Today's podcast features Eli Lake discussing with our crew the question of why America seems determined to prevent our allies in Ukraine and Israel from actually winning the wars we are actually supporting, preferring stalemate and ceasefire to victorious conclusion. Why? Give a listen.
The Commentary Magazine Podcast
Let Them Win!!!
Today's podcast features Eli Lake discussing with our crew the question of why America seems determined to prevent our allies in Ukraine and Israel from actually winning the wars we are actually supporting, preferring stalemate and ceasefire to victorious conclusion. Why? Give a listen.
- Broadcast on:
- 13 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
I'm Rick Julius, a partner at Cordell and Cordell. As a business owner in these uncertain economic times, you struggle to guard your life's work against unexpected challenges. But can it withstand the sudden disruption of a divorce? When your hard-earned work is at risk, count on our experience at advocacy in handling these matters at Cordell and Cordell. Schedule an appointment with one of Cordell and Cordell's Charleston area attorneys. 1-1-8-0 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard, sweet 200 Charleston, South Carolina, 29407. Rick Julius, licensed in Pennsylvania only, cordellcordell.com. I'm Rick Julius, a partner at Cordell and Cordell. As a business owner, it's your job to anticipate constant market changes. But what do you do in the event of a divorce? Years of hard work building a business are on the line. This is not business as usual. You need an experienced partner you can count on for help. We're Cordell and Cordell. Schedule an appointment with one of Cordell and Cordell's Charleston area attorneys. 1-1-8-0 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard, sweet 200, Charleston, South Carolina, 29407. Rick Julius, licensed in Pennsylvania only, cordellcordell.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] [SINGING] Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, September 13. It's a Friday, the 13th. I didn't realize that can't be good. For today. So just everybody batten down the hatches. I'm Jon Podhor. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me. As always, executive editor, a green walled high aid. Hi, Jon. Media commentary columnist and author of the new book, The Extinction of Experience available wherever fine books are sold or on Amazon. Christine Rosen, hi, Christine. Hi, Jon. And joining us today are contributing editor post of the-- I guess it's the re-education podcast, but it's now on the honestly feed at the free press. Yeah, just, yeah. And staff are at the free press. Eli Lake, hi, Eli. Thanks so much for having me back, Jon. It's great to be here. Before we go any further, I don't know if we're going to have time to talk about it specifically. But if you have not heard Eli's latest podcast, which is called When Students Become Terrorists, on the honestly feed, which came out last week, you must go Google it, find it, listen to it, read, realize, print version of it. The third from the top, if you go to your honestly feed. If you go to the honestly feed on your podcast feed, it is an astonishing tale of this journey in 1968 onward of upper middle class Ivy League educated kids literally becoming bombers, setting off 1,100 bombs in the United States in a 14-month period, blowing up a townhouse in Greenwich Village over the next 10 years, knocking over brinks trucks, killing cops. These are all rich kids who are very well-to-do kids or elite kids, and what it was that drove them to this place. And obviously, there's a reason why, Eli, you are taking up this topic now as school is beginning. An incident last night in Newton, Massachusetts, where a Palestinian protester ran across what appears to be Commonwealth Avenue, maybe, ran to attack somebody who was carrying an Israeli. It was in Newton. Not Boston. Is it Newton? Right, but Commonwealth goes through Newton. I should know that I remember my geography correctly. And like dashes charges at this crew of three-- sounds like religious Jews holding Israeli flag, saying on a corner, and a scuffle breaks out, and a gun shot goes off. He tackled one of the men to the ground. He tackled one of the men. Another one started, like, put his foot on top of him on the ground, and somehow a gun went off. And the guy who charged these three Jewish-- I'm not sure they were Jewish. They were pro-Israel. OK, well, we don't know. We don't know that this is OK, fine. So in any case-- Also, it's not clear how he was shot. Like, that's the other weird-- it wasn't like the guy he was charging. He shoots his gun while he's charging. It's-- the gun goes off. No, somebody says, get the pistol, or there's a pistol on this very chaotic little video. Anyway, we will know more today. But I only bring this up to say that-- Well, the man who fired the gun has been charged. The man who fired the gun, but it's not clear that it's his gun. We don't even-- we don't know what all the details are. But I'm only bringing this up to say that we are on a knife sedge-- we've been on a knife sedge in the country for 10, 11 months. There have been obviously incidents of violence. We had the killing of the guy in Thousand Oaks, California, killed by a adjunct computer science professor, smashed on the head with a flagpole and killed on the street. But they've been few and far-- the really, really violent incidents have been relatively few and far between during these protests relating to Israel and Gaza. And-- but this is part of what Eli writes about and podcasts about here. It doesn't take much except marinating in an atmosphere in which resistance turns into the celebration of violence for people to cross that invisible barrier between protest and actual action. And if I can just say one more thing and then stop monologuing, our October issue in which both-- in which Eli, Christine, and Abe all have important articles, also features an article by Gary Saul Morrison, a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University, which is about Dostoevsky's novel, variously known as The Devils, The Demons, or The Possessed, published in 1873. And as Saul Morrison says, widely considered the greatest political novel ever written. And it is literally on this topic. It is about young intellectual Russian bohemian hipster adjacent people who end up in a kind of death cult in a sort of organized totalitarian death cult. And this was Dostoevsky's visionary ability to-- literally, to see 100 years into the future, as he often was able to do in this portrait of a world of people who look not in any way dissimilar to the students for justice in Palestine or into fought a revolution or whoever you want to call it. And that issue should be up. Or some of it, at least, will be up today on our website at commentary.org. And the rest of it will be up by Monday. But we're in this heightened atmosphere. And school has only just started. Can I just add one thing? There is a connection between the language and the violence, which is to say the reason that we have to object so vociferously to the labeling of the Warren Gaza as a genocide is because when you really believe it's a genocide, that justifies any number of horrific things, including violence. So if you think it's an actual genocide, then you can understand-- not to say I would condone it-- but you can understand why somebody would charge at full speed at somebody across the street waving an Israeli