Yesterday, we shared a recording of a talk I gave to a group of Christians visiting Jerusalem, all of them very dedicated to Israel who have been here on multiple visits.
I thought that some of their questions were very important and interesting, so today we’re sharing portions of the Q&A session that followed.
The link above will take you to a brief excerpt of this portion of the conversation. For the full recording, please click the audio button embedded below.
There is also a full machine-generated transcript for those who prefer to read.
Now, we will move onto the Q&A portion. Please, go ahead.
The question is Iran. Is Iran the next target on Israel's side? Again, I don't know. I'm not involved.
And thank God, some Israelis, some places can still keep some secrets. A secret in this country is you only tell a few people. It's a crazy country in that regard. But militarily, at least, look, the Trojan horse thing, I mean, probably hundreds of people knew about it for years, and it didn't leak out. It's pretty unbelievable. You saw about these Israeli commandos that were in Syria and destroyed this factory. A hundred commandos went in, and they were apparently training forever. Look, there are certain things. You don't know if we can do it. I don't know if we can do it. What I can tell you is that there is an overwhelming sentiment in Israel that this is all about Iran, that if there's no Iran, there