Rafah, Egypt & the "Day After" - with Amos Harel
Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
Negotiation Dynamics and Regional Complexities in the Middle East
Exploration of the intricate relationships between Egypt, Gaza, and Israel, shedding light on historical involvement, shifting stances, and potential risks to peace treaties. The chapter also addresses the lack of transparency in negotiations, questionable actions of Egyptian intelligence, and the complexities surrounding humanitarian issues in the region.
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Speaker 2
I
Speaker 4
want to pick up on one thing. I got to say something about that. Earlier in this conversation, Anne suggested that we should bring people in that are better than us, taller, thinner, better looking, higher IQ. Trump said something sort of similar a few days ago. He talked about how we should bring in people from nice countries, nice countries like Denmark, Norway, Switzerland. They have something in common. Saurabh, you and I are from, well, I mean, when my ancestors came here, they were not considered white. Saurabh, you come from a country, Iran, that is not considered a nice country. If you could wave a magic wand, like what is your ideal policy? Do you and Anne have some daylight on you on that? So if
Speaker 3
you listen to Anne and if you have a certain point of view, you might think, wow, what horrible things she's saying. But again, I want to go back to the Barbara Jordan commission. It was a really important document at the time. It was commissioned by the Clinton administration, and she more or less said what Anne said, which is we want skills-based immigration. In other words, it has to be cases where you're actually, there's a need in the labor market rather than just flooding the country and harming Americans without high school education or just a high school education. And she mentioned the reunification methods, right? Where she said it has to be limited to the nuclear family. And that's what Barbara Jordan said, to prioritize the nuclear family if you're going to have reunification rather than like cousins and so on and ever more distant, attenuated from the nuclear family. So I actually think a lot of what Anne said, I would sign up for as well. So that's what I would do. And yes, and I'll tell you one more thing. I came through the family reunification. I am a chain migrant. And so some people might say, well, how dare you then oppose other people who seek to gain entry into the United States the same way? And what I say to that is that now my allegiance is to the well-being and common good of this country and not to the general class of potential migrants out there who would be clamoring to get in. So I think that's a perfectly fair position for an
Speaker 4
immigrant to take. Let's go to Cenk, and then I want to talk a little bit about the politics on this issue, because as we were coming down here to Dallas, big news broke that President Biden is sort of eyeing an executive order that could take hold as soon as this month that would dramatically limit asylum seekers from entering the country. And it's a very, very different position than when where his presidency began. Of course, within the first hours of his presidency, he was rolling back what he called Trump's stochronian immigration policies. Now he's ending up maybe somewhere- To his credit,
Speaker 5
he has no idea what he was thinking then.
Speaker 4
Cenk, jump in, but I want you guys to touch on the politics of this. One last thing I'll add is that we had a fabulous story in the Free Press a few weeks ago by Olivia Reingold that talked about seven lawsuits being brought in the city of Chicago, almost all by people of color, including from a DEI consultant on the South Side named, I think, Darnell Jones, who said they're giving things away to migrants that we've been deprived of in a poor black community. So speak to the politics of this a little bit.
Speaker 1
Yeah. So first of all, I agree with her, and I'll come back to that. You're not going to get me to defend Joe Biden too much. I ran against him. So I'll come back to that too. But I've got to address two things. First of all, when I said national security threat is zero, there was gasps in the room. And let's just note for the record that the debate concluded with, well, what if there's one later? So that just literally happened. That was Sourab's point. Okay. Now on this idea of, oh, but the bad countries are sending people in. Like when the Irish and the Italian and the Jews were coming in, do you think that they were coming from great, amazing countries? At the time, the Irish were starving. They had the Great Potato Famine. They were so, so poor. The Italians were poor, and the Jews were poor. They lived in the worst parts of New York, etc. And we want to close it off. And if we had done that completely and closed it off to those immigrants, it wouldn't be the America that we know and love today. And by the way, it might not even be America. The Jewish physicists driven out of Germany came to America, and we won World War II because of them. If we had done Ann Coulter's strategy at that time, we might not even exist. We weren't doing Ann Coulter's strategy. It was pre-1970. And, Jake,
Speaker 3
you're a progressive. Oh, that's such a convenient thing to say. Jake, you're a progressive. Between 1923 and 1965, you had the period of restriction of immigration, and that was the period when you had the highest union density in this country. That's like the 30 glorious years. That's the New Deal order. And it coincided
Speaker 1
with relatively, in fact, not relatively, pretty strictly controlled immigration. No, totally conflating two different issues. So corporate power becomes supersized in 1978 after the Supreme Court decisions of Bellotti and Buckley v. Vallejo. So we had a golden period of 38 to 78. We had plenty of immigrants at that point in different parts of that period. The immigrant does not jive with that, the story you're telling. It's actually all about corporate power. And why we were doing so well is because we had power in a democracy, the American people. If you cut off all of these countries based on, oh, this arbitrary 1970 rule, right? Oh, well, yeah, it's inconvenient because everybody that came pre-1970 is about 98% of the country, right? But these guys, oh, well, the Latinos, they're not good, and the new immigrants are not good because they're coming from really poor countries, and they're not helping. But the Irish and the Italians and the Jews everyone else came from really poor countries.
