The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - While Israel Slept – How Complacency Led to Catastrophe - Yaakov Katz ( No, there was no conspiracy)

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Yaakov Katz joins Noam Dworman and Dan Naturman to dissect the failures behind October 7, the moral and strategic crises of modern Israel, and the political culture that allowed catastrophe to take root. Based on his new book While Israel Slept, Katz lays out how a nation of elite intelligence, defense technology, and Iron Dome confidence was blindsided by its own assumptions. Buy Yaakov Katz’s book — While Israel Slept — on Amazon: http://bit.ly/4o3b7XE He addresses: Whether Israeli journalism should expose government failures during wartime The growing rift between American and Israeli public opinion Why Israel misread Hamas for decades Netanyahu’s political survival and the myth that Israel “built up” Hamas How AI is used in IDF targeting and whether it saves or costs civilian lives The accusations of an Israeli “stand-down” on October 7 The uncomfortable moral math of urban warfare in Gaza Chapters: 00:00 – Introduction 01:10 – Journalism in wartime Israel: Patriotism vs Accountability 04:40 – Why Israelis didn’t see Gaza’s destruction 08:10 – Media bias and trauma after October 7 13:00 – AI targeting, 972 Magazine, and how truth gets distorted 21:10 – “While Israel Slept” – The Premise and Title’s Origin 22:30 – Israel’s strategic blindness: Containment and Complacency 26:50 – The myth that Israel “wanted” Hamas 30:00 – Netanyahu, Qatar, and paying for quiet 34:00 – The failure of imagination on October 6 35:10 – Hezbollah and the deterrence paradox 38:20 – Can Israel learn from this? Preemption vs Occupation 40:50 – The Right, the Left, and the Gray Zone 44:00 – Morality, civilian deaths, and propaganda math 50:00 – The antisemitism question and media narratives 56:00 – Netanyahu’s communications failure 57:20 – Conspiracy theories: the “stand-down” myth 01:00:00 – Friendly fire and the Hannibal Directive 01:03:20 – Why Israel must investigate itself 01:06:10 – Closing thoughts and the future of Israeli democracy

This is live from the table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller, available wherever you get your podcasts, in particular on YouTube, which I think is how people prefer to do it nowadays because you get the visual as well as the audio. Dan Natterman here, along with Nome Dorman, the owner of the comedy seller, the ever-expanding comedy seller with locations in New York City and Las Vegas, Nevada. You know, I was going to say, you don't need to introduce me that way anymore. Okay. Okay, because Peril did it too.

It sounds like self-aggrandizing. It can't be selling. self-aggrandizing if you're not saying it. That's the definition of self. Owner, common seller, move on, that's it. Okay. Whatever, but you know.

Noted. Yeah, yeah. Paralachian brand is also with us. And we have with... A lot. We have with us. Yaakov Katz, former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, which is the English-language Israeli newspaper.

And... Brett Stevens was editor-in-chief at one time, too, right? Is that right? That's true. So it's a big shoes to fill. Author of While Israel Slept, How Hamas Surprised, The Most Powerful Military in the Middle East, he wrote that with his co-author, Amir Bobbitt.

Babut. Not sure how that's pronounced. Not bad. But who needs him? We got Yaakov here. And to discuss the book and whatever else we're going to discuss. Before we get into the book, can I ask you a question about, because I didn't know your editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post.

I probably should have known that. I has a question about being a journalist in Israel during wartime. Sure. It's got a tremendous pressure knowing that you have to break stories sometime, which are immediately going to be picked up by the enemies of the country and blast it all over the earth. Talk about that. It's a good question.

I mean, I was editor for about eight years, but I was also military correspondent for about 10 years. And maybe I'll just add to the question. It's not just if you criticize Israel, then everyone will jump on the bandwagon and will say, oh, the Jerusalem Post is doing it, then I can do it too, wherever they might be. But it's also, you will find out information definitely about issues of national security, for example, failures like what the book touches on or other operations that take place, and you will reveal information that could potentially

change the outcome of those operations. Like about the plot to kill Charlie Kirk. I'm kidding. It took me a second, but yes. But I mean, like, you know, there are cases. of where you do find out information and the question is do you publish it in the name of transparency and accountability and what journalism is meant to be I would say yes but in the name of we're a country that I've served in the army I have a daughter who recently completed three years as an officer in the IDF I have other children who will one day serve we're a country that's definitely threatened on so many different fronts so revealing that information is that good for the country so what are you first are you a journalist are you a soldier are you a reservist are you what are you and those identities that clash, I think, is very unique to journalists in the state of Israel. It's not something that, I don't know how many journalists in this country have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, probably not that many. Are you American by birth? I am, born and raised in Chicago.

And you made Aliya because your family, are you... Can he finish this? I thought he was finished. I was born and raised in Chicago. My parents moved me to Israel at the age of 14. Oh, that's got to be rough. It was the journey. quite the journey. Are they Israeli? Please.

No. Guys, get back to please. Well, that's a big deal. Fourteen years old, you're a teenager and all of a sudden you're moving to another country? All right, I forgot. I'm just here to add occasionally. I mean, you know, it ties in to some extent because I think what my personal story is one of add to the journalist identity, and I've served in the IDF

and for many years I was in the reserves and being the editor of a newspaper, but also feeling I get a lot of questions now, for example, about the book while Israel slept. You know, why do you got to rehash all the problems? Why do you got to bring up all the failures? You know, why do you got to give people more reason to be upset with the state of Israel? I personally feel that it's my job, right? It's that we have to be, we have to learn the lessons. We have to be accountable. We have to draw the conclusions. And, you know, I feel to some extent, having lived in both countries and spent time in both countries, that I also have something of a perspective of the unique importance of this

relationship that our two countries also have with one another, because there's no question, I think, that we all understand how important the United States is for the state of Israel and how, when we look at the world, definitely in the two years that have passed since this war began on October 7, 2003, Israel today is isolated around the world. We can't rely on Europe. We can't rely on Canada. We can't rely on Australia, but there's one country you can rely on, and that's here in the United States. And I want to hope that that lasts. All right. So, so, so, so the American people are saying that Israel is bombing indiscriminately. They're committing war crimes. And then it comes across your desk that Netanyahu slammed his hand on the table, says, I need more targets. I don't

care what, whatever that quote was. It wasn't in the Jerusalem Post, but you know what I'm referring to. And now you have to publish that. I'll publish it. Right. So, but what is it, well, like, what does it feel like to know that what you're about to publish can undermine what, what, what is actually more important to you, but it's just not your job. But I don't know, you know, you take an oath to that, but I, but I'll tell you what I take an oath to to some extent and how I've looked at it is, journalism is, is not any other job. I've, you know, I don't want to, you know, grandstand or grand denies, like whatever the word is grand as you used before, but I think that the, the selling homeless is important also, but go ahead.

No, and hey, I've been to, I've been to the comedy seller. It's great. I've been to shows here, It's super important. But, no, but I think journalism, it pays a civic role in society. It's meant to do something more than just another job. And that job carries with a responsibility. And that responsibility is to, at the highest level, at the basic level, is to ensure that there is oversight of government, there's transparency of government, and there is accountability of government.

