The Duran Podcast - Moving towards Lebanon offensive

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Moving towards Lebanon offensive

All right, Alexander, we have the news that the War Cabinet, Netanyahu's War Cabinet in Israel, has collapsed. It's been disbanded. I don't think this should be shocking to anybody given Gantz's withdrawal from the War Cabinet. And what are your thoughts on this announcement? Right. I think the first and most important thing to say is that he doesn't mean the Netanyahu. ceases to be Prime Minister of Israel. It merely means that he has returned to the format of the government he had before the Hamas attack on the 7th of October.

Now, that government, the pre-7th October government, was more hardline in some respects than the War Cabinet government, which brought in parties which were seen as being in some ways, and I stress in some ways, rather more moderate and American-friendly than the coalition that Netanyahu headed before the 7th of October and the coalition, which is the same coalition that Netanyahu heads now. What it means is that within the current Israeli government, the influence of the very strong hardliners, the extreme hardliners, people like

Smotrich and Ben-Gvier has increased. They can bring Netanyahu down more easily than they could a week ago. And that is going to lead, I think, to a toughening of the Israeli position. and we already see that Netanyahu is making public statements that he's unhappy about the fact that the Israeli army has apparently operating some kind of a pause in Gaza in the Battle of Rafa. We're going to see a tougher line being taken by the Israeli government

and this is a direct product or so it seems to me of the I think overcomplicated and frankly deceitful policy that the Biden administration has been following to try to resolve the crisis in Gaza. When as it resolved the crisis in Gaza, what they really want to do is to park the crisis in Gaza so that it doesn't affect them or, you know, damage them during the election. So what they did, if you remember, we talked about this and we've talked about this further with at Yovac, Almacian on a live stream, and also Glendison and I talked about it with Alistair Crook. What they basically did in another program that we did, all of which have appeared on the duat.

What the Americans did was that they pretended that they'd got the Israelis and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire, which was essentially, well, which they told us was an Israeli person. plan, a ceasefire which would have left Hamas in control, in effective control of Gaza, which would have resulted in Israeli troops being withdrawn from Gaza. And as we said, this was never something that Netanyahu was ever going to agree to. And the pretense that this was something that he had not, that Netanyahu would not only agreed to it, but had actually proposed. it was obviously false. So that has provoked a crisis in US-Israeli relations, or at least

relations between the Netanyahu government and the Biden administration. We've seen the more pro-American figures within the Israeli government, people like Gantz, pull out. We've seen the war cabinet dissolved, which removes again. again, more of the more pro-American figures. And we've seen a harder line government emerge in response, which, of course, is now strongly opposed to this ceasefire that Biden pretended that the Israelis had agreed to. So instead of getting a ceasefire and getting a situation

where Israel does not attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, we are more likely now to get a situation where there will be no ceasefire where the Israelis are going to intensify operations in Gaza and are going to try to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon. This whole cunning plan has collapsed and it's left the Biden administration potentially in a worse position than it was in before. As things like this, when you try and do these sort of things,

they often do. Was this Neranyahu's chest move, his response to Biden and to Gantz and to all the talk about elections? Was this his way of hitting back at the Biden White House by collapsing the war cabinet and moving to a more hardline stance? Is this his response? That is exactly what he was. And of course, what he's also doing is because he has his supporters in the United States

and he's working with them. And of course, next month, he's coming to Congress and he's going to be addressing Congress. And he's got his friends in Washington. And he's isolating the pro-American or more, less reliable, as he would say, figures within the Israeli political scene. As he reconstitutes his government in a more hardline direction, it was exactly his response to what the Americans are doing. As I said, when you try and play both sides off against each other and pretend to each of them that you've agreed to, that they've agreed to something which they haven't done, you will end up in this. You will end up in exactly this kind of outcome. I have mediated and brokered agreements, legal agreements in the past.

And I know one thing that if you are going to broker an agreement, you have to be absolutely. sure that both sides, each party to the agreement, understands fully what they have agreed to and that they are committed to it and that they want the agreement to work. And if you go to that program, Glendison and I did with Alistair Crook, Alistair Crook, who has broken far more fraught agreements than I have ever done agreements for hostage releases in the Middle East. He said exactly the same, that you have to take your time, you have to build trust between the parties, or at least if not trust, a modicum of understanding. And you've got to reach a point where everybody really is generally signed up to whatever has been agreed. If you try and play tricks with people and deceive them and catapult them into some kind of agreement,

particularly in this region, things are bound to fall apart and will leave you in an even worse position than the one you were in before. Do you think we might be heading into a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah? Yes. I think it is more likely now than it was three weeks ago. I mean, it would be a very, very bad idea. I mean, it would be disastrous ideas. First of all, Hezbollah is a much more powerful organization than Hamas is. They're well trained, very well organized and they're very well equipped,

and they control territory on a scale that Hamas does not. And of course, behind them is Iran. And, you know, Iran was not behind Hamas. it was not involved in Hamas's attack on the 7th of October. But Hezbollah is its ally. You know, there's a religious unity there also. Iran will back Hamas. Sorry, we'll back Hezbollah in that conflict.

So an Israeli attack on Hezbollah is more likely. It might not succeed. in fact it probably won't succeed and it contains again the very real danger for a major expansion and aggravation of the war and of course if we get there

and as I said it's more likely to happen now because the people who are now in control of the Israeli government are extreme hardliners who do want an attack on Hezbollah if it happens now this attempt to trick everybody into a ceasefire that they hadn't agreed to is going to result in exactly the outcome that everybody has been trying to avoid

a major escalation and expansion of the conflict in the Middle East and probably an outright confrontation eventually between the United States and Iran, which of course is precisely what some people in Israel have been trying to achieve for a long time now. In the United States. And in the United States. And all these hardliners in Israel

supported by the hardliners in the United States who are also pushing for in this direction. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Biden really screwed this one up. Biden. Absolutely. They really made a mess of this thing. Yes. On a colossal scale from the very beginning, as we have said, video after video from the very beginning, the Biden foreign policy has completely screwed this thing up from top

to bottom. They made one mistake after another, starting with Biden's disastrous, Blinkets and Biden's disastrous visits to the Middle East in October, directly after the events of 7th October. They took completely the wrong approach then. They gave Netanyahu a blank check. They tried, to pressure the Egyptians to accept millions of people from Gaza, which the Egyptians flatly refused to do. And that has antagonised the Egyptians intensely. And ever since then, they've found themselves with an unending conflict in Gaza that they have no real control of. And what they have just done, as I said, by trying to trick everybody into a ceasefire in the way that they did, is that they've destroyed trust, first and foremost, trust in themselves,

and they've increased the prospects of a blow up in the Middle East. It's been foreign policy so badly conducted that, again, it leaves me speechless. Henry Kissinger must be spinning in his grave of what we've seen in the Middle East now. All right, we will edit there at the durand.locals.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, bitch, shoot, telegram, Rock Finn, and Twitter X,

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