The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 288. Arabs vs Jews? Maybe Not | Ambassador Ron Dermer

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueSXh The numerous heated and hotly debated conflicts surrounding Israel are almost always threatening to boil over and cast the Middle East into unceremonious chaos. Ambassador Ron Dermer sits down with Dr Jordan B Peterson to discuss the issues, the misnomers, and the underlying truths surrounding one of the most resilient peoples and countries in history. Ron Dermer is an American-born political consultant who served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States from 2013 to 2021. As Prime Minister Netanyahu’s top advisor, Dermer was a driving force behind many of the era’s most important diplomatic developments, such as the monumental Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with several Arab nations. Dermer earned a degree in Finance and Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford University.  After moving to Israel, Dermer became a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and served as a close advisor to Natan Sharansky.  In 2004, he co-authored with Sharansky the best-selling book, “The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror,” which has been translated into ten languages. —Links—For Ambassador Ron Dermer:The Reform Islam Needs - https://www.city-journal.org/html/reform-islam-needs-12374.htmlProud to Have Been an American - https://www.nysun.com/article/opinion-proud-to-have-been-an-americanJohn Kerry is Wrong - https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=I_m1QlPxQ88Ron Dermers Podcast, “Diplomatically Incorrect”- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/diplomatically-incorrect-with-ambassador-ron-dermer/id1616923197?uo=4  —Chapters—(0:00) Coming Up(1:02) Intro(5:00) The Abraham Accords, Timeline of the Gulf(14:00) The 200 Pound Gorilla, Israel(18:15) Conflicting Goals(21:33) Saudi Arabia Moving Toward Peace?(26:21) Why do we reduce the complexities of the Middle East to a single conflict?(32:00) Shocked by the Numbers, Burundi(44:00) President Trump and the Middle East(50:09) A Bit Too Convenient(53:12) Israel’s Right to Exist(1:00:23) Denying History, Crossing the Rubicon(1:10:43) Modernity VS. Medievalism(1:23:20) US Foreign Policy(1:32:47) How President Biden Can Win the Nobel Peace Prize // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.com/youtubesignupDonations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-lifeMaps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning // LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus #podcast #politics #rondermer #israel #middleeast #middleeastconflict #israelipalestinianconflict #palestine #ambassador #arabs #jews

Hello everyone, I'm very privileged, I would say, and happy today to be speaking with Ambassador Ronald Dürmer. I've been investigating the background and the significance of the Abraham Accords, which are a piece initiative signed a few years ago, aimed at stabilizing and bringing prosperity and security and opportunity to the Middle East. And I became aware of these accords somewhat late in some sense, given what appears to be their significance.

And they looked to me like the most, no where they moved towards something approximating peace in the Middle East that might have occurred in the last. Certainly since the Second World War, perhaps since the First World War. And that's really saying something in such a fracious world where so much of the conflict has been centered in that area

as it has been for so many thousands of years. So I'm doing some background investigation into the Accords, trying to find out there are strengths and weaknesses, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and give credit where credit does do. And I talked to the American ambassador to Israel, a while back who was signally important in bringing these about. And now I'm reversing that by speaking to Ronald Dürmer. And I'm going to share that with you so you can make up your own mind in so far as that's possible. I'll start with a brief bio of Ambassador Dürmer.

And then we'll move to a discussion of the Abraham Accords in their details and in their context. And some of the associated moves on the political and strategic front that have been, that we're undertaken in Ambassador Dürmer's term. So that's the plan for this conversation. And so welcome aboard. Ronald Dürmer, an American born Israeli political consultant slash diplomat served as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. from 2013 to 2021. In 2004,

Dermer and Nate and Sharanski co-authored the best selling the case for democracy, the power of freedom to overcome tyranny and terror, which has been translated into 10 languages. He served as Israel's economic envoy to the US from 2005 to 2008, and then for four years as senior advisor to former Israeli PM's Benjamin Netanyahu for four years from 2013 to 2021. Mr. Dermer was Israeli ambassador to the US. As Netanyahu's top advisor, he worked closely with his US counterparts on securing long-term military assistance and missile defense funding for Israel, moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, attaining US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, implementing the maximum

pressure campaign against Iran and achieving, as I mentioned, the breakthrough Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel's relation with several Arab nations. Mr. Dermer is currently a non-resident, distinguished fellow at JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. He's co-host of the podcast, diplomatically incorrect and has assured me that he is, in fact, diplomatically incorrect, a partner at Exigent Capital, a boutique investment firm in Jerusalem, and serves on the board of NetSpark, a leading Israeli internet filtering technology company.

So welcome to my YouTube channel and podcast, Ambassador Dermer and I'm pleased that you're here and willing to talk to me. And I'd like you to take over the conversation here and introduce the audience who is watching and listening to the Abraham Accords and your understanding of their nature and significance and the process by which they came to be. So it's a pleasure to be with you, Jordan. And I'm also thrilled to be here

because there is a slight chance that my children will actually watch this. So they can be my audience as well because they won't listen to me around the dinner table, but they are big fans of yours. So I'm looking forward to them actually listening to their father for a change. So the Abraham Accords, if we're trying to understand the Abraham Accords, which happened

in the summer of 2020, it's very interesting because Israel had its first peace agreement with Egypt in 1979. So we waited for 30 years. Israel was established in 1948. It was three decades before we had our first peace agreement with Egypt in 1979. So we waited for 30 years. Israel was established in 1948. It was three decades before we had our first peace agreement with Egypt, which was definitely a breakthrough. And I think changed Israel's not only the military equation regarding Israel and its neighbors,

but had a huge impact on Israel's strategic position in the region. Then we had to wait another 15 years in 1994 when we had a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. And between the second and the third, we had to wait over a quarter century, 26 years. Until 2020, on August 13, 2020, there was a phone call between Prime Minister Nantanyahu,

President Trump, and Muhammad bin Zayed, who then was the Crown Prince of the Emirates, the United Air Emirates, and today is the ruler of the United Air Emirates. And that was a breakthrough. Well, we only had to wait about 25 days for the next breakthrough to happen, which happened in early September with a call with the King of Bahrain, the Prime Minister and the President. And then you had the Abraham Accords which were formally signed on September 15, 2020. So we had two. Immediately after those Accords were signed, two more countries, Sudan and Morocco,

increased the number of four countries, four Arab countries that had done peace or normalization agreements with Israel. And what is striking is how little attention is paid to the fact that in the first 72 years of Israel's history, we have two peace agreements with Arab countries. And in a four or five-month period in 2020, you had four agreements. Now how did that happen? Now there's a lot of reasons why this has been dismissed by a lot of people around the world because it actually, I think, breaks a paradigm that it existed for many, many decades. It also maybe will give political credit to people that they don't

want to give political credit to, but in understanding what changed in the region and what enabled ultimately the Abraham Accords. And by here, the Abraham Accords is specifically the surfacing of Israel's relations with our Arab partners, particularly in the Gulf. If you want to understand, in my view, the Abraham Accords, you really have to go back about 20 years. I'll take you back to 2002. You may remember, I don't know if you were following the Middle East in those days, but in May 2002, the Saudis put forward what was called

the Arab Peace Initiative in May 2002. Now, a lot of people thought that was a breakthrough for the region. I did it. I actually thought that that was a con job in the sense that a few months earlier, about eight or nine months earlier, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers had flown planes into a building, the World Trade Center, had down the plane in Pennsylvania, and 15 of those 19 hijackers were Saudis, and they were responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. So they faced enormous pressure on them to do something. And if you know a little bit about the history of Saudi Arabia, there was a bond that the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the Saoud family made with the Wahab family, which is the Wahhabis. And part of that deal that they made enabled the Wahhabis not only to control the education

system within Saudi Arabia, but also to promote a particularly virulent brand of Islam all over the world through the mosque that they had funded. That was the deal that the Saudis made. And 9-11 was a product of that, not because the Saudis directly were involved in it or directly ordered it, because the Saudi regime had actually enabled this infrastructure of radical Islam to develop and ultimately it blew up on September 11th, 2001. Now, think about the situation if you're Saudi Arabia, 2011, 2001. Now think about the situation if you're Saudi Arabia, how much pressure you have on you to do something? So about eight months after those September 11th attacks,

they called in the reporter from the New York Times, a columnist, Tom Friedman, I believe, who went to Riyadh, and he met with one of the senior Saudi leaders and he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a peace plan. And all of a sudden the Saudis in the public imagination went from being terror masters to peacemakers. But the real question Jordan is this, if you would have asked the leaders of Saudi Arabia in 2002, if you would have asked that, if you could wave a magic wand and end the Arab Israeli conflict, or end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which are not the same conflict, which we'll

get into, but if you could wave a magic wand and end those conflicts, would you? And the answer in 2002, in my view, was, no, I think they had no desire to do it. I think the conflict served their purposes. It helped divert from a lot of bad things that were happening in the kingdom. And I think a lot of the British and the French and the American diplomats fell for the nonsense that the center of all the problems

and maladies of the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So they had no strategic interest in solving the conflict period, full stop. Now let's fast forward 10 years, not to 2020, let's talk about 2012, maybe even a little bit beforehand, but around 2012. If you would have asked the leaders of Saudi Arabia, if they could wave their magic wand, would they end the Israeli Arab conflict, would they end the Israeli Palestinian conflict? The answer then was yes. Now what changed in that decade? I'll tell

you what didn't change. They didn't translate Herzl who is the visionary of modern Zionism. They didn't translate his Jewish state, his famous book into Arabic, and you didn't see a wave of Zionism spread across the sands of Arabia. What changed was a fundamental shift in their understanding, not only in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the Gulf of what their interests are. And this was a result of several factors that came together to, I think, change their approach to Israel and to many other issues, even internal issues we can get to, but certainly to Israel. One of those changes that happened was the Arab Spring. You remember that in 2010, you had Tunisia underwent this revolution.

You saw it in Egypt. You saw Libya. You saw Syria. Some, you saw Libya, you saw Syria, some of them were violent, some of them were not violent in Yemen, in Iraq, all across the region, things were starting to get unstable. And so regimes that were certain of their hold on power for decades to come were less certain. That's the first thing.

