestinians killing, I don't know, Belgians. And our experience in the Middle East is that peacekeeping forces only work when there's no peace to keep. They leave. They run away. But I was thinking if you have a Saudi presence or, you know, let's say a Saudi presence,

and then all of a sudden the Saudis are seen killing Palestinians on behalf of Israel. They're going to go. They're going to leave, honestly. So my point is when you said would they reoccupy, Israel's going to have to retain security control for a long time. But the reeducation of Palestinian youth for peace, something that can't happen under UNRWA because UNRWA doesn't educate for peace. It educates for continued conflict. Has has to be undertaken, not by us. That can be undertaken by international organizations, by NGOs, but it has to be done.

That is the sine qua non of any type of future peace arrangement, laying the groundwork, but it takes patience and it takes resources and forethought. And that has been woefully lacking in our approach to peace, certainly with the Palestinians. So we have to do that. We talked earlier, we were off microphone about Steve Witkoff's idea of taking 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza and relocating them to Indonesia for 10 years while they rebuild this area. He says, this is prime real estate. It's along the beach.

It's great. It's a great climate. You know, this could be the Riviera, right? And it could be. Singapore on the Mediterranean this year. Singapore on the Mediterranean. Or Boca Raton on the Mediterranean. Boca.

It's a great idea. I don't know. The Palestinians weren't thrilled about it. And I heard that the Indonesians weren't thrilled about it. But someone's at least thinking out of the box. There's a line that we say in the after-meal prayers, the Rakatama Zon. You end up with this line that says, I was once a young man, now I'm an old man,

but I've never seen a righteous man abandoned. Now I eat the gumsy cunty. And so I want to say now I eat the gumsy cunty. I was a young man, now I'm an older man. I've been involved in the peace process for well over 30 years. I was an advisor to Yitzhak Rabin. I was an advisor even to the Trump peace plan. And so I have a certain perspective.

And now the big question is, do we go back to trying to work out a two-state formula? And I've a certain perspective. And now the big question is, do we go back to trying to work out a two-state formula? And I've seen them all. Interesting enough, the only peace plan I saw that actually bore a passing resemblance to realities in the area is the Trump peace plan. And God knows, even Thomas Friedman says that's the best peace plan we've seen.

It is. It was a great peace plan. Pre-October 7th, things have changed. But the issue of a two-state solution, and it was hammered again and again by the Biden people, is going to come up. And you've got to ask that question, and I think we touched on it earlier. Okay, what does this state look like? Who runs it? How is this leadership to be chosen? Does it have the ability to have an army? Does it have the ability to make a pact with Iran? How do you keep Hamas out? How do you keep Iran out? How do you stop? We're 85% to 44% according to one poll, 84% of the Palestinians at the West Bank,

you know, hate the Palestinian Authority. They want Hamas. What do you do? And my big beef, and we could probably dedicate an entire episode just to this, to the two-state solution, is that as long as you're hitting your head against this formula, which really stands almost no chance of success, are you closing the door off to other venues that could lead to success? If you're looking for a boost in the bedroom, HIMS is here to help with personalized ED treatments. From chewable hard mints to Viagra and Cialis, get what you need to get it on. Everything is done online, so there are no awkward doctor's appointments and no long lines. To get started, just answer some questions on their website and a medical provider will determine the right treatment option for you. If you're prescribed, your medication ships directly to you for free.

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Price varies based on product and subscription plan. For example, federative solutions. You know, the District of Nablus and the District of Hebron and the district of Jerusalem being federated or a Swiss model of contendment. And why I'm bringing this up is because of Steve Witkoff's notion of moving this population out and rebuilding Gaza. I don't know. I don't know if it has any chance, but it's thinking out of the box.

It's thinking unconventionally. But they have to, you know, I made an observation recently when I saw, you know, they were obviously the Saudis were very close to a deal with Israel prior to October 7th. And yet, despite all the carnage we've seen, all the poor dead Palestinians, the Saudis are very clearly still sniffing around for that deal, trying to figure out how they can make some excuse to be able to still do it. This is how a party behaves when they really want a deal.

