And that, that would be opening up, you know, large swaths of territory. And he was talking specifically about northern Gaza to settlements. I mean, that's essentially what we're talking about,

right? So what is actually happening in Gaza, and then the question becomes how you interpret it. What is actually happening in Gaza is that the Israelis are creating three buffer zones. One is the Gaza-Egypt border, the Philadelphia corridor as it's called, where it is continuing to entrench itself, the Israeli army, and to continuing to dig for tunnels and destroy those tunnels and choke Hamas's ability to reinforce itself, rehabilitate, resupply. And that is something that has been happening essentially since May, June, when we went in there for the first time. And there is in central Gaza what we call the Nitzarim Corridor. That's how Israelis call it. And that is a major eight-kilometer highway, essentially, from the Israeli border to the sea that has Israeli fortifications. I mean, there's a prison for Hamas people caught in Gaza in that corridor. There are Israeli units there. There's a big story about this in The New York Times today. It was

presented as if Israel

is hunkering down and going to be there for a while. That was essentially the headline. It is almost certain that Israel is hunkering down and going to be there for a while. And then there is the north. And the north is where the Israeli army moved in to, in the north, the areas that are strategically most dangerous for Israel, where rocket fire can reach Tel Aviv. These are also areas that are traditionally the home base of Hamas. For example, Jabalia. The Israeli army went into Jabalia two months ago, and it was a major operation. And I forget the exact numbers, but there's something like 1,500 Hamas fighters killed and almost 1,000 caught. And these are people known within the Hamas hierarchy. There isn't a debate about whether or not they're Hamas. It isn't that in the battlefield, there's who knows who's what exactly. Hamas don't obviously wear uniforms. So these are debates that are constantly happening. Army estimates that it's going to be operating in Jabalia for another, you know, four, five, six weeks. And in order to move in at such a massive scale, it told the civilian population to leave. So it told the civilian population to leave this band in northern Gaza, moved in in a massive, with overwhelming power to chase down and including destroy tunnels underneath Jabalia, which of course destroys some significant portion of Jebalia above ground, and moved south to destroy this Hamas fortification force. And what does that mean? So up until now, these are the agreed upon facts on the ground. What are these three corridors? What does Israel intend to do with them? Does it intend to create a safe place for the military to operate into Gaza City, into Khan Yunis, into the major cities and population centers of Gaza over time, in order to slowly degrade Hamas over two years, let's say, and finally destroy it? This is, for example, the American Kurdish-Iraqi strategy against ISIS, in which they took territory, surrounded and fought these bitter, awful urban battles, basically demolished cities in the course of these urban battles, and had to slowly, over about five years, that's the nature of this war, degrade, of this kind of war, degrade ISIS until they could move in. Is that what Israel is doing in Gaza? Or, as Betzalel Smotrich keeps saying, and the world keeps hearing from him, is it in fact trying to clear sections of Gaza so that Israeli right-wing political factions can move in and build Jewish settlements and annex and take land? Now, what is the likelihood that something like that would to pass? We have polls over the months, over the last few months that tell us that the vast, vast majority of Israelis, an early poll was 90-10, don't want settlements in Gaza. And so Bogia alone is weighing in on that debate. The public doesn't want to sink into Gaza to create what was once to be forever attached to Gaza, to be forever fighting in Gaza, and to be doing things in Gaza that are immoral. The public doesn't want that. includes the majority of the coalition's voters. Is that changing? Are these politicians sort of leading Netanyahu by the nose? What does Netanyahu actually want? One of the great problems of this war on every front is that Netanyahu doesn't speak. Netanyahu over the last 14 months has gone three months at a time without giving an interview to any Israeli media, including right-wing media that supports him. That Netanyahu is not telling us, he's not speaking to us clearly about the future of Gaza. And his critics are starting to say, wait a second, why won't he speak? Now, either he won't speak because he doesn't want to lose those right-wing partners, coalition partners, or he won't speak because this is his plan as well. He's signed on to their agenda. Boghielin was expressing that concern. He said it in a way that I think is very damaging for Israel, but the Israeli government's inability to articulate a day after in Gaza, I think, is more damaging to Israel. So that is that debate. That is what Bogielon was saying. Tell

me how this ends in Gaza.