Second thing is you had the rise of Iran as a very dangerous power in the region. And that was happening before 2012, but it sort of shifted into overdrive in those years as Obama, the Obama administration pursued a policy of appeasement with Iran rather than confrontation with Iran. And Iran is a shia radical power. They not only threaten the state of Israel, which everyone knows with destruction, but they also threaten their Sunni Arab neighbors. And as I would sometimes tell my Arab friends, they want to re-ad for breakfast. They want to use them for lunch.

And frankly, they want New York for dinner. I don't know if Toronto may be a midnight snack. But the Shia radical power of Iran threatens them, and you see Iran getting stronger and stronger as they feel less certain. Now you had another factor, which is the rise of Sunni radicalism. And that would be in the form of ISIS. Now Iran, as I said, is a Shia radicalism. And that would be in the form of ISIS. Now, Iran, as I said, is a Shi'a radical power. They're also Sunni radical forces, Al-Qaeda,

who perpetrated 9-11, that's Sunni radicalism 1.0. ISIS is 2.0, and there'll be a 3.0. And these regimes in the Gulf are also frightened of them. So you've got this Iranian tiger whose claws are getting longer and teeth are getting sharper. You've got this ISIS leopard that is roaming throughout that region, chopping off heads, decimating populations, and instilling fear in a very wide swath of territory. And here is another factor that is critical to understand the change in the Middle East. When that Iranian tiger and ISIS leopard is rising and becoming stronger, the Middle East. When that Iranian tiger and ISIS leopard is rising

and becoming stronger, the 800 pound American gorilla is leaving the building. So the withdrawal from the Middle East of the United States, at least the reduction of the military footprint of the United States in the Middle East, I think that helps seize the minds of plenty of people on the Gulf. Because if there is one thing Jordan that connects Obama, Trump, and Biden, and they don't

want to be in the same sentence with one another on nearly anything, none of them are looking to send more American troops to the Middle East. So when you see these threats, that tiger and that leopard getting stronger. And the 800 pound gorilla has left. So they say there's a 200 pound gorilla with a keep on, called Israel. Let's work in closer cooperation with them. So the fundamental thing to appreciate is they had a different understanding of their most vital security interests. And working closely with Israel helps them advance the interests.

Second issue now is the rise of Israel as a global technological power. Israel is the second great source of innovation outside of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is one. Israel, that ecosystem that we have for innovation, is remarkable. And we're not just a great innovator when it comes to technologies in traditional fields like agriculture or water. They're also taken area like cyber, which has both civilian or military applications.

So Israel is one tenth of one percent of the world's population with all of nine million people. But we account for about 20% of private investment in cyber. So Israel is punching 200 times above its weight in cyber. So we're not a country the size of New Jersey with all of 9 million people, as I say. In cyber, Israel is bigger than a China. But there are other areas, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence. All of these technologies are the future, and maybe we'll get a chance to talk about why Israel has that ecosystem, how we developed it, but we have it.

Now, if you think about the Arab world's traditional boycott of Israel, it's about as intelligent as Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and half a California boycott in Silicon Valley. It makes no sense. And to the extent that you have leaders in the region who care about the future of their regimes, which they all do, but who are smart enough to understand that the world still needs oil today, but who knows what's going to happen in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, they have to prepare their countries for

a different future. And Mohamed bin Zayed, the crown prince of the Emirates, is certainly one of those leaders. And I think Mohamed bin Salman, and we could talk about Kishoggi and all of that, but I think he's also one of those leaders. And they're looking around the region, and the bottom line is this. They see that their security interests and their economic interests are tied to a partnership with Israel. They want to actually move into an alliance with Israel, but they do have a big problem. These regimes have been poisoning their populations against Israel for six, seven decades.

So it's very hard for them to turn on a dime and say, all of a sudden, hey, you know, we need to do this for the good of our countries. It is very difficult. They don't have democracies. There were authoritarian systems. Some people say it's, you know, more benevolent or less benevolent, but they're all authoritarian systems. But public opinion in these systems matter. And they have to navigate, particularly when you've seen in other countries, a whole regime's go down because they didn't respond to public opinion. So let me summarize just so that I make sure I've got this. So you made a couple of points at the beginning, one of which was that these peace agreements,

multiple peace agreements, four of them emerged in a very short period of time after a very slow process of similar peace agreements extending over about a 70-year period. And that there was some movement towards this in 2002 by the Saudis, but that was mostly reaction to the negative publicity associated with 9-11. You said that the Saudis, however, by 2014, because of all sorts of changes on the international scene, including the American withdrawal and the rise of the Arab Spring, and the dawning realization of Israel's value

as a tech and innovative hub, had convinced many Arab leaders in the region, including the Saudis, that it was more intelligent to pay attention to the threat that was posed to their regimes and to the stability of the area by internal dissidents, both on the Shiite and the Sunni side, than to be concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to ignore the potential benefit that partnership with Israel might bring about.

And that shift at hard enough by 2014 so that even the Saudis who might have been regarded as particularly intractable because of their partnership with the Wahhabis were willing to contemplate the idea that the proper pathway forward for them was in fact a normalization of relations with Israel and the development of the kind of economic stability and military security that might ensure the longevity of their regimes. So just a couple of fine points on what you said. First of all, it's before 2014. By 2012, it was already there.

I would say we went into the Prime Minister's office. I joined Prime Minister Netanyahu there as a senior adviser in 2009. Very quickly, we could see a situation where we were assessing the region in the same way as the Saudis, because you'd have officials, presidents, prime ministers, senators who would come through the region. And a lot of them would be coming from Riyadh or coming from Abu Dhabi. And they would say to prime minister Netanyahu, you know what? Your analysis of the problems of the region are the exact same as the analysis that we're

hearing in the Gulf. And so there was clearly a marriage of interest at that point. The other thing I would say just to clarify, it's not about the dissidents that happened, because my view, I wrote a book with Natan Shoransky about the case for democracy. When I think of dissidents, I think about people who were fighting for freedom and for political and civil rights and human rights, obviously, these are about terrorists. I mean, you know, I was thinking more about the Iranians and ISIS actually. Right, right.

No, so Iranian and ISIS, I agree with you. I would say it's terrorists who want to not only destroy their regimes, but they want to actually take the whole world back to the 8th century. And you know, there's Sunni terrorists that want to take us to the 8th century. There's Shia terrorists that want to take us to the 10th century. Maybe they'll get together and they'll make a compromise and try to take us all back to the 9th century. But they're all bad and there are a huge problem for any regime that is actually focused on the future and don't want to go back to the dark ages.

Okay, okay. Now, how are the, now you, you've laid a fair bit of stress on the positive Saudi contribution to this peace process, but the Saudis aren't signatories yet, and maybe they will be, but I have heard from many informed sources that they were powerful players behind the scene, and were fundamentally not only on board with this, but in some sense enabling it. I'm wondering, given there the bet with the devil in some sense that they made with the Wahhabis, and I'm saying that metaphorically, to some degree, how are the Saudis managing to move towards normalization of relations with Israel, given their partnership with a particularly fundamentalist brand of, well, the fundamentalist brand of the Wahhabis? How are they managing that? And what's the remaining threat there to the

How are they managing that? And is what's the remaining threat there to the further distribution and maintenance of this peace process? Well, to me, the Saudis are the invisible hand behind the whole Abraham Accords. It's hard for me to imagine that would have gotten off the ground without at least their tacit support.

So Bahrain, if you've been there, it's literally a bridge from Saudi Arabia. You could, in American terms, see it as sort of the 51st state of Saudi Arabia. So, the idea that the Bahrainis would have made a peace with Israel with the Saudis giving a red light, I just don't believe that that would be the case. And I think even the Emirates, despite the real leadership of Muhammad bin Zayed and BZ, I think if the Saudis had a complete red light against doing this, and we're fighting it actively,

I think it's very hard to imagine that he would have agreed to move forward. Also, remember that in order to get from Israel to the Emirates, you've got to fly over Saudi Arabia, unless you want to go around and fly over Iraq and Iran, which I don't think anybody wants to do. So the Saudis made their airspace available for planes flying over.

So there's no question that they were behind it, and I think they probably saw Bahrain and the Emirates as a trial balloon to see how that goes, to see how the public, their own publics, because you never know exactly about public opinion in these societies that are more close societies. In a democracy, you can tell where people are because they say openly and freely on all the television stations and everybody's criticizing everybody.

In these countries, when you do a big event like that, a big move for peace, you know, you maybe think your assessment is right about where the public is, but you don't know for sure. And I think that was part of that process. Unfortunately, and maybe we'll have a chance to get into this, unfortunately, the Trump administration began the Abraham Accords in the final months of the presidency rather than in the first months of the presidency. And I think that was a missed opportunity. Certainly better late than never when it comes to a breakthrough piece. But this was something that was possible to do years before. Because as I said, already in 2012, 2013, they were ready. If the answer to that question, and when you're thinking about peace, the first question

is, do these people actually want peace? Forget about them doing the dance internationally to try to get on the right side of what popular elite opinion is. It could be seen as peacemakers that they always wanted. But would they actually want to make peace? I think that they were already there about a decade ago. And we tried, I must confess, we tried with the Obama administration, Israel did, and its second term to convince them to move along this track and to try to focus their efforts on achieving an Israeli-Arab piece. And then Kerry was Secretary of State, and I spoke to him countless times about pursuing it and explaining that the Arabs were ready. And he was insistent, and this had been conventional wisdom for two decades.

He said, the only way that you're going to get these Arabs to make peace with you is if you make peace with the Palestinians. And I would have people, not just Democrats, but also Republicans for two decades saying, you know, if you make peace with the Palestinians, you'll have peace with some two dozen Arab states. And I would say, well, that may be total logical. You may be right. They'll have no other big excuse that they can put forward. But what if the Palestinians don't want to make peace?

Does that mean that we have to just wait when these countries' interests are to move forward? So we try with Secretary Kerry so many times to convince him to take this approach. He instead, before he did the Iran deal, which is also connected to this, but he tried to again use the same formula and a failed approach to peacemaking and went down this Israeli Palestinian rabbit hole, which was a road to nowhere. Why was there so much insistence? I've heard this from other people that I've talked to here, and you see this playing out

on the media landscape. There's, it's as if there's an insistence, and maybe it's psychologically rooted to some degree, to reduce the entire intractable complexity of the Middle East to a single point of conflict. And you can imagine the psychological advantage of that. It's because you reduce an irreducible set of problems to something hypothetically comprehensible. So you focus it on Israel versus Palestine.