And for that to happen, you have to call them out. So if I might have ideas of the policies I want to see the Israeli government enact or adopt, and they don't, right? And that's fine. But the best way to do that is when you see them make a mistake, you call them out on it. When you see them do something stupid, you say you guys are a bunch of stupid idiots. I mean, when we had a minister in the Israeli government in the beginning of this war who said something as idiotic as, you know, oh, yeah, nuclear weapons is an option for Gaza. I'm paraphrasing here for a moment. I mean, that guy is a moron, and he needs to be called out.

First of all, I didn't even know Israel has nuclear weapons because we don't say we do, or we don't say we don't. We have that policy of ambiguity. But everyone assumes we do. But I mean, what are you saying? Are you an idiot? The whole world thinks we're doing ethnic cleansing and committing genocide. You're just giving them now on a silver platter.

You're a moron. So, of course, we're going to call that guy out. Now, just the last question, then you can get on to the, which goes, but for time to time, there's like 972 magazine. And then that's like, I think, the furthest out there. and then Haarets, which I actually do regard as a reliable paper most of the time. But obviously, they will run stories that you guys don't run. Yeah.

And not because you didn't have access to them. For some reason, you decided they were not reliable or whatever. I mean, you can tell me why you don't run that. Well, look. What accounts for the fact that certain stories I will read in those further left papers, but I won't read them, at least it won't be broken in the Jerusalem Post. I think that there is, there's a spectrum here that we're talking about. One of the things that has bothered me in the last two years of the coverage in the Israeli media of the war is the very limited spotlight that was put on what is happening on the ground in Gaza.

So whenever was spoken about from the perspective of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, very much about what's happening inside Israel. There are stories, the soldiers who fall, the hostages, the evacuees from communities. there's many stories within Israel. What's going to happen with Gaza? What's going to happen here? But we can't deny the fact that there is a tragedy that has befallen the Gaza Strip, right? There's tens of thousand people who have been killed.

There's large parts of Gaza that have completely been destroyed and devastated. Question of responsibility is a different one. I would say it's Hamas' responsibility. Put that aside for a moment. The reality is Israelis did not see what you are seeing here in the United States. When you turn on CNN or MSNBC

and you open up the New York Times or even the New York Post, for that matter, you're going to see pictures that Israelis are not going to see. Ha Arez stands out as the one Israeli media outlet that was actually showing that all the time, was putting a spotlight on the, was humanizing the numbers that were thrown out there, 50,000, 60,000, or maybe people were killed, was giving them a face. That's journalism, right? That's journalism, but it runs up against a question of, which Israelis,

and we have to understand, Israelis are a country that are still. very traumatized by what happened on October 7th. And Israelis are people who, you know, you get into a competition, and it's a bad word, I don't know if it's the right way to say it, but you get into something of a, who's pain? Tacharud. Thank you for the translation. But whose pain is worse or more, whose suffering is more. Israelis will care, obviously your pain is more than the person over there, right? I care more about my pain. But just to illustrate it, I mean, take my family as an example. I'm a father of married, father of four. kids. October 7th happens. From the get-go, we know two hostages. Day one, day one of them,

Elkanabukh, but just got out of captivity last week, now that we're recording this, was a week ago, had been in Gaza for 738 days. He served in the same elite IDF unit as my youngest brother. Hersh Goldberg, Poland. I know John and Rachel, knew Hirsch, from the same neighborhood, same community. He used to go to the same synagogue. that was day one i knew people who were killed on day one the the husband of one of my daughter's teachers the rabbi of my son's school i mean and the list goes on on we're one family in israel right this is every israeli for you so now you take that real trauma that's still there right that only now is beginning to heal because those 20 living hostages finally came home do they

have do Israelis then have the bandwidth to look over there and say oh yeah, they're also suffering. Now, in an ideal world, yes, but let's also be honest. We don't live in an ideal world. They attacked us. That will be the narrative. I understand there might be pain, but I have my pain. So, you know, try to explain that to your average Israeli. They're not going to be open to that. By the way, I don't think the Palestinians are open to it either. Well, that's a different system. Right. But, but, you know, we want to see better on our side, and sometimes we do. So all I'm trying to describe here or portray is what Haritz does is a very important role, and I totally agree with what you're saying.

But I think that you'll have a spectrum of how much coverage you want to give there to give nothing, and there's somewhere in the middle. That's where the Jerusalem Post and probably most of the Israeli media has tried to place itself. So two other things. So first of all, I'm surprised, and I've heard this before, to hear that there is, that Israeli, the universe of what is Israeli see in the media is filtered by the fact of what it is covered in Israel because we now live in a global media system. I mean, I don't get my news from MSNBC. I go online. I go on to the same Twitter that Israelis go on to and the same stories. It's like, how are they not seeing the same stories that I am?

They must be seeing them. Well, no, they're not, but they're not, Israelis aren't watching CNN. They're not watching Sky News. They're not watching, you know. Well, if they don't, if they're not seeing it, it's because they don't want to see it. No, that's 100%. It's available. It's on cable, right?

They could watch it if they want it. They don't want to watch it. So they're watching their TV stations. They're reading their newspapers. They're going to their web. websites. They're seeing social, I mean, social media is the biggest echo chamber that exists in the world, right? If I don't want to see any Palestinians or any pro-Kamas guys, I won't see them. I'll just be clicking my friends and then the algorithm is going to show me what I want

to see. But this is dangerous for democracy, right? Because they have to know. That's the first question. The second question is. I know. I'll just want to say one other point on that. And that was my argument long, in the beginning of the war, like two months into it, I met with the top executive of one of the TV stations. And I said to her, you're doing a disservice to the country by not showing what's happening in Gaza. And she said, we have our funerals and we have our pain and our hostages. And I said, I understand. I feel that pain.

But we the people in a democracy, we are the sovereign ruler of the country, right? We determine what happens by choosing in elections. We need to know the full gamut of what's happening. And one dimension of that is the price of this war and what we are now doing in the Gaza Strip. We need to see it. You're not showing it to us. So my analogy is always, you know, in computer program, in garbage, garbage out. This is

the case with any decision-making process where you don't have full access to the truth. Garbage in, garbage out. And in democracy, the decisions in some way be made by the people and the decisions are only as good as their grasp of the fundamental essence of truth, whatever that is as painful as it is. So we're saying

the same thing. I totally agree. The second thing is just in the 972 magazine. Like they broke the story about the AI targeting. Now, I looked into it, and I felt like they oversold it, and they left out some of the, you know, countervailing arguments, although, you know, if there is a human being that's supposedly still signing off on this stuff,

I do doubt that it's that meaningful. I assume it will be rubber-stamped most of the time. Can I interrupt you? Of course, go ahead. No, go ask the question. I'll ask, and then you can go back to what you want to say. So I look at 972 magazine, and I don't know what to make of it. I know this is a very anti-Israel paper.

I know it's a lot of Palestinians of the thing. And then I wait for the Jerusalem Post story on the same thing. And often, I never see one. And then I say to myself, well, I guess it must be true. You know, I wouldn't read too much into that. Okay, go ahead. That part I wouldn't read too much into. But look, 972, I know some of the people, one of the editors is someone who used to work with at the Jerusalem Post.