Oh, I mean, this ends when the sun expands and the earth is, you know, burned to

a crisp in a billion years. And all of our efforts are for naught. I mean, do you have that attitude, honestly? Like, do you have, I mean, know there's a certain Israeli cynicism. Do you have the sense that something like this never does really end? So let me say something about Gaza through Lebanon

and Iran. Lebanon, our interest is very simple. We have this enemy called Hezbollah. It is not Lebanon. There is all the rest of Lebanon that is not Hezbollah. And we fought a war that was incredibly careful to distinguish between Lebanon and Hezbollah to the point where the Lebanese army obligingly moved out of any area the Israeli army asked to move into so that the Israeli army could fight Hezbollah and never have to engage the Lebanese army. There was just an airstrike on a Hezbollah infrastructure in the Balbek Valley somewhere, in the Balbek area, in which a Lebanese soldier reportedly, literally this morning, was killed. The Israeli army put out a statement saying it was investigating the death of that Lebanese army soldier because it wants to make it very clear that it does not want Lebanese army soldiers to die. There is Hezbollah, and then there's all the rest of Lebanon that when we weaken Hezbollah, we hope will come in and fill that vacuum. In Iran, all we have to do is break things. We don't have to worry about the rest of Iran or anything. We just have to break that regime and break that proxy system that's threatening us. And I say all that just to say that Gaza is a radically different kind of conflict. It's a radically different kind of war. Gaza has to be rebuilt. And that can't happen without Israel. But that means that also Israel has a tremendous responsibility for shaping how that happens. And for making sure it happens. And for making sure it happens in ways that are beneficial to Gaza. Stabilizing also because that's safer for Israel. And so Israel in a sense, owns the Gaza problem in a way that it doesn't own the Lebanon problem and doesn't own the Iran problem. And now the question becomes, how does Israel craft that future, craft that day after? You don't have to give specifics. This is a vast, complex negotiation. If you say too much, you hurt your own interest, you hurt your ability to actually build out that future. But you do have to give Gazans, Israelis, the world, the Arab partners you hope will come into Gaza to help rebuild eventually, a sense of what Israel's fundamental intentions are. And this government is a government, every single Israeli government in the history of Israeli governments has been a coalition of factions set against each other. I mean, every Israeli government has one ministry belonging to one party pursuing one policy and a different ministry belonging to a different party pursuing the opposite policy. And depending on the competence of the minister, that's how the policy, one policy or the other wins. This is a government with many different voices, voices that want opposite things. Who's winning? And what are Israel's fundamental objectives and fundamental vision? And Israel needs to articulate that. If we can, over time, hold our Arab allies, who are uncomfortable allies, they don't want to be be our allies right now. Al Jazeera, at Qatar's behest, is driving the narrative in the Arab world about Gaza. But nevertheless, they're still at our side on the fundamental strategy questions. If we can hold those Arab allies to our side over the course of the difficult and painful period that it'll take to actually degrade Hamas, then they remain at our side of the rebuilding, and they will come in and help in the rebuilding and actually do the rebuilding. The Israelis can't come into Gaza and then rebuild. If we can't, because they simply don't trust our intentions, then we won't have them there when we need them. And if our intentions are bad, well, that's very bad. That's very, very bad for our future and very bad for Gaza's future. So the Israeli government needs to start clarifying, speaking, saying things that the world wants to hear from them. We can't escape it. And we have to figure it out. And we have to show the world that we have to show Israelis that we were going to figure it out. And it's two years away, any solution to Gaza,

if we build it now, and if we're not building it now, it's much worse. But you're not suggesting that there's two years of military conflict ahead of Israel? Guaranteed. Guaranteed in Gaza.

