The Ricochet Podcast - This Year in Israel

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Nice as it would be to turn away, the Ricochet Podcast follows up on the chaos covered last week with a new pair of guests. David P Goldman joins for the first time to o lay out China’s long term strategy to build global markets, the edge it's gaining in the tech sector, the risks of its real estate bubble and the types of opportunity it may look for from the war in Middle East. Then Annika Rothstein gives a powerful report from what we may call the relative saftey of Jersulem. She talks about her harrowing trip to Kibbutz Be'eri and the mood of Israelis stuck waiting for the war to begin. Peter, James and Steve Hayward discuss the bloodthirsty protests stateside and in Europe (where Steve's calling from); and with all the unrest, they lament how little can be done without a functioning functioning House of Representatives.

We have dressed in our best and are prepared to go down as gentlemen, as Mr. Guggenheim said, as the Titanic foundered. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lotlix, and today we talk to Daniel P. Goldman about China and Annika Rothstein reporting to us live in Jerusalem. So let's have ourselves a podcast. War is already hell. It should not be made worse by misreporting. But I fear that on Tuesday, the media made a bad situation worse.

They actually did harm as opposed to trying to do the opposite. Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment. These shipments, we're going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians. I say no U.S. tax dollars to the Gaza Strip. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 663. Why don't you join us at Ricochet.com and you too can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And speaking of stimulating, here's Peter Robinson full of vim and vigor and Steve A. Wood sitting in for Rob Long. Gentlemen, how are you today?

I'm very well. I'm curious, Steve, where are you? I'm actually in Munich, Germany, because Peter, unlike you, when I go overseas, I can still function, whereas you can barely function even when you're home. Perfectly true. I confess it. I confess it. Munich. What are you doing in Munich? Well, I'm on a few days of vacation.

I spent a month in Budapest with John O'Sullivan and his merry pranksters at the Danube Institute. And then I'm spending with my spouse, as you did over the summer, a little bit of holiday in Austria and now ending in Munich. Springtime. What a time to be there. I know. We've seen the footage of the riots. I think there was something I saw in Berlin that was quite zesty. I saw some Dutch policemen who, using only sticks, did a rather efficient job of moving people out of the airport where they were protesting,

which is against the law. We haven't seen this sort of anti-Semitic, I'm sorry, anti-Zionist protests in Europe in some time, have we? No. In fact, Sarah, quick story. I took the train this morning from Salzburg to Munich, and the train stopped at the German border, whereupon there entered a very large police force. It must have been eight or ten officers asking for passports. And so they looked at mine and my wife's, and then they looked at two pairs of Arab passengers in the same train car that we were in, and they looked them over very hard, asking them where they were coming from, where they were going, how long they were

staying, who they were staying with. Looks to me like they are on it, trying to stop a flood of any further agitators into German cities. And I thought, I've never seen that before. Now we're at the curious point where we are applauding the notion of German officers saying, your papers, please. Right. Yeah, it was unusual. I never had that experience on a European train before. Peter, you've been probably front row to some of the academic disputes that have happened. We'll get back to Stephen in just a second here, but I want to bring you in. Academia seems to be showing itself in many ways. All of these people who are signing letters and tweeting ill-advised things and actually, in some cases, outside of academia, suffering consequences for it.

Are we seeing a revelation of what some believe to be a deep institutional rot in our educational system, and do you think that it will change anything? In the second week, this is my observation here at Stanford, it's a different kind of rot. The first week, there were all kinds of anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protests, although as I mentioned last weekend, Condi Rice never had a finer moment. In the middle of these protests, Condi went to White Plaza, which is where the students hold their protests, and she climbed a set of stairs and gave a marvelous little speech in favor of Israel and against brutality and just changed the temper on the campus.

In any event, that was week one. Here we are in week two, and there's still anti-Israel chalk marks here, there, and everywhere. But the protests have died down, and would you like to know why? Because these kids need grades. These kids need jobs. The kids have gone back to the classroom and like Stanford students, they are extremely industrious and very serious about justifying the money their parents are spending while they're here at Stanford. So, first things first when it comes

to students at fancy institutions, and the first things first, I'm not entirely thrilled with this, the careerism, but that's first things first is getting good grades so you can get a good job in the tech culture that surrounds this campus. The one disconcerting note, actually I shouldn't say it's disconcerting, in a way it's reassuring, but it's reassuring that the university is taking care of this. But at the Hillel House, there has been, ever since the invasion, a permanent Stanford police presence. They've got a car parked very conspicuously, police cars parked very conspicuously in front of the Hillel House, and an officer there. Every time I've walked past, there's been an officer standing, just letting his presence be seen. Everything's quiet, cheerful students going in and out of Hillel House. I stopped and chatted with an officer, perfectly relaxed, everything calm,

but the police are there. Well, you mentioned, Peter, students going back to the classroom, except last Friday. Maybe you missed this, Stanford Law School last Friday moved all their classes onto Zoom because they thought it was not safe to hold classes in person because of the whole atmosphere at Stanford Law, which I think probably traces back to shouting down that federal judge a few months ago. Honestly, I was right on this campus and you were in Germany. You saw it and I missed it. I confess I did miss that. Right. Well, there was also the, I'm sure you must have heard the story of the, I guess, a lecturer or teaching assistant who... Oh, yes.

