Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The Political Consequences of Gaza w/ Yousef Munayyer | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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The Political Consequences of Gaza w/ Yousef Munayyer | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to reborn, now is the time of monsters.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those words from Grams, yeah, welcome to the time of monsters podcast.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: On this week's episode, which is a sponsored by the nation magazine, where I, I, G, T, R, M, of course, funded for.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're going to be talking about the Gaza so-called ceasefire and trying to look at, you know, what has been achieved and where do we go from here politically?
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now Donald Trump interviewed by Fox News said something interesting.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was asked by the host, do you think you've earned a place in heaven by a delicious ceasefire?
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Trump actually, you know, someone I've often criticized, but I'm this one point he said,
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the honest which he says, you know, like, I don't think I'm going to get into heaven.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not haven't bound.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that's true.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both with the Gaza Seaslier and perhaps more generally.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Seaslier, you know, is something a lot of us have been hoping for for a long time.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it, you know, I think it accentuates the sort of need for a political solution.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the talk about this, I'm very happy to have on Joseph Manier, who's the head of the Palestine Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's been on the show before, is a very insightful speaker on these issues.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, welcome to the program.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me back, G. It's always a pleasure.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so so let's just get into this like just the overall survey like what do you think you know about the ceasefire like what has been achieved and and then maybe talk about you know some of the sort of rockiness that we were already seeing.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know it's interesting that you you let off with a trump in his sort of assessment that he's not going to make it through the the pearly gates and that that might be his most realistic take that we've heard in quite some time because what we've seen in you know recent days and weeks with his work here in the Middle East is that he thinks he's achieved peace in the Middle East
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's, you know, had these pretty massive meetings with world leaders in Egypt and the, you know, the branding of this entire gathering was peace in the Middle East and they all gathered in front of these big bold letters that said peace 2025.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, you would think, if you listen to the words of Donald Trump that he's resolved in his language, something that's been going on for 3,000 years.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, the reality is, I think, is most honest observers know that that's not what we have here.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not even remotely close to that.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: What we do have at best case scenario is a very, very fragile ceasefire agreement that is being challenged every day by the situation on the ground.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've already seen Palestinians being killed by the Israeli military since this so-called ceasefire took effect.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have already seen the Israelis reneging on their obligation to allow the free flow of humanitarian aid in Takaza.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this ceasefire, if we can call it that, is not without numerous challenges.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's really the extent of it.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can't say that it is anything beyond that, certainly not now.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: At the same time,
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know right now we're not in a place where a hundred hundred fifty Palestinians are being killed every single day in Gaza by the Israeli military that's where we were last week that's where we were before this agreement right that's a good idea I'm glad that that's not happening and I think the entire world was hoping for that to stop
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Are we in a place now where we can move more towards peace?
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: That all depends on many, many different questions that are yet to be answered.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think one of the most important of them is, how do we look at the past two years?
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's a lot of people out there, including many of the world leaders who were assembled on a stage along with Donald Trump and Cairo to announce this piece in the Middle East agreement who would like us to simply turn the page from what is happened.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Would like us to simply move on.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, we witnessed genocide for two years.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Day in and day out.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And anybody who has been paying attention knows precisely what I'm talking about.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Holocaust Scholars, people who work on genocide issues around the world is rarely human rights organizations.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would also add to all that, like this is the general consensus of the sort of, you know, people's of the world that, you know, they're spawning in the United States.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think they're out of the Americans exact that Israel has committed the genocide.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm certainly in Europe, one would find the same thing.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the Middle East, and I suspect in Asia and Africa and Latin America, this is a 100% consensus of the 100%.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not something that's controversial.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, people who deny that at this point are the equivalent of the flattery society in my view.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But just for the sake of argument, let's just say that that's not the situation.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: even if you're not ready to use the G-word, and I think most of the world is, given what we've seen.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no denying that there's been incessant war crimes in Gaza for the last two years.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that is the most generous best case scenario.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you move on from that?
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you just pretend that that didn't happen?
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: What kind of world are we going to live in?