As opposed to the Palestinians, who were supposedly very close in 2000, right? And then Sharon takes a walk. That's it, we're out of here. And start the intifada. I mean, that's how a party behaves when they're looking to get out of a deal. Look how they reacted to the

ceasefire. Look at how they swarmed around these poor three women as they were getting released and how they pounded the doors of the cars and how they cursed them and fired fire. They shot in the air with their guns.

These are prospective peace partners. So who says they want a two-state solution? Who says they want a deal? I haven't seen any evidence. Zero evidence. I've been in negotiations. I participated in the last round of negotiations with the Palestinians.

And I will tell you that we talk about borders, we talk about territories, we talk about settlements, even we talk about Jerusalem. It's all, I don't know, window dressing. The issues here are so fundamental. I'll just tell you a quick story. You remember Sy Barakat, who passed away during corona, said something during one of these talks that has stuck with me, and I suddenly realized that all those years in university were wasted. I learned more from this one remark than I learned in many courses,

with all due respect to Bernard Lewis. He said, you want us to recognize you as the Jewish state, which, by the way, is the basic demand of successive Israeli governments going back to Sipi Livni and Barak. Why? Because we're going to recognize a Palestinian state as being the nation state of the Palestinian people. We needed them to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, and so we'd have mutual legitimacy. They refused to do that. They refused to say that there actually is a Jewish people. They refused to say that there was a first or second temple.

They said that all that archaeological evidence is all fabricated. Fabricated history. Fabricated history. Unbelievable. Now go ahead. So Saebarekat says something extraordinary. He says, you want us to recognize you as the Jewish state? Don't you understand that that means negating our identity?

Right. Now take that in for a second. We get up in the morning and we're Israelis and Jews, not because we're not Palestinians. He was basically saying, we're getting up in the morning, we're Palestinians because we're not you. And if we accept you, we cease being Palestinians. What a moment that was, like light bulb, whatever coins falling. We realize what we're dealing with in solving this problem. And find any Palestinian leader, and I mean the most moderate Palestinian, that says there is such a thing as a Jewish people, that the Jews are indigenous to this land, that the things you dig out

of the ground with Hebrew on them are not fabricated, that the two-state solution, get this, is actually the last solution. You can't say final solution. And not an interim solution. Right. Because they will never say it's an end of claims, end of conflict. Never. Is that true?

Don't find one. One. Clinton talked about that, that one of the biggest obstacles was getting to say, okay, this will be the end of the conflict. Never do it. We didn't say that. No, no. We had many disagreements with the Obama administration. But we devised a paper where we had points of agreement.

It was a great paper. And one of the agreements we had was Jewish state, Palestinian state, mutual recognition, and end of claims and end of conflict. Palestinians would never accept it. Things that – With their mouth hanging open. You're supposed to know this. I know it, but I, my entire life, and continue to hold on to this idea that there can be some kind of peace. Well, but there's another thing I heard. But don't abandon that.

Don't abandon that. That's very important. I believe there can be some kind of peace. It depends on how you define the peace and how you get to the peace. And there won't be peace if you keep seeking formulas that have proven again and again to be unattainable.

And think, as Steve Witkoff, maybe not in the same way, but think out of the box. So a friend of mine said, he's a Palestinian-Israeli, said to me that if there's peace, he says, I'm staying in Israel because they're going to all wind up killing each other, meaning that any new Palestinian state would descend into civil war. And that hit me kind of like a ton of bricks, too, because that to me said that if I'm a moderate, intelligent Palestinian who has some middle class existence there, I don't want a two-state solution because I understand that it'll be the end of my prosperous life because it will descend into civil war. So I might not like the status quo with Israel. I might not like the humiliations, but it's still better than what I understand the alternative will be when we are on our own. It may not descend into civil war, but it almost invariably has to descend into

tyranny, and I'll explain. There are very few nation states in the Middle East. Turkey, Iran, Egypt. You see these countries are also very unstable. Like I said, they also need very strong leaders to hold them together. Brutal central power. Israel is a peculiar nation state, because you can take Jews from 70 countries around the world, and we don't have a shared language or a shared culture. You stick them in a land without natural resources, without allies back in 1948, and we will actually create a very highly functioning nation state, because we are a people, it turns out, rather a munchous people, sometimes an impossible people, but a people. All the other states in the