...stayed for the Jewish students, right? Exhilarated. He was exhilarated by the carnage. Though that was the Cornell professor. Oh, I'm sorry. This was a person, and by the way, he's a product of the Berkeley Black Studies Department. So, you know, John, you and I are part owners of this debacle in a certain way. He's the one who called out the Jewish students in class,

told them to stand in the corner of the room, stand closer in the corner and saying, this is what you are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. And then he went on to say worse things from there. Now, he's been suspended. How does a person like this get fired or the person that you see davis uh also a transgender some kind of gender studies person uh who uh threatened on twitter uh zionist favoring reporters saying we know where you live we know your children go to school you should fear us more than you fear you know something rather and and that person's been suspended too i believe but suspended suspended the usual phrase is suspended pending an investigation investigation unbelievable right what is there to investigate don't forget that the the message that you the last one you referenced had twitter emojis of a knife and drops of blood so right this could reasonably you know

here and here we get inevitably to the point where somebody says well i thought you guys on the right were against cancel culture. I think when it all boils down to what we're against is people losing their job because they misgendered somebody or told an off-color joke. Or were accused of clumsy behavior on a date seven years ago. Things like that, which seem to be offenses that we can work through without people losing their livelihood. What we're talking here is another side of a line, which is praising barbarism and justifying barbarism. And that when you start to talk about, when you're a doctor or you're a teacher or you're a dentist or something like that,

and you start vilifying an entire group of people and saying that Hitler didn't go far enough, I don't think that's cancel culture. I think that's what the left always said. It's the consequences of your actions. And in this case, we see that the speech that we were previously told was violence, such as, you know, a Yale professor telling a student to not really get their undies in a bundle when it came to cultural appropriation of Halloween costumes. That was violence. But we know where you live and you know where kids go to school stabby stabby blood blood that actually smears more into the the violence category i think than telling somebody on campus to grow up yeah amen oh there we have it we've settled everything we're all you know peter

somehow turned his microphone off i see his moving, but no sound is coming out. Well, I'll just add this. Well, Peter is having his usual technical difficulties. Hold on, hold on. Am I back? There he is. There he is. I just thought Ben Sasse got the right form. Leave it to Ben to get the right formulation. That as president of the University of Florida, he's put out a statement saying that the Constitution, so he's admitting that the First Amendment extends to the University of Florida, the Constitution protects the right of everyone to make an abject idiot of himself. That was the phrase, abject idiot. But then in the next paragraph, he went on to say, however,

violence is completely unacceptable, and the campus police here at the University of Florida will be watching. That struck me as just right. Say what you want no matter how stupid, brutal, misguided, but the moment there's any hint of violence, it stops. Okay, so here's the follow-on to that story. The University of Florida faculty has now said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a moment. That statement was too strongly worded. That statement in favor of free speech actually discourages free speech. Unbelievable. It is just unbelievable.

All right, that's all. I just want to register my shock, horror, and dismay one more time. I'm done. Hey, I hate to interrupt you, but I have to tell you, you know, this is the digital world, right? You're listening to bits and bytes streaming and, you know, all that stuff bouncing around the internet world. All digital, ones and zeros. Well, the digital world is full of hurdles. However, with Persist SEO, you've got a seasoned guide. Are you feeling overshadowed online? Shine brighter with our digital marketing expertise. Competing with the big players? Well, let Persist SEO be your secret weapon. If leads are trickling or non-existent, their optimization strategies will open the floodgates. Say yes to digital marketing and

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and he writes the Spangler column for Asia Times. He's also the author of You Will Be Assimilated, China's Plan to Siniform the World. Oh, great how great orgs to deal with now David welcome we've been talking about the Middle East and the American reaction to it but of course it's big world and China is a player in it as we're discussing Putin is looking at this how other countries China certainly has got something to get out of this and some people are worried the China will be meddlesome because they want to stretch American capabilities beyond what we can do so that they can stroll in or assimilate or take or just do what they want to do with Taiwan or elsewhere. In a recent column in the Asia Times

under Spengler, you had some doubts about this. So walk us through what you think China's position is going forward in this new conflict. China is being opportunistic and trying to damage American interests because it's convinced that the United States wants to do substantial damage to the Chinese economy and hold back China's development. This occurred last week, of course. The Commerce Department promulgated a new set of rules against chip technology sales to China. To give an idea of the extent of this, NVIDIA booked $5 billion worth of orders for artificial intelligence chips to Chinese buyers, and that's only directly. There are many

shipments through third parties which are not included in that. So China has just been denied, what, $5 billion worth of chips, and they're furious about it. So the United States and China have been at daggers drawn over a number of issues. I think Taiwan is not going to come into play soon for a number of reasons that we can discuss. But absolutely, China is using the discomfiture of the United States and the surge of anti-Israeli sentiment in the Muslim world and parts of the global south to win points against the United States. And since Israel is an American ally, Israel is in the middle and getting beaten

up by China, which is something Israel never wanted. Netanyahu very publicly tried to pursue a somewhat independent policy towards China. At the end of last June, for example, he announced a trip to China. Israel has had enormous investment and a great deal of trade with China and wanted to keep that up. So this is not an Israeli initiative by any means. It's the Chinese deciding to make trouble for the United States by going after its ally. And that's most unfortunate for Israel.