And then that becomes an intractable moral issue to some degree, because then it depends on which side of the argument that you take. And that seems to have completely stymied any attempts to, well, do the sorts of things, to go around in some sense or to find alternative routes in the manner that you describe. But why do you, why do you think that the Israel versus Palestine conflict has become such an unbelievable sticking point for this kind of movement? What are the sociological

and economic reasons, I suppose, and geopolitical reasons, why that might be the case? I mean, Kerry's attitude seems, in some sense, incomprehensible, given that you were providing evidence that there was at least some possibility that there was an alternative route. Yeah, listen, I think that's a deeper question that you're asking now is why people have the view of Israel that they do. I mean, let's take a step back. The idea that there's a Middle East conflict singular is ridiculous.

I mean, you could solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue tomorrow, and it's not going to impact what's happening in Yemen or in Libya or in Iraq and 10 other places countries around the region. But everybody focused on this being a Middle East peace process. It's not a Middle East peace process. It may be an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. If you solve that conflict, maybe it'll have some positive impact beyond that conflict. But in the Middle East, you have a battle that is going

on between the forces of modernity and medievalism. That's what the conflict is, and there are SUNY forces on the modern side, and she-a-forces on the modern side, and there are SUNY forces on the medieval side, and she-a-forces on the medieval side. Israel is clearly on the force for modernity. As a country, as a society, as the one real democracy, if you came to Israel, which should have all the rights, free speech, freedom of the press, independent courts, the things that we take for granted in democratic societies.

You don't have that anywhere else. And these societies are trying to overcome centuries of this tyranny to see if they can chart a path for a different future. But the focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, why everybody believes that this conflict is the root of everything, I think a lot of it has to do with the demonization of Israel for many, many decades. Because if you can cast Israel as the villain in that theater and were the powerful force against the Palestinians who are the weak party, and so therefore if it can all be cast to Israel and Israel can be blamed, I think that's sitting on thousands of years of history.

I'll tell you a story about how absurd the Israeli Palestinian conflict is as the source of all the region's problems, let alone the world's problems. And by way of background, I remember there was Obama's former national security adviser. I think it was General Jones once gave an interview and he said something very bizarre. He said, you know, if I were God and I came to Obama and I told him to resolve one issue in the world, I would tell him to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You know, It was bizarre, a bizarre statement, but it shows the centrality that this conflict has held. And even we'll get to with Trump, where Trump was also at the beginning, like the holy grail of peacemaking, is you're going to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Yeah, it makes me wonder to some degree, too,

to how it's tied to a very deep underlying dynamic, which is something like that's being played out over thousands of years in many different places, as that makes the Jews in some sense the eternal scapegoat. And it's so convenient that you can point, if, imagine, you're a leader that's beset by all sorts of ethical troubles in the Middle East, and you can point to the outsiders who are the Jews, let's say, who also happen to be successful, which is extremely annoying. And you can say, like the Germans did in Nazi Germany, well, look at those successful outsiders.

They must be oppressive thieves. And then all the attention that might be paid to the distributed evil is localized to that particularized and externalized evil. And that's just hyper convenient for everyone involved. And so it seems to me that there's something like that going on in addition to many other things. I agree with you. It's a potent cocktail. I think part of that cocktail for decades was essentially oil, because you have oil

producing states and Israel is seen as being on the other side. You've got 22 Arab states, you've got 57 Muslim states. So what are you going to, you're going to stand with the one Jewish state in the region? Great. And you see how oil affects the politics of Russia and Ukraine and everything around there. So oil played a big role, but I think it's also sitting on this powder keg that goes back a couple thousand years with this attempt not just to make the Jews, let's say, escape goat, but also to cast them as some sort of source of evil in the world and the problem of the world.

Well, you do have this weird situation that you described. So you said, if I've got my figures right that Israel is one tenth of one percent of the world's population but responsible for something like 20% of a major element of technological development. And so you have this not only do you have this status on the Jewish side as an extreme minority, very tiny population considered by global standards and generally within any country, but you also have the additional problem of a tiny minority who are disproportionately successful and at an exponential scale. And so you can also imagine that people looking at that have

a moral problem to solve, which is something like, well, there's hardly any of these people and they're really really successful. And so either they're doing something right in some fundamental way, which implies that we're doing something wrong, or their thieves' invillage. And there's a fair bit of moral hazard in a calculation like that, because obviously the easier pathway to take, rather than the radical self-examination, but that might be required to determine what you're doing wrong, is to point the finger and say, well, they're obviously just thieves and parasites and should be scourged. to determine what you're doing wrong is to point the finger and say, well, there are obviously just thieves and parasites and should be scourged.

And, I mean, it's not like that's only happened once. It's happening continually, and it's pretty much happened forever. No, it gets, first of all, I think it's a deeper discussion. I know we're going to do a deep dive. We'll have to do an even deeper dive on sort of the mission of the Jews and the nature of antisemitism, how it developed, why it developed, why you see its reemergence today. I think that's true, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to cast Israel as the world's Jew, that's a kind of new form of antisemitism, to single out Israel for special treatment,

to treat it by a standard that you treat no other country in the world, and that when Israel does something wrong, because we're not a perfect country, no country is perfect, and somebody could make a mistake. Somebody could do something in the society that's wrong. We're the only country that when something is done that is wrong, we supposedly have no right to exist, which I think is a much deeper question of the role that Jews have played in the world. You know, Abu Ghraib, I remember happening about 20 years ago in Iraq, and people were

rightly appalled by that, and people called for heads to roll and all sorts of things to happen. And nobody says America doesn't have a right to exist because of Abu Ghraib. But every day, multiple times a day, the second anything that Israel does is perceived to be wrong, we no longer have a right to exist. But I wanted to tell you a story just when you're looking about the scale or the scope of the Israeli palestinian conflict when you're thinking about global affairs. A story that happened to me when I was ambassador. So new ambassadors to Washington, you usually get, you pay courtesy calls to other ambassadors.

And by way of tradition, you meet about 10 other ambassadors. So when I came to Washington, the first ambassador I went to see was the ambassador of Egypt to the United States, then the ambassador of Jordan to the United States, who are peace partners. I think I met the ambassador of England and Germany and a whole others, a whole bunch of others. I found myself in my seven and a half years. I met a lot of ambassadors who they would come to town and it was there and we would find ourselves in their top ten list of ambassadors that they

wanted to meet with. And I would never turn down a meeting with another ambassador for two reasons. Number one is Israel is not in a position to turn down anybody, any friends, potential friends. And the second thing is if you meet a smart ambassador, it usually saves you about five years of reading the economists, which I don't really like to read the economists. So one particular day, I come back and it's after a long day, I had seven or eight meetings,

a White House Congress, and I come back and in my waiting room there is the ambassador Burundi to the United States. So I said, give me a moment. I went into my office and I have to admit, on your podcast, I had to look up and Google Barundi. Like, I knew it was in Africa, but that's about it. I didn't know what it bordered. I didn't know anything about its history.

I did the Wikipedia thing in two minutes to try to get as much information as I can, and then I invited him into my office and we started speaking. And this happened to me that day. It's very rare for me. It might be rare for you. That day, it happens about twice a year. I was actually tired of listening to myself speak. I was so exhausted having talked for about eight hours. I just didn't want to talk about Iran, about the peace process, about anything to deal with

Israel. And I know nothing about Burundi, and I get this very smart guy. I think he was Harvard educated in my office. And I start peppering him with questions about Burundi. What are you making, Burundi? What do you export from Burundi? What are you trying to achieve in the United States? And then I ask him, do you have a security problem? And he says, not since 2004.

Well, I said, what happened in 2004? He said, well, in in 1994 you had the genocide in Nguanda. That spilled over to Burundi. And we had a terrible violence over the next decade and there was some sort of ceasefire peace agreement in 2004. And since then we haven't had a security problem. And I asked him, how many people died in that decade between 94 and 2004? And he says 300,000. I said really 300,000. I said, how many people you think have died in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict? Now, this meeting is about 2015. So we're talking about a century, almost a century, in 1920, when you had an attack outside of the immigration office in Jaffa until 2015 where I'm sitting with this ambassador. It's a very intelligent person and he thinks about it for a while, probably 30 seconds or so, and then he said 2 million. And I said, well, you're pretty close, you're only off by two zeros, because it's about 22,000, Israeli and Palestinians have died in the century of conflict since 19,

from 1920, 22,000. Now, if you take the Israeli Arab conflict, will you take all the soldiers of Israel who have died, all the victims of terror, the wars that we have fought, and you add Egypt, Egyptian casualties, and Lebanese casualties, and Syrian casualties, and you add Egypt, Egyptian casualties and Lebanese casualties and Syrian casualties and Jordanian casualties. You take the entire conflict, you get to 125,000 of that 125,000, about a fifth or the Israeli Palestinian conflict without getting into who's right, who's wrong, just in terms of the number of people who have died in this conflict. This ambassador's jaw drops. He cannot believe it. He said, why is the whole world obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Yeah, well, there's a biblical phrase, right? The biblical phrase is, to those to whom much has been given, much will be demanded. And that seems to be the eternal position of the Jews in some real sense, right? So I don't know what to make of that exactly. But that's one way of looking at it. But what I told him in that meeting just to finish the point is I said, you know, it's a problem for us that the world is obsessed with Israel and demonizing Israel and that more resolutions are passed at the UN against Israel than all the rest of the world combined or in the so-called human rights council

then I mean seriously if you show the statistics to your viewers, they won't even believe it. It's a farce But I said it's not just a problem for Israel this demonization and this Piling on Israel. It's a problem for you. Nobody knows that 300,000 Burundis were killed in a decade. That is an enormous tragedy. And barely anybody even knows about it because the world is obsessed with Israel. And he understood it. So then what I did is I said to myself, listen, I don't know anything about Burundi. So I shouldn't begrudge him for not knowing anything about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So I started asking other people. And I would do this question, and you know,

you've got to set it up so you're not trying to game one answer. And I would do it sort of straight. I'd say how many people have been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The lowest number that I got was 500,000. A factor of 20 times as big. And when this person who was headed his foreign ministry

in Europe, he was the head of the Middle East Division of the foreign ministry of one of the European countries, he said, that's not true. What you're saying is not true. There hasn't been 22,000. I said, well, you know, it used to be an antiquity. If you wanted to be a scholar, you'd have to sit in the library of Alexandria and Peru's scrolls for a few decades.