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where we say that that's okay.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: that there's no accountability for this, that the leaders who calculated these policies, I've been Jim Nettanyahu who's been indicted by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of using starvation as a weapon of war.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do we go on living in a world where he just gets to walk free?
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: where the people who carried out these horrific crimes and posted evidence of it every single day on social media, running over the bodies of Palestinians with tanks, shooting children in the head, blowing up a civilian infrastructure and laughing maniacally about it all at the same time so that their TikTok followers can laugh along with them.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do we just pretend that didn't happen?
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think if we're going to have a conversation about whether or not we move from whatever fragile ceasefire we have now to a place that's closer to peace, accountability has to be at the center of that conversation.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And any organization, any government who dare speak of human rights, who dare speak of international law or a rules-based order or some kind of norms,
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: If this is an at the top of their agenda, they cannot be taken seriously.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: But right now, what we're seeing is most of them just want to move on.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that does not vote well for the future of the region.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And frankly, for the future of the world, for us to live in a place where what we saw,
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: becomes normalized is not just dangerous for Palestinians or the Middle East's dangers for everybody around the world.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, this is my thinking on it.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you raised the issue of accountability because I mean, I think it extends a problem.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think obviously there's the issue of the war crimes of the Netanyahu and his government and that's still going to be carried through international courts and that's going to be a process that's going to take many years into the future.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then there's also a broader political accountability.
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, all these acts were supported.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the last two years, by two American administrations, a bipartisan sort of political consensus.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what is seen, I mean, since you mentioned accountability, a sort of attempt at rehabilitation by certain members of the Biden administration, many of whom have been now been taken up into the arms of the establishment and given all this sort of nice little positions that one gets.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe Jake Sullivan is at the Harvard Policy School and whatnot.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these people, like I speak very much to your point about,
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: for, you know, wanting to move on, you know, like they say, like, you know, we're happy that it's been negotiated.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We had tried to do certain things that were able to do it.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, like, what does it say if we were talking about the need for accountability?
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What would the accountability for Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk?
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is there anything that can be done about that?
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, look, I think that the folks that you named these key architects of Biden administration policy, which we should be perfectly clear, was a policy that supported this genocide from the beginning and did nothing to stop it.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that, you know, somehow puts them in an even more pathetic place than the Trump administration, which also supported this genocide for far, far too long, but managed at least at this point to get to a ceasefire agreement.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll see how long it lasts.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I hope it does last.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the Biden administration, I mean, what does one even say, I mean, to get, you know, to get out done by Donald Trump on on this issue.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's, it's, it's a, it's a really, really low bar and somehow they are way below it.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, and they are like you said, you know, seeking to sort of whitewash the history here.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I just, I just don't think that that could be acceptable.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Look, I think there are multiple pathways for accountability, including legally.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you know, these folks in my view violated U.S. law, and that, and they should be held to account for that.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they should never be allowed to forget that they did that.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there are lots of ways in which that took place.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And frankly, I think, in some instances, there were conspiracies to violate US law.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: particularly around evading laws that govern US support for militaries that are denying humanitarian aid.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know that the State Department effectively cooked up a report to say that Israel was not doing what everybody knew that Israel was doing.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: what every international organization was saying that Israel was doing in denying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, which would trigger U.S. laws in relation to armed supplies to Israel.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's a long list of ways in which U.S. laws, I believe, were violated by this administration.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there also needs to be political accountability, frankly, these folks and people like them people who have supported this policy, either in positions to shape policy or just being supportive of that policy from the outside.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: they should never be welcomed in the Democratic Party again.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's where things are going to be honest with you.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think people are so outraged by what they saw.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So dumbfounded by the way that their government was behaving so differently than they wanted their government to behave in relation to this genocide.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: That they don't they don't want to see these people ever again.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: They don't want to see them in positions of power.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: They don't trust their judgment and they don't want them representing them.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that that is something that is kind of happening.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to be frank, it's kind of surprising to me like how quickly it's been happening.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, I've long thought that like at some point,
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: APEC would have to become like the NRA, like just seen as a toxic lobbying group and one that lawmakers, certainly if they wanted democratic party votes, would now not be associated with.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now I had frankly thought that this is something that's gonna take like 10, 15, 20 years to happen.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But suddenly it's like, happening at quite a remarkable pace, we talked about this right before we started recording, but,
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congressman Seth Moulton, who looks to want to do a centennial run in Massachusetts, very centrist role Israel Democrat just like wrote the other day that he will not take a pack money.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So can we talk a little bit about that?