David, could I... I'm trying to get in before your co-conspirator Steve Hayward gets in. The two of you know each other too well. I'm suspicious of what might happen if you start talking. Could I just ask the threshold question, a threshold question, at least as I try to grapple with all of this. China has done very, very well in the last 30 or 40 years in the world system that the United States and its allies constructed. They have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of real poverty. They've achieved a middle class of, what, 100, 150 million?

I've read varying estimates. There are now Chinese billionaires. They have a real tech industry. They lead the world in manufacturing. And all of this has happened within the international system that we built. Why does Xi Jinping want to take it down? Truly, what does he think he's doing? The Chinese view is that the United States changed the rules of the rules-based international order, and those rules included free exchange and technology, particularly semiconductors. Remember, China is the world's largest market for semiconductors.

It imported several years ago nearly $400 billion worth of semiconductors. And the United States in 2020 determined that it did not want China to reach past a certain point in development and cut off the availability of high-end ships, first to Huawei, and then in October 2020, reinforced by last week's measures, to all of China, on the grounds that China might leap ahead of the United States in artificial intelligence, with economic and military applications. So the United States wanted to hold China back. And China's response to that is that the United States is trying to ruin our economy. Now, there are nut balls on both sides who are pushing us into a confrontation.

There is a minority of American politicians who want to push for Taiwanese independence, such as a small group of Republican congressmen who promoted that. The Chinese will go to war over the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. That's a tripwire. The vast majority of the American foreign policy establishment, as well as Donald Trump, are against dancing too close to that third rail. And there are also knuckles in China who think that imperialism has to be destroyed. Those are minorities.

But the American consensus has pushed China into an oppositional position where the Chinese view, to summarize, is that we had a rules-based international order and the United States the massive illegal transfers of intellectual property. I mean, my question would be, if I may rephrase my question, since the international order treats them so well, why do they violate it, undermine it? I mean, any fair reading of the circumstances has to say that what the Biden administration has done in cutting off certain kinds of chips is retaliatory and late at the retaliation. Isn't that right? Or do you want to argue that we're making a terrible mistake the way some argue we did when we cut off oil to Japan? We're forcing them into a box. Well, what we're forcing them into is a massive national effort to duplicate all the technology they used to buy from us, which could lead to

a glut of semiconductors and a situation in which China is better placed to win a price war in a saturated market than we are. That could backfire. I don't think China is going to launch missiles at us the way the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor over chips. It's not at all an analogous situation. The Chinese are certainly serial thieves of technology. In China, the opposite of wrong is poor. They steal from each other, they steal from us and anyone they can. It is a predatory system. Nonetheless, we're at a point where the Chinese are now not dependent on stealing technology and they're developing their own uh huawei has a hundred thousand research personnel it spends more money on r d than microsoft does or google uh i've toured their research facilities i've met with many of their researchers a large part of

whom by the way are not americans europeans australians and so forth, and not Chinese. So the point at which the United States panicked about China's technological impulse was when China showed its internal capacity to generate R&D breakthroughs. Remember, China now dominates two high tech industries. One is a telecom infrastructure, 5G communications and so on. And secondly, electric vehicles. That's an important industry. China is by far the biggest player in the auto industry, the world's biggest manufacturing industry, and their best position at the technological frontier. China now has more robots per industrial worker than the United States does. Above all, China's advances in the applications of artificial intelligence to manufacturing, transportation,

logistics, and so forth are way ahead of ours. If you'll pardon me, one number. Huawei claims they have 10,000 customers for their AI systems in manufacturing. I spoke to one of the three major telcos in the U.S. and asked them how they stand. And this particular telco said they, at this point, they have no industrial customers for 5G systems. So it's complicated. Retaliatory, yes, we could call it retaliatory, but that's not what we're responding to. We're responding to Chinese endogenous innovation, which threatens to leave us behind in certain strategically critical areas.

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this, the Ricochet Podcast. David, you lay out in your latest Asia Times article China's long-term strategy to build global markets for the next generation of Chinese prosperity and trade. I want to ask you about the Chinese economy at the moment. I keep talking to people I know in the finance industry who have some varying degrees of knowledge of China, maybe not as much as yours, but they think they're very worried about the current state of the Chinese economy. They're worried that they're close to perhaps a catastrophic recession like the Japanese had 30 years ago, I guess. And first of all, what is your assessment of

the Chinese economy at the current time? And what are the risks not only to our own economy and the global economic cycle, but also what political effects that might have on China if their long run of economic prosperity hits a wall? China has one big problem. They have to transform their economy fundamentally from what Deng Xiaoping created in the reforms of 1979. Deng did one thing, which is to take dirt farmers and turn them into semi-skilled manufacturing workers. The workforce that Deng had to deploy in the 1980s, when China began its great run of growth, had a tertiary education rate of 3%. They were cheap labor that took a lot of American jobs and other jobs away. Now, that great migration, 700 million people have moved from countryside to city. There aren't that many people left to move.

The semi-skilled industrial model is past its use by date, and either they move to a high-tech industrial model, or they go through a major crisis. So the entire emphasis of the Chinese government has been to develop what they call the fourth industrial revolution. That's a lousy phrase they stole from the World Economic Forum, another example of technology. But what it means is the application of artificial intelligence to industrial automation. They've had mixed success.