Middle East, particularly in our area, in the Fertile Crescent, are creations of the Europeans. Back in 1916, Mr. Sykes and Mr. Pico sat down, and they divvied up the Middle East between them, and they said, okay, from tomorrow on, you guys are Syrians, and tomorrow you guys are Iraqis, and tomorrow you guys are Jordanians. And they made borders that conformed to their interests, the European interests. It cost tribal lines. And they imported what I would call a Westphalian solution,

Treaty of Westphalia. I'm a historian. 1648, the nation-state system. They imposed a Westphalian system on the Middle East. At a time when the Westphalian system wasn't even working in Westphalia anymore. But okay. Which didn't reflect an underlying reality of ethnicity. Right.

So what happens? How do these states hold together? How do they cohere? Because there had to be a very strong, brutal central power that said, hey, you want to be a Syrian? You don't want to be a Syrian? You're dead. You want to be Iraqi? You're dead.

This was after the Europeans left. So what happens now with Assad leaving? The Assad regime has fallen. And if you ask me, the chances of Syria cohering are relatively small unless the leaders of this Tahrir movement emerge and basically be a new Assad and hold it together. You're not going to – that's how it's done. And people tend to look at the Palestinians and the Palestine issue as somehow outside of Middle East.

It's not Middle Eastern, but it is very Middle Eastern. And so what I say is the chances are it won't maybe go into civil war, but certainly tyranny. You can have the emergence of a very strong, brutal central power that say, hey, you think you're not Palestinian? You're going to find yourself in some terrible prison at best. And that's why the democratic model that the neocons wanted back earlier in the century hasn't worked.

But I just imagine that if the Palestinian Authority did make peace with Israel, the Hamas types would eventually force the country into some sort of violence. There'd be coups, there'd be civil war, and then the middle-class people would be seen as collaborators. And why would they want that risk?

They have, as I understand it, they have the highest standard of living of any non-oil Arab people. And as I said, as much as they don't like it, they certainly, they're not dumb. They're smart people capable of thinking

along the lines of their own interests and they can play it out and say, well, this is not, this is not such a yearning for me to be left

to the whims of our own tribes and our own violence. Israel keeps order. Yes. But we can, we can improve the situation. A decade ago, it's now a decade ago, I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal called the two-state situation. And what did the article say? Listen, you go up Highway 6. If you know Highway 6 in

Israel, it goes up the eastern spine of the country. And you look to your right and you see the cities of Tulkarim and Qalqalkalia, they got big Palestinian flags flying over. This whole notion of should there be one state, two state is kind of moot because there actually are two states. You look to your right, there's a Palestinian state over there. It's got a government. It could be elected if they wanted to. They haven't had elections in 20 years, but okay.

It could be elected or would they elect Hamas? They'd probably be elected, but that's the reason the PA won't stand to vote. That's why Mahmoud Abbas is in the 20th year of his four-year term because he knows if he stands for election, he won't be reelected. But it's got a police force. It collects taxes, you know, at gunpoint. But it collects taxes, right? It's there. So the question is not whether there's one state or two states.

There actually are two states. It's a reality. The question is what is the extent of the sovereignty of that state, both territorial and functional? And if that's the case, let's give the maximum amount of sovereignty that is consonant with our security interests. They can't threaten us. And let's make it better. Is it going to be perfect? Is it going to be a Weberian state? You know, the old Max Weber notion that the state is, you know,

has a monopoly over power? No, it's not. But we can get out of their hair much better than we do. And I think that settler violence is just reprehensible. It has no excuse whatsoever. I'm happy to hear you say that.

We can enhance the situation, but one of the ways you do enhance it is by actually looking at the reality and not thinking you're in a classroom somewhere. All right. I have three quick ones. We've kept you a long time ready. First of all, let's start with

the settler stuff. Stefanik was being interviewed in the Senate yesterday, and she said that she believed Israel had a right to biblical, the West Bank. You said something in our last interview that surprised me. I don't remember exactly what it was, but you take the religious claims on the land more seriously than I expected you to. They have to. Yeah. So how do you put in perspective what Stefanik said, how and and to the extent that you agree with her, how is that still compatible with the two-state solution that clearly you want? No, I don't necessarily want the two-state solution. I said two-state solution is not, I want peace. And you want them to have sovereignty and you want peace.