flag. And that's why it is so pernicious that it's not like these two things are disconnected. I think most people, there's very few people who would be gondion. There's probably a circumstance under which you would be violently often say, oh, if your family was being attacked or something like that. But if you really believed that there was an actual genocide taking place, one could support violent action. I mean, I try to put myself into the position of somebody like Monoc and Begin in the early 1940s. And so that's why it's important that these things are so related. It's not just a matter of, wow, that's wrong or it's offensive or it makes me feel uncomfortable to say this lie about Israel. It's no, it's that kind of thing leads to violence. And it was a point I think that was made after Trump survived the assassination attempt. I mean, it's language matters, and this is why. That's a great point, and again, find honestly, find Eli's podcast when students become terrorists, just to prepare yourself emotionally for the worst, if the worst should happen over the course of this year, could universities seem to be trying in whatever completely incompetent way they have to lower the temperature on campus. All these universities are now issuing statements of viewpoint neutrality. They're going to stop issuing statements about current political events. And so therefore, they can't be importuned by their students to do that if they say, we're just not going to do it at all in any way, shape or form. I will say that that worked on the campus of my daughter's college, Williams, the president of Williams, a day or two after October 7th issued a statement saying, we will not be making statements on political issues, and the campus was quiet and was calm for almost all of the year. So that's at least one anecdote about how using one of these moments where the administration says, we're not open. We're not opening for discussion the question of what the university's role should be in dealing with this world issue. We're here for people to pay $200,000,000 a year to get some kind of an education, or at least get the diploma that the scarecrow gets in the Wizard of Oz, where he has no more brain than anybody else, but he has a diploma. So anyway, that's happening. And maybe that will have a positive and ameliorate of effect. But let us move to the headline today in The New York Times and talk about aid greenwalls cover piece. Our cover package is called, why won't we let them win? And the them, in this case, is Israel and Ukraine. And Abe, you went to Ukraine in July, and you have come back with a report on what you saw, what you experienced, and why the policy that has been pursued by the United States is so off key and so unrelated to the actual facts on the ground in Ukraine. Then we see a headline this morning, which will require some updating of our piece, in which we're told Biden is poised to allow the Ukrainians, finally, to use offensive weapons on Russian terror, American weapons, and I guess planes and stuff on Russian territory. Well, he didn't say planes. He didn't say planes. Well, he didn't say weapons. The administration just said, we're working on that now regarding the weapons. But it fits the pattern perfectly. This has been the case from the very start. Every single weapon or vehicle or aircraft that Ukraine has requested since the start of this war, the Biden administration has been trepidationous about-- certainly at first, saying, no, well, no, that's a little much. Don't forget when the war started, Biden said, I can help you evacuate to Zelensky. And Zelensky said, we don't need a ride. We need ammunition. And that has been-- Hamilah was the last person in the room, remember? Yes. Hamilah went to the Munich Security Conference and had a meeting with Zelensky, which we are told is supposed to be the evidence of her deep foreign policy experience. And she was part of a conversation, probably very much like that conversation where it's like, oh, you have to go to war with Russia. Here, let's flee. Let's, as Woody Allen says in love and death, let's do some active fleeing. And remember, Zelensky had a-- that was a moment of choice for as many other people would have fled. And the war would not have gone on the way it went. And that's what the administration was hoping he would do. And there was a very brief moment. It was during one of the early-- this isn't in my piece, but I remember this. One of the-- Biden's early, it was like a press conference where he was talking about who getting ready to invade. And I think this is the same press conference, I think, where he kind of stepped in and said, well, it depends. Well, what NATO will figure out what to do, we may disagree on whether-- depending on the size of the invasion. But he said, but yeah, we definitely believe Russia is going to go in and take Ukraine. And Biden's had something like-- and he can do it if he wants to. Not meaning I allow it, meaning he has the power to do it. So the administration thought that it was a foregone conclusion that when Russia invaded Ukraine, they would be successful sooner rather than later. Can I-- can I-- I have to say, because as our listeners know, I'm not a foreign policy expert by any means that I learned from you all. And what I learned from Abe's piece that was really important, and everyone should read it regardless. But this idea, the fact that the Biden administration thought that, first of all, shows that they really don't know what they're doing on a lot of serious foreign policy issues. But second of all, it has huge implications for how this war has been prosecuted and how our lack of support has actually extended what we hear in another context is concerned for the humanitarian impact of war when you're talking about Israel and Gaza. In Ukraine, if we had simply stepped up and given the Ukrainians what they said they needed allowed them to prosecute a war, it probably would have ended, because as Abe's piece very thoughtfully lays out, Putin might not be able to win this, which is why he's bombing children's hospitals and terrorizing with the weapons he does have the people of Ukraine, hoping their will would break. Yeah, that's precisely right. I think so the US administration has been driven from the start, one by the idea that Russia would win, so there's some sense of futility to helping out Ukraine here. Look, we tried to bail them out, which we tried to get them to leave instead of have to fight a war. And two, of course, Biden is constantly afraid of Putin's threats. Putin's saber rattling has had a really intense effect on this administration, and as we've seen every time, so Biden doesn't give Ukraine the weapons it wants, doesn't give him the aircraft it wants, doesn't give him the launchers it wants, or it gives them launchers, but secretly will augment them so that they can't fire a long range, doesn't give Ukraine these things, until past the time when they really could have made a difference, then he gives them to him, then he gives these things to Ukraine, and none of it triggers any World War III, none of it triggers a tactical nuke from Putin. All of it just keeps Putin threatening the West, and it keeps Ukraine able to fight the war, never able to win it. Let me read the key passage here from your piece. Why won't we let Ukraine win? The point is that if Russia could have defeated Ukraine in days, it would have. If it could have defeated Ukraine in months, it would have. And if it hasn't