They've done some very impressive things, as I mentioned, in auto, telecom, and so forth. I could give you some examples. I was in China and saw some of them recently. Their tertiary education rate is not 3% under Deng. It's 64%. It's about equal to Germany. They graduate 1.4 million engineers a year, and they need to redirect the capital of the country, into this industrial project. Now, for the past 30 years, the savings of the Chinese people have gone mainly into real estate. 70% of the assets of Chinese households are real estate.

That's created a bubble in some of the major cities and a huge deformation of the Chinese economy. Real estate is a quarter of GDP. They've got to reduce that. So for the past two or three years, they've been tightening credit and restricting activity in the real estate sector to pop the bubble. And that's produced a lot of pain. They've managed to have sluggish but still positive growth for the last year while they go through that mammoth reorganization. And so far, I don't believe they have a crisis. They simply have the mother of all hangovers after this 30-year spree on real estate. Can they make the transition? I don't know.

They've made progress in some areas, less progress in others, but that's the nature of the problem. Right now, I don't see a crisis. I just see a somewhat sluggish economy. Jobs are scarce in some places. People are complaining, but most people are working. Most people are making good money. Real wages are going up. And I don't see a political problem yet. It could turn bad. But so far, they've been able to keep the balancing act going. I mean, in America, when we say that, you know, 50 percent of my net worth is in real estate, we mean our house, perhaps, or a place down the street that we bought and rent out. In China, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of this is just investment in a property that is a place in the sky. It's not finished. It doesn't have the appointments. It's just your investment in a complex which itself

is completely unoccupied. So there's this sort of ghost building, ghost city problem. That can be exaggerated. When you move 700 million people, you build homes for 700 million people, if you have a 5 or 10 percent error rate, you're going to have tens of millions of unoccupied houses. And it's also the case that typically between sale of a house and occupancy in China, there's about two or three years of improvements that need to be made. So yes, there are a lot of unoccupied houses, but there's also an enormous pent-up demand for houses. This is a generation of Chinese that went from living with a dirt floor and an outhouse to having central heating and plumbing,

but a very small apartment. So there is a great deal of pent-up demand for more space. I don't think that, I think the ghost cities argument, it reflects a problem, but it's exaggerated. Basic problem is, in America, something like 40 percent of household assets, pension funds and everything else are in corporate assets, stocks and bonds. We invest in America. In China, it's perhaps eight percent. And the Chinese government has to convince the Chinese people to invest in its high-tech industrial project as opposed to in houses. If they want to make this transition, it's not going to be an easy thing to do.

And it's probably two years of a sluggish and unpleasant economy, at least, before they turn the corner, if indeed they do. All right, David, let me ask you about Israel. And the problem is, I don't know where to begin or end. So let me just ask you to give us your two top observations or concerns about whether it's the disposition of Israeli capabilities to subdue Gaza, or whether they should attack Hezbollah first? I don't know, but just give me your top two things on your mind on the Israeli scene right now. Urban warfare is a horrible and nasty business. There's no way to neutralize Hamas without going in on the ground. And Hamas has had 16 years to dig in, including building a tunnel system that's probably larger than the London metro in terms of length.

So doing this would without doubt involve a lot of Israeli casualties and a very large amount of collateral damage, by which I mean civilian Catholics. If you look at the mass demonstrations in Europe against European governments by Muslims and their sympathizers, the amount of political blowback that Israel will get if it follows this policy is frightening. It's a very difficult line to walk. And my second problem is that if Israel looks weak, no one in the Muslim world will want to negotiate with it. No one likes Israel. The Saudis and others are willing to negotiate with Israel because Israel looked strong. And if Israel does nothing, it will look weak and its position will deteriorate. So either alternative is going to entail terrible costs, and I think

they'll take the first with all the attendant costs as bloody and unpleasant as it will be. Very simple question here. Is there any solution? I'm hesitant to use the word solution because really it suggests something that can, a problem that can be solved and we're dealing with human societies. There are trade-offs as Tom Sowell said, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Has the moment come when Israel and the United States have no choice but to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities or to attempt to do so? I don't know, and I have no comment on that because I don't have a technological reading on this. Taking out Iran would lead to all kinds of chaotic

developments, and I'm not willing to recommend it without having access to intelligence about their state of nuclear development. I think the core problem in the Middle East goes back to 1948, when you had roughly equal numbers of Jews and Arabs expelled, respectively, from Jewish and Muslim zones. The Jews, of course, absorbed 800,000 refugees expelled from Muslim countries. So Israel's Jewish population went from 630,000 in 1948 to 1.6 million in 1955. No Arab country accepted Arab refugees. They turned into the Palestinian people by being dumped in camps as a bargaining chip against Israel. When Saudi Arabia appeared poised to sign a peace agreement with Israel, that would have meant that the refugees had become irrelevant. And I believe that's why Hamas launched the attacks when it did, to stop those negotiations.

And they did it effectively and they succeeded. So this is a victory for Hamas. They maintained the relevancy of the Palestinian refugee problem. The ideal solution would be for Gaza to be incorporated into Egypt. Let the Egyptians deal with it, create a national boundary. Solve the refugee problem by making them citizens of a nation state which thank you for joining us in the podcast today david goldman his spangler column appears in asia times and he's the author of you will be assimilated china's plan to siniform the world thanks for joining us today a pleasure thanks thank you david um i know what you're thinking that after conversations like these you look at

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the Ricochet, I'm sorry, the Ricochet podcast. And now we're happy to have Annika Rothstein, the author of Exile, Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora. She's contributed to the Jerusalem Post, Tablet, Commentary, and Ricochet. And she's reporting from Israel today. Welcome. Thank you. Your Twitter page, you have images that the world needs to see and that the world would prefer to turn away from. All the things that are coming out left in the wake of October 7th attack.