Degrading Hamas is a long, long process. And the gentler you can do it, the better. But Hamas will make sure. Hamas is one hope, not even for survival, for rescue, is to force the Israelis to cause as much damage as possible while doing so. There are a lot of complex answers

here to very complex questions. If you live in New York City, as I do, you can walk out the front door of any building and run into people that are swaddled in kafiyahs and sometimes even flying Hezbollah flags, which I've seen in Union Square, saying that Israel is committing a genocide, it is an apartheid state, etc. You've heard this a million times. If you were to walk out of this building and walk into one of those demonstrations and talk to one person, what would you say to them that they get wrong about this conflict? And I would say Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, as its fundamental existence, which is usually questioned by all these people, they say it was a colonial mistake and this is a settler colonial project and it shouldn't even exist. It's very hard to talk to people who have that idea about a sovereign nation in the Middle East. But how do you talk to people like that? They don't know enough to talk to me. What would I talk to them about? They are passionate enough to go out in the street. Yeah,

but they're passionate about something they know nothing about. When you find someone who's passionate about something they know nothing about, something else is at work. It's not really about me.

So if someone's walking down the street, you know, how many 5,000 miles away from your country, saying that your country is committing a genocide, the army that you served in are genocesis that are not unlike the Wehrmacht or the SS. I've seen signs that... There's a wonderfully

delicious overlap between the people who are distraught that Israel is committing a genocide and people who defend Assad as the great, I mean, literally these, what's her name? The UN person who's Albanese, right? She just liked and shared and said, well said, or something like that to a tweet of a far left Israeli, arguing that Assad is the only thing holding Syria together and you don't have to like him to... Friends, if Assad's 600,000 dead, if Assad's driving of millions of people based entirely along ethnic lines, Syria in 2011 was 10% Christian. Syria today is less than 2% Christian. Something you would call ethnic

cleansing.

Nobody on this earth gives a shit. And those people don't give a shit. And now because they have this vague sense that maybe Assad is anti-american possibly potentially he must be okay these are people who are perfectly happy with genocide as long as it fits their little ideological peccadilloes and their little story of themselves nothing happening here nothing happening here has anything to do with the real people living over there. The progressives in all of their deep studies of self-critical critiques of criticism have managed to remain totally ensconced in the warm blanket of Western Orientalism. get to look at all the people over there, and they're still looking at cartoons. And these cartoons that they make us into are meant to serve little narratives running around in their own heads. And those little narratives' fundamental purpose is to self-justify their own morality. They simply know nothing at all. I gave a talk at GW at DC. A kid, one of the students, I've been doing a lot of talks with college students. One of the kids raises his hand at some point and he says to me, everyone on my campus is anti-Zionist. I can't, my friends aren't my friends. My professors are all anti-Zionist. I can't get a date. And I admired this kid because he came to a talk of mine, which is kind of a self-selecting group of kids he could probably get a date with, right? And then said, smart kid, I'm just saying. Fly that flag in the right audience. But he said, everyone's anti-Zionist. And I tried to convey to him the gap between the lived experience over there and the weird moralizing discourse over here. And the gap has a lot to do with the word Zionist and how it's understood and what these people decided that it's this particular superstructure their ideologues told them. I said to him, I'm an idiot Israeli. What's an anti-Zionist? And the kid says, an anti-Zionist is someone who thinks Israel should never have been founded. So I said to him, well, that's a really interesting argument, because every other Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere is dead. What? What's the argument? Is the argument that the Jews who couldn't get into the West, as the pressure was building in Eastern Europe and in Central Europe and in the Arab world couldn't get into the West because of quotas, because of immigration quotas and laws against them, that those Jews should have been able to get into the West? They should have had other choices other than to become Israeli? Is that the argument? Because I agree with that. If that's the argument, I'm also anti-Zionist. It would have been really nice if the whole world had opened their doors to these desperate refugees 10 seconds before their genocide. But it didn't. Or is the argument that those Jews should just have died? They should just have died. Israel is the last living Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere. Statistically, there are a few others. I apologize to French Jewry, who, by the way, are 90% Sephardi because after the Holocaust, they refilled when every last Jew fled North Africa. French Jewry is an exception that proves the rule. If you don't know what I'm talking about, folks, don't worry about it. Google those words. The Jews emptied out of everywhere. And as the world homogenized, few places did it as completely and perfectly as the Arab world. And the Arab world is still in the process of brutally homogenizing. And the Jews found one place, one refuge across three continents, ancient communities. The Jews had been living in Baghdad a thousand years before the Arab speakers got to Baghdad. There