Now, all you need to do is Google it. So go into the palm of your hand at ever-expanding library and go look it up. And he was sort of stunned. And so it is ridiculous. The obsession with Israel. Forget about the fact that we have focused only on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we have not opened the door. Finally, we did, to peace with the Arab states,

but the obsession of the international community with this conflict, and every single person who dies is of course a tragedy for that family. If you're looking at it from the point of view of the international community, with that which threatens peace and security, it's a non-event, and yet they've made so much focus on this for the last century and they wasted a lot of time.

So what Carrie getting back to the point that I wanted to make about Carrie is I tried and Nittanyahu tried, incessantly, to tell him John, they know each other for three decades. There's a real opportunity here. You need to focus on it. Netanyahu spoke about it at the UN. This is before Trump.

This is a couple of years before Trump, where he says, never in my lifetime, has I seen the possibilities that I see today, the Arab world is in a different place for all the reasons that we discuss, but he would not listen. He was focused on the holy grail of peacemaking and this rabbit hole to nowhere because unfortunately the Palestinians have not abandoned their desire

to destroy the one and only Jewish state, which is a separate question from the Abraham records. They have not abandoned it. And we try to convince Kerry, go and focus on the errors. And he refused to do it. In fact, there's a famous video. I don't know if you have links that you put on your podcast, where you can see Kerry, who says, there are those in Israel, or political leaders in Israel, I think he said, who say that you can have a separate peace between the Arab states and Israel

without first having peace with the Palestinians. And he goes, no, no, no, no. And I said after, it's too bad he didn't say no six times because then we would have had six peace agreements and not four because he said no four times. But we tried very much with Secretary Kerry, and we failed. They weren't focused on it.

And one of the reasons why they didn't do it is you not only have this paradigm that goes back from Oslo. That all roads to peace must go through Romala. So everybody's waiting for the Palestinians to dame to even meet with Israel, let alone make peace with Israel. But everybody's waiting on the Palestinians and solving this conflict. And because the Palestinians are holding the line, inevitably more and more pressure gets brought to bear on Israel, because we're seen as the powerful party.

And you know what happens in a world where power and justice are seen as buckets in the well, which is the kind of world that we're living in now. So all the pressure comes onto Israel. And there were many other reasons why Kerry decided to pursue it. There was also skepticism that when Netanyahu was saying to have peace with the Arabs, he was really just trying to avoid making hard concessions to the Palestinians, because making peace with the Arabs could be peace for

peace and not land for peace. So instead of having the quote, quote unquote courageous decisions of sacrificing vital, the vital interests of your country to make peace with the Palestinians, he wants to move to the Arabs where it'll be an easier path for him to do it without the political risk. That's how they thought about it, not realizing, hey, the Middle East has changed. There's a real opportunity here. And here's something that people do not know. We also failed with the Trump administration at the beginning. They were not prepared to see that as well. About a week after, I don't think I've said it publicly, but a week after, I went to visit Trump at Trump Tower. This is a week after he gets elected, sorry, in November 2016. It's a Trump Tower, and I walk into his office, and the first thing he says to me is,

so you think we can make peace. And I said, with whom? And he said the pal's sitting is almost surprised by my question. And I said, no, but we can make peace with several Arab states. Right. That's what we were telling the previous administration. We started telling him that now fast forward three months. Netanyahu visits Washington, his first trip to Washington as prime minister with Trump in office. It's February 2017. What Netanyahu says to Trump, and I can say it because he mentioned it recently, publicly as well for the first time. What Netanyahu said to Trump, and I can say it because he mentioned it recently publicly as well for the first time What Netanyahu said to Trump in that meeting he said 75 years ago

There's a picture of FDR sitting with a leader of Saudi Arabia and that helped establish a 75-year alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia and he says to Trump says get a boat you meBS, MBS, we change history. That's what he said. Now, it took us about two years to convince them of the opportunity that it was real. And this is really do more to President Trump, who deserves a lot of credit for a lot of decisions that he made, but at the beginning he was really fixated, even at the end, to a certain extent. He was still fixated on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. That was the holy grail.

That was the ultimate test of whether you've actually done something, rather than trying to do all of these agreements that have a huge impact in the region, because a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia is effectively the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's not the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's not the end of the Israeli-Ran conflict, but it's essentially the end of a century-old Israeli-Arab conflict. And I think that that's a goal that is worth pursuing. But it took two years for them to see the opportunity that was there. And then we wasted another year

because of our insane politics in Israel, where we were going from one election after the other. So by the time the President Trump kind of put out his peace plan, which was sort of an effort to open a door for the Palestinians if they'd like to go through that door, but essentially it would park a real plan on the table while Israel moves ahead and normalizes its relations with the Arab world. That process only started in the last year of his administration rather than in the first

year. And I do believe that had we done this from the beginning of the administration, we would have a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia today. But because we waited too long, we only started it very late in the game. Now, the Trump administration, they didn't waste the time. They may not have recognized the potential for that breakthrough in those two years or three years, but they didn't waste the time because they took steps that actually facilitated the emergence of the Abraham Accords. So what I described to you before is the fundamentals underneath the surface. Okay, so let me summarize some of this too and ask them I'll ask you some broader questions. So

you're you pointed out and please correct me where I get it wrong you pointed out that it's a straightforward psychologically to make the assumption that all the conflict in the world but certainly all the conflict in the Middle East is best conceptualized in relationship to the Israeli Palestine conflict and that's morally hazardous and inappropriate. And it also blinds people, whatever the flaws of the Jewish state might be. It also blinds people to the fact that Israel is a hyper-successful state, and it has much to offer its Arab partners and the world in terms of technological development and innovation and governance. And now I think that's just clearly true as far as I can see. And then you pointed out that there are many conflicts that are rivening the Arab and Middle Eastern world. But the most fundamental of those likely is something conceptualized as modernity versus medievalism. And that's

raging that war, both on the Sunnyside and the Shiite side. Then you, and so you, you complexified in some sense the Arab situation, then you pointed out as well that there were pathways around the Israeli-Palestine conflict that were very productive that you had been developing and that were emerging of of their own accord that the players who were fixated on Israel versus Palestine weren't willing to consider including the Trump administration until relatively late in the game. And then, okay, now I said, so I have some questions that come out of that that would help me and hopefully my listeners understand the broader context within which this is occurring.

And so it's not appropriate to reduce the complexities of the problem in the Middle East to the Israel-Palestine conflict for a variety of reasons. And you started to detail out the complexities of the situation with regards to this modern versus medievalism situation. And so if I ask you, maybe I could get you to flesh in for me, the status of other major players in the region, in relationship to a potential pathway to peace forward. So I would like to start by picking your brain to some degree

about both Iraq and Iran. And so I would like to know how you see them in relationship to the world geopolitical situation, but to the Abraham Accords. And I would also like to know, I've always thought that the Palestine Israel conflict was just a bit too convenient for many major players in the region, partly because it could be used as a scapegoat. And partly because support for the Palestinians caused a certain amount of intractable and continual trouble that did, this is the moral hazard argument, that did detract people from other sources of unrest

and instability and corruption. Obviously the Palestinians are backed by external players who are, I think it's obvious, who are capitalizing on that conflict for their own purposes. And so, in whose interests do you think it is primarily in the Middle East to foster and facilitate a continuing, non-peaceful standoff between the Palestinians and the Israelis. So the first is the Palestinians themselves because they've been dining out on this conflict now for, since Oslo, really for 30 years and becoming the wards of the international community. I'd say the Middle East is incredibly complicated.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict much less so, in my view. The reason why you have a conflict today is the same reason why you had a conflict for the last century, which is the refusal of the Palestinians to recognize the legitimacy of a nation-state of the Jewish people in any boundary in our ancestral homeland. They refuse to do it. It's very simple and almost raw. In their minds, we stole their house. And that's how they do it. It's very simple and almost raw. In their minds, we stole their house. And that's how they see it.

They don't understand that this is the territory, where the patriarchs of the Jewish people prayed or where our prophets preached and our king's rule. It's a complete denial of any historical connection between the Jews and the land of Israel. They're refusal to accept some sort of compromise. The fact that they haven't paid such a huge price for that refusal because they've been supported

by various actors in the region for a long time. And actually, the Abraham Accords is like the beginning of a shift away. It's the removal of the Palestinians veto over this process and the Arab leaders for their own interests, which we discussed before, security and economic interests. Understand, we're not gonna give the keys to the Middle East to the person who's effectively the mayor of

Ramallah, the leader of the Palestinian Authority. Because Palestinian politics are divided, you have Hamas, which is a terror organization that openly calls to destroy Israel, leading Gaza, which is half of the Palestinian polity. Then on the other half, you have this Palestinian authority, which refuses to confront the terrorists, and also make sure that the next generation is fired by the same hatred and denial of any Israel's legitimate presence in the land because they do it through their schools and their media and everything else. And they also pay people, actually.

They put them on the payroll, those who are terrorists. So the Israeli-Palestin sitting conflict is a pretty simple one. Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. This is something that's bothered me for a very long time and I think it's key to this in some sense. So let me set up an analogy and it's a dangerous analogy and it may be inappropriate, but I'm gonna use it anyways. And so Khan stands in Opal is now Istanbul, but historically it wasn't.

And so you could say in some sense that the Christians have a claim on Constantinople, and it's not like people haven't made that claim. And so I'm not saying they have a claim or that they don't. What I am saying is that when you look at a given region, you can look at it When you look at a given region, you can look at it through the lens of different temporal durations. And the ethical conclusion that you derive is in some sense dependent on the expense of the temporal horizon that you're willing to consider. Now, the argument you made for the legitimacy

of the state of Israel is an ancient claim. And then that begs the question. And I think this really is, it's an extraordinarily difficult question. How do you know which temporal horizon should be most appropriately applied to a given landscape, especially given that there are different claims and different temporal frames of reference

that are applied to the same territory of land by other people. And I mean, the same thing is true, say in North America, because the Europeans came in. And obviously, there were people living here before the Europeans came in. And so it's an endless conflict in Canada, let's say, and the US about to what degree the people who inhabited the territory originally have a valid moral claim on the territory. And it's not like that's been resolved.