They're serious people. I'm not taking away from that. About the AI, though, I've been to the base where the AI targeting is done in just north of Tel Aviv. I've seen how the system works. I've seen how targets are built. What the AI does, essentially in this case, is it takes all the amazing amounts of information that's coming from a multitude of sources, from signal intelligence to visual intelligence

to human intelligence, to open source intelligence. I mean, it's all coming together and being fused in one place. And what it allows you to do, and this is one great example that I got during the war, is at one point they noticed that there was a rocket launcher that was being covered by like this white kind of nylon covering of sorts, right, this fabric. And they said, this is interesting. Are they doing this in other places? And you throw that into the AI and you say, bring up for me all those white coverings

that you have throughout Gaza. And they found that dozens more of these rocket launchers under that. That's just one stupid little example, but it shows you there's always a person in the middle. Nothing is attacked autonomously or automatically. That's what that story. So there, what's my issue with 972 on this story specifically, is what they wanted to portray is as if Israel just kills people indiscriminately without looking into it. I'm sorry, but that's not true, right? Israel uses technology to shorten what's known as the sensor-to-shooter cycle.

So from when I identify a target to when I engage the target, all very important, especially in a battlefield and an area of operations like Gaza, where Hamas guy will pop out of a tunnel and one second shoot an RPG at you, like happened just a couple days ago, where two soldiers were killed down in southern Gaza and then go back into that tunnel. You got to be able to engage him really quickly. AI can play a key role here. So, you know, I think like anything in life, and we're also now all using AI in so many different ways that we use it. We're not yet creating the Terminator, but we're using in it a way that

helps make our lives easier. It helps make military operations easier as well. Well, I find it very frustrating that I can't get to the bottom of it by reading these articles because, you know, I'm pretty tech-sabby. So I know, like, Google, without even asking, does facial recognition now, right, of anybody that you've identified. And in a video, and they don't even tell you that they're doing facial recognition on videos. This is something they're introducing without making it a feature that you know about like they do it at their own pace I'll be watching it

it'll say my daughter's in it and I'll be watching a video of like us at a baseball game like a huge crowd and I don't even see and Google will pick up on a little tiny instant picture of my daughter and so that indicates to me that actually the AI could save

drastically save civilian lives because it's much more accurate than a human ever could be, right? So, but you'd think that we'd see a story saying that. Yes, it's true, but actually you got it backwards. This is saving a tremendous amount of lives because humans are much less accurate than AI. But in any case, here we're two years into the story. It's such an important story. And I still never felt like I got a handle on it that if somebody brought it up in an argument at this table in a debate, I always felt like I was on squishy ground because I didn't

want to defend something that I couldn't defend, you know, with full sincerity and my suspicions about it. Somehow the media is failing in its look into these uncomfortable topics. That's just my observation as a, as a consumer of news. I can't say you're wrong. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get to the, Dan, you want to talk, so your biography? Go ahead. Well, I was saying that to be 14 years old and to be told, and you have all your friends. You're bringing back all my childhood trauma. And you're told, now we're going to move to a country. You don't speak the language, I'm assuming, at that time. Not a word.

And you've got to make all new friends. I mean, I would imagine that's a traumatic experience. It was a challenge, yes. Are your parents Israeli? No, no. My parents are American Jews, both born in Chicago. First generation, both of my set, one set of grandparents are Holocaust survivors from Poland. Another set, one Lithuanian, one Polish Jew came before the war.

but very American Zionists who decided that they wanted to try to make their lives. Here's the irony, though. You ready? I live in Israel. Two of my brothers still live in Israel. My mother lives here in New York, and my father lives in Chicago now. So, you know, my wife is addicted to the show Couples Therapy. Yeah.

What was it, Orna, Goralnik, I think. It's Israeli. And his couples, and my wife is just addicted to this. And every night there's a different couple. And in this therapy, they're always saying, well, I have to understand. When I was a child, my father did this. And when I was a child, my friends, it's like all about childhood issues and childhood memories.

And I turned to Juanita and said, I can't identify with this at all. I literally have nothing about my childhood that I feel in any way implicates anything that happens to me as adult. I have no childhood issues. It's not, you know, my childhood, you know, abuser is not in the bedroom with us. Like, and she says, well, you're very lucky. And I just don't know what the percentage of people is. Obviously, show a couple's therapy. You're having people who are having therapy.

But anyway, it's just something that I was thinking about. Maybe that's why you don't believe in therapy. Do you have childhood issues? I think everybody has, like, some trauma from childhood. Like, would you speak perfectly normally if you didn't have something? No, but you're just, you're completely blocked off to it. mean that like none of you, like none of your Ms. Shagas comes from your childhood. And we only have like 40 minutes. I'm not going to ask Dan now, but.

Well, I have issues, but I don't know if they have anything to do with my childhood or if it's just the way I, you know, I'm made. So I don't know that. But I do have things that happen in my childhood that might affect my behavior now, but I can't say that with certitude. Well, I mean, we could tell you a whole episode about this. So back to the Jews. Yes. While Israel Slept. This is a very, now this is an allusion to a name of another famous book. What was that book?

There were two books. While England slept. One was written by Winston Churchill, which had a name when he came out in the U.K., I don't remember. But when he came out here in the United States, he wrote it. I think he came out first in 1938. It was called While England Slept. And then John F. Kennedy, when he graduated from Harvard, I think it was 1942, 1943, wrote a book, which I've read, might have had a ghost writer, unclear,

called Why England Slept. Why? He changed it to why. He had while. The credit goes to my agent, Peter Bernstein, who came up with the idea and sent that to me.

A Jewish agent? Go ahead. That's a whole other show. And I like the while because I think the story is not just what happened and why it happened. It's all that happened

while we were sleeping in because it was over time. It was from, and that's what we tried to do in the book was go back to the creation of Kamaas to the inception in trying to look at what happened in these 30 plus years since then. And how did Israel come to a point that it knew that there's this genocidal jihadist terror organization

living on its southern border? I mean, see, here's the crazy part of the story. And this is also why I think the comparisons that people have made to October 7th to 9-11 are flawed. Because the better comparison, I think, is Pearl Harbor. What happened in Pearl Harbor? America knew there was a war raging in Europe. It knew that the Japanese were fighting in the Pacific, but it felt insulated and protected, impenetrable here in the United States and the homeland until the war came and crashed onto its borders. Israel knew that Hamas was there, right? We knew, we pulled out in 2005 in the Gaza trip disengagement, handed it over them. 2006, we were already back in after they kidnapped that soldier Gilad Shaliyah. 2008, we went in again in for cast lead. 2012, we had

Operation Pillar of Defense. 2014, we had Operation Protective Edge. You see where I'm going. So you can't say that we didn't know about it. We knew all about it. We knew everything they were doing. But we somehow believed that it was possible to pay them off, to kick the can down the road. Oh, they come in with tunnels.

We'll build an underground wall. They build rockets. We'll create Iron Dome. Everything had an answer that was very tactical without dealing with the real root issue, which is we have a real serious problem here. I've heard a lot of soldiers tell me exactly what you just said, that it was sort of like a hot potato. Like, they knew something was going to happen. There was always, but they just were like exactly, as you said, kick the can down the road.

By the way, and there was good reason, too. You know, I can't, I can't, it would be disingenuous to say that there wasn't. I mean, first of all, we have, we had, and we still kind of have bigger fish to fry, right? You had Iran looming on the horizon, pursuing a nuclear weapon up until the 12-day war in June. You had Hezbollah, which before it got involved in the war on October 8th, the day after the invasion by Hamas, had 150,000 rockets and missiles, we were told. So if you go back to 2006, the last war with Hisbalah. And 100,000 terrorists.