And we see more and more and more tell us about your day there at the kibbutz well it was the it was the longest day as as some of you know i've i've had the pleasure of being on your podcast before and sometimes i've been on from well usually i'm on from one of the conflict zones of the world and it's it turns out it's very very different when it's family and um i'm i'm usually very proud of not being scared of things but this morning i was genuinely frightened to go see for myself the things that you know i've been like any other Jew in the diaspora before. Now I'm in Jerusalem and I came here after the massacre. But before that I'm sitting

there doom scrolling and I'm seeing all the videos and I'm crying and I'm anxious. But when you go for yourself and you see for yourself, it's, it's, it's a hole that I was very worried about falling into and that I, I was right was right to worry, but I'm glad I went if that makes sense. I was able to speak to the rescue personnel there, the Zaka, or basically the forensic team in Israel. And they told me stories that no person can ever forget of of women pregnant women whose stomachs were cut open and breasts were cut off and babies with hatchets in their head babies that were tortured babies that were tied together and burned alive um and then you you walk around i i was able to walk around house to house to house to house and because of the

situation and because it's still chaotic yes most of the bodies have been taken away but there's no cleanup yet which means that you you smell it before you see it and and it hits you with with all the senses and of course you know as as a jew it's it's impossible not to feel as if bizarrely you're standing in the holocaust and and i i had to call my rabbi in the middle of it and i i haven't prayed in a long time and i said i i don't know what to do because a part of me just wants to kill somebody. I'm so angry. I'm filled with such rage, and yet I can't, so all I know how to do is pray. And I said, send me some tehillim, send me some Psalms, because I want to stand in this unholy place and pray because I don't know what to do. Darrell Bock

Annika, you're in Jerusalem now. As I understand it, Jerusalem feels relatively safe, but it's a small country, and Americans, I at least, am always surprised by how small it feels when you're there. From Jerusalem, where you are right now, and that's a safe place, to the kibbutzim that were attacked attacked to the site of the big dance or rave where a slaughter took place what is the distance two hours by car okay at a leisurely pace israel is is tiny you know it's like uh it's not even an american state right uh so the distance and when you say okay jerusalem is safe yes relatively but also jerusalem is a mixed city everybody is incredibly tense i was here in march and i was doing the usual hanging out with my friends and we drink a lot of good wine eat a lot of good meats you know we

walk around in the city none of that that is here now. What we do is we sit and we ask ourselves when, when is it coming? We know it's coming, right? When the war is breaking out in earnest, is it opening on one front? Is Hezbollah gonna, as a lot of us suspect, when we go in on the ground, hezbollah and iran gonna attack from the north which means that we're we're in at least the two front war right at the same time in a tiny country so the first thing i mean i'm i'm staying at a hotel everywhere it says mamad you know shelter a bomb shelter we the first thing you do is you check, okay, on my floor, where is the bomb shelter? Because we know it's tomorrow morning, it's the next day, but we're going to have to run.

And on my way back from the south today, sirens, you get out of the car, you lay on the ground. This is the life now. In Jerusalem, in a supposedly or relatively safe place right because also you know i'm sure that you've discussed this at length but we thought we did not realize or at least there was there was a significant intelligence failure at some point and hamas is not is not as weak as we had hoped the you know the sirens are going off in Tel Aviv. They're going off in Jerusalem. They're going off in the south. They're going off in the north. This is terror.

And, Annika, I'm struck. Population of Israel is about 9 million. Standing army, typically, of about 100,000. Reservists have been called up of 360,000, which puts the number of people bearing arms on the ground at 460,000. The active duty United States Army is only 440,000. So, in a nation of 9 million, 460,000 people called up to military service, quite apart from the military situation they place, that must leave shops without attendance. I mean, it has to be visible everywhere that people who are engaged, that's

what I was getting at. What does it feel like? It's, you know, it's the simple things as the night I arrived, and of course, I'm always excited to be able to go eat kosher food or, you know, be in Israel. Like it's, it's an exciting experience, but even at the hotel, the answer now is sorry, we don't have it because of the situation. Sorry, we don't do this because of the situation. There is, there's no staff, everybody, you see it everywhere. Every able everywhere every able-bodied man is in the army now everybody i know is either in the army or has said goodbye to their husband their brother their father their you know to go to the army um you drive around i drove from from jerusalem to the south what you see are not cars going to work or you know going to visit friends what you see is military you meet the military and you feel it it's um it's it's an interesting sense

for a jew because of course we we tell stories that's what jews do and of my generation we i was raised in a generation where we told the stories of our grandparents and, you know, the time that changed the world for the Jews, the Jewish world. Right. And I was sitting with my friends here yesterday and we said, do you realize that we're now in those shivering few days before we're in those times? We're about to live in the times that our grandchildren speak about, the times that changed, you know, the status quo, that changed the history of the Jews. Never would we have imagined, but you feel it on every street corner. You feel it everywhere. And you also feel the tension between Jews and Arabs.