I don't think we know how to resolve it. And then with the Jews, you seem to have this additional insistence by the world that they solve it better than anyone else. And again, that has something to do with to those to whom more has been given more will be demanded. The Jews seem to be held consistently to a higher moral standard, but it is a real problem. Why do you think the Palestinians should both ethically and practically accept the claim

of the Israel state to exist and the Jews to inhabit it. Because that really is the central issue. The thing with your analogy, in the issue of sort of the New World, were the Indians who came back. In the case of Constantinople, you'd have the Christians who would come back and they would have had to have lived there continuously and then established a state and then the Muslim power says, no no you have no right to be here. Like no one would question if the Native American somehow and this is not the case with Native, most people were lost to history when they lost their land. Now the Jews lived continuously a small

Jewish community lived continuously for over 3,000 years in the land of Israel but Jews were dispersed all over the world and they came back. No one has ever dealt with that, where people coming back. But when you're talking about legitimacy, there's a historical legitimacy here where we are in our ancestral homeland that doesn't exist anywhere else. It's not displacing the natives. The Jews were the ones who were displaced, not just by the Romans, but also by the Arab conquest, where a lot of Jews were. People just don't know history.

I mean, most people sense of history, as you know, goes back to breakfast. So why should anybody care about what happened? But if those historical Keynes don't work for you, what you could take the legal claim? And the legal claim was that there was an Ottoman Empire here, the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The British were given a mandate to control this territory, specifically by the League of Nations, in order to enable the settlement of the Jews, specifically by the League of Nations, in order to enable the settlement of the Jews, who in the 19th century, the late 19th century, the spring of Nations were considered a people. You know, there are people who don't consider the Jews of people,

but we have a 4,000 year history and people have rights of self-determination. And so, the British were given a mandate by then the League of Nations which folded into the United Nations to actually affect the settlement of that territory, to enable the Jews to establish this homeland there. That's the legal case is rock solid. The historical case is rock solid. And to me, the moral case is rock solid because we're people that the entire world turn their backs on the Jews, anytime we were oppressed. I mean, Jews would have a right to a state, anyone,

but to say that the Jews don't have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland, that seems to me lunacy. Now, there are people who say, no people have a right to a state. So those people who deny Israel's right to exist that they should be no nation states, well, I wouldn't call them being anti, I wouldn't say they're anti-Semitic. One of the raises, one of the measures of antisemitism is, are you treating Jews to a different

standard than you're treating other people? So if you believe any people have a right to a state, that there is such a thing as a people and what makes a people a people, it can be language, it can be a common culture, it can be a common history. The one thing that the Jews were missing historically is they didn't have the same land, but all the elements of people who they had. So if you're going to look around the world and you're going to say people deserve states. But for some reason, the Jews who their statelessness has caused more oppression and persecution than against any other people in history, at least any other people that currently exist. And you have pogroms and you culminate it because everyone is focused on the Holocaust,

which I think the Holocaust has a certain sense distorted our view of antisemitism and Jewish history. Because it is such a blinding event that happened. 18 million Jews, 6 million are wiped out. It's a third of the Jewish people, the equivalent of 100 million Americans, or over 10 million Canadians, huge numbers of people. And I used to, when I was ambassador to the United States to explain what the Holocaust did to the Jews, I would tell Americans, if you can't wrap your mind around 100 million people,

imagine a 9-11 everyday for a century. That's what the Holocaust did to the Jewish people. So it is such a seismic event that people don't recognize all the antisemitism that came before it. All the sentries of antisemitism that came before, people who killed 200,000 Jews, 400,000 Jews, the Jews are expelled from England and then they're expelled from France and they're

expelled from Spain and they're expelled from Portugal. All the persecutions, all the pogroms, all the massacres during the crusades, before the crusades in antiquity, in present day, you're sitting, I understand in England. Well, they just discovered up in Norwich, a well, I don't know if you had a chance to read that story, where they have a bunch of skeletons that they found at the bottom of a well. And they dated those skeletons to the 12th century, to the end of the 12th century,

when there was a pogrom against the local Jewish community. So anti-Semitism has existed century after century to century. It's a big subject that we could maybe tackle in the future. But for me, the bottom line is to make a case where the Jewish people do not are not by right, entitled to a state is absurd. And the fact that somebody would deny it in our own homeland is the height of absurdity. Let me ask you one more question on the Palestinian front then. So you've made a case, I would say globally and abstractly.

And that's not a criticism of the case precisely, that nationhood, it's reasonable to associate nationhood with the necessity of a state. And then you made a case that the Jews have a legal right to the land they occupy as a consequence of what occurred after World War I, a strong legal case. And so then I would say, let's particularize that for a minute. And perhaps if I was arguing the Palestinian case, I would say, yes, but it wasn't reasonable for the world to purchase what was just and appropriate to deliver to the Jews at disproportionate cost to the Palestinians.

Yeah, but Jordan, the world didn't do that. The Jews did that. The Jews came and immigrated in larger numbers. There was a trickle of immigration to Jews over the centuries to be in the land of Israel and the Holy Land. But in the late 19th century, with the birth of modern Zionism, and actually Christian Zionism came about three or four decades even before that, and maybe even further than that in the late 18th century and the 19th century, the Jews came back, settled the lands, drained the swamps, purchased it, a lot of times from Arab landowners who weren't even present, who would sell it. And the Ottoman Empire collapses. So now the question is, who does

this land that you have legal detour? Who does it belong to? And instead of actually having a Palestinian national movement, and this is really their great tragedy, they didn't have a Palestinian national movement 100 years ago, and they don't have it today who says, look, guys, you have a right to be here, but we have a right to be here. You know, if that's the case, you're in an negotiation. When somebody says, you stole our house, even if you give 99.9% back, there's no justice to your client. When another side says, it's 1% yours by right, not just by might, but by right, and it's 99% ours, you're actually in an negotiation. And the reason why you have to ask yourself, why did the Palestinians deny history?

So Arif had went to Clinton at Camp David, Yasser Arif at the leader of the Palestinians at the time, 20 years ago, goes to Camp David and tells Clinton, there was never a temple on the Temple Mount. Like, why does he say that? And why do they deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem? It's like you hear the current Palestinian leader Abou Mazin says, the Jews are trying to Judeaify Jerusalem. You know, that's like saying the Chinese are trying to synify Beijing, or the Russians, a Russifying Moscow. I mean, it's ridiculous. But why do they do that?

Because the entire scaffolding of their rejectionism collapses if we have a legitimate claim to that territory. They don't have to deny their claim, but they can't make themselves take that one step, which is by far, that would be a very small step for a leader, but a giant leap towards peace. The second they say that we, the Jews, have a right to be in the land of the patriarchs, the prophets, and the kings, then we're in an negotiation, then we have to work out

a settlement, but they refuse to cross the Rubica. In the aftermath of the Abraham Accords, there's a couple of things we want to get to, which partly would be the pathway forward for expanding the Abraham Accords. We don't want to forget about that, but we'll take a bit of a side venture into the Palestinian issue. Do you see any reasonable pathway forward to movement towards peace on the Palestinian side as a consequence or an extension of what's being achieved with the Abraham Accords. So yes, I would say yes, but my yes answer is the right way to approach this is you have

in the Arab leaders, particularly in the Gulf, the recognition as we discussed that their interests mean and aligns with Israel. What we should do is focus on expanding that, broadening it, and deepening it. Because, you know, we've had peace with Egypt since 1979, Jordan with 1994, but it is a cold piece, which is certainly better than a hot war, but you didn't have any people to people or business to business development. They could actually create the foundations for something that would convince the people in these societies that their interests are served by having their peace, that peace. The leaders get it, but the peoples don't yet.

There is good will that's coming from the bottom and the Emirates, I think in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and other places in the region, but we should be trying to expand it. Now, what would happen if we expanded it, if we had not now six countries, the Jordan and Egypt and the other four, but if we can get it to 10, 12, what you'd be left with is Iran. You mentioned the Iraq before, Iran and its axis

that is opposed to Israel because you have this sheer radical power in Iran. It is a historical aberration. You know, we talked about antisemitism. You know, Jews have been kicked around in so many different societies. We have a pretty good sense of what a tolerant society is. So Western democracies like the United States and Canada

are different in terms of history, in terms of acceptance and openness of Jews and allowing them to become full members of the society. But if I have to say, like which ancient civilization was relatively welcoming to the Jews with all of its imperfections and problems, and programs occasionally and things like that, it's the Persian. Persian civilization, Cyrus, the great Persian king allowed the Jews to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and throughout history we had decent relations, and even when the Shah was there before the Revolution in 1979, Israel had good relations

with them and also the United States did. If this regime in Iran would disappear tomorrow and you would have a semblance of, if you don't want to call it a democracy, but a more open society in Iran with some representative government there, you would see good relations between Israel and that country, good relations between Europe and that country, good relations between Europe and that country. I mean right now Europe is doing appeasement anyway, but there would be no fire in them to have a kind of global revolution to export their particular brand of Islam. As Netanyahu said, there's a fight in Islam between the Sunni radicals and the Shia radicals of who's going to be the king of the militant Islamic hill. But there's no place in their world for Christians, for Jews, certainly not for

atheists, for anybody who disagrees with them. But if we're able to actually get to a point where we've gotten the Israeli Arab conflict as far as we can and all we're left with is Iran and its proxies, I think then we're going to be left with the Muslim Brotherhood and its effort to push against it because that's another force in the region that is against, that it would be on the force of medievalism, not on the force of modernity. Then the hope would be that there would be Palestinian leaders who would say, guys, you know, the Arab armies and the Muslim armies are not waiting us to conquer Jerusalem. They're already on the other side. They're in an alliance with the Jews.