Yeah, I mean, up to almost that number, but really well trained. The Rodwan forces of Hisbalah, the Nukpa guys in Hamas, and we saw what they did. Rodwan is a whole other level. We, in 2006, when we fought Hezbollah in that summer, they had just about 25,000 rockets. They fired about 5,000 of them. We watched over time. They could only hit Haifa North, about 20 miles into Israel. Over time, they got to 150 and capable of striking anywhere inside the country.

So, I mean, you know, you're looking at this and you're saying, okay, Hamas, I got you. You know, you're bad. You're problematic. We understand you're doing stuff. But we got a big fence. We got a multi-layered barriers. We got iron dome. You come in with the tunnels.

We'll build an underground. wall. We'll create a system that can detect when you're digging a tunnel. And we have troops along the border. I mean, it's not a ton, but it's enough to deal with anything that you guys might try to throw across the border. We're covered. And occasionally, yes, we'll play a game of whack-a-mole. You do something. We'll hit you on the head. We'll fight you for two weeks. But we never really have to deal with it because we got to stay focused on those guys. And you know what the best proof of it is, look at what we did. Look at the pager attack. I mean, that's wow, right? What Israel did with his way. That's wow. I mean, someone's going to have to make a

movie about that. But that's, I mean, by the way, the brilliance of the pager attack, I mean, it's really cool that you're able to take a beeper. You can be starring Elliot Page. And put, and put explosives into it. But the bigger question, I think the bigger, wow for me is how does this? Get them to pay for the Pagers. How do you? No, that was Spahnter's joke. Nobody's true. So then we get them to pay for it. How do you, how do you fool his Bala into believing? that Mossad is actually a real, legit company,

and they're going to make this order of thousands of pages. So look at what we did there. We took out Nasrallah, the leader of his Bala, his successor, successor, successor, that guy's successor. Look what we did with Iran, taking out their scientific leadership. You had Mossad with a drone production facility into Iran, right? Unbelievable. So what you see here is that when you understand the gravity of the threat,

you know how to put the resources to it. With Hamas, we misunderstood what was going on. And that's the... How? How? Well, so I think one issue is what we spoke about, the totem pole, if we could call it, of threats. So you got the top ones, you have limited resources where a country with X amount of money,

why a number of soldiers, you got to deploy as you can. You can't put the same, dedicate everything to every front in the same way. It's just never going to work. And you do your allocation of resources based on intelligence. So you say, okay, Iran number one, Hezbollah number one and a half for number two. Hamas, I can deal with with less because they, A, can't do more. And B, is they don't want war.

And that's my assessment based on intelligence. Yeah, I don't know if normal let me go pursue this line of questioning, but I think it's a good time, it's a good time to address the notion, the widespread notion. I do think his biography is interesting. But the widespread notion that Israel wanted. Hamas there and work to bolster their power. I agree.

So the policy of containment that we were talking about had three legs to it. One of them was the legitimate I got to allocate resources in the right way. Number two was in that allocation, I have technology. Technology can help keep me safe. So they create missiles. I create Iron Dome, right? I then can shoot them out of the sky. They're no longer a threat to me. So let them fire missiles. I intercept 90% of them. They don't do anything. They cross with tunnels. We build a wall. We build

the system to detect the tunnels. That's no longer a threat. So we created what we now know was a false sense of security. On October 7th, how many terrorists crossed in through tunnels? Zero. They blew 60 holes in the border in the fence. So that was a false sense of security, but it did give you a sense of security. The third leg to the policy of containment, Dan, is what you were talking about, which is the, for some members of the Israeli government, and definitely for this current government that we have in Israel, Hamas was seen, and I don't want this to be interpreted as if, God forbid, Israel wanted Hamas to attack, that Israel built up Hamas, that Israel created Hamas, that is a myth,

and it's not true. I could talk about where people make that mistake in a moment. But for certain parts of the government, who are totally opposed, and we don't have to agree with them. But their ideologies against the establishment of a Palestinian state. They do not want to see it happen. Having Hamas in Gaza and Fatah, or the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, so then divided, was seen as something of an asset because it helped make the argument, what are you talking about a Tuesday solution? They don't even get along. So where do you want me to go? And the crazy reality is that, and this is, I mean, this is insanity, if you ask me,

But, like, if I told you right now that the war is going to end and we're going to ask the Qataris to send $30 million in cash every month to Hamas, you would say you're insane, right? That's crazy. You don't pay off these guys. Look what they did. But Israel did that for five years to buy quiet. So at the same time, though, that we were asking Qatar to send money to Hamas. You know what we were doing? The Israeli government was using lobbyists here in the United States who were going to Capitol Hill and passed a law called the Taylor Force Act.

You guys know with the Taylor Forrest Act? Taylor Force was a U.S. Marine or army veteran who was stabbed to death on the Tel Aviv Promenade on the beach by a Palestinian. And Lindsey Graham in the Senate, and together with a couple other lawmakers, passed a bill called the Taylor Force Act that basically said the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, the one that everyone wants us to make peace with, pays every month stipends salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons. So legitimate piece of legislation, by the way, says we're going to. you guys want to keep doing that? No problem. But USAID to you will be deducted based on how much money you're sending. So you send $100 million to terrorists. We're giving you $100 million less. But think about that for a moment. We're taking, we're giving money to the terrorists, the genocidal terrorist organization. And we're taking money away from the guys who might not be

perfect, but they are against terrorism. So a lot of this stuff I've heard and has never made sense to me. So I'll tell you, you know, what my thoughts have been. First of all, buying them off seems not crazy to me. First of all, you're dealing with corrupt people who want money or you might tell. It was also the theory behind the JP, uh, JP, uh, JP, COA, whatever, the, the Iran deal. Yeah. Um, you know, you give them money. Um, but, and, and, and most importantly, the alternative to not letting money in there is just adding to the world's ammunition that the Israelis are emissarating the Ghazans, they don't have food, you know, whatever amount of money went in there in some way goes, some trickles to the, to the Ghazan people. So what was the alternative?

If instead of giving the money, Israel was, we're not going to give the money, we're going to go in there and root out Hamas, yeah, good luck trying to do that without October 7th. You couldn't and get the world to support you're doing it with October 7th. You were not going in there to root out Hamas. So paying money seems like much smarter thing to do. As far as keeping them divided and conquered, what does not divide it mean? It doesn't mean the Palestinian Authority. It means 100% Hamas.

It's not going to be Palestinian Authority. So, of course, Israel doesn't want 100% Hamas. Like, who could imagine they would not want to prevent 100% Hamas? And number three, they kick. the can down the road in Gaza because, as you say, they didn't really realize what a threat. I don't even buy that because they allowed Hezbollah to have 150,000 missiles, many of them guided with 100,000 fighters. And that 90% of, if the Iron Dome was 90% effective, that would mean 15,000 missiles raining down on Israel and Netanyahu was paralyzed by that.