defeated Ukraine in two and a half years, it's because it hasn't been able to. Russia isn't the fighting machine of Joe Biden's apocalyptic imagination. It's a big bungling mess that terrorizes civilians in lieu of winning. If the next American president, whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, were to reject Biden's too little, too late approach and give Ukraine what it needs, when it needs it, he or she would surely go down in history as a co-author of Putin's defeat. You just point out that, in fact, Russia is really bad at fighting this war. It has weapons and it has numbers. It is now recruiting new soldiers with enormous bounties, $60,000 signing bonuses in a country where the per capita income is $15,000 a year because all he has, it's classic Russian military strategy, is throwing bodies at something and hoping that the corpses pile up enough that whoever is remaining behind the corpses can create a fork to shoot at the remaining soldiers with. And that should be a very hopeful sign about the fact that we chose the right side, not just morally but tactically in a conflict over whether or not one country in Europe was going to try to swallow up another country in Europe. All the signs are that we chose the more inventive, the cleverer, and by the way, the more needy side. That is to say, Russia can pull out with its tail between its legs and it's still Russia. Ukraine loses the war, Ukraine disappears. So there's an imbalance there on who actually, whose lives are at stake. And Ukraine has had to be inventive and ingenious because of the restrictions we've put on it. Part of the fact of the Russian summer campaign was the largest of the war so far and they didn't achieve their major goals, which was to create a buffer zone around Kharkiv. But they cost a lot of Ukrainian lives. And that's overwhelmingly because of American restrictions on where Ukrainian fighters could shoot during this campaign. We did not allow Ukraine to shoot deep into deep across the border of Russia where the planes were, where they were firing these drones and glide bombs that were killing all these Ukrainians. One of the things that I got from the piece-- Oh, excuse me, hold on. I'm sorry. Because we have not introduced you coming in late. But present here, completing our panel is, of course, senior editor Seth Mandel. So Seth, one of the things you got from the piece was-- Hi, John. Hi, Seth. One of the things I got from the piece was that Ukraine is making the sacrifices on behalf of the West and the Western Alliance and everybody involved, that they're actually sort of sacrificing for America and American interests. And they're paying the price for it, right? I mean, that's what I got away from the part about Kharkiv and the part about, you know. And also, we just saw news that Iran is transferring missiles to Russia. So if Russia has to go begging for missiles to Iran, I guarantee you, Iran is not putting limits on where they can shoot those missiles inside Ukraine. But is that-- I mean, is that right? Is that like-- it seems like Ukraine is sacrificing everything to stay alive. But also, if they do so and they succeed, they will reshape geopolitics, at least somewhat, clearly in the direction of the Western Alliance. Well, one way of switching that around, Abe, just to add to this is Ukraine wins or Ukraine loses. So you make the point that the world in which Ukraine is seen to have won this war, resets the geopolitical table as Seth says. The other part, which is that Ukraine loses and Russia wins, what follows logically from that, which you also explore? Well, a few terrible things. First of all, there's no more Ukraine, which is in itself a horrific tragedy. You're talking about a country and a people that are just swallowed, and not disappeared, but subsumed into Russia. And in addition to that, you then have militant, aggressive Russia bordering more NATO countries, which either intentionally or by accident could trigger some sort of war that would bring the whole alliance into it. If you're afraid of World War III now, because we may send some long-range missile systems, we have much more to fear if Putin is suddenly inside of all of Ukraine. And we will be spending more money, by the way, on European safety in the future, if that's the case. So to America, so two American political points then. So one is we are arming Ukraine. We've been arming Ukraine for two and a half years. Lava, Ukraine, where everybody two years ago was just hot to trot all over America in the West and in liberal circles. This is our cause for Ukraine and all of that. Now it's two and a half years later. And a lot of that passion has, of course, quieted itself. But we have Harris and talking at the convention about how NATO is the greatest and isn't NATO fantastic, saying that the debate, and he hates NATO and I like NATO and aren't the 800,000 Poles in Pennsylvania, offended by the way that Trump talks about NATO or whatever. And then you have Trump on the other side, saying this war needs to end today. We need to end it today and saying falsely, millions and millions have died. And they're trying to start World War III. So Trump, arguably, forget the Republican Party and the NatCon, and all of that. Trump's instincts here are horrible. His instincts are to say that we are perpetuating the threat of World War III at a time when the CIA director, under Biden, Bill Burns, went to a conference last week and said I was wrong. I thought, along basically with my administration, that we had to play this carefully and quietly because I thought Putin might use a battlefield nuke and break the Hiroshima Nagasaki compact that we weren't going to do this again or the world wasn't going to do this again. And I was wrong. I'm clearly wrong. He's a paper tiger where that's concerned. Trump is now to the pacifist left of the, you know, in this conversation. And the Biden people are none too good either. So that's-- - And there's another point here regarding the nuclear threat, which is that the other thing that reality we'd face if Putin were to win is that that would mean that going forward any tyrant with a nuke could rattle a saber and get whatever he wants. There's no longer US protection umbrella, superpower out there to keep world order. It just means that the person with the nuke who we're scared, the regime with the nuclear weapons that we're scared of gets what it wants. And that is a world that none of us want to live in. - Can I just ask a kind of question which is, we know where the Iranian missile and drone factories are that are supplying Russia. Why aren't they smoldering? I mean, it's like at this point, the Israelis have managed to show that you can do all kinds of things in Iran and the Iranians are kind of stumped about how to respond. And so we have this, I mean, until now, if it's true that Biden will remove restrictions on long-range missiles into Russia, like it seems like the aggressors have had this advantage of not having to worry about their own territorial defense while they are acting insanely aggressive, whether it's in the case of Iran, the proxies and then arming Russia's war against Ukraine or Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Why does Iran still have missile and drone factories? That's a, that's a 20, that's a push of a button. - Because I think ever since the presidency of Barack Obama, there's been this residual impulse to not be too hard on Iran, to hold out hope that you can make some sort