And then hopefully there'd be courageous leaders within that society that could emerge and at least start with something called some sort of accommodation. But I really think people don't take ideology seriously. And it's a major flaw in international diplomacy, because we, I mean, you're the psychologist. I don't want to touch on your field, but I think people project. And if they, because they don't understand

how important their ideology, which has gone wrapped up in a religious faith, that they have to sort of destroy the Jews who are there, if it were Christians, they would destroy that as well, as well, the radical Muslims. They would try to destroy like a crusader state that would be there. But the fact that its Jews makes it worse, because historically, the Jews were not seen as a powerful actor. When Muslims were defeated by Christians, okay, they didn't like it, but they could understand it. But for the bully in the class who sees himself as this warlike figure to be defeated by the nerd

in the class, which is supposed to be, you know, the George Costanza of Seinfeld fame, you know, the George Costanza Jews, they can't make sense of it. In fact, the greatest scholar of Islam of the last century is Bernard Lewis. And he said, the birth of European-style antisemitism in the Arab world, one of the factors that gave rise to it was their defeat at the hands of Israel in 1948, because they couldn't believe that a Jewish army could defeat them.

There had to be other forces at work. So the traditional protocols of the elders of Zion were Jews are manipulating all these forces. You don't really have a history of that in the Muslim world. You had us having dimmy status like Christians in the Muslim world, but the European style, globalist, Jew, anti-Semitism, that actually came in the way Lewis argues, in the wake of Israel's

defeat of making sense of why this happened. At the end of the day, getting back to the point, if we're able to finalize as many peace agreements as we can with the Arab world, we will diminish those forces on the medieval side, their power, and then hopefully there would be forces within Palestinian society. I personally believe many of them are in the business sector that would seek a long-term accommodation because peace with Israel would be great for the Palestinians, it would be terrific for them, but it wouldn't be good for leaders, it wouldn't be good for their leaders because they're more interested, the Palestinian leadership has been more interested in the cause of the Palestinians and the Palestinians themselves.

And the cause would die when there's peace with Israel. But the Palestinian people would actually, their futures would be improved. But they have to cross this Rubicon, they haven't crossed it yet. One thing I can tell you just to put a period on that point, the only way it's going to happen is if Israel stays extremely strong. The stronger we are, country militarily, economically, technologically, diplomatically, which is the Abraham Accord is part of it,

the more there's a sense within Palestinian society, the time is not on their side, that the train is leaving or has left the station, the more likely you are to see people get on board. OK, so I want to turn to the issue of Iraq at some point, but before that I want to go back to the notion of modern versus medievalism, and I want to speak briefly on behalf of the medievalists, and I'm going to try to do that from a Jewish perspective, let's say, because one of the things that's very interesting about the Jewish state is that despite its status as a modern democracy, it's also unbelievably deeply rooted in an ancient

tradition and also draws the ethical wellspring of its right to exist from that tradition. And so the Jews are wrestling in some real sense with the problem of not precisely medievalism versus monotony, but definitely tradition versus modernity. And I do have some sympathy for the more fundamentalist end of the religious spectrum, but let's say more specifically, the Islamic law and also the Jewish Orthodox end of the spectrum. And the reason I say that is because one of the problems with modernity is that it's psychological, it frees you up technologically and it produces a land of abundance in some sense, but the price that's paid is ethical confusion and a kind of corrosive

and nihilistic cynicism that emerges as a consequence of the realization, let's say, that the world is only objective in nature and that God is dead. And Western societies are paying a very big price for this, reflected, for example, in places like South Korea and Japan, reflected not least in their catastrophically low birth rates, and their dizz, what would you call, they're lack of a belief that it's ethically appropriate to move forward forthrightly into the future. And so you can imagine that on the medievalist side and the Christian-funded Methodist side and the Jewish Orthodox side, there's this insistence that goes something like, look, there's a lot of things in these more traditional views that have to be, there are appropriate bullworks against the disillute tendencies of an overwhelmingly intellectual modernism.

And I do believe that's the case. Now, I've had some preliminary discussions with people who are more on the fundamentalist side of the Muslim argument, and they took me to task for a variety of things. But did admit that from their perspective, even that there is, in some fundamental sense, in the ideal to be no compulsion in matters of religious belief, which is a doctrine that has some origin in the Quran itself. Now, of course, it's always subject to interpretation, but at least you can make that case. And so I would say, do you see a pathway? You said that with regard to the Palestinians, that the proper approach in some senses to expand Israel's relationship with other Arab states, particularly on the diplomatic and

economic fronts. And that also opens up the rest of the Arab world in some sense to be the beneficiaries of the immense innovative capacity of the Israelis on the technological of the Arab world in some sense to be the beneficiaries of the immense innovative capacity of the Israelis on the technological and the governance side. What would you do to extend a hand to the medievalists given that the Jews are also rooted in an ancient tradition and obviously value it immensely and regarded as what the very ethical foundation of their claim to a state. Like, what's the pathway forward? And so one of the things that really struck me,

after I had this conversation with a more traditional Muslim leader, and I've talked a lot of different Muslim thinkers, some of which are like, I am herzealiyah, quite profoundly anti-Islam in some real sense. The, the, what was very heartening to me was that despite the rather fratious nature of the conversation, it was watched by many millions of people. It got about two and a half million views in the first two weeks it was posted. And most of them were Muslim, and most of them were traditionalist Muslims, and all of them said almost without exception that they're absolutely thrilled that a conversation like that could take place where real issues were discussed relatively peacefully but intensely and that there is a sense that I got that they were extremely pleased to be regarded as valid participants at the table of discussion.

So a lot to unpack there. I will say about the Jews first. What's different is we're not omissionizing a missionary faith. So for radical Islam, they have to spread their particular brand of Islam all over the world. That is an article of faith that they have to spread their particular brand of Islam all over the world. That is an article of faith that they have. Certainly in all those regions that Islam once held, they have to go back and sort of reconcrete. And I think if there is a radical Christian group that would believe they have to missionize

to everybody around, they would also make it harder for them to develop tolerance for those who disagree with them. But Jews are, I think, in a different category because we've been, you'd have to go back to the Bible and how we governed in the Bible, and it certainly wasn't perfection there. I mean, I think one of the most remarkable things about Jewish Scripture is that all the blemishes are put there for everybody. And if you see the Jews wandering through the desert, it's 40 years, but the five stories of them sitting or so, whatever that number is, it's all there.

And all the warts and everything, and even King David, when he sins and the prophet is telling him, you're the sinner, that's the foundation of the rule of law, frankly, and that the Jewish leaders would put a king being rebuked by anybody is I think remarkable in itself. So there was always a check on power, but a people could argue, the jury is still out because you haven't had sovereignty for 2000 years, now you're working your way through the modern world. I think Israel is actually an excellent example of reconciling faith and freedom.

And I'm somebody who was born and raised in the United States, which you may have mentioned at the top. And I always thought the greatness of America, one of the things is their ability to reconcile faith and freedom in a way that Europe didn't, because it's sort of abandoned faith. And in the Middle East, they couldn't accept freedom. And that America could do it. And now a lot of those things are breaking down in the United States. But let's take a step back about five centuries.

And here I want to go back to something I read that fascinated me by Isaiah Berlin, the great British philosopher. He said that sincerity is a completely modern virtue. It doesn't exist before, I think he said the 17th century, maybe the 16th century. Like this idea that we have today, that we accept other people who disagree with us fundamentally on theological matters, because we know that they are true to their faith and they live by those principles. That did not exist before the 16th century.

So when Protestants were killing Catholics and Catholics were killing Protestants in Europe, they weren't saying about Thomas Moore or others. Well, that guy really believes what he believes. And we have to have appreciation for that. No, sincerity is a completely modern virtue. And I think it's very interesting. James Q. Wilson, the great sociologist, I don't know if you had ever had a chance to meet him. but he wrote an essay, I think it was in city journal about 20 years ago called the reform Islam needs. And in that essay, he's explaining how democracy rose in the West. And it didn't rise because philosophers got around a table and came up with ideas. He says it rose because of the expedience of kings, because you had these religious wars of fanaticism in the 16th century, and the kings understood that they're not going to have young men to collect crops or to gather taxes from. If this continues for more and

more decades, more and more centuries, so what you had was a freedom of conscience that emerged. Then the philosophers come and codify. Then you expand the freedom a little bit, and then they codify. Of course it can be reversed. You can have a Nazi power that wants to take you back. All sorts of things can happen like that way. But what was interesting to me is he's saying that Islam now, and this is right after 9-11, where you have the Shi'a radicals and the Sunni radicals, you might be actually in that path where you have these religious wars.

And in the wake of these religious wars, you have the ability to have a space for dissent, to have freedom of conscience. And we only see it in hindsight. It might take many decades. But frankly, it took hundreds of years for these democratic ideas to develop in the West, even the founders. As you know, there was slavery in the United States for a century. You didn't have women that had the right to vote for 150 years. But the ideas, the ideas that they put in place in 1776 and later when

they were developing the Constitution, those are the ideas that still give the sense that you can keep expanding it. Now, could what you see happening in the Middle East with the forces of modernity facing the forces of medievalism could add of this tremendous violence and there's one difference as an aside between today and the 16th century. The ability of one person or a small group of people to kill many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of that, that's what's different. It could be that you're seeing the Middle East in the 21st century is sort of where Europe was in the mid-16th century, and you're moving hopefully to a different future. Now, we can speed that up because of communications, because of ties between people. So what may have happened in a hundred years can happen in 10 years, but the real danger,

and this gets to Iran, the real danger if you allow any of these fanatics to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Because when you marry militant Islam to nuclear weapons, now you're talking about danger to millions or tens of millions of people. So the fires burnt themselves out in Europe in the 16th century, and you could kill a lot of people.

But this is a different order of magnitude. And I think that's why the most important thing, and this is our view in Israel, but it's not just of you, it's not just for Israel. It's for all our Arab neighbors. It's also for Europe, it's also for the United States, because you know, we're the little Satan, as Netanyahu says, America is the great Satan. Europe gets aggravated, maybe there are middle-sized Satan. But their designs are not just on Israel, they're on you to reverse history

to upend the whole order. You know, the Chinese are trying to replace the United States. But here you have in militant Islam, you have a fanaticism that is trying to upend the whole order and to think that the traditional rules of deterrence will work with a nuclear armed power. Whether it's a Sunni or Shia power that's radical, that is armed with nuclear weapons, to think that the traditional cost benefits of deterrence and mutually short destruction will work, you're gambling with the future of the world. Now, if you're stuck in that situation, because you couldn't stop it,

well, you're gonna have to make the best of it, but to allow something like this to happen is completely insane. And that's what's happening as we speak, where they're trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with these Ayatollas in Iran that are trying to export this revolution around the world. I mean, it's insanity to do something like this.