There's that story, I think in Jerusalem Post, of him looking with Galanda saying, look at this, Tel Aviv is going to burn. So that wasn't kicking the can down the road because they didn't take the threat seriously. They goddamn well knew that threat was serious, and they still kicked the can down the road. So for all these reasons, none of this narrative has added up to me. It never has. If we had met, if we sat here on October 6, right? You follow me, right? I follow you.

If we sat here on October 6 and you asked me about the Qatari money, I would have told you, hey, it's working great. We got quiet. Right. keep doing it. Would not giving the guitar money have mattered at all? I think, you know, it's obviously, it's easy to prosecute history, right? But why would it have mattered? But what we should never have done is allowed this terrorist group to grow in the way it did.

We never should have allowed his belot to grow in the way it did. Should have never pulled out of Gaza. That I disagree with. There's no other way to stop it. No. So here I disagree because I'll tell you how they would have stopped it on the way. First of all, I mean, there's a couple. And then tell me why they didn't stop it in with.

So there's a couple of things to unpack here. First of all, it's not about misunderstanding the threat. We spoke about how we knew there was a threat there. But take the night of October 6 when there are alarm bells blowing, going off in all the intelligence agencies, right? They're seeing the so-called the SIM card story, right, where Hamas operatives in Gaza are switching their Palestinian SIM cards to Israeli SIM cards. They're seeing the uncovering of rocket launchers. They're seeing the preparation of underground bunkers for Hamas. senior commanders. They're saying, and is this a drill or is this an attack? We knew the,

we had all the information. We lacked, as I think was Donald Rumsfeld, who said, we lacked the imagination. The unknown unknowns. We just did, we didn't, we saw everything happening. Nothing here was a surprise. We just couldn't put the pieces together. And why couldn't we put the pieces together? Because we believed something that wasn't real. And that's the fear is that we go back to that one day, because we will, because the Israeli people want something more than anything else. Quiet. And a good life. I mean, I'm just repeating myself, but what you say you didn't believe, you believe something that wasn't real, but to the north, you can't plead that you didn't believe it was real.

You knew it was real, and you didn't do anything there either. So why would I think if you knew God it was real, you would have done something about it. But his Bala is even, is a worse story, if you asked me. Yes. Because his Bala got to the point where, take, for example, what happened after the so-called Arab Spring, when Civil War broke out in Syria. Iran starts moving in, and Israel launches what becomes known as the war between wars. Almost every week, it's bombing some target in Syria. Never once, not once, did it bomb a target in Lebanon. Why?

And the answer is simple. In Syria, once the country was disintegrated, we didn't have to worry about retaliation from Assad. Lebanon, we were scared. Mighty Israel was deterred by the Hezbollah terrorist organization. That happened under our watch, right? So the question that you look at, that I look at now is okay. We've seen what happened over the last two years. We've degraded and weakened our enemies. They're still there. They haven't disappeared. We're watching what's happening on the streets of Gaza where they're executing people in broad daylight. Hizbalah is still in Lebanon. How do we ensure that this doesn't happen again? And one of the key pieces of that has to be, in my view, at least, you cannot allow enemies to grow. You have to eliminate threats as they emerge immediately.

So it's easy to talk about that today. So when those two soldiers were killed, Israel bombed a bunch of Hamas targets in Gaza. It's easy to be aggressive now. What happens in the summer? What happens when kids are off from school, people are on vacation, tourism's back, hotels are full, all of that. And then you see Hamas guy moving with a rocket. Do you attack? Or do you say, you know what, it's not worth it?

Things are good right now. Let's keep it quiet. And then you say, I'll just write down where they are. I'll keep a list. So one becomes 10, becomes 100, becomes 1,000, becomes 10,000 becomes 100,000. That's the reality. We now know that. So, I mean, the sad part of what I'm saying is that it means you're going to have to

fight all the time. But the important part, I think, is that we're going to have to fight all the time so we don't have to fight big wars in the future. And to avoid another October 7th massacre, that's the reality. This is why, for my whole life, although I didn't want it to be true, I always felt like the people on the right made sense. What you're expressing now is the argument that people in the Israeli right

are expressing against the deal that they've made now. No, but I see, I'll tweak it. They're tying our hands, Hamas is going to reconstitute, and they will. And now that we have the hostages back, our resolve is gone. Nobody's sending their soldiers off to war again to read for a, you know, a Gaza war redo

when the hostages are home. I stand by what I said but we're allowed diverge from the Israeli right is what I'll say now which is we have degraded our enemies we will have to now adopt a preemptive strike doctrine which means to attack when you see these conventional threats emerge if you look historically at Israel it was only against nuclear threats it wasn't against conventional threats but the second thing we have to do is we have to take advantage of the opportunities that now exist. Klausovich was the one who said that military is political, is just another way to achieve a political

outcome, right? It's politics by other means. We have to use this opportunity to help facilitate the creation of new leadership, of a governing entity in Gaza. We have to work now with the government in Lebanon. We have to work and try to work with. the government's in Syria, we have to also engage in diplomatic and political processes. We can't just, we can hold a sword, and it's got to be one big sword in our hand to hit these guys

really hard. But at the other hand, we got to keep it out, stretched out for the opportunities that exist. Because if we don't, I don't think that's the country I'm going to want to live in, and I want to see, I do believe, and it's going to take time. But I think that we can change reality. We can't, you know, one of the things that drives me crazy. I think this is one of the greatest sins of this war, is why did we not say from the beginning what it is that we're working towards? Imagine the Trump 20-point plan, right? That so far only one point has been materialized, which is the hostage release and the Israeli prisoner release. But imagine, had Israel said from the beginning, we're fighting to free the Palestinians from

Hamas, to free Gaza, to create safety and security for the state of Israel, to get back our hostages, of course, degrade Hamas, but also to help create a new governing entity in Gaza, which will be made up of the Palestinian authority. Degrade Hamas? Well, to eliminate is not, it's a nice word. Right. Are you saying on October 8th, you could have said, our, our mission is to degrade Hamas. You could say to defeat Hamas. It doesn't make a difference. There's no such thing. There's always going to be Hamas guys left over. You're never going to get every single last one and round up every last AK-47. Okay, but degrade has a... No, so I wouldn't use that word. You're right. I got to be a better politician. Okay, good. But the, the, the, that's why I'm not

politics. But the, the, the, and the other thing, is and we're going to neutralize the mosque neutralize and we're going to establish help establish a new government in Gaza and we're going to go embark on a political process that will help create one day hopefully peace between our peoples and stabilize the Middle East. Now imagine we said that there would still be people protesting all over the world. I'm not a you know that naive but I think people would understand that this is about something else because what did we say nothing? I hear some words to that effect. Not by the Israeli government. No. What you heard was Netanyo saying, to cite total victory, right, what he called in Hebrew

in it's achon, Mughlat, even printed magat style hats with total victory. You had his top official said, we can't talk about what's going to happen because it'll ruin its chances of happening. And you created a vacuum. And then you had people like Smutrich and Ben-Gvier, the more far-right active people in the government who said, oh, yeah, we're doing this because we want to resettle the Gaza strip. So everybody around the world is hearing that and they're saying, oh, we get it.