of deal with them and they can be some sort of partner. - Yeah, well, that's true, but the flip side of it is that we are worried about a spiral of escalation with regards to Iran that, you know, just taking Bill Burns's, you know, logic to its conclusion, haven't we also learned in addition to the fact that the Iranians can do these things that nobody thought they would be successful at, that the Iranians have a real problem. They haven't responded yet to the Hania assassination in their own capital. - Okay, what? - And saying they would. At the debate, what was the single thing that most needed fact-checking from the moderators on Kamala Harris that she said that was not true? - No Americans are fighting an active fight. - She said there are no Americans in active combat anywhere in the world under our presidency. Now that is lit, that is so not true that it is almost nauseating because it's an insult. - It's an insult because we have people on the ground in Iraq, we have people on the ground in Syria and the Navy and the Air Force are fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea, right? So and in the Gulf. So it is not true. There are at least 10,000 Americans in active combat roles in some fashion or other that she just waved away with her hand, but then let's parse why she said that. She wants to say Trump's a war monger and we don't want war. We want a ceasefire. We want cease fires, all of that. And that's why. I mean, do you think a person who is running that way and lying about actual Americans in harm's way at every moment as we speak is gonna bomb an Iranian drone factory? I mean, I wish they would. She ain't gonna do it. He's not gonna do it. He's got a granddaughter visit on 9/11. - I agree. I just saying as the journalist intellectual, part of this debate, the things have changed, which is to say that there was an incredible point before, which is that, all right, if you, I mean, this just came up if you remember 20 years ago almost in the Iraq war, which is why don't you, you know the IADs are coming from Iran. There were people in the Bush administration who wanted to attack in Iran. And it was seen, no, that's a terrible escalation. You don't have no idea what the Iranians will do. And all these things unconventional, blah, blah, blah. Well, okay, we've played it out now. The Iranians are stumped. - But you know, part of the thinking now in the administration with this new news about the Biden administration being poised to allow Ukraine to use Western, I didn't even say American, Western, you know, like a European weapons long range in deep into Russian territory. Part of the concern though, with the reason it's not a yes yet, has to do with their fear, it's a new fear, which is that Russia will help Iran target Americans. So, you know, this administration is afraid of every bad actor everywhere. Instead of seeing this axis as a problem and seeing it as an axis. - Is Priscilla not an American now? I mean, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I'm just saying it's like enough already. - And the three American service men and women who were killed in Jordan by Iranian proxies. - Come on. - Yeah, they're already targeting America. - So those are... - They're trying to kidnap Americans by the way too, apparently with the health angels. That's an amazing story. - That's the targeting and the killing. And then there's the question of how the world changes, which Abe, I think is the point you're making, which is then you have targets of opportunity that are created by changing facts on the ground. We are learning things about the Iranians. We have learned things about the Iranians over the last six months. Which is that they're implacable, martial resentments and hostilities that mean that they will not let this, these insults to them go unanswered. So they fire 300 missiles at Israel, all of which except for one are shot down. Yes, by Western Alliance, it was really amazing. Israel has been killing Iranian nuclear scientists. It has stolen the Iranian nuclear historical documents. It is acting with impunity inside Iranian borders. You know, we killed Soleimani. All this stuff is going on. And what response has Iran had? Iran, also you could look at and say is a paper tiger. Iran is not a terrifying threat to the world. They are scaredy cats. They don't know how to respond to these aggressive acts by Western powers in Israel. And maybe-- - It flew the red flag of revenge. - Right, and maybe that should be the data that you use to figure out how you're going to deal with them as actors on the stage. They're giving us inputs. - I was trying to figure out the last time Russia was invaded, and I think a bust of then the Nazis, right? Is that the last time Russia was invaded-- - I don't know, did the Chinese invade in '69, the Soviet-China border war, did China cross into Russian territory? I don't know. - But this is what we're talking about. Like, maybe China definitely Hitler and the Nazis, before that the Japanese Empire and also-- - And the Japanese Empire beat the Russians in 1905. - And also the Ukrainians encursed. Russia doesn't get tested often. Like people just say, as Abe says in the piece, there's this belief that we don't want to wake the sleeping bear in the woods or whatever. But Russia doesn't get tested. Nobody marches an army across their border with Russia, into Russian territory, holds hundreds of square kilometers of territory and prisoners of war and entire towns and sits there. And that's what's happening now, like it's a crazy-- - Nobody wants to invade with an army, Russia, like as a war conquest the way that Hitler did. People are talking about, I mean what you're talking about in this piece, Abe, is simply allowing Ukraine to go after, you know, their military infrastructure and their supply chains. And that's very effective because they're using all of that to kill innocent kids in a children's hospital in Ukraine. - Right. - But I mean, I just mean in terms of whether they will respond, how they will respond to like full frontal attacks. - Yeah, but Seth is making an important point, which is that Russia, whoever famously said was it, McCain said Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons. That is what we are seeing here. Russia is an ineffective and ineffectual fighting force that has thrown, spent two and a half years fighting a much smaller and much less powerful country. I mean, maybe this is also a story with Afghanistan from '79 to '89, like it's not good at this. And people don't challenge it or test it because it has nuclear weapons. And it's not gonna use those nuclear weapons because if it were, it might have already. And so why are we allowing them to blackmail us or stalemate us or stalemate the West? They're giving us information about what they will do if we move more aggressively. - You know, and part of why we have this built in sense of Russia as this scary, imposing military monster is because of the Cold War and because of its status, you know, its super power status. And but it was a superpower then because it had in it Ukraine and a number of other republics that it doesn't now, that's the point. An important point. - I'm Rick Julius, a partner at Cordell and Cordell. As a business owner in these uncertain economic times, you struggle to guard your life's work against unexpected challenges. But can it withstand the sudden disruption of a divorce? When your hard earned work is at risk, count on our experience at advocacy in handling these matters at Cordell and Cordell. - Schedule an appointment with one of Cordell and Cordell's Charleston area attorneys. 