And this, if this happens, as you talked about, who are the forces of modernity, who are the forces of medievalism, on that medieval side, the point, the Shia point is certainly wrong. And all their proxies to the region, the Shia militias in Iraq, the Shia terror proxy in Lebanon, which is Hezbollah, their proxy in Yemen, which is the Houthis, their controlling through their proxies and terrorism, a huge swath of these medievalists. On the other side, you have, as I said, al-Qaeda, and that was replaced really by ISIS, but Sunni fanaticism has not disappeared. It will reappear again.

And what you want to do is move those forces of modernity. And here I would put those Gulf states, not because of their modern democracies, because they're trying to advance their society. So let's look at women's rights in Saudi Arabia compared not to the United States or to Canada or to Europe, but compared to women's rights in Saudi Arabia 20 years ago. Look at what's happening in sort of the opening of these societies.

If you think about it in a 16th century context, the progress is remarkable. Yeah, well, that's why I want to draw positive attention to these developments, because I think I know psychologically, there's a role in terms of establishing peace and prosperity and the possibility of negotiation that seems to work at every scale. So, for example, in your marriage, you might criticize your wife if she does something wrong and she might do the same to you. And there is some utility in that, but B.F. Skinner, who is a famous behaviorist, he could train animals to do virtually anything. some utility in that, but BF Skinner, who is a famous behavior, is he could train animals

to do virtually anything. And he said, reward works a lot better than threat and pain, although you can use threat and pain. Reward works better. But you have to pay a price for it. And so if Skinner was training a route to climb a ladder and do little down, so on top of it, and then climb down the other side of the ladder, I mean, he could train animals to do virtually anything.

What he would do is he'd sit and he'd watch the route in the cage for a very long time, was usually a hungry route, by the way. And when the route was near the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet. And then it would just hang around near the ladder. And then now, and then it would put its paw on the first rung, and he'd give it a food pellet. And then soon it was putting its paw on the first rung a lot. And then it would be the second rung, and by careful attention and reward for due progress, he could get animals to do things as complex, skinnertot pigeons to navigate guided missiles by pecking on photographs in reference to the landscape below.

And so, so the, and I know that's kind of abstruse and it seems like a sideways move, but it's not. Because one of the things that's very much worth doing, and I think you captured that very well in the last thing that you said, in one of my books I have an adage which is compare yourself to who you were yesterday, and not to who someone else is today. And the idea is your best measure is your previous self, and you should try for incremental improvement at the rate you can manage, and you should recognize that incremental improvement in yourself, and you should reward it. And you shouldn't denigrate it because it isn't a leap forward that's too big for you to

manage, and it's not getting you to wear someone else who is hypothetically better off than you might be. Because all of that is counterproductive. And when I see these things happening in the Middle East, let's say on the Saudi front, as you just pointed out, from a Western perspective, we might say, well, you know, you're a little hard on your women. And we also know that rights granted to women are a very good predictor of economic progress as it turns out, and also of educational status among children. And so there are both ethical and technical reasons why that might be a bad idea, and we can

shake our fingers at you because you're not doing that, and to some degree perhaps that's appropriate. But more importantly, if we do see something like incremental progress in that direction, and we want to facilitate it. We should be saying, hey, look, man, and this is what's happening on the Abraham Accord side is, for all of your faults and ours, let's point out, this looks like a nice move forward. And it really is unfortunate, as far as I'm concerned concerned that more positive light hasn't been shed on the Abraham

Accords themselves and on the contributions of the people who made them possible. And I would say that's particularly, although you're not uniquely true, of the Saudis. And it's very hardening to me given the complexities of the last 30 years in 9-11 and the Wahhabis and all of that, complexities of the last 30 years in 9-11 and the Hobbies and all of that, that the Saudis were behind this and that they are willing to, they appear willing to move forward. I agree with you, Sid, and I want to, I want to explain why I think it is, because I think it also explains the event that Surface, the Abraham Accords as well. You know, when I gave an exit interview when I was finishing my time as a ambassador and they said, who's next? You know, who's next? I was finishing my time as ambassador and they said who's next?

You know who's next you've done four in the last six months who's next and I said nobody But I want to explain why I said nobody and Unfortunately, I wanted to continue. I believe actually the current US administration could continue it They just have to completely change their policies and I'll explain why And this gets also to Saudi Arabia and the whole view of Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis Iran in terms of who is your partner in the region. What I said to you before about the failure at the beginning to get the Trump administration to sort of see it, I said also they didn't waste time because they shifted U.S. policy.

And this shift was critical to help surface the Abraham Accords. Again, I want to draw the distinction between the surfacing of the relations between Israel and Arab states versus what happens underneath the surface. Because underneath the surface, since that change in 2012, the 1110, that was all moving forward underneath the surface in various different degrees and speeds, but it was moving underneath the surface. The Abraham Accords speeds, but it was moving underneath the surface. The Abraham Accords in 2020 was the surfacing event. Now, what contributed, what facilitated surfacing it?

The most important policy was the US confrontational posture vis-a-vis Iran, and I'll explain it. When the US is confronting Iran as a policy, they're confronting the Saudis' worst enemy, and the people in Saudi Arabia get that because they're firing rockets into their airports. They're the ones attacking their oil facilities. The same thing in the Emirates. Who's attacking their ships? Who's firing drones? Who's a threat to them? When the US is confronting their worst enemy, you open up the political space for these Arab leaders to come into an open alliance with Israel. That was critical. Trump changed from appeasing Iran to confronting Iran. Now, of a sudden,

an MBS who didn't say it publicly, but behind the scenes, an MBS said, the King Comet of Bahrain and others, can look at their people and say, guys, you know, you see on September 15, 2020, you see you got a Trump and you got Netanyahu standing there. Yeah, we know we've said all these things about the Israelis for many, many decades, but guess what? That Trump guy, he just took out Kostum Sulemani in January 2, 2020. He's confronting Iran. He's starving them of the cash that they're using to fuel their war machine in the region. We need to stand with him.

And that Netanyahu is leading, you know, is authorizing all of these operations for Israel to attack Iranian positions in Syria and due to all sorts of things in the region against Iran. So you've now opened the political space for these leaders to move into a public alliance with the United States. Now, once the U.S. shifts its policy towards appeasement, why in the world are the leaders in the region? Why are they going to stand with the president who is actually undermining their own interests

and endangering their peoples? You've actually shrunk all the political space. So the first important policy is you need to confront Iran. An administration that confronts Iran will move us closer to expanding the Abraham courts and deepening them. The second thing that they did is they embraced Israel, the Trump administration, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, all these issues that were made where many people said it was going to prevent peace from happening. It will be a big blow to peace. Well, it didn't create peace

between Israelis and Palestinians, but that wasn't happening anyway for a century for the reasons we discussed. But what message did it send to the Arabs in the region and the Gulf? It said that if they want to get closer to Washington, they should move closer to Jerusalem. So you actually made them understand the importance of having a solid relationship with Jerusalem. And here you have to say that Trump,

by not abandoning MBS, after the Kishoggi incident, which we can talk about, by not abandoning MBS, after the Kishoggi incident, which we can talk about, by not abandoning him, he showed that he was actually a reliable friend. Usually the way the Arabs in the region see is if Israel, if the United States is infriction with Israel, which was the case for most of the Obama administration, on settlements on this and that, that's assigned to them that the US is not a reliable ally. Because they know the Israel-US relationship

is fundamentally different because we share interest, we share values, it's very, very deep they get it. So if the US is now, is bothering Israel and turning the building of Jewish apartments and Jerusalem into a world crisis, these are not gonna be reliable. And they get it. If they confront Iran and they embrace Israel, they move actually to the Arabs closer. And the third factor, which was critical, take the veto away from the Palestinians, stop

chasing down that rabbit hole. So the Trump administration ultimately, it stopped chasing them because he made the decision on Jerusalem and the Palestinians effectively, after after that decision cut off ties with Trump. And guess what? Jared Kushner and Trump's team, they didn't rush after them. They said, guys, we're here. You know our number. In the meantime, they put forward a plan eventually that said, if you want to go through the door for a realistic solution to this conflict where both sides will get something and both sides will compromise, we're there to support you. If not, we're moving ahead. So the three legs of this stool in terms of US foreign policy are confronting Iran, embrace Israel, and take away the veto from the Palestinians.

Now look at the Biden administration. They're appeasing Iran, which is the worst thing they can do. I can't, they're not embracing Israel to the extent that Trump administration has, but they haven't fully reversed it. And on the issue of the veto for the Palestinians, they're slowly but surely trying to move the Palestinian issue back into the center. In the name of helping the Palestinians, it actually just hurts them. Because if we would actually move ahead with the Abraham Accords, then we could get those forces

within Palestinian society who wanted to accommodate us. Now, a few weeks ago on my podcast, diplomatically and correct, before Biden made a visit to Israel, I said what Biden can do to win the Nobel Prize. Because look, Biden will give the Nobel Prize to you. They'll never give the Nobel Prize to Trump,

no matter what he does. They'll never give it to Netanyahu, no matter what he does, but they gave it to Obama before he did anything. They will certainly give it to Biden for actually doing something. I said, here's how you win the Nobel Prize. You go to Saudi Arabia and you tell the Saudis, here's how we're going to deal with a Khashoggi incident. It was a horrible incident. We're putting it behind us, ABC and D, okay? Here's how we're going to deal with the problem of Yemen. Because the Saudis having Yemen, what Israel has in Lebanon,

they've got a terror organization, these Houthis, that are establishing essentially a beachhead for Iran to attack them from the South, like the Iranians have a beachhead against Israel from the North, with Hezbollah to attack us from the North. One of the first acts the Biden administration did was to remove sanctions on the Houthis. For no reason, imagine the message that sent to Saudi Arabia.