This is about ethnic cleansing, destruction, killing, genocide, starvation, so Israel can rebuild the settlements that it took down in 2005. I'm sorry, that was stupid. That caused us damage. So I think that, you know, I agree with the right on the fighting, but I agree with the left on, that's why I'm in the center, on what we also have to do, we have to do both at the same time. Well, I would just narrow in on one thing there, which I think is very clear, which is

that when Venvira and Smokic was saying we want to do all these terrible things to reoccupy Ghazi, expel the Palestinians, Netanyahu could have at that point said, absolutely not. They don't speak for the Israeli government. Why didn't he? And he wouldn't do that because he doesn't want to risk the coalition. And he could have done all the other things that you've criticized, absolute victory, and all that stuff. And if he had simply said, I want the world to know these knuckleheads are talking out of their

ass, there's absolutely no chances, not the policy of Israel. That would have accomplished a lot. All the rest that you're saying, I don't know what it would have accomplished, maybe would have. You know, people who listen to the show know that I've invented my own theory. It's called the difficult child theory of history. I'm going to tell you the difficult child theory of history. You have a...

But it's not from your childhood, as we've already... No, not from my childhood. No, I'm not... I wasn't... Difficult theory of history is as follows. You have a kid who's really acting out. He's misbehaved. He's going, getting in trouble all the time.

and you see his parents, and his parents are very, very liberal. They're like you, very liberal. You know, they're easy going to whatever it is. And you say, well, of course, look at these parents. They don't set limits. They're solicitous of them. They don't punish him.

They're always like trying to understand them. Of course, this kid is acting like running a muck. That's not how you have to, you have to raise a child. You have to be firm. That makes perfect sense, right? They didn't see the same kid. His parents are very, very strict. They say, look at these parents.

They never give you this kid a man. minutes rest. They're constantly punishing him. They're hard on them. They don't show him love. You know, of course his kid is running amok. And both explanations make sense. And neither are probably correct. What's really correct is that it's a difficult child. And no matter what strategy, you throw at him, in retrospect, you say, oh, look at what we did. And look at this result. Of course, we should have done the opposite. And this to me is Israeli history because we tried to make peace and we got the second intifada. Oh, we've got to show them who's boss.

And we got on October 7th. Now we're going to try. Nothing is going to work, in my opinion, because Israel is not the problem here. And that's very, you know, that's very upsetting. And you feel you lose all agency, just to imagine actually no policy that we throw at them is going to have an effect. That's how I feel about it. But I think he's talking more world opinion. But I'm saying world opinion, they were ripping down the hostage

flyers in New York City, the city with the most Jews in the world outside of Israel, before Netanyahu even devised a strategy. But they were protesting on the streets of New York on October 7th before a single, while the Kibbutzim will still burning. That's why I'm saying Netanyahu shouldn't have had absolute victory. That somehow caused this. The world was already at 11 on October 9th. Now they're at 12.

You, you, first of all, I agree with what you're saying. Yeah. But what's depressing about what you're saying is, no, it's depressing. And what it means to an extent is that there's nothing we can do. I don't want to accept that. I don't think most Israelis are willing to accept that. Now, here is where we'll be divided, because you will have Israelis who will say, we just got to keep fighting.

Can't end the war. Go there. Take every single one of them. Occupy all Gaza. You have to be there. You have to have settlements there. That's the Benvir Smuthr-Ritch opinion. You have the people on the far left who are like, you've got to end the war, you got to give them a Palestinian state.

That's what's going to solve it. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think what one of our problems in general society has become is we want to look at everything in black and white terms. And really most of what's happening is somewhere in the gray zone. It's a mix of both. And that's a little more complicated because I actually think that's more debilitating to some extent because it makes you unbalanced. because you take, it's hard to see what is the absolute truth. But it's not always a zero-sum game.

Well, I mean, what's most important to me, given my pessimistic outlook, is that somehow the Jewish people resist the human weakness to dehumanize the Arabs and Palestinian in such a way that their life becomes cheaper and cheaper to them. And they end up doing the wrong moral thing in terms of killing people who, nothing is accomplished by killing them, and it's a stain. It's a moral stain to kill people because you haven't sufficiently consider their humanity. That is very important to me that Israel doesn't continue down, to some extent, in every war. You're talking about the Palestinian civilians who have been killed. Palestinians are, yes, Palestinian civilians predominantly, but anybody,

yes, Palestinian civilians, because this is inevitable, to some extent, in all wars, but, you know, I am kind of like you, an idealist, I would like the Jewish people to be, have the best score in the world on that human frailty. It's not going to be perfect score. Can I say something on that? Yeah. If you don't mind. I have to push back because you don't want the Jewish people have the best. I definitely want the Jewish people to, to have the highest level of morals and ethics. And I think to the greatest extent, for the most part, we do. And I know how the, I know how the army operates, and I look at a couple. I wasn't saying they don't. I was saying that's what's important to me. No, no, and I understand, but I think you can take pride, and that's what I'm

going to tell you. I think that if you look at what the IDF did in this war, the number of leaflets, millions that it dropped, telling people to leave. In Arabic, I hope. Of course, in Arabic. And the number of phone calls that it made. I mean, no other military calls. Oh, you get a leaflet. You don't even have to read it. You get the hell out. The number of phone calls for people to leave homes before they're destroyed, right? Which has never done any war. But, but, you get a little. But look at what Gaza was. It was the New York subway, the London Underground put together 300 plus miles of tunnels. Two years into this war, maybe Israel has destroyed 60% of the tunnels.

Maybe every home, every mosque, every school, every UN compound, every supermarket has tunnels underneath it. This is how they operate. So we could look at just on a simple level, all these people who have been killed. And we don't know the exact number. But all these people have been killed, it's in the tens of thousands, definitely. And Hamas claims that it's, you know, 65,000 plus. But all these people who have been killed, who's to blame? Is it Israel or is the Hamas?

That's one question. Question number two, and this I'll push back on, I don't know how many people were killed. I know that a lot of people were killed. But you all live here, right? Do you imagine for a moment that any media in this country would ever quote the ISIS health ministry or the Al-Qaeda health ministry? It will never happen. But for some reason, the Gaza Health Ministry, aka Hamas Health Ministry, is quoted as if it's God's gospel.

I'm sorry, it's not. It's a terrorist organization that murders, massacres, rapes, abducts in the most horrific ways known to mankind. But I put that aside. I say, you know what? Fuck it. I'll take their number anyhow. What number do you think it is? You have a feel for it?

Oh, I have no idea. Well, you have to have some. It's high. It's definitely tens of thousands of us. I'm not saying people have them to kill. I'm not saying it's not 65. It's 50. I don't know what the numbers, but again.

So at this rate, the balance, whether it's 15,000. plus or minus, it's not... Oh, but it makes a huge difference, and I'll explain to you why. Because even if I take their number of 65,000... 65,000 total, but they're... Total, exactly. That's what I'm saying.

They don't distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel says, so I said, no problem. I'll take the Hamas, murderous, terrorist, mass. I've heard Netanyahu repeat that number, by the way, in an interview with Barry Weiss. Right, no, so they... With lack of another number, we'll take that number. But the one thing I'll ask is take the Israeli number.

And that is, and by the way, repeated by Jared Kushner, repeated by Donald Trump, We don't have to believe what they say. But the number that Israel says and backed by the administration in this country is that 20 to 25,000 of those people who have been killed are Hamas terrorists. Let's go with the 20,000, okay? Every war has something called the combatant civilian ratio, or every combatant to how many civilians are killed. Every war, it's, you know, I'm not even going back to World War II, where it was really bad.