were 50,000 Jews in Baghdad in 1946, right? Or maybe even more. I think in

1930, there's a poll or a census where 25% of the city is Jewish. In 1960, there's 0%. 0% of the city is Jewish. Okay, it was twice as Jewish as New York. And then 30 years later, it's zero Jews, no Jews. Anti-Zionist, Arab nationalist, Iraqi Jews had all fled. Imagine if New York City in 30 years doesn't have a single Jew left of any kind. Left-wing, right progressive, Hasidic, no kind of Jew can serve. You would know something about New York. The Arab world empties out. Everyone empties out. So is the argument that they should have died? In my view, and what I told this kid was either your argument is history should have gone differently, in which case, you know, I'm with you. It's a damn shame that Zionism turned out to be so prescient and correct. Or your argument is those Jews should have died, and then I would be able to sleep better at night. Well, then you're a genocidal asshole. Or you're a Zionist. What's the fourth option? So anti-Zionism that treats the idea of Zionism in this country as if it's one ideological option among many, Jews can be, you know, left-wing Jews, reformed Jews, conservative Jews, Trump voting Jews, Obama voting Jews, Buddhist Jews. Jews can be 16 different kinds of Jews, so don't be the Zionist Jew, because Zionism is one of those 16 options and we don't like it, so don't be. Zionism as this kind of luxurious ideological option of safe people is an entirely Western cartoon. Actual Zionism is the last living remnants of a destroyed civilization in the only place where they could survive. And everyone then deciding that they are the problem with the world and have to be destroyed for redemption to happen. Everyone in the Muslim context, in the Marxist context, and now in Western academia. So, you know, if you want to come to the Jews of Israel and argue about things they're doing wrong, first of all, join the club. Second of all, there's a lot of us doing it already. Second of all, learn us, actually know something about us. These people know nothing about us. I have walked through these campuses and talked to these protesters. They know nothing about us. They didn't read in some ideologue pamphlet. And third of all, don't live only in your own self-righteous cartoons. We are not cartoons. We're real people going through a real history. So when I walk out of the street of New York and I see a keffiyeh, first of all, well done, you found a cool way to wear a scarf. I am totally disinterested. They are uninteresting. They are boring. They don't know enough to challenge me. They don't know enough to talk to me. And if they actually do want to produce, to create their own moral world out of me, they're not, that's just bigotry. That's just racism. By the way, they're doing it to the Palestinians too. The Palestinians are not as innocent as they pretend, not as stupid as they pretend. The Palestinians are deep and interesting and have many factions and a rich history. And they turn them into the same shallow moral. They're the good guys. I'm the bad guys. But it's the same cartoon. And it's the same dehumanizing and shrinking of us. Orientalism never died. It just, the progressives managed to make it into a slightly more self-righteous version of the same old Orientalism in the West. That's what I believe when I look at these people.

And you have these conversations when you leave Israel, when you're inside of Israel. I mean, I've listened to you on the Times of Israel podcast. I mean, you spend your time in very specific things, you know, attacking the government and being critical of decisions that the Netanyahu administration has made. Whereas here, you just have to have a sort of pull the focus out and talk about the country in general. And the idea of Zionism, you're a Zionist. I mean, I suppose if you're an anti-Zionist, that means you want the destruction of the state because Zionism in that sense is a settled issue. It was settled in 1948.