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like how the tide is sort of shifting and the way in which the very least aback is being seen as toxic?
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was super, super interesting.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad you raised it.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, look, this is a trend that's been happening starting for a while.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, it's accelerated a lot because of the genocide over the last couple of years.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, the roots of this, I think, in recent years, was in the way in which the Israeli government politicized the U.S. Israel relationship.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the most significant moments around this were really during the Obama administration, where a pact
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: along with the head of the Israeli government, Benjamin Netanyahu, worked alongside Republicans to circumvent the White House and undercut Obama's approach with Iran.
• 14:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: and that really identified to Democrats, the ways in which this relationship was changing, and that APAC was not the kind of bipartisan player that they had once thought they were.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you started to see Democrats start to create some difference that some distance between them and APAC.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: It used to be sort of like a
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: an annual ritual for all of these different, you know, members of Congress to go speak at the APAC event and what have you.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: People who are running for president and so on, but slowly and slowly progressive Democrats first and then more mainstream Democrats start to skip some of those APAC events and create more distance.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's been starting for a while.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, we have seen also a pack and it's not just a pack to be fair.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a number of other organizations that are part of the sort of pro-Israel lobby effort.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Try to fight back against the shift by getting deeply and overtly involved in democratic primary politics.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so they have sought to primary progressive Democrats who are critical of Israel, who are seeking to hold Israel to account.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: people, for example, like Congresswoman Cory Bush, people like Jamal Bowman, people like Somer Lee, and some of these cases they've been successful in supporting primary opponents.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Some of these cases they have not, but they have very directly
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: been involved in basically recruiting candidates and then giving them absurd amounts of money to be able to run these campaigns.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think in the Missouri one, it was the most expensive primary campaign ever on record.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Something like $10 million they spent to try to unseat Cory Bush, right?
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this has been sort of the role that they've been playing because, right?
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're trying to hold on to an evaporating consensus around this issue.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: It used to be that they didn't need to really spend money on this stuff in this way.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: But now, just to hold on to a consensus, they have to spend a significant amount.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: right, but what's so interesting about the molten thing is that here you have a democratic primary, and he's seeking to primary a senator who, you know, as far as, you know, senators on this issue has been one of the more vocal critics of a of Israel that are out there, and he has, as you said, he is a centrist, right?
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Normally, those people would be flocking
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: to APAC money, to be able to finance their campaigns, right?
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: He starts his campaign now by saying, I don't want anything to do with APAC.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a pretty, we have never seen that before, right?
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I should also know, like, even in the years leading up to this, when APAC was getting heavily involved in these kinds of primaries, they were getting heavily involved with money,
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: but they were not trying to make their involvement about Israel.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they would spend all this money on campaign ads against the candidate that they wanted to take down.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: But none of the campaign ads would have anything to do with Israel.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because they understood that Democrats are really not interested in hearing a pro-Israel message.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: right.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, but now we're at a stage as you said with molten, where here's a centrist Democrat and even he's saying, a pack is too toxic for me, man.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he did this the day after he announced that he was running, right?
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when he did it, he said, hey, our FEC filings show that we're not taking any a pack money, right?
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And those FEC filings came out like the
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, he made this announcement or something like that, which shows you that actually this was a decision that's been in the works for a while, right?
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the ground is shifting actually quite significantly, quite quickly, right beneath all of these all of these politicians feet and it's not just happening on the left It's yeah, I don't that's what happened on the right.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, absolutely, because I mean, I think that like Benjamin Netanyahu in many ways is the author of all this and it was his sort of decision under the Obama administration to basically make the pro-Israel stance a more partisan stance and I think his thinking was
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: that Israel could rely, always rely on the Republicans.