I have one more question before James and Steve come in, and it's this. I haven't been watching it that closely, but my impression is that the traffic, the Jewish traffic in Ben-Gurion Airport is inbound rather than outbound. That lots of American Jews, lots of Jews from Europe, lots is an odd way of putting it because of the way the 20th century turned out, there aren't as many Jews as there should be, but Jews are flying to Israel to be there, and the younger ones, the more able-bodied, are flying to Israel to fight. And I have not been aware of streams of mothers and children or old people lining up at Ben-Gurion to get out of the country to safety. Am I generally correct about this?

You're absolutely correct. Today, I checked the numbers today, 200,000 Jews out of a population of 9 million have returned to fight. And I said, you know, as I left on Thursday, I said, I live in Ghana now and I work in Ghana. And my employees were very puzzled by the fact that I wanted to go home, to go to Israel during the war. And I said, I wish for you, and even more so I wish for the Western world to have what we have. These are dark, dark times for the Jewish people. But my God, am I proud and happy to be a Jew? Because we do not sit and say, oh, somebody else has got this. So I can go about my day. Or even worse, say, oh, he's got this. And then we complain about how he's doing it. We all do.

We all come home. And we all have this sense, almost childlike, that when something is wrong in the world, where do we want to go? We come home. And I didn't know what I was going to do here. I didn't know how I was going to help. But I know that there's no other place that I can be right now than home

because my people are hurting. My people are bleeding. We're about to face one of the greatest battles that we've faced in 50 years or even more. And this is a pivotal time for the Jewish people. And we Jews, we come home. This year in Jerusalem. This year. Amen, amen, amen i'm in exactly oh yeah steven oh that's good yeah annick it's uh steve hayward talking to you

tonight from munich germany actually and wow hi steve i hope i can get through my question um you know i'm not jewish but i always understood growing up what never forget meant and of course one thing i remember is coming here to munich as a teenager 40 years ago and doing what american tourists did i went and visited dachau i'm not sure americans are doing that anymore i hope they are i don't know um i was struck by the way it's just that you know an impressionable teenager that the german bus driver who pointed where we wanted to go was clearly ashamed as he should have been right i mean we go through that for a long time but and and now suddenly the point is it seems that people have forgotten or are willfully forgetting i mean the thing that outrages me so much

is at least you've heard the stories we were talking about them earlier in the show the tenured professors on campus openly siding with hamas yeah right in other words uh you know from the river to the sea it may as well be sieg heil and and i've been saying for a long time that uh i've been talking about american universities as our east german universities well that's becoming more literally true because you know it's German universities 90 years ago where an awful lot of the vileness and anti-Semitism spread as official intellectual doctrine. Okay, enough of a rant.

What are you hearing about the hostages? There doesn't seem to be a lot of talk about it in the media right now. What are people there saying? I'll just stop there and let you try and help out flesh out my question these are the things that you know one of i've like i said i've been doom scrolling a lot and and the video that got me the most and of course i'm also a mother and and as parents we all can relate to this as the father who's eight year old daughter when he found out that she had been indeed murdered and her body was found, he said, yes.

Thank God. And I don't think there's a Jew in the world that is not constantly thinking about these faces, these children and these women and these men and thinking what it would be to be in the hands of Hamas. I think about it because as a Jewish woman, the images I've seen, it's not difficult to imagine what it is to be in Gaza and be in the hands of these animals. And as one parent said, they're neither alive nor dead in her mind. They're living in a hell that we cannot imagine as it is now um you know of course as some of you know israel has a the hannibal doctrine there's there there are there are rules and there are practices when it comes to not negotiating over

and allowing the leverage that it means to to be held hostage by by terrorists in this way um i i can tell you for myself of course we speak about them every day we wonder about the babies every day where are they are they alive is somebody holding them is somebody putting them to bed are they eating what has happened to them um i think that we all we say kaddish for them already in our way. I don't know if you know what that means, but it's a difficult thing to say, but Kaddish is the Jewish prayer of mourning, and we say it for the dead. And this is, it's a very difficult thing. We cannot be held hostage by them holding hostages.

We do not know, and I pray every day that the IDF and the intelligence know something that I don't. But I'm afraid that they're lost to us in one way or another. We pray that's not the case. But we also know that it will not stop a ground invasion either way. It will have to happen because there is no way to defeat Hamas. There would be no way to retrieve these hostages without having a ground invasion either way. We also know where Hamas keeps their weapons, right? So we can assume that they are keeping their hostages where they keep their weapons we are assuming that they have placed these jewish babies

as human shields and that is the best case scenario so when i say that we are living in a non-stop heartbreak it is no it is no exaggeration and i will also i i also want to add that there's there's no jew that is not paying attention to what is being said on these campuses across the jewish world and i will say and i say you know i i half jokingly say i didn't think i could become more right wing you know i've always been to the right of genghis khan but but at this point there i know these names i know these institutions i know every single person and what they are doing at this time and none of us will forget although the western world forgets willfully or otherwise we don't i certainly don't and when this time is over when it is all said and done, and we have beaten back Hamas beyond, you know, to the edges of history as we have everybody else who has ever come for us,

then we will remember that list. Good. Annika, yeah, in one sense, when it comes to the students, you can always say, well, you know, youthful stupidity and naivete. But no, it's something else. It's a failure to apprehend the nature of barbarism and horror and evil in the world. But today is hard. Tomorrow is unknowable. But the future, there will be a reckoning.