1180 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard, sweet 200, Charleston, South Carolina, 29407. Rick Julius, licensed in Pennsylvania only. cordellcordell.com. - Let's move from the why won't we let Ukraine win to why won't we let Israel win? And both Seth and Eli have pieces in the issue on this very subject. Eli's is called Blamey Bebe First and Seth's provocatively entitled Who Are Kamala's Jews. And the two are intertwined. So let's talk about why won't we let Israel win? Kamala Harris did it again during the debate on Tuesday. What did she say? She said, I will always have Israel's back. Israel has the right to defend itself. But we need a ceasefire now. We need to end this war now. This war must end today. This war must end today right now with the ceasefire right now right now. Which is, by the way, what Trump said about Ukraine, exactly like five minutes later in the same debate. So more signs of. So if there's a ceasefire here as we're taping at 8.43 in the morning on February, on September 13th, Israel doesn't win. It doesn't lose. And it has largely won. Or it's largely achieved the goal of neutralizing Hamas. But it hasn't done it. It had there hasn't been a surrender. There hasn't been the hostages aren't back yet. Whatever. There's no ceasefire deal that doesn't mean that what we are doing and insisting on it is stopping Israel in its tracks rather than letting it complete its task. And there seem to be two players in this. One of them is the people who work around Kamala, who are her palace guard, largely centering on Phil Gordon, her national security advisor, and how they are trying to make right as a friend to Jews and a friend to Israel. And there is literally no reason to believe that either is the case except these statements. And Eli, in your case, it is the idea that everybody who is uncomfortable with this war has decided to fix as its target. Aside from the protesters who want to blame all Jews everywhere for everything, on one man on Benjamin Netanyahu. So tell us how they blame BB first, Eli. - Well, I mean, this was a great stroke of editing from you, John, because you kind of, you told me to write this when I was hot about it. So it was always smart to do that. But this was right after the horrific execution murders of the six hostages, who were in this labyrinth of hell underneath Gaza. And the response that broke my heart, I think it broke all of our hearts, was that many Israelis started saying the blood, their blood is on your head. They're on yours on your hands, Netanyahu, because you have resisted a deal that would have returned the hostages. And what was, I think that in a way, as an American Jew, as a Jew in diaspora, I really do think that we have to usually defer to Israelis who have skin in the game. But there are these moments when, because we are distant, we're more distant from the crime scene, that we have the kind of advantage of a little bit of perspective. And I can understand why the Israeli people are exhausted and at their wit's end. But it's blaming BB for the actions of Sinwar, is such a gift to this rat face demon. And that he has, and it's also false, Hamas has not participated in the ceasefire talks. The ceasefire talks are between America, Egypt, Qatar, and Israel. And Qatar is kind of a proxy for Hamas, but they're not really a proxy for Hamas, because Hamas has rejected numerous offers before. And even the State Department, which doesn't really like BB that much, has said that over and over again. So the idea that, and hopefully we're not seeing this now, but the idea that there would be a ceasefire deal where Israel would have to give up this strategic hard one position of the Philadelphia quarter, which would basically, if that was the case, I mean, I think it's fair to say, you're asking the leader of Israel to save the lives of hostages at the expense of future lives down the line, because Hamas will survive. Let me put it like this. I think you should think about ending Hamas and saving the future lives, but I can understand someone who argues it the other way. What I can't understand is somebody who pretends that that's not a significant and serious and real strategic choice. And that was the commentary, not just, I mean, listen, among Israeli politicians, sadly, or Lapid, where there was a time when I liked him, I interviewed him a few times. But also, Tom Friedman, in that you guys talked about it last week, that horrible column that he wrote, and it's like this position that like, oh, BB doesn't want to cease fire, 'cause he knows that after the war, he's gonna face criminal charges and he's trying to hold on to power, and he means what a cynical and horrible guy he is. And that just elides this choice that I think we all have to recognize that Netanyahu is trying to make. So that's what blaming BB first was about, and I have my own criticisms of Netanyahu, and I'm sure everybody here does. That's not the point. The point is, is that in this particular situation, you can't blame him for the deeds of Hamas. He just can't. - I mean, it's an enormous moral stain to once again to take responsibility out of the hands of every single death in Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian, according to international law, which is cited falsely to attack Israel with, is on Hamas' hands. It started the war. It prevailed in its aggression. It could end the war. It's the one that could end the war at any single moment by saying we surrender, we give up. That bombing in November, that was way too much. We're done here. Come put us in handcuffs. We can't take this anymore. We'll leave. Let's see what happens. Every single death, Palestinian and Israeli and Thai and whoever else was there at the Nova Festival and all of that, every single death morally attaches to Hamas and not a single one attaches to Israel under the terms of what we understand to be the laws of war. And yet in Israeli politics, famously fractious. And oh, you know, there are 27 parties and seven Jews and nine opinions and all of that. But even there, the moral stain of attacking themselves, attacking their own, I know a lot of Israeli leftists and people don't like BB wanna believe that he is an illegitimate leader for some reason or other because he doesn't do well in the polls. He won an election, the last election. He won with an outright majority of his coalition of 64 seats, the first majority election since 2015. He is the legitimately elected leader of the country, has a parliamentary majority that has not collapsed and is therefore executing or carrying out the will of the people as we understand that is carried out in a parliamentary system. And yet the intelligentsia in Israel and a lot of people who are very emotionally, you know, out of control because for very good reasons seem to think that they can cite a poll from channel 12 that shows that he shouldn't be considered somebody that you should talk to or negotiate with. - Yeah, it's extremely frustrating. And the other thing is that this is one of the Achilles' heels of historically, the Jewish people, which is that when there have been moments of disunity, like after the end of King Solomon, it's the Jewish state that has suffered. So you have to understand that the best possible thing for Israel's enemies is to see scenes of massive political unrest inside of Israel because