Yeah. When you challenge someone and you say, what the heck's an anti-Zionist? You mean destruction? And then they say, no, no, God forbid, we mean a one state solution for all the people. No, that's the same thing. Right? A civic democracy, all of the United States. That's really sweet, but you're arguing with the Jews who survived the 20th century that they should give up their self-defense because the Arab world can contain them. And when I said that, right, the Arab world will just treat the minority Jews okay. Why? Because they're so beautiful and wonderful and it's so great to live in the Arab world right now. And there isn't a massive crisis of modernity and there isn't a massive crisis of political Islam. And there isn't a massive crisis of minorities on every turn dying and being destroyed. And then the response from a prominent Palestinian activist in Washington, D.C. to my saying that was, you're a racist. What do you think? All Arabs are bad? What do you do with that? What do you mean? What do I think? All Arabs are bad. Let's go throughout the Middle East and talk to every minority in the Middle East and ask them if they can take a vote by pulling that lever on whether they should have their own self-determination and self-defense. You will have a hundred percent saying yes. I'm not saying Arabs are bad. I'm saying the Arab world right now is, excuse my French, a shit show. Massively dysfunctional. Dictatorships and genocides at every turn. Yemen just had a war in which a quarter million people starved to death, literally, including 85,000 children. And it wasn't 100 years ago. It was in 2018. And none of those college students gave a shit. So no, I submit to you that I am not racist. In fact, to ignore that and totemize one specific conflict because it tells you a story about your own morality in the West, and ignore all the vastness of human suffering, to come out in defense of Assad while worrying about Gaza. If the worst case scenario in Gaza, that every enemy of Israel is right about Israel's absolute mendacity and evil, is still a tenth of what Assad actually did, and Assad is okay. No, I submit to you that the Western moral left-wing discourse is utterly and totally compromised and that it cannot actually challenge us because it's actually about something else. And we are figures

in this narrative. What is it about if it's about something else? I mean, you point this out, the 500, 6,000 people in Syria that have been slaughtered since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, people forgetting about not even knowing anything about Yemen until the Houthis started raining missiles on Israel. And it became a bit more of a news story. But why is it Israel then? I mean, I used to have this question because I lived in Sweden. And I said, you know, this is a country of 9, 10 million people in about 40% of the pieces that I see in the newspaper about Israel. You guys are obsessed with this and you're very, very far away. It's very cold here. And this is prior to, you know, a huge influx of Muslim immigration. That could explain some of it, but it goes back. It goes back to the anti-colonial struggle, this kind of lefty stuff of the 1960s and 70s, but it's gone from Marx to Saeed Khatoub, and no one seemed to notice. But is that—why Israel? Why the focus, that monomaniacal focus on this one country?