I want them to have the maximum sovereignty that's consonant with our renters. It's probably what they call autonomy plus. Well, if you were convinced that they were totally peaceful, then you'd want them to have full sovereignty. Yeah, but we know that's not going to happen. Right. But as a principle. In principle. Let's talk about Elise.

Elise is my former student, I should say. Great student. So I knew her when she was quite young. And I was younger. And I will also say, and I've written, that the land of Israel, to its last millimeter, belongs to the people of Israel. I live in Jaffa. I live in a great neighborhood. Jaffa, very cool. But my right to be in Jaffa is the same right that these, quote, called settlers have to live in Samaria and Judea. It's exactly the same.

You can't divide the right. It all comes from the same place. The question is, do you have to actualize that right everywhere in all circumstances? But don't they also have a right? Who, Palestinians? Yeah. I don't deny their right. Equal right?

I don't even want to go down that street, because I understand their narrative. I can actually – I can declare their narrative on this podcast as well. I can almost declare the Zionist one. I understand it very well. Let me just say – We can't – but just the last point is – Go ahead. I don't have to accept their narrative.

I have to understand their narrative. I want them to understand my narrative, too. And so I have – the Jewish people have a right to every square, whatever, millimeter of Judea and Samaria. But the Palestinians also have rights. So you have these clashing rights. You have clashing realities, because two and a half million people aren't going to disappear overnight. You could wish them away, but they're not going to. So what do you do about that? I'm a practical person. So my ideology takes you only so far. And at a certain point, you say, okay, where do we go from here?

How do we make this better? If there's no solution, how do we sort of enhance the situation? So when Elise Stefanik says what she says, or Mike Huckabee, who I saw this week, I was at the inauguration, says something even more. So he says, there's no such thing as Palestinians, right? Never mind, no such thing as the West Bank. There's no such thing as Palestinians. You can say, you can disagree with them. But what's interesting here, and now we're getting into a political question, more than

a philosophical or ideological one, is that all of these individuals who are extraordinary in many ways don't make policy, they carry out policy. I know this from an ambassador. I didn't make policy, I carried out policy. And there's only one person making that policy. And right now, nobody knows what that person thinks, really. I don't care what they say. And we have some indications, but I think that President Trump is a transactional individual. He wants deals. And deals involve compromises.

Do they not? But the question of right is – She's smiling. I guess you like that, huh? In the law, it's complicated so if i have a diamond yeah and she you steal my diamond and you sell it to him uh i don't necessarily have the right to recover the diamond from you you're an innocent party there so like i'm the jews you're the romans wherever it is that kicked me out of israel now you're the palestinians you moved in right and and in a you know if you put in a legal framework

your rights would be equal to mine if if not even supersede my rights. What would change that is the religious argument. And it's hard to pin people down on how much of their thinking is just a logical, legal thing. We were there first, so therefore this is ours. Well, that doesn't really work when you've been gone. Who's they? Ours meaning Palestinians or ours meaning Jews? I was talking about the Israelis. We were there. This is the land of the Bible. Well, is that a historic argument? Well, then, of course, but you were out for thousands of years,

and an innocent party is now there, and they have rights. Or is it, well, yes, but they don't have God's signature on their right here. and that's where it becomes complicated. I don't know where you stand on that. It wasn't clear where Stefanik stood on that. Was she making a religious argument, or was she making some sort of legal argument? I was making a legal argument, because you could... there was actually a legal brief submitted by Eugene Rostow back in 1967-68. He was the chief White House counsel to LBJ. And Lyndon Johnson wondered, no, after the 67 War,

if Israel captured the West Bank, who has the eminent domain, who has the rights to this area? And Rostow concluded that since there had never been a Palestinian state there, that it was what he called, it was called Rex Nullius, that the country that had the most rights to it was the states of Israel. I think the Reagan administration used this argument too when they found the settlements to be legal, I believe. So there's a legal argument. If you're legally minded, certainly you can make that.