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if they're empowered, they would give Israel what it wants.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the Democrats would be afraid to challenge us.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if they don't like us, it doesn't matter.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, that's around two on both counts.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the case, you know, they alienated the Democrats enough that APEC money is now seen as toxic.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But also, I mean, I think the gamble that he made,
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the Republicans are always going to be on their side, that you will always have, because of the Christian evangelical Christian's ideas component, you'll always have a strong pro-Israel Republican party.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that's actually been born out either, and yeah, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it was a strategy, the idea of putting all of your eggs in the Republican basket was something that was criticized by many proesural folks for some time because they felt that that was risky to begin with.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think for some time, you could say that Republicans were reliably proesural and would continue to be.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, the thing that really changed that was the magamovement, and political parties go through transformations.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the Republican Party that existed prior to the advent of the magamovement was not the Republican Party of the 1950s and 60s, right?
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: The role of evangelicals in Republican politics is a recent development, right?
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's something over the last 50 years, but just as these waves can come, they also go.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in the process, parties can shift their positions on some of these issues.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, with the maga movement, the key issue here is this question of America first.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: right?
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not really out of love for Palestinians or concern about the rights of Palestinians, but it is a viewpoint that says, why are we giving our money to this foreign country?
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how is that in our interest?
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if this foreign country is going to keep dragging us into wars and endless entanglements in the Middle East, we're only going to be spending more of our money elsewhere than where we should be spending it, which is here at home.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And obviously there's lots of other sort of dimensions to this, but that's the basic point.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think one of the things that's happened over the last couple of years is that this question,
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: has become really central.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why are we supporting Israel?
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And people are left to sort of sort that out.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: They don't understand why we support Israel to the extent that we support Israel.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: No matter what it does.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when you start asking questions about why you end up in places,
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: where you're thinking a lot about the role of interest groups, where you're thinking a lot about the role of campaign contributions, where you're thinking a lot about a corrupt political system that doesn't seem to be representing the views of the people that it's supposed to represent, which, by the way, reinforces pre-existing MAGA views, right, and reinforces pre-existing views on the left elsewhere, right, anti-establishment views on the left.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, the last couple of years have really dragged this into focus.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you have voices on the right now who are really asking questions about why are our politicians taking money from APEC?
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why is this organization playing such an influential role in our politics?
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's not a question that comes out of concern for Palestinians.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It comes from a very different place.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it is a question that's being asked more and more and more.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's led to a lot of resentment.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Resettlement towards Israel, resentment towards Israel's involvement in American politics.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Politicians who are playing this game, taking money from the interest groups and not really representing the people that they're supposed to represent.
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Lindsey Graham is supposed to be the senator from South Carolina, but that guy talks more about Israel than I think he's ever talked about South Carolina, you know, and same same goes for Ted Cruz, I mean, you know,
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when people start thinking about this, they see these things, I say, this doesn't make sense, this doesn't add up, right?
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, if this genocide had gone on for a month, I don't think we get to that place.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the daily grind, the daily destruction, the imagery, led to a lengthy conversation in
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: and we're at a place today that I don't think we were ever before.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, I don't.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's absolutely right.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the other thing I would say about the right is in some ways.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: As you mentioned, the evangelical period of domination, and I've also mentioned also the sort of the role that Neil conservatives, former Cold War liberals, who had migrated to the Republican Party,
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The period of their domination was much more recent and prefer than we would think.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It really sort of, you know, coalesced in the 1980s under Reagan and came to fruition under George W. Bush and the global war on terror.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think in some ways the the failure of that war has, you know, called a lot of the
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: that consensus politics into question within the Republican Party has made people receptive to other voices, and particularly has revived older traditions.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think people might not be aware of this, but like in the broader sweep of American history, until Reagan really
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Republicans were the more skeptical party about the Israel relationship than the Democrats were.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was always like Republican presidents, working from a tradition of sort of national interest realism who were asking the question the cost benefit question, like, what does this alliance get us?