But go ask the United Nations. And every loss of life I want to say from the get-go is a human, is a tragedy, a loss of civilian life, whether a man, a woman, or a child. Terrible and should not happen, but war sucks. The combatant civilian ratio here, in the best case, is one to two, and in the worst case is one to three. Okay? Go ask the United Nations, not far from here.

What's the number? What's the average in urban conflicts? And there's no more urban conflict than what we see in the Gaza Strip over the last two years, and they'll tell you the number is one to six, if not one to nine. So instead of accusing Israel of genocide, people literally should be standing. up on the streets here and applauding the IDF. Now, of course, that's not going to happen. But, I mean, and, and listen, mistakes are made, 100%. I mean, those journalists who were killed what is a month or two ago in that hospital of Khan Yunus, that should never have happened.

But again, it's war. Of course mistakes are going to be, but it's upon intention. Yeah. What we're talking about is something completely different. I mean, the world is seeing something, and I hate to say this, but I'm the less concerned about Israel when it comes to this. I'm more concerned about what's going to happen to the world, because if they don't understand what's happening here, we're in deep trouble. So, yeah, so what I meant, and I take everything you said, I agree with everything you said, is that within the universe where I'm satisfied that Israel is valuing human life, I feel like it has to do what it has to do. and I wish that Israel would do a better job at making the many good arguments it has that it doesn't make terribly. And that is a, I mean, that's a crime, right?

That this government doesn't do that. But in the current political, still in the, you know, half-life of wokeness and progressive, as anti-colonialism, and all of it that the world is enthralled with now. I don't think it would make a drastic difference, even if the arguments were heard. What we see is that many people who know the arguments are able to just ignore. But then, no, the question is a different one.

I'm just painting a bad picture. No, no, but I'll, I see your picture. But then I ask myself a different question. Look, I've done maybe probably, I have lost track, but I would say about 500 interviews, mostly on CNN, BBC, Sky News over the last two years and many other places, right? I was always the guy pre-October 7th, and I've been doing this work for 25 years now almost. I was always the guy who when said, you know, the people would say to me, journalists are anti-Semites.

The Western media is anti-Semitic. I would say, no, we have to do a better job explaining ourselves. We have a better job informing and educating. They're not. It's our fault, et cetera. After October 7th, I'm sorry. there is a foundation of anti-Semitism. And it's not that, you know, you have Jewish anchors, you have Jewish journalists,

you have people, you would say to them, you're anti-Semitic, they would say, what are you talking about? I'm Jewish, my wife is Jewish, my husband's Jewish, my best friends are Jewish. I'm not saying the individuals are. There's something in the media. There's something in the way that Israel is judged and evaluated. Don't we control the media? We thought we did.

We should do a better job. But the way it is is something that is much deeper. I mean, we could do, we speak. spoke about this before. I mean, October, people, people smell Jewish blood on October 7. And let's be honest for a moment. They wanted more. That's the reality. I got to tell you something.

First of all, in actuality, I don't know, in my own heart, obviously some of it's anti-Semitism, some of it is just the habit of viewing the world in a particular way, which came from anti-Semitism, but people don't even realize they're actually viewing it through anti-Semitic or through a lens which was created by anti-Semitism you know it's kind of like a psychological distinction but but the result is one and the same because when you have Jews in this country who are afraid to walk outside with a star of David right right but let me just get my last thing but I think so that's the reality and as a strategic matter I think

we need to go easy on making the accusation of anti-Semitism, as opposed to demonstrating the anti-Semitism by making the arguments so well that you leave an observer to say, what the hell is that person talking about? If these arguments don't satisfy him, maybe he must be an anti-Semite. Because when you, it reminds me of like when, of you aware of it, when they wanted to take down the Confederate flags in the South. Now, there were a lot of white Southerners, and I knew some in the actually, Senator Webb, but I had a friend who really saw this Confederate flag as part of their culture. The South was a culture, and this was all they had left, and they'd have the flag.

And when people would come in and call them racists, very few of them would say, oh, you're right, I'm a racist. Let me take down that flag. They say, go fuck yourself. That's the natural world. You think I'm a racist? Go fuck yourself. You think I'm an anti-sumai?

Go fuck yourself. But if you say to them, listen, I'm not calling you a racist. But can you imagine these are your neighbors? This was the flag that flew over slavery. And then I say, yeah, I, you know, you're right. I didn't look at it that way. You're right. Maybe we should take it down without ever having to be called a racist.

You're 100% right. I totally agree with you. So I think we backfire. We fall on deaf ears. The second we get bad press coverage, The only explanation for this bad press coverage is because you're a bunch of Nazis. Oh, sorry, you called us a bunch of Nazis.

We're going to change your press coverage. It doesn't work that way. If you were, I mean, Israel, every war today is fought on three different fronts. The battlefields where you're fighting actively, the home front where those rockets are landing and you have to protect yourselves with missile defense systems and others

and public diplomacy, the UN and the media, right, in other places around the world. We have totally, totally, totally neglected the public diplomacy. plumacy fronts of this war. That's on us. So before you won't hear me go around yell anti-Semitism, I will yell to Netanyahu and his ministers, you're a bunch of fools and your criminals for neglecting this. I'll give you just one quick example. And then we've got to talk about Charlie Kirk. Go ahead. We created the National Information Director, which is supposed to coordinate between

all of the government agencies and spokespeople back in 2006 or 7. Netanyo hasn't staffed that with the director since April of 2024. It's imagined for a moment you're going to war without an Air Force commander, without a Navy commander. Does that make sense? How do you account for it? He's not stupid. He's not stupid. He's probably

the best communicator we have. He gets media. He understands the importance of it. I am a loss to explain this gross negligence that I find. Do you think there has to be an explanation? You just haven't figured it out? To me, I mean, there's, there's, it's definitely

politically motivated in some way. It's by design. He doesn't care. I think it's either he doesn't care. He likes the argument that everyone's an anti-Semite because it just helps him politically. You ask Israelis, they'll say, oh, CNN anti-Semites. Oh, MSNBC, anti-Semites, right? They don't care.

New York Times, oh, they're all anti-Semitic, right? So he doesn't need to make that locally domestic policy, I think was Kissinger who said, or was James Baker, one of the guy, one of the two who said, Israel has no foreign policy. It's all domestic policy. That's the way it is. So my question about the Charlie Kirk, it's not really about Charlie Kirk, but he's an example of it. There is still this theory going around that on October 7th, Netanyahu or people around him, issued a stand-down order to allow Hamas terrorists to rampage through Gaza, raping, pillaging, killing. And you've seen the Charlie Kirk video where he says this.

so I have my own feelings about it. What is your response to that accusation? I mean, I've heard even better ones than that. I've heard that the Shin Bet, the intelligence agency, wanted Hamas to attack because it wanted to bring down the Netanyahu government. There's always going to be conspiracy theories. In my opinion, I mean, I only spent about a year and a half working on this book, right, and researching it. There's no evidence to back that up. It's complete nonsense. Conspiracy theories will always exist. By the way, did you hear the one? about how the United States wanted Hitler to win the election in Germany and then launch World War II, and that it was by design by the United States.