What the people who say that the settlements are illegal, they refer to the Geneva Conventions that were enacted after World War II saying you can't forcibly move a civilian population into a captured territory. Now, the Geneva Convention was enacted with the German effort to move Germans into the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, after the war. But now it's being used against us, just as the genocide conventions are being used against us, and they were formulated as a reaction to the Holocaust. But that fails a certain common sense test, because it just, common sense says, well, if you invade another country and you get beaten back, you don't have the right to declare a do-over.

You have to take some sort of a – if they take some of your land, that's the way it goes. Otherwise, you're saying, give it all back to us and next year we can do it again and you can play this out over and over. That is basically the Palestinian argument. Yes. of even countries that have signed peace with us, which is in 1947, the UN partitioned Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Not a Palestinian state, but an Arab state, because in 1947, if you were a Palestinian,

you were a Jew. Very interesting. Like my father, yeah. Like my mother. Was a Palestinian. My mother's passport, her birth certificate says Palestine. But it was even more than that.

If you went to the 1939 World's Fair in New York, you went to the Palestine pavilion. It was the Zionist pavilion. The Palestinians were Jews. And only in 1948 did the Palestinian Arabs become Palestinians and the Jews became Israelis. Created two different peoples in one day. But their argument was, you know,

the UN had no right to partition this land. This is our land, and we went to war against it. Yeah, we lost the war, but now we want retroactively to impose the partition resolution. So it's just what you're saying. We keep on turning down these deals, and then retroactively we demand them. And the principle that if you go to war and you lose, you pay a price holds everywhere in the world, probably except for the state of Israel. And it has to hold otherwise. Maybe Ukraine will be different.

But right now, it's only in our area of the world. I have two exit questions, but do you have anything you want to say about Ukraine? Only go back to being on Israeli television and getting the crap beat out of me. I'm sitting here. I'm held together with chewing gum. Not from being on American television, but being on Israeli television. February, what was it, 2000?

22. 22, when the Russians invaded. I'm on one of these panel discussions, and everyone's in support of Israel's declaring neutrality. If you remember our then prime minister, he was coy for support of Israel's declaring neutrality. If you remember our then prime minister, he declared neutrality, actually went off to talk to Putin, and I thought this was a really bad idea. And the rationale for neutrality was that we need to be on the good side of the Russians

because the Russians are in Syria, and our air force has to attack Iranian positions in Syria, and we don't want the Russians because the Russians are in Syria and our air force has to attack Iranian positions in Syria. We don't want the Russians shooting at us. Remember this? And I got on TV and I said, no, no, no, no, no. First of all, the Russians aren't going to shoot at us because we're doing their dirty work. They don't want the Iranians in Syria either. So, you know, we're getting rid of them for, and if they shoot at us, we're just going to shoot back and they don't, no one's going to buy a used S-300 anti-aircraft system from Putin if we destroy it.

They won't know either. But I said the major reason was a moral reason. Israel, we're part of the West. If we don't stand up for a fellow democracy that's being invaded by a totalitarian state, how do we look at ourselves in the mirror? People yelled at me and screamed at me. You don't care about our pilots, you don't care, you care more about the Ukrainians, those anti-Semites, than you care about... People

assaulted me on the street, you don't know, not assaulted, they sailed me on the street, yelled at me. But here now, you know, what is it, three years later, I feel the same way. Even though, you know, there's been great disappointments on the battlefield for the Ukrainians, at the end of the day, that's where our interests lie. I also said that someday we may have to call on the West to support us. Well, that's right. And, you know, a little bit of prescience there. And how do we do this if we don't stand up for Ukraine? And America, from the American point of view, we need, we can't keep letting our allies down.

We can't keep selling out. I mean, it matters. I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. But don't go on Israeli television. They'll beat you up. Getting back to a real quick one. I meant to ask you this before.