So you have to tell the Saudis, here's how we're going to solve Kishoggi, here's how we're going to deal with the issue of Yemen. Now I'm going to change my policy and this is what Biden needs to win the Nobel Prize. I'm going to change my policy 180 degrees on Iran. I'm going to confront the Iranian regime with all elements of American power. And if there was a credible military threat in Iran's nuclear facilities,

they would not break out to the bomb. We would put crippling sanctions on them. We'll reach out to the dissidents in Iran who hate this regime as well. Meaning you have a clear strategy to confront Iran. And he tells MBS, he says, I don't want to go back to the American people and tell them I started a new war in the Middle East. For you, I need one thing.

I need to go back to the American people and say I've brought peace in the Middle East between Israelis and Saudis. And that's really the big prize. Now if I'm MBS and I want this relationship with Israel, I want it for my security and economic interest. That's my opportunity to look at my own people and say America has shifted. We have now a bipartisan policy confronting Iran. I'm standing with a president who's confronting

our worst enemies. That will give him the political space to make a peace. And I think that, by the way, what I just told you right now could be done in six months. It doesn't require rocket science. It's it's it I think the chances of it happening approach zero. I want to be optimistic so I'll give it 0.1 percent because they are wedded divided administration to a policy of appeasing this regime in Tehran. And that begins and ends their whole problem with the Abraham Accords. It's not that they don't support it.

It's that the policies that they've put in place are not facilitating it, are actually undermining it. Now, the good news is the fundamentals that I spoke about of the rise of Iran, the rise of Sunni radicalism, America's not in the region. What happened with the air in spring? Those fundamentals still exist. And so therefore, the potential for the diplomatic breakthrough will survive this administration. The one thing that would undermine it, if an American administration decided to send

500,000 troops to the Middle East and establish military bases over, the bloom would be off the Israeli rose. Or if Israel lost its technological edge and all of a sudden we had a brain drain because our government decided to hike up taxes and not let people afford apartments in Israel and they all left and went to Silicon Valley or someone else and you wouldn't have an innovation engine. As long as we have an innovation engine, a powerful military and intel and weapons making capability and the US is not there.

Israel is the best show in town for them and they understand that. And I think what we need to do is work as fast as we can with them to build the bridges. The ones, I'll tell you what will happen if this deal is done. And by the time the podcast airs, the deal could be done. It could be done 10 days later, two weeks later. You're going to see two things happen simultaneously that are going to be a little bit confusing for people. the podcast heirs the deal could be done or could be done ten days later two weeks later. You're going to see two things happen simultaneously that are going to be a little bit confusing for people. Underneath the surface the heirs will move closer to Israel at a fear of the rise of Iran because the nuclear deal gives Iran a glide path to a nuclear arsenal that is paved with gold.

So they're going to be frightened to death of Iran and it's rising power and they're going to move underneath the table to Israel. But they will move above the table towards Iran because power in the region will shift in that way. And you already see signs of it where the Emirates who didn't have an ambassador for many years in Iran are now sending somebody back. There's open meetings. The reason all of this stuff is happening is not that they change the view. They know exactly what this regime in Tehran is. They just know that in Washington, the policy is a capital A appeasement,

and it's not changing. And you can shift the whole region fairly quickly. So I would hope the Biden administration that has over two years in its term will do it. If not a new administration that comes in, will be able to pick up these peace accords much faster than you think with a shift in policy. Much faster than people think because the strategic moment is there. And I think it's going to be there probably for 20 years or

30 years. Now if Iran, I say one thing, if Iran goes down, if that regime goes down and you have a different relationship, it'll actually make making peace with our Sunni Arab states harder. But I'll take that as a problem. Let me, let's work on figuring out how to solve that problem if that regime in Tehran, that openly calls and actively works to destroy Israel. Let's deal with a problem of them going down and having the Iranian people actually govern themselves and have a responsible government there

that wouldn't be hell-bent on conquering the Middle East and half the world. That's a very good place to end. I think unless you have anything else specifically you wanted to say. Yes, I want to say for the record, because what you said, as you said, if sometimes you criticize your wife

and she criticizes you, I never criticize my wife for the record. Yeah, well, you're probably a wiser man than me then. So I appreciate you walking through that all for me and for all my watchers and listeners. And I found it extremely, almost unbearably educational in some sense because it's an awful lot of, well, it's an awful lot of information to try to digest in the 90 minute period. It's right there. You just have to put that little crumb on the top with a paw can reach. We're very close.

Right. It's so hardening, you know, to see that this pathway forward beckons, and it's so useful. I'm so happy that I can play a small role in shedding some light on it, because it seems to me so significant and important, and so much worthy of reward. And so I'll probably ask my people who've been in contact with you to recommend other people, maybe closer to the Arab world itself, that I could talk to if they would like to about the Abraham Accords. Maybe someone, I suppose, what would be optimal would be someone on the Saudi side in some real sense. And so we didn't get a chance to talk about Iraq, and I think we'll leave that because it's another rabbit hole, and it would take a long time to

go down. But... Well, it's somebody... It's whether Iran is effectively in control of Iraq through the Shia militias that it has there. I will tell you one thing that I would like to say, in this battle between medievalism and modernity is not a battle of tradition versus modernity. I actually believe that that part of the world will remain traditional for a very long time and not only do I have no problem with it, I actually think the path to peace will go with the traditional forces, not the fanatic forces, the traditional forces in this society. It is interesting forces, the traditional forces in this society. It is interesting that many of the people involved in the Abraham Accords were traditional Jews or traditional on the Arab side or people on the Israeli side, which was actually, there

were only about three people in Israel who knew that the Abraham Accords was about to happen, but I don't necessarily think that it's a coincidence, meaning the ability to deal with traditional people on the other side and not working on the assumption that the path to peace is really about these people abandoning their traditions and their ideals. You know, I always thought that was a mistake when it comes to promoting democracy. If you tell people choose between a democracy in your tradition, they'll choose tradition, but there's no reason why they have to choose. And I think America, for a good part of its history, was a perfect example of that,

which it was a very vibrant democracy and an extremely traditional society measured by church attendance and all these different metrics that they had. So I don't see any inherent disconnect between those two things. And I actually think the legitimate forces in these societies are the traditional forces. We mentioned Saudi Arabia. Like to me, you want to know a sign of how close we are to a steric breakthrough is when the head of the Muslim world league, I can't remember his name off the top of my like, a shikh in Saudi Arabia, he visited Auschwitz

as an act of solidarity. Now, without MBS support, Vecta's not happened. And he also gave, they insured that he would be given the sermon in the mosque, in the important mosque in Saudi Arabia before Biden's visit, this same share. Now, it's clear that MBS is trying to move his country into the 21st century. It's clear that the situation with Khashoggi was important, and it's clear that you have to have some show that this is unacceptable.

But to throw out, as I said at the time, in real time, by the way, and because Netanyahu didn't throw them under the bus and Trump didn't throw them under the bus, that also helped. I said in real time a few days after the incident, because Shogi thing is terrible, but don't throw out the prints with the bath water. That would be a huge mistake. Don't throw out a print that is confronting the Islamists in his country, changing this whole lobby fanaticism that is spreading around the world, and it's trying to propel his country forward decades if not centuries. Now, if you're 1550, it's very hard to go to 2020 in one day.

I mean, if he could move to the 19th century, and a more open society, that would be a great gift to the region, and hopefully the region will all have free societies around us, but that can take some time. In the meantime, these forces in this region, they're on our side. They are confronting these medievalists. The one is who want to take us back. And so therefore, they're the ones that should be supported. And it just so happens that this completely overlaps with the Abraham Accord.

So the important thing for me is for people to recognize what changed in the region, what enabled the potential breakthrough so that policymakers will continue it. It wasn't luck. One of the reasons why they want to avoid it is probably because of the politics regarding Trump, because it happened on his watch, the politics regarding Nitenyao, it wasn't the players that the Nobel Prize committee wanted to be involved in it, but guess what? Trump was the one that recognized Jerusalem. Trump was the one that withdrew from the Iran deal.

Trump was the one that took out Sulimani, right? And Nitenyao did all the things that he did. These were the leaders who actually enabled us to have this breakthrough. And one last thing about Iran and Saudi Arabia, you had Salman Rushdie, and I'm not, I can't say that I read his books, but growing up, Oesam is like a great liberal intellectual who wanted to live in a free society.

And he always stood behind that. So now you have this man who was stabbed multiple times. And the outcry for what happened with Rushdie is nothing compared to what happened with Kishoggi. And that has everything to do with politics. Meaning Iran is trying to order hits on Americans, on the Informer National Security Advisor, John Bolton, on a female democracy

activist that they tried to send somebody to kill her. One thing after another, on U.S. soil, no response, virtual silence against the regime that is glorifying this. When Kishoggi happened, how did the Saudi regime respond? They were embarrassed, okay? So people will say, well, he ordered it, so they said, okay, these people were responsible. But nobody in the Saudi regime was saying this was a good thing. They said this was a terrible thing and the Prince wasn't involved.

So people will believe what they want to believe. But they said this is bad, the sense of shame was tremendous that this was a terrible, and they understood that you can't just do this openly in the modern world. I'm not saying that if it would have happened that they would have expressed regrets, but because of what happened, they had a tremendous sense of shame and and and and issued. They issued statements condemning it one after the other. Look at the how the Iranians are dealing with Rushdie. You don't have any condemnation of this guy who killed Rushdie. They glorify. They think this is a good thing. And I think that tells you the

difference of this regime. One regime was embarrassed about it and wants to move ahead. And one regime was glorifying it and wants to take us all back. And that's a real big difference in the region. And I think if we focus our efforts on expanding the peace, which implicitly is this confrontation of Iran, we can actually receive pretty good outcomes much faster than people think, not perfect, but pretty good outcomes. And I think that the Middle East deserves it.

Israel does the Arabs do. And ultimately the Palestinians do, because if we're able to do that, then I think the chances of having those accommodation as forces emerge are going to be much higher. Well, that's as optimistic ending as we might hope for from such a deep dive into such a complex topic and it really is heartening to hear it and that there's a pathway forward of that sort.

Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com. listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.