of this horrific act. Now after October 7th, the horror of that day unified. In Israel, and I would say Jews all around the world and anyone unconscious. It's really almost a year later, it's heartbreaking to think that another kind of, you know, on a smaller scale, horrific act like that is something that would be the cause of division, which is that that is more serious in some ways than a lot of that sort of tactical or other sorts of things. And that's, it's a concern. It seems like things have maybe calmed down a bit. We haven't seen the client level of protest as we saw before, October 7th, like every week there was, you know, but it's a real concern for me inside of Israel. And, you know, I also think like if you're outside of Israel, it's like now is an opportunity to have a little bit of perspective on this and not to just, you know, take the easy road and which is socially easy to say, like, well, you know, I like Israel, but I don't like Netanyahu. And it's a way, no, it's like, that's, now is not the time to do that. Now is the time to say this is a ridiculous libel on Israel's prime minister and by extension Israel, because they like to say. - So Seth, you, we, we, we decided to do a piece on Kamala Harris's Jewish Palace Guard because she is, you know, it's a jump ball. She may be the president of the United States coming up and she not only has a Jewish husband, she has a, her leading foreign policy advisor is a Jewish guy named Phil Gordon and she's got a Jewish liaison, Jewish outreach person named Ilon Goldenberg and her husband's very pleasant and, you know, has a mazuzah and wants to make lacas on Hanukkah and she makes a mean passover brisket that brought him back to his faith and all of that. But all of this is an effort to whitewash or quiet the concerns that Jewish Americans within the ambit of the Democratic Party among whom are many big donors and all of that, that what she has said and what she has done as vice president and then even maybe before vice president should be very disquieting to people for whom Israel is a signature concern. - Now, that's the point of all this really is that they know that she fails the so-called Kishka's test, you know, which is sort of instinctive, does she care about Israel in that instinctive way and the Jewish community and that, you know, is it in her gut? And so she's going to be surrounded by Jewish advisors and figures who are there to try to deflect the concern and the idea that she's not good for the Jews or she's not good for Israel or something like that. And so you're going to see the advisors, as you mentioned, Phil Gordon, Elon Goldenberg, you're going to see Chuck Schumer continue to parade him. You know, he got up at the DNC and said, I'm the highest ranking Jewish elected official in American history. And then he proceeded to go into, you know, his case for Kamala and why she's good for, why she's good for the Jews. We're going to see J.B. Pritzker, who is the governor of Illinois and increasingly powerful player in the Democratic Party, now that he is also governor in the past, he was mostly a donor and a sort of fixer-upper and independently wealthy. And that changed when Biden crashed at the debate because Democrats said to themselves, we may have to break glass in case of emergency. Is there someone who could literally step up and fund their own presidential campaign tomorrow? Like, if we needed to, could somebody emerge? And that answer was J.B. Pritzker, who was a billionaire and who could, in fact, launch a national campaign any day of the week if he needed to. So he became their sort of break glass in case of emergency and he stayed at that level. So all these guys surrounding Kamala Harris are there specifically because she's weak on these issues. That's why they're there. Chuck Schumer has to be called in out of the bullpen and J.B. Pritzker and all these guys. And then on there, in terms of her advisors, I mean, the problem with people like Phil Gordon is that he has a very, first of all, he is credited with Kamala's, quote, more sympathetic turn toward the Palestinians. The more sympathetic voice the way she talks about the Palestinians in Gaza. That's first of all. So his first big change was to come in and say, be nicer to the Palestinians than your boss, Joe Biden has been. The other thing is that. We're talking about this, we're talking about last November. We're not talking about April or, you know, convoys or whatever. We're talking about, she started saying this a month after the war started. - Right, position yourself differently than Biden is positioning himself, not, you know, right. And then the other thing is that this is, this is how he describes Israel's founding in his first big book, which was on the War on Terror. Israel's very foundation was the initial humiliation as the relatively small number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine managed to destroy a coalition of Arab armies and set up the Jewish state. So that's the second thing to know about Phil Gordon is that he doesn't seem to have an instinctive belief that Israel is legitimate. That is, as the state is legitimate. He sees it, he's happy to see it as, you know, the sort of settler colonialist narrative, which is a bunch of European Jews came in and beat up the Arabs. And so there isn't something underlying his worldview that says, of course, Israel has a right to be there. Of course this is the Jewish homeland for 4,000 years, you know, going back to Hebron in the Bible. Of course, this is people trying to take away from the Jews a safe haven, et cetera, et cetera. He isn't moved by those arguments. Also, by the way, I think we have to just stop for a minute and say that this is historically an obnoxious argument because it wasn't a relatively small number of Jews that were in Palestine who displaced the Arabs. First of all, there were 650,000 Jews in Palestine in 1948, which was not a small number, particularly compared to the population, the Jewish population of the planet. And they were not displacing the Arabs. They were displacing the British. The Jewish war before the war for independence, which was against the Arab Alliance that said they didn't want a two-state solution, which had been promulgated in 1947. That was an anti-colonial war by Jews against the British and the fact that Phil Gordon, a leading foreign policy voice, worked for Barack Obama, all of that can characterize the founding of Israel in this way, should give everybody who cares remotely about this issue an incredible chill down their spine. - I think this is one of the things that Seth's piece really highlights is that she's saying one thing, but she's always done another when it comes to Israel. And her advisors, people like Gordon, facilitate that. So I was struck by the reminder that, you know, remember she got a lot of props for shushing the protesters, the pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted her speech in Detroit. Meanwhile, earlier that day, Gordon, I assume, or someone in her foreign policy office, arranged for her to meet with those exact same sort of pro-Palestinian types, including wildly anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists types. So she's behind the scenes in private saying one thing, and we don't know exactly what she's saying because she won't answer questions about that part of her policy. And then in public, it's, oh, I worry about civilians, but also Israel has a right to defend herself. And then to the other point in Seth's piece that I think is important is, and she's not really speaking to the danger to Jews in America, particularly on college campuses after post-October. - Oh, they have a point, right? What does she say? What does she and Biden and Tim Walz have all said that the protesters have a point? And let us say, just flatly, the protesters do not have a point. Protesters are criminals. They are anti-Semites. They are monstrous. I don't care if they don't know what they're talking about. They have cited themselves, allied themselves with monstrous, vicious, anti-Semitic, Jew-hating views. They are supporters of violence and terrorism, and they have a-- - A terrorist, actual terrorist organizations that are on the foreign terrorist organization. - They wave their flags. - And they wave their flags, and they have a point. Is the view of the Biden administration as spoken by the President of the United States, his successor as Democratic nominee for president and her chosen agent as the vice presidential nominee. And then this, again, the creation of this palace court, and then maybe one final point about Elan Goldenberg. So she chose someone to be her outreach liaison to the Jewish community. And who is Elan Goldenberg? - Well, he's a longtime Democratic foreign policy guy who is therefore happily associated with and affiliated with all the Democratic foreign policy policies of the past decade or so, the number one of which being the Iran nuclear deal. And Goldenberg was part of selling the deal. He was part of arranging both Gordon and Goldenberg, we should say, because Gordon also goes back to that time. And Gordon had moved over to the National Security Council in Obama's second term from the state department. So Gordon is also a part of that crew. But yes, Goldenberg was as a liaison. He's essentially a domestic ambassador. And what's he a domestic ambassador for? Iranian nuclear legitimization and things like that. And so you have a sort of total lack of, there doesn't seem to be the presence of anyone who's really kind of concerned that Israel's being attacked on five fronts and that American Jews are facing a wave of open anti-Semitism that they haven't, you know, in decades, maybe close to a century. So there's no, you know, there's no balance. It's just, it's not, it's not Phil Gordon and Elon Goldenberg and also people who you would be really relieved to see in those positions. It's just Phil Gordon, Elon Goldenberg. You know, on the politician's side, it's just, you know, it's just a tumor and the other guys. There's no balance. Yeah. I have a question. It's not rhetorical. I don't, I don't know the answer. Were Kamala to want to employ some Jewish Americans in these positions who were on somewhere high enough in democratic circles with the appropriate background and the appropriate credentials? Could she find democratically leaning Jews in these positions that would not be like the people we're discussing? And if the answer is no, it's certainly no less damping. Right. I mean, there's, you know, there's very, very few, you know, that the first that, you know, people would answer that question by saying probably Dan Shapiro is the first to come to mind, right, that would because Dan Shapiro, who was Obama's ambassador to Israel, was also in favor of Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which Elon Goldenberg was not. Right. That's it. But that's, that's really what you're doing with. You're dealing with people who are, you know, who the embassy should should be obvious. I can name people. Ted Deutsch, who was the head of the, who was the head of the American Jewish committee, who was a democratic congressman from Florida, could be her Jewish liaison. Like Mark Bellman, a pollster, long-time pollster, runs the democratic majority for Israel, could be her Jewish spokesman. You know, there are literally, there are five or six or seven congressmen she could hit, who could be like Cedric Richmond, the congressman who was her great, who was Biden's sort of surrogate, along with James Clyburn in the Black community, could be there. Sure, there are. Of course, there are. They're not, I mean, they may be less numerous than the kind of general foreign policy establishmentarian types, but, you know, doesn't this get into, I'm just saying there could, you could. I mean, I'm not, but I'm saying, it just gets into something that's been going on now for like 20 years in the American Jewish community, which is, I mean, it's, it really goes back to Jay Street in some ways, which is that there is this view that, I mean, I'm, there are a number of Jews that are, you know, really far to the left of the Israeli consensus on land for peace. And there has been a kind of, you know, there's been an argument inside the American Jewish community about, okay, well, you know, these people, and it's not a fringe. It's, there are, it's a lot of, a lot of American Jews, you know, are of this, they're still stuck in Oslo, and they still, and they hate BB, and it's a big part of their identity. So in that respect, and I'm not defending the choice, but Ilon Goldenberg is part of that world, and that's the community they're reaching out to. Okay, but Ilon Goldenberg, the one policy thing that we know that Ilon Goldenberg was involved with this year, I do not believe represents a majority view in the Jewish community, even though it is a policy somewhat hostile to the settlers, and therefore Jews tend to want, American Jews of this liberal stripe tend to want the retrocession, well, I don't know, not even retrocession, somehow the handing over of the West Bank to the Palestinians. The Biden administration has been sanctioning individual Jews on the West Bank for misbehavior in an act, I think that doesn't really have precedent in, you know, we've generally sanctioned, you know, people who are on the terrorist watch list, or run organizations on, if you're doing individuals, and they have been plucking out, as a means of handing some kind of "sop" or throwing some "sop" to the Dearborn Michiganders to say, "Oh, look, no, no, we're not that we're sanctioning these terrible West Bank people, and we're going to sanction them and make sure they can't, whatever it is the sanctions are." And according to tablet, Ilon Goldenberg, on the National Security Council until August, was the leading figure in figuring out who should be on that list and applying those sanctions. So he's not just like a guy who represents the general view that BB's bad and the two-state solution is good. He is an active player in targeting individual Jews with American government assault. And so people understand what that means is that there's a group within the National Security Council who meet regularly. They're jobs like we, you may have a weekly meeting at Monday morning meeting at your office, the weekly Monday morning meeting until the end of August, I think, was for Ilon Goldenberg was, all right, who can we sanction next in the of Jews living in the West Bank? This is a regular meeting point, and they discuss names, and they discuss the pros and cons of the names, but this is an actual ongoing thing. This is not like somebody commits a terrible act, and so you go to the National Security Council and say, "What can we do? Oh, well, we could sanction them." This is a proactive sanctioning group who sit and meet about it. And the other thing to remember is that this is a new, they created a new category, essentially of sanction, which was part of the problem. They created the category of people who make a piece in the West Bank difficult for us, and give us a headache, is essentially what the Biden administration did. We have the legal tools to sanction people who break international law, or who we don't want holding assets in America or anything like that. There was never anything stopping us from taking some bad guy in the West Bank, and putting him on a list. They created a new list, and it's that list that Ilon sits and calms of. But don't you think that that's also a stop to, I mean, I don't want to put a number on it, but probably there are hundreds of thousands of rabbis who that is a stop to as well. Which is to say, I mean, unfortunately, there is a segment of faction within the American Jewish community that thinks that those are the bad Jews and the American government should say. There is, and you're right, and they represent a distinct minority of Americans. And I think there's a support. Which does not believe in boycott, divesting, and saying, within the Democratic Party. No, you're right. I'm not saying you're you're right, but actually, if you're a majoritarian and you're running for president of the United States, right, and you got a community of 400,000 Jews in Pennsylvania, like the 800,000 Poles in Pennsylvania. And we have new data, by the way, that continues to support the idea that Kamala and Biden before her and Kamala now are doing uniquely poorly, not that they're not going to win an outright majority, or even two thirds of the community or something like that. But they're doing uniquely poorly among Jews in the history of Democratic polling with Jews. And Pennsylvania is on a knife's edge, and it has the second and third largest Jewish population in America is in Pennsylvania. And again, 50,000 Jewish votes move from the Democratic camp to Trump, or people stay home. And she loses Pennsylvania. And then that's the ballgame, since, of course, they couldn't possibly choose the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, because it might make, you know, 40,000 Arabs in Michigan angry. And that would all that. The Josh Shapiro thing also keys into this, because, you know, to Abe's question, right, you don't see a Josh Shapiro among the staff. It's not just Phil Gordon. It's an Elon Musk. You don't see a Jew like Josh Shapiro within that group represented also. That was the first time where you sort of had this, somebody who represents a large amount of US Jewry. Again, it's not about, you know, orthodoxy or, you know, observance. It's just sort of about a kid who grew up, you know, doing activism for Soviet Jewish refusenics, and then Zionist activism and went to, you know, Zionist schools, went to Jewish day schools, or Hebrew schools, went to camps and, you know, has gone to Israel and has a connection with it. And when his connection with Israel and the general subject is fairly representative of the American Jewish experience. I'm not sure that's right. I mean, he is more Jewish than most secular American Jews. Right? But he feels about the way he feels about Israel. He managed to be a successful politician in a world in which Jews are not the dominating presence in a state, you know, that has 19 electoral votes and that he won, you know, by a huge margin and has a 60% approval rating and all of that. And he wasn't good enough. All those virtues, including the fact that he's from the state that you have to win in order to win the presidency, were insufficient unto the day because that is not where her to get back to your original point. That's not where her Kishka's tell her she needed to go. Her Kishka's told her she needed to go with the, you know, with the football, with the progressive football coach who will say that the protesters are good and that, you know, that Israel is not so good. So that's where that's where that is. And I think she doesn't want the contrast either. I don't think she wants you to see this type of Jew and this type of Jew together in a room. I think she just wants you to see the kind she has. Right. So Kamala's Jews are Kamala, which should probably be the point, right? I mean, she is who she's the one who's running and we need the information that she keeps trying to hide from us about who she is and what she believes and what she'll do as president. That's what this piece is intended to try to make clear to American Jews, in particular, who might be think feeling sympathetically toward her and want not to pay attention to what we should glean about where she will go on matters relating to Israel, if Israel is of importance to them. So this is a very exciting issue, our October issue. And we talked yesterday about Christine's piece about about the press's cover up of what role Kamala might have or might not have played, not only in Biden's defenestration, but also in not alerting the American people to the condition of the president as her constitutional oath should have not the number one issue in the election right now. Yep. I'm going crazy with that. I still can't get past it. It's it's not the number 10 issue. It's it's not even anything. It's like we just moved on. Why are we not talking about the fact that I don't think Biden can be president for like most of the hours in a day. What is it's we just like, you know, the other eating cats and dogs in Springfield. No, the president, the president, the president is like demented. What is going on? Oh, no, instead we'll get as we did yesterday. Joe Biden actually being kind of a good retail politician and talking to a Trump supporter putting on the MAGA hat, which of course I've become so cynical that I was like, well, that's kind of nice. And then I thought, but he was telling the American people for years that Trump is a fascist, you know, threat to democracy. Yeah, we're not hearing that anymore either. Listen, who knows where this is going. So and what I mean is here's what I'm hearing and then we'll end up on this. So two, three polls yesterday have Harris benefiting from the debate having her gained a couple of points. Uh, have her like plus two polls ever plus five nationally. One poll has her plus three and those were all gains, but everything I'm hearing one public poll in Michigan, but private polling not only by the Trump campaign, which isn't really private because Tony Fabrizio is supposed to put the memo out, but hearing about democratic private polling say that in the seven battleground states, nothing was gained. So this election was probably not materially affected by the debate, except to the extent that it reveals, uh, strengths that Harris has that she might not have made clear to people in terms of her being a day to day politician who can project qualities that you can accept in a president and also liabilities on Trump's part about his in discipline, his emotional sort of like the offness and the fact that he had the psychopathic Laura Loomer on his plane whispering in his ear. And yes, if it matters that Phil Gordon is her national security advisor, it matters if Laura Loomer is one of the people who is giving him advice on what to do in a debate. So people need to take whatever information they get and get it from wherever. We're not going to do a recommend stay because we've we've gone over time. I hope everybody has a wonderful weekend, uh, and for Eli Lake, thanks for being here as ever. Thank you. I'll be back. So for Seth, Christine, and Abe, I'm John Pudford. Keep the candle burning. (gentle music)