I read some quote of Ben-Gurion's not that long ago, the father of the Israeli state, where he said, you do not negotiate with terrorists. He was very adamant about it. Do you think he would be in favor of the hostage deal? Probably not, but we've been negotiating with terrorists for, you know, 45 years now. But he was maybe right. 45, yeah. And yes, and at a certain point, Israeli society is trying to make a decision,

trying to get away from, you know, Gilad Shalitism. Okay. And it is so difficult because it goes to our DNA. We are a nation that loves life. We are. And that love of life has made us stronger, not weaker. One of the illusions that Hamas has is that they've won this, when in fact, we've won it because we've shown what a society is. We are a society that cares about one another passionately, completely. They're a society that doesn't care about one another. Not only does Hamas not care how many Palestinians are killed,

but the way the Palestinians steal food from one another there and everything, there's not a lot of mutual compassion. The Talmudic notion of kol Yisrael ar- aravim zelzeh, we are responsible for one another, is hardwired into our DNA. And that's what makes us strong. That's the reason, looking at the long game, not the strong game. Yeah, they're parading in Gaza now and celebrating and shooting in the air, great. But we've been around for 4,000 years because of this, because of the hostage deal, as horrible as it is. That's why we're here, and why we'll continue to be here. And it helps being an historian with a

historical view and seeing what this country has gone through since 1948, war after war, and not just cohering, but making this high-functioning nation- state. I've also moved to Israel from New York in the 70s and I've seen a country that back then had nothing. I mean, really nothing. The food, there was no food. Even the falafel was bad. I remember, you couldn't get any meat, you couldn't... Anything, there was nothing. Nothing. Our biggest

export item was orange juice. And where we've gone in the spite of all this, constant I've been in wars, my kids have been in wars all this constant – I've been in wars. My kids have been in wars. Now my grandkids have been in wars. I mean really. And yet we cohere.

And there's something indomitable about us. And to me, you cannot have my personal perspective and you cannot have my historical perspective without being fundamentally optimistic in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Can I tell you what I think? I very much agree with you. And I thought to myself, the culture that would have to emerge of an Israeli society that says, oh, well, they took your daughter hostage and nothing we can do about it. You know, that's it. They'll have to and they'll kill him on TV and say well you know we have

to do that otherwise we'll ask it would be such a damaged psychological culture so hardened it would be a tragedy it would be a tragedy to become that and it's all and it would all be done on the theory just a theory that somehow

this would deter them from doing that which by the way they might only double their efforts. Oh, five people didn't get you to move? How about we kill 25 people? You know, like it doesn't – it's not even – I have a friend who's a high-ranking security person who said to me again back on October 8th, you know, if the government had any gonads that come out and say just we lost 1,200 people. We're going to lose 250 more, but we're going to save the state.

It's not true. You can't say that. It's not true. I don't think it was true. It's not true because your kids are right, ultimately. Your daughter's right and your son is right. They are. They are.

But ultimately, this is what makes us strong. The fact that we care for one another. It's that internal cohesion that keeps us together. And by the way, if you become so coarse as being able to brush off when your own people are killed that way, you will also become coarse in the way you treat other people. You'll become coarse in the way you treat prisoners. It cheapens your whole aspect of how you respect life. It would be a cancer, a psychological cancer.

I can't prove that. I feel that in my heart. But it's also true that, and about Tel Aviv, that people say that, you know, people scream at you on television, people scream at you on the streets, like they'll say horrible things to you in traffic, but the second there's a war, every single

door in that city is open. Or the second you sprain your ankle on the sidewalk, everyone runs over to help you. The same thing. Last question. Wait, come closer to the mic. I was on NPR the other day. And they were asking me again and again, explain to us why you care so much about the hostages.

Explain to us. Again. And I said, because this is a peculiar, deeply embedded notion that comes from the Torah, the notion of redeeming captives. And it's, again, not just in the Torah, but throughout the Talmud. And I said, on December 8th, 1941, a day after Japan attacked the United States and took thousands of American prisoners and proceeded to torture them and march them to death and behead them, President Roosevelt didn't come out and say, listen, we're not going to go to war. We're going to negotiate to get our passages back.

This is to show you how alien this notion – you're laughing, right? It wouldn't have occurred to Americans to do that. But had that been an Israeli state and those prisoners had been taken and were being executed and held that way, the Israeli reaction is different. It distinguishes us. And yes, it is a vulnerability.