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was like, people are like Eisenhower with the Suez crisis, there were Nixon or even Reagan with like in Lebanon who were like, you know, more willing to
• 25:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: go against Israel, literally going as more recently as a busineer, George H. W. Bush taking a very strong stance against the settlements.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in some ways, I think that's sort of failure of busineer in the war on terror combined with this more recent genocide and grinding on, and this sort of maga question, what is America first?
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Have all caused the ground to shift and
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: young Republicans, Republicans under, say, you know, 50 who, like, seem almost a skeptical of Israel as their sort of liberal counterparts.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So do you want to say anything about that?
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, look, I mean, one thing I think is important to keep in mind is that Ben Javan Netanyahu becomes the political operative that he is here in the United States in the 1980s working in the Israeli embassy.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: during the Reagan years, right?
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you can see where this vision and strategy comes from.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: It comes from an understanding of an American politics that was evolving in that direction during that time, right?
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that's your parents' Republican party.
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe not your parents or my parents, but that's somebody's parents Republican party.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's not that's not the Republican party of younger Republicans today.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one thing that we see in the public opinion polling around this issue is that it's not just younger Republicans, but also younger evangelicals.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: among those Republicans who are moving away from the pro-Israel position.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what we're really seeing is a generational divide and it's across the board.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, across the board, across the spectrum, younger folks are increasingly fed up.
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think you're right to put your finger on, you know, the global war on terror period.
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: which, frankly, without the global war on terror and the failures of it, I don't think you get the magamove.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Part of the MAGA movement is a resentment towards establishment politics, a resentment towards being lied to and of course who they look for to blame for that right might be different than who you and I look for to blame for that right they might blame immigrants they might blame whoever but the resentment there is real
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they don't want to go down the road again of endless wars of the Middle East.
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're they're very sensitive to that and angry about it, but I also think like,
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we were talking about this in a conversation the other day, there is an Iraq generation.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And maybe you and I are part of that Iraq generation for whom, you know, the March to War on Iraq post 9-11.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And all of the disastrous lies that went into that were really formative and shaping our understanding of politics for us.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And these are folks who for the last two years have been watching day in and day out, the horrors that the Israeli military is committed in Gaza and cannot understand why their government here in the United States not just allowed it to happen but supported it.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's going to be something that is going to shape their politics for years to come.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: and I think it's going to change the landscape of what's possible here in terms of U.S. policy on this issue.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're just starting to see the impact of it.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, there's many areas that's coming here.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: We mentioned Seth Moulton.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the New York mayoral race has also been part of this.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly Zaron, M. Danny has laid out a sort of non-signist position, which was unthinkable, really, the Democratic Party.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now is the contract to be like the mayor of the city.
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that has like the most number of Jews of it.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's doing pretty good with Jewish New Yorkers, you know?
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know, probably getting into a majority of, like, certainly younger Jews.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And doing robustly interesting thing about that whole election.
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: What really is, I think, so consequential about it in terms of the bigger sort of political questions.
• 30:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Montana has said a lot of things about this issue, you know, obviously he calls it a genocide without a quivocating, and he said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to New York, right?
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he hasn't paid a political price for this at all.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But quite the reverse, I actually think that's like this helped him because it gave a lot of credibility.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's what's so different about this.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's so different is that the attacks that used to terrified Democrats, right?
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: The smears of being anti-Semitic or the smears of not being supportive of Israel enough.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that was a time really not that long ago, where I mean,
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: right and and now that's not the case in a biggest city in America with the biggest Jewish population in America and that that sends a message that you know what those those kinds of attacks those attack ads that line just doesn't carry the kind of currency in American politics that it used to and that means a lot more things are possible.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, don't know.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, in terms of like sort of laying out, you know, where we might be going, like, sort of from here, you know, we mentioned accountability.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I, you know, some listeners might remember that moment.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2016, where Hillary Clinton touted her friendship with Henry Kissinger and Bernie Sanders says, well, if I'm president, I will not be calling up Henry Kissinger if he is not my friend.