There will be an evaluation. There will be, amongst many people, some of it will be political. Some of it will be technological and, you know, whatever intelligence failures there were. But there also has to be or maybe there won't, but there should be words like decolonization and the rest of it without really realizing the true intention of the people behind it. That's the question. How many people on the left, how many Jewish people on the left, secular, content to have an easy feeling of virtue by siding with the Palestinian cause, how many of them are going to look at this and say, wait a minute, the people who I thought were on my side because we said the same buzzwords are not. They hate me, and they hate me for the

most fundamental reason of them all. Do you think this will have this lasting impact, he said, finishing up his long-winded speech as a question well i see it happening i mean i certainly see it among the journalists that i meet here in jerusalem and there are a lot of very difficult conversations being had now it is a loss of innocence if you will but again i'm not i'm not of a forgiving nature i'll say that uh, uh, I find it curious that when Hamas tells you, for God's sakes, they wear GoPros when they kill our children. If they have told you what they think about you, they are in no way unclear about where they stand. So if you want to take up for them, I don't know. I have very little time for you.

And whatever internal struggle they have, I won't be losing any sleep over that. If they come to the right side, then they're welcome. I welcome them, not with open arms, but I welcome them. Well, what I will say is I, what I wish for them then is that they can go to Gaza, but, but I pray that when we speak again in three months time, that Gaza will be very different. So, so who knows, maybe I will move to Gaza after all is said and done. So what I can say is, you know, we're, we're all very focused on not even tomorrow, but the next hour right like we're we're we know what's what's coming and and there's also a somber feeling i'm in a different position now

than i was all those years ago when you're very raw about war my oldest son is 20 now and as i drive across israel the faces that i see in those tanks they're are 20 and, and I want to hold them. And I want to, you know, there's, there's this feeling of, ah, may we earn the sacrifice that you are about to make for all of us because I, I feel it in my heart. So as, as much as I am excited for us to win and to regain a little of that security that was lost two weeks ago, I also feel that the absolute heft of what we are about to live through and the lives that are about to be lost because these young men and women are about to enter what can only be described as the pits of hell. And they are doing it for all of us. And the Jewish people knows a lot about sacrifice. And like I said, this will echo through time. This will really echo through time.

And as I sit here in our eternal city, it's a heavy heart. It's a very heavy heart that i have and and we're all we're all waiting for that big great big unknown i'm saying nothing because i don't want to blaspheme your remarks with anything other than thank you for joining us good Good luck. Best wishes. Thank you, Anika. Strength and victory. Thank you. Amen, amen, amen.

Thank you. And now we go to a commercial. I was going to say, James, how are you going to do a normal segue after that? There's no segue to be had. Yeah. Rob's not here, so it's up to you to get us out with a joke. No.

Well, maybe. I'm just joking. I'll try to rally, but it's impossible. It's impossible. I have to ask you, though. You're in Germany during Oktoberfest, right? Is Oktoberfest going on? Well, actually, I think Oktoberfest is actually in September. I've always been confused about this. Right. That would be very,

very typical German, just, you know, very efficient. Why wait until October to get it out of the way in September? Right. Yeah, well, there's been no shortage of beer consumption on my part the last six weeks, that's for sure. have you consumed the beer in lederhosen though that's the question no because i'm not i'm not trans anything james i'm not gonna do that you're not trans cultural you didn't bring no you didn't bring lederhosen on your vacation to germany you know the thing that i would like about you know if i'd lived in a lederhosen culture they look like you know it's uh kind of vague in the sizing of it that you know you pretty much leader hosen fits nobody so it's just always going to be baggy or the rest of it

me i have problem getting close because i just have one of those absurd little uh sets of measurements that i can't find anywhere never find anything pants wise that i can get at the department store no i gotta order them online and that means that you're at the vagaries and the wishes of what different companies think your waist size means. I've got about six, seven pair of pants that all have the same waist size, and every single one of them is different. It's just absolutely mad things. Some of the bags, some of them are tight. Well, Roan solved my life. Roan solved my closet problems. Now, you know, guys, men's closets were due for a radical reinvention, right? And Rhone stepped right up to the challenge, I'm happy to say. Rhone's commuter collection, and no, you needn't commute to wear them, but I do, and I love them because

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as you stretch and wear the products. And that's why they're great to take on vacations, too. It's that easy, really. And with their Gold Fusion, Gold Fusion anti-odor technology, you will be smelling as fresh and clean all day long as you started. Now, on top of that, Rhone is 100% machine washable, so you can ditch the dry cleaner altogether. I love these pants. And what I loved about them when I first put them on was a as i said how good they felt and b how they absolutely fit my measurements like no other pair of pants i've ever had peter i believe you have a pair as well and you can testify testify i do and i i i just love them i just this is the first what what is it called? Technical fabric. That's, there's a new, this is sort of the new wave of, in men's clothing.