It is a deep vulnerability and a liability because now we're encouraging further hostage taking and further terrorism. But if that's the price we pay for our peoplehood and our cohesion, I'm willing to pay it. It's like that old philosophical, is it Plato or something? Is it right because the gods say it's right or does God say it's right?

And this is, yeah, it comes from the Torah. However, it's in the Torah because it's right. It's not just right because it's in the Torah. It's there because the, because the Torah understood, you know, is a reflection of wisdom. That it would be right even if it wasn't in the Torah.

It's just, you know. Okay, the last thing is when will we see a 10-7 independent commission so we get all our questions answered? We must. We must. You know, the Prime Minister wants to have

a government investigative committee. It's not going to wash. No. Because we have to heal. There was a tremendous failure of the state on October 7th, 2023. A failure of the army, a failure of the political leadership.

A tremendous success of the society, but the state failed. And that has to be investigated. It has to be in order for us to heal. And it's not just a moral and sort of a judicial imperative. It's a strategic imperative because we are still in the Middle East and there are more challenges coming and we have to be in a position as a society, as a state to meet those challenges. And so we must do this. And I know, except for people in the government, I don't know anybody who supports a governmental committee. You have to have an independent, anything is independent. You have to have an independent investigation. It's a prima facie picture of someone who doesn't want to be investigated if they don't want it to be independent, right? I mean, I get it.

You think that there's going to be an attack on Iran on the nuclear site? That is the question. It seems to me there has to be because otherwise Iran will have to go nuclear now. They understand they're exposed. I don't think they're going to roll that dice with Donald Trump. They would have rolled it maybe with Biden or Obama. But they don't know. He's too unpredictable.

If we know it's happening. We seem to know an awful lot what goes on in Iran. But having said that, and I can't emphasize this point enough, nothing's going to change. Not Mr. Witkoff's plan to move 2 million Palestinians. Not any idea of a two-state solution. Teach him to speak Indonesian first. Not even the attempts to somehow bring about a peaceful settlement in Lebanon.

Right. And so nothing will happen until the world deals with Iran. Nothing will happen. And there should be no, no delusions about this. And in previous administrations, no delusions about this. And in previous administrations, and I must say this, Biden, Obama, they wouldn't even say the I word. You had Iranian, pro-Iranian militias firing almost 200 times at American bases in the Middle East and no one fired a single bullet at Iran. It's got to stop. I was reading a case in the New York Times about this Italian journalist, Sala, who went to report and found herself in prison and what she went through, the tortures she went through.

This is a – talk about an evil empire. And that evil is not just internal. It's exported throughout the Middle East and the world. I wrote a memoir called Ally, now available at famously reduced prices. And in there, I talk about an Iranian attempt to assassinate me in downtown Washington. Obviously, it didn't work. I'm sitting here. Assassinate me and the Saudi ambassador and how it was broken up and this. But after that, nobody exacted any price whatsoever from Iran for attempting to assassinate – they tried to assassinate Trump.

They tried to assassinate John Bolton. No one takes – where is the price for this? Is Iran in some way a mirror image? I may sound like an idiot now because you describe like these moderate – emerging moderate Arab governments sitting on top of a population which we feel might be much more right-wing and much more conservative. In Iran, we're painted a picture of a very, very Islamist government and we're told that the population might be quite moderate and even cosmopolitan. It depends where and what, yes. Iran is a very diverse society and the part of that society is very conservative. It's a corrupt, vicious leadership and they are – that leadership is responsible for

– what did I say? Ninety-eight percent of the violence in the Middle East. I mean how – Responsible for Hamas, responsible for Hezbollah, responsible for the Houthis. Nobody's even mentioned the Houthis. What's going on in Yemen is insane. Insane. So all of this, nothing's going to happen unless someone steps in.

So my hope, and this is speculation, I'm not now behind the closed doors, that perhaps an incentive for the Israeli government to agree to this hostage deal, which was a hard deal, especially in terms of their constituents, the people who vote for Likud, very unpopular, is some type of understanding about Israel's latitude in dealing kinetically with Iran. So what we've proven in this war, there was a long-time assumption that Israel doesn't have the capacity, doesn't have the ability to take on the Iranian nuclear program. And it's true.