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I can imagine someone running for president in 2028 on the Democratic primary saying, you know, like when I'm president, 20 Blinken will not be part of my administration.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jake Sullivan will not be part of my administration.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brett McEarck will not be part of my administration.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would not recommend it, so someone running do that because that's a very clear way of drawing a line in the sand.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's one sort of political consequence.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: To me, the other larger issue is both what can be done within a political system, but I think more broadly outside the political system.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It seems like the population in the United States and in Europe is far more sick than by what's happened.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the Middle East than the elites are and that sort of working within the political system will get you some necessary results, but like working outside the political system in terms of like boycott, divestment might yield even more results, but I'd like your thoughts on that.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think all those efforts are going to continue and really going to grow significantly.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the only reason we're at a place where there is a ceasefire now is because the costs of this genocide were starting to add up for Israel.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: In a Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech about a month before this ceasefire announcement, where he was speaking in Hebrew before an Israeli audience and he said, look like this international isolation thing is real and we're actually going to have to restructure
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: and we're going to have to engage in independent arms production because we can't really rely on that for the long term, right?
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is not a person who has a vision for peace, okay?
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's also a person who's saying, we're kind of, we're kind of in deep trouble here.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that the growing efforts in Europe to call for sanctions of Israel, you know, some European countries have actually been at the forefront of this and doing far more than others.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Others have been less willing or comfortable to do that.
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But particularly after the United Nations General Assembly, when so many European countries recognize the state of Palestine.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, that may not be the thing that, you know, puts sanctions on Israel, but it sends a clear message to Israel, to the Israeli government, to the Israeli people that those European governments do not see eye to eye with the Israeli government and are getting frustrated and fed up.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what's the next step going to be?
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: If they're at a place where they're recognizing the state of Palestine, what's the next step going to be?
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: They didn't want to wait to find out, right?
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think they started to come to the conclusion that the costs for this genocide were starting to add up.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do want to say something about 2028 though, because I think, when I think about 2028, I think about 2008.
• 35:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the reason that I say that is because in 2008, you know, he ended up seeing Barack Obama get elected in the Democratic primary, which was, you know, not something that people really expected.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: But one of the key reasons why was because he was able to say, OK, during the Democratic primaries, I oppose the Iraq war.
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I did not support it and my form policy is going to be different than that.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now we can talk about whether it's form policy really was and all the issues with the Obama administration that we ended up seeing for eight years.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the electorate was pissed about Iran.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: and they did not want to reward politicians that they felt were on the wrong side of the most consequential foreign affairs issue of their generation.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think 2028 is going to shape up much the same way when it comes to the question of where were you on the Gaza genocide?
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: who are you going to put around you?
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's going to be an important issue in a democratic primary, but I also think it's going to be an important issue on the Republican side as well.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because there is a big devolved ruling now among Republicans about what America's position in the world should be and where Israel fits into that.
• 36:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's going to break out into the open as we approach 2028.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and I mean, I think on the Republican side, one figure to maybe keep an eye out as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I think once he was roadblocked from running for the Senate from said he was against the border has been moving in a very interesting direction and all sorts of issues of you know, she's not someone I would ever support for wide variety of reasons.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you know like on Israel and like he was like basically saying well, this is a country that has like free healthcare and free college education and we're like, you know, something that made the money and why and I think that what reason why Marci Taylor Green is saying that stuff is her next path
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: if she's not going to go to the Senate is going to be the presidential run in 2028.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she is like, you know, laying up markers for stuff that she can say that some of her rivals will not might not be able to say.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it is going to be like a very interesting and contentious period.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think there's a lot of hope.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I actually, I mean, I want to leave maybe listeners with that.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, obviously like what we've seen over the last two years,
• 37:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been reporting on it and you've been like covering it and you know, it's been a very dark and depressing period in many ways, but there's also a path forward and there's a political path forward.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that the sort of struggle continues and it's also a struggle where I think the people are in the right side are winning.
• 38:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're winning hearts and minds every day and they're changing the conversation every day and we could be entering into a very different world.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Surprisingly, off the mistake note, I want to thank Yosimoneer once again from the Air Center in Washington, D.C. for being on the program.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, G. and I look forward to staying in conversation with you as this new world is born.