And honestly, I was very skeptical of it because I'm old enough to remember leisure suits. Right. I'm old enough to remember what, exactly what they were trying to do with what we used to call polyester back in the old days and it was all just unspeakable stiff and clammy and looked as though it would melt if you put it in the washing machine instead of get washed and these roan clothes are technical fabric i guess is the new term anyway they feel light they're extremely comfortable they're just particularly we've had some heat here in california and um it's a way of dressing for the office in a way that just isn't that feels as i honestly feels as though you're headed off to a resort they're just great they're great so what i would say is women in the audience get these for your men the men may not upgrade their closet

they may think that what they have is fine but they will be happy women for christmas go get for whatever holiday you got coming up go to rowanan. The commuter collection, it'll get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. And if you head to roan.com slash ricochet and use the promo code altogether now, ricochet, you will save 20% off your entire order. That's 20% off your entire order when you head to r-h-o-n-e dot com slash ricochet promo code ricochet it's time to find your corner office comfort we thank rome for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast well gentlemen before we go um the brouhaha kerfuffle in the house continues and i'm profoundly uninterested in it i'm just i'm just not uh except apparently uh aid to israel is dependent upon them getting their their um ship in order right and it seems to be

and this is what is irritating a lot of the the gop's base i think and not without reason is that we're spending an awful lot of money on Ukrainian and Israeli security, but our own border security seems to be a bit lax. And I'm of the walk and chew gum school, so I believe that we actually can walk, chew gum, and I don't know, snap our fingers. We can do Israel and Ukraine and border security as well. But Abbott is sending more immigrants in buses to New York, which is compounding their difficulties as such. Ben Dominick had a great piece, I think he linked to it the other day in The Federalist, about his experience in New York and going to the Roosevelt Hotel. And I remember the Roosevelt Hotel is an absolutely wonderful gilded lobby, which apparently now is somewhat worse for wear.

Anyway, what in there would you like to take? Would you want to talk about the speaker, the aid, the migrant crisis, or do you just want to throw up your hands and say, for heaven's sakes, we've dealt with two huge topics already. It's Friday. Let us go. Let us go, James. James Crips As it turns out, you can't operate too terribly long without a functioning House of Representatives. The government's going to run out of money on November 17th. That's less than a month away. Israeli aid, there's a certain amount that the Pentagon can do with drawing down reserves and using standing orders and so forth. They get it all lawyered up. What else can we do? What else can we do? And it turns

out you come to an end to what you can do. So, we do need a functioning house. I feel to me that I understand what the Republicans are going through. They're angry with each other. They're really angry. These guys fought a very hard campaign. They ended up with a majority of just four, if I have that right, just four seats. And with four seats, everybody has to put up with a lot. They have to put up with each other. They have to engage in a certain generosity with each other in order to hold the coalition together. I have had a high view of Kevin McCarthy, who was through sheer jollity and good spirits and really hard work to raise money, even for Republicans of the left and of the right, of whom he personally might not have approved, who wouldn't have gotten elected in his district

in Bakersfield, California. He crisscrossed the country month after month to raise money, hold it all together, and then eight sons of bitches turned on him and broke it all apart. And Jim Jordan now has run, and Jim Jordan unleashed aspects of his support who started attacking Republican moderates on Fox News and other outlets. And the Republican moderates said, Jordan, you tell them to knock it off or you're not getting my vote. And Jim Jordan didn't tell them to knock it off. So these guys are just, guys and women, have had it up to here with each other. It's a mess. As far as I can tell, the only workable solution, and I'm surprised they haven't tweaked to it already. They've got

to give Patrick McHenry, whom no one seems to dislike, he's a speaker pro tem, has extremely limited powers as a temporary speaker. They need to pass some sort of resolution that gives him the powers to hold votes and get the government funded and get aid to Israel properly underway. That's my vent. I'm kind of angry that they're angry. Steve? Yeah, well, so by the way, Peter, you could have that solution of, was it Patrick McHenry, is that his name? By the way, I didn't know we had a speaker pro tem until this all happened, and apparently it's some very strange arrangement from the semi-secret order of succession in the event of a catastrophic terror strike. Right, right. We've never needed one before.

Well, guess what? The catastrophic terror strike was named Matt Gaetz. Look, you know, I actually have a little more sympathy than you guys do for, let's try a little chaos once in a while. However, by the way, I like Kevin McCarthy just fine. I thought that was dumb to throw him out. However, what we have right now is a de facto government shutdown you just i'm just restating what you just said right second of all we could have speaker temporary speaker mchenry if 20 democrats said yes tomorrow right let's remember that uh the and i think by the way the democrats may regret their opportunism

and all this before long because if we get to a real government shutdown with, you know, budgetary authority expiring here in three weeks, and I think, by the way, this puts aid to Ukraine in jeopardy more than it might have been if you'd carried on with Speaker McCarthy. So I think there's going to be a pox in all our houses, not just Republicans, but I think some sober Democrats are going to have second thoughts on their own role in all this before it's all over. Sober Democrats. And with that, I know an oxymoron. I know I'm off running these parts. Right.

Before we go, though, we want to tell you one thing. And that is if you enjoy this podcast, although enjoying really isn't the word. If you were struck and moved by Anika's testimony, the other Ricochet podcast network. And there are so many other podcasts here what's bugging me with Dennis Neal he speaks to two women, a Jew and a Muslim Tal Hartuv and Azra Nomani

and they discuss their fight against radical Islam, jihadis and the horrible events that drove them to do what they do now so that's something we wanted to tell you to listen to as well on the same subject. And, yeah, that will help you explore the depth and breadth of the Ricochet Podcast Network, which, by the way, comes to you thanks to Ricochet.com,

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