We don't have strategic bombers. We've got these little things called F-15s and F-35s, limited range, limited payloads. But we proved two things in this war. One is that Hassan al-Sarala can hide under 60 feet of concrete and we're going to get them by consecutive sorties dropping 2,000-pound bombs. You must know this. They used the laws of physics to amplify the explosion by overlapping shock waves, and so it exceeded the tonnage of the bombs. Yeah, amazing.

These nuclear facilities are under concrete. Okay, enough said, right? Secondly, our planes flew 2,000 miles, 2,000 kilometers to Yemen. They flew almost an equal distance to Iran, took out all of Iran's air defenses. Didn't lose a single airplane in all of this, okay? Not a single one. So we have capabilities. Maybe not, you know, we don't have B-52s.

It would be nice if the B-52s cooperated. But it certainly should be on the table. Yeah. All right. Ambassador Oren, I feel we probably kept you longer than we were supposed to. I didn't look. I told you this the last time. You have been a hero of mine for many, many years, going back to when my father first gave me your book about the Six-Day War, which I think I told you he described, he was so excited about it,

he described it as cinematic. You see, from the Egyptian point of view, from the Israeli point of view, you know, I read it, I bought copies of it. I never thought I'd be able to meet you. I'm very happy to know you now. And I hope that I'll be able to speak to you many times in the future. Ambassador Orrin, I heard you have a new book coming out. I would call it an old new book. An old new book. An old new book. Why? Because it was written several years ago, like three years ago.

It grew out of a conversation I had in the middle of the night at some of these filibuster sessions on the Knesset. I had a conversation with the prime minister. We were sitting around lamenting the fact that we Israelis are so bogged down in our daily crises that we never think about the future. We didn't know what a crisis was back then. Okay, now. And we started discussing, okay, what kind of country would we like to see on our 100th birthday, which is 2048?

And a country that would assure another century, a second century of prosperity, security for the Jewish state. And Netanyahu said, well, let's do a project. Okay, let's do a project. So I started looking into this, and then, of course, the government fell. And then a good friend of mine by the name of Nathan Sharansky and I decided to have a series of discussions about 2048 with some very interesting people, some of you know, Yossi Klein-Levy, great discussions, but then corona hit.

And I retreated to my office, and I decided to write this book. And what is it? It's basically a manifesto. It is a book that comes out in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, all in one volume. The English is about 80 pages, divided into 22 chapters, each one about a different aspect of Israeli society. So it's the education system, the social system, Israeli Arabs, the peace process, which is the longest chapter, U.S.-Israel relations, diaspora-Israel relations, all there. That's a vision. It's a vision of what I think Israel should look like on 2048. Now, it is designed to stimulate discussion, to get people thinking about our future. Before Israel was created in 1948, for basically the hundred years before that, Jews argued with one another about what the state would look like. Would it be a democratic state, an autocratic state, secular, religious, pro-Western, pro-Eastern?

And that's what made Israel so dynamic. I want to reclaim the ability to argue about our future. And that's what this book is about. Now, before the war, I tell you honestly, it didn't attract a lot of attention. Now it has. Because people understand that we cannot be indifferent to our future the way we were. We just kick that can down the road. We have to really start thinking seriously about our future.

And I'll tell you honestly, in the aftermath of October 7th, I wouldn't change a single word in this book. I'd add a paragraph or two, but it's right there, including the section on Israel's defense and the problems with Israel's defense theory. And being very passive, by the way, and too dependent on technology. And it's 80 pages, and I highly recommend it. It is, again again available at famously

reduced prices I'm taking a trip I'm taking a flight to Poland tomorrow you can read it all the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz wow

so I'm going to read it all the way as bright as the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz yeah this week that's extraordinary 2048 by Michael Oren 2048

it's called the rejuvenated state in English a bit of a pun right and in Hebrew it's called ha rejuvenated state in English a bit of a pun right and in Hebrew it's called a medina

hayichudit as opposed to a medina hayichudit the special state yeah okay hayichudit and

yes I never miss an opportunity to make a good pun right I'm saying this but by the way that's supposed to be

a sign of high IQ is actually being enamored with puns and wordplay all right thank you sir okay

thank you everybody all right