I'm getting worked up here. That's why I'm keeping you. These are the fundamental questions. The answer is surprisingly simple. And I think we don't understand. I think the West doesn't really understand anti-Semitism. And mainly because it produced a lot of monuments to anti-Semitism, Holocaust memorials, things like that, that did their very best to avoid the lessons of the Holocaust and of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not hatred of the Jews. And this is really important for non-Jews to understand. The basic Jewish understanding, there's a lot of different kinds of Jews who understand very differently all these issues. But I think that the mainstream basic Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism is not that it's disliking Jews. People can dislike other people. you can have your prejudices, we think in intuitions based on experiences. If you have an Irish landlord and he treats you badly, you might have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder over the Irish and you might call the Irish drunk. That is a kind of prejudice that everybody has. It's a banal prejudice against other groups, against others, generally in different people. If somebody says the Jews are greedy, that's not anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is something very special and very unique. It is the idea, and it has a specific starting place in time, that the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world. It begins in early Christianity. Christianity has gone a huge path to correcting a lot of this. Catholicism, Protestant groups, Orthodoxy, Vatican II was a big part of that. But in early, early Christianity, there's a huge theological problem, which is that the Jews don't accept, don't accept the very Messiah who says in the Gospels that he has come to fulfill their own messianic arc. And that's a lacuna at the heart of the idea of Jesus, of the Christ. And folks, you don't have to look hard. I mean, this is St. Augustine, all the beautiful things he says about love, except for the Jews, who shall remain, he writes, oppressed for all time as a message to my people, my people meaning Christians. The Jews must remain oppressed until they have accepted Christ. And this is a idea deep within Christianity that the Jews in their refusal to accept Christ, early Christianity, their refusal to accept Christ means that the redemption of the world is delayed. And this is what crusaders talked about as they murdered Jews down the Rhine River on their way to the Holy Land. Part of conquering the Holy Land, they probably ended up killing more Jews than Muslims in the Crusades. And they talked about it as you rejected Christ, and that holds up the redemption of the world. In Islam, there's Muhammad's early life and then Muhammad's later life. In the very beginning, he has great hopes for the Jews around him. And he hopes they'll convert and he institutes rituals that are similar to Judaism, a fast and other things. And they don't. And then he turns on the Jews viciously. And this is all contained in the Quranic text, this flipping on the Jews. And there's a sense, and there's a whole doctrine, which is dogmatic Islam. It is the belief of Muslims. And folks, not all Muslims. Islam is probably more diverse than Christianity, okay? It's big, it's complicated. There's a thousand versions of it. But it is dogma, certainly in the Sunni Arab world, in which I am embedded, in which I live. And that dogma, which comes from the very earliest years of Islam, is that the Jews received the true revelation from God, but then because they are a people who couldn't handle it, or didn't want to, or needed to warp it to their own interests, lied about that revelation, so God had to give it again in the form of the Koran. And so the Jews are the great liars who prevented, and by not converting to Islam, call into question. All of these religions that take the Jewish idea of revelation and then are upset that the Jews don't adopt it and then create this sort of supersessionist idea, that's the heart and root of it. And you see it exactly in Marxism. When the Marxists come along, the Soviets especially, they are total humanitarians and individualists, and they're just breaking down all the barriers of class and property in order to create the great proletarian dictatorship, which will then be followed up by the perfect equality. And yet they still, the Soviets made sure Jews knew they were Jews and knew their place. And it was literally in their passport that they are Jews. And this was Hitler's problem with the Jews. The Jews call into question, first of all, he thought of them as this great, right, where the communists thought the Jews were a capitalist conspiracy holding on a proletariat. Hitler thought of them as a communist and capitalist conspiracy because they're all secretly the same thing, keeping the folk right oppressed. The Jews are the thing standing in the way of the redemption of the world. And when you understand antisemitism as that idea, which was born once, but adopted over time because it was so useful by others, that one moment invented once and regurgitated and repeated again and again whenever it was useful. And then you go to the college campus and you hear a fervent screaming student explain to you intersectionalism and explain to you that everything is Palestine and create memes and shirts in which one it's literally like a Seder plate. I don't know if it's, it's a, you know, six little circles around a big circle. Well, the middle circle is Palestine. And then one of the little circles is police violence in Missouri. And another little circle is climate justice. And another little circle is capitalism, or, you know, it's anything I think is a problem, all of it ultimately intersects, all of it is ultimately one problem. It's all the same systems of oppression everywhere. The distinctions between different places and histories and contexts is artificial and silly. Ultimately, there's only one great struggle, and the heart of that struggle, the place where it is distilled in its most perfect form, is the struggle against Zionism. You know what that is? That is the Jews, once again, being the thing holding back the redemption of the world. That's what antisemitism is. This is perfect, pure, unadulterated antisemitism. The difference between prejudice and anti-Semitism, the idea that the Jews are holding back the redemption of the world, is that anti-Semitism feels righteous to the people screaming it in the streets. Why the Jews? Because they were the thing that was most useful to certain parts of early Christianity. And so they're the first archetype of this, in this secret order of being, thing standing in the way of redemption. And since then, the Jews have always been the most useful, the most convenient. It's already there. It's a thousand years there. Why invent when you can borrow and have that sense of old truth to it?