But I presume the Jews were behind it. And the Jews were behind it as well. I mean, come on, we could come up with a million different conspiracy theories. On October 7, it was the perfect constellation of everything that could potentially go wrong went wrong. We misunderstood the intelligence that was coming in, and we go through the blow-by-blow in the book of what happened and how that happened. We, the, the, the Hamas attack, as low-tech as it was, was super sophisticated in the way they used the rockets. They knew they'd studied the IDF on the front-line positions. They knew they would go into the safe spaces. They knew they

would be preoccupied. They crossed the border within four minutes. We have their GoPro videos. from when they were sitting around a table like this, having a last cup of coffee and a last cigarette and then dashed to the border, blew the hole in the fence at the same time dropping explosive devices on the cameras, on those towers on the border, blinding the army. They went to the front line positions, cut the communication cables with explosives and then attacked the soldiers themselves, forcing them to be to fight for their own survival and not able to deploy to help the key. people would seem that we're also under tech. At the same time, so you don't have cameras, you don't have eyes, you don't have ears, you can't coordinate in Tel Aviv, they're looking at what's happening. They can't really get anyone on the phone because they're calling the Gaza division commander. And he's holed up in his safe room because he's got hundreds terrorists inside his own base. So how's he going to coordinate a response? So you have in Tel Aviv,

they can't fully understand what's going on. And then they're watching, they're hearing that this is happening, and they have to think about the north as well. Because if we now send the entire IDF down south, what if His Balano crosses the border? And let me tell you something. If His Bala had attacked us on October 7th, they would have made it to Tel Aviv and potentially beyond. They were more powerful. We did not have the soldiers also on the northern border. So to right away, there was no stand-down order.

There was no plot here to allow Hamas to do this, to bring down. Netanyahu. This was the greatest disaster since Israel was created as a country in 1948 and we have to face up to it. So I'm happy you gave all those put meat on all the bones. My argument has been I didn't know all those details that obviously there

could be no stand down order because you'd have to have a thousand people who knew about it including relatives of the victims, parents of the victims people opposition to Netanyahu like how could you keep? I mean everybody knows they're marauding for hours somebody's going to say hey why aren't

be doing something about this? You know, obviously. You know, you know where I think it comes from and trust me, I have the same crisis of faith, right? That's what it is. It's because we looked at the IDF and we said, wow, what a military. Look at what they could do. Look what they did. We spoke about this, the pagers and all this. They didn't do it. It had to be by design. Exactly. It can't, it can't be something else. But unfortunately, tragically, I wish that was the case because that would be the easiest answer. I then also wouldn't have it to write a book. Relatedly, and this is very important, by the way. I don't know if you've addressed it or haven't addressed it. Someone needs to address it. You know, Mearsheimer is out there saying that a majority, if not

I don't remember his adjectives, but I think an overlong majority of the people who died on October 7th. We're killed by the IDF. We're killed by the IDF. We need an accounting of this because obviously there was some friendly fire. It dripped, the truth dripped out, which has always is bad because it made it look like there's a cover-up of some kind. Two years into this, we must know, somebody must know already what the truth is. What is your sense of the truth, and why isn't it being released? I don't have the exact number. There were definitely friendly fire incidents. Look, in a chaos and in a battle, like what was happening here, where you also, let's not forget, Hamas came in disguised and dressed as ID of soldiers.

Well, can I add to that, but just quickly, not only is the accusation that it was friendly fire that it was on purpose because of this so-called Hannibal directive. Yeah, which is the directive that at all costs, you stop people from being taken hostage. By the way, this is a misconception. Hannibal doesn't mean that they target the Israelis on purpose. It just means that you don't hold fire because. Like if you see a car, even with hostages. But people say that it was on purpose. Right.

But people use the term Hannibal, and they describe it sometimes, Israeli policy, to kill somebody rather than. than let them be kept to the hostage. That's not what it is. Mersheimer's argument, which I've heard from other people, I think like any of these things, when there's a kernel of truth somewhere, they will pounce on that and blow that out of proportion. That's not what happened.

You had 1,200 people were killed on that day. Maybe a fraction were killed in friendly fire, instance. Khamas went door to door, house to house. And we have the evidence to show how they were killed, the videos that they themselves took, the Facebook lives that they themselves... I saw them. Yeah, I mean, this is horrific stuff.

What about all the cars that were engulfed in flames? And people say it had to come from helicopters in the sky. They were shooting them up and they were blowing them up and they were using their RPGs and explosive devices

that they came in with. And there's video of some of that. Yeah, no, no, no, 100%. So the Israel needs to take the bull by the horns here. They need to get these videos out. And let me ask you. Yeah. If the videos came out,

would that make a difference? what's the name, Walt Merseheimer, that's the other guy, Steve Walt and David Mersheimer, with David Mersheimer. John Mersheimer, would he change what he's saying? No, I don't think so. But he would be, he would be in some way discredited. And in, you know, this is seeping.

These videos are available for people to see, are they not? The GoPro videos, I don't think have been released yet. Some of them are out there. Some of them show up on telegram or something. But it's insidiously spreading. It just shows doubt. It spreads from Mersheimer to, to Dave Smith, to Joe Rogan, to, and all the way up to Tucker Carlson,

who's associated with J.D. Vance, and it's becoming... It becomes legitimized. Acceptable, even if you don't really believe it, it's no longer at, like, a ridiculous position. We're not really sure. Like, the Kennedy assassination, even though I always thought these conspiracy theories were ridiculous, it was not considered, like, a blemish to say out loud, no matter who you were saying.

I think there's more to that Kennedy assassination, right? reasonable people were allowed to have that thought it wasn't ridiculous and now it's becoming like that like reasonable people can say i think israel killed most of those people we we definitely need to do a better job yeah 100% yeah yeah all right well is there anything else that that that's important i have a heart out that you want to tell us like i don't want to bury the lead of of the book that you want to tell us that that you'd like people to know you spend two years researching this what what I'll tell you, the one thing that I might just add is that the importance of the need to investigate what happened, because we could find ourselves in this situation once again.

And we have to get to the bottom of this. And Israel does have to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate and to understand what happened. There have to be, whether it's intelligence reforms or structural reforms in the IDF, whether it's personnel changes, whatever it might be. there's a lot that should change, but it would be a stain on this, definitely on this government, which already has a stain from October 7, to not do a thorough investigation. So I definitely hope that that's something that they do. And you're going to get to the bottom of the Charlie Cork thing, that we need to go to the bottom of that.

I will try. Dan, anything else? No, I'm all done. I mean, I did ask my question about his, you know, childhood. So I, Ariel? All right, sir, thank you very much. Thank you. Wait, where, get the book while...

Amazon, I assume. While Israel slept on Amazon. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local bookstore. Are you reading the audio book? I wish I was, but I'm not. No. Oh, right. Next time.

Next time. Okay, you should get Perry Alta read it. There are some words that he says that... On the morning of October 7. There are some words that you say that betray sort of an Israeli accent, like you've kind of lost your... Well, American accent. in a little bit. That will happen

after 30 years in the country. Maybe that's why they didn't let you read the audio. Well, let's hope that President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues American support for Israel. Good night, everybody. Thank you. Do people say it the same thing about the Yom Kippur War where like how did Israel let that happen?

Huh? I mean, I don't know that they're conspiracy theories who asked? I would be nice. the so-called Egyptian.