Speaker 4
That's great sort of informal reasoning. Sorob, 30 seconds, then Nick,
Speaker 1
30 seconds. And Sorob, you concede that it does not affect employment at all. Record low unemployment. You have to concede that.
Speaker 4
30 seconds, then Nick.
Speaker 3
So that's your anecdote. Here's what the labor economist, the preeminent economist of labor, the relation between labor unionism and immigration said. That's Vernon Briggs. Membership in American unions has over time moved inversely with trends in the size of immigration inflows. And here's what Cesar Chavez said, which is why Cesar Chavez always reported illegal immigrants to the authorities. He said, the illegal aliens are doubly exploited, first because they are farm workers, and second because they are powerless to defend their interests. But if there were no illegals used to break our strikes, then we could win those battles. That's as old school a labor figure as you can imagine. Then make them legal.
Speaker 5
Okay? Make them legal, and then suddenly they're not under the rock, and they're not under the boot of unsaved people. The problem is
Speaker 3
the more heterogeneous the workplace, it becomes harder to organize
Speaker 5
it. The other thing is that private sector unionization peaked in the early to mid-50s. It's a product of industrialization. That era is over. Okay. And American workers are actually gaining in wages and compensation. If I may come back to your other point, the problem with Chicago and Chicago City Services isn't illegal immigrants. It is generations of terrible city government. Okay. And a welfare state that is completely out of control. The same thing in New York. You know, it breaks my heart when Eric Adams says, we can't handle 50,000 illegal immigrants coming into New York or something like that. You're telling me a city of eight and a half million people. Martha's Vineyard
Speaker 4
couldn't handle
Speaker 5
it either.
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In recent days, we have had three persistent questions:
One, how is it that – in just a matter of approximately 10 days – the IDF managed to move anywhere between 850,000 to a million Gazan Palestinians from Rafah to other areas of Gaza so Israel could conduct its operation against remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah? Weren’t we repeatedly told by the Biden administration that it was impossible?
So, our first question is, how did this happen? And what does it tell us about other gaps between the Biden administration forecasts and that of Israel’s when it comes to war-fighting in Gaza?
Our second question is about Egypt. Given what we have learned in recent days, why has Egypt escaped any real scrutiny or pressure over the past 7 months?
Our third question is whether all the heat on the Israeli Government for a lack of a “day after” plan really about the pursuit of a “day after” plan, or is it about deflecting scrutiny from other failures?
To help us answer these questions and others, we are joined by Amos Harel, who has been the military correspondent and defense analyst for Israel's Haaretz newspaper for 25 years. He is among the most well-sourced and thoughtful journalists and analysts covering Israeli security affairs inside Israel. Prior to his current position, Amos spent four years as night editor for the Haaretz Hebrew print edition, and from 1999-2005 he was the anchor on a weekly Army Radio program about defense issues.
Along with frequent "Call Me Back" guest and Fauda co-creator Avi Issacharoff, Amos co-wrote a book about the Second Intifada, called "The Seventh War: How we won and why we lost the war with the Palestinians", which was published in 2004 and translated into several languages, including Arabic.
Amos and Avi also co-wrote "34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah and the War in Lebanon", about the war of 2006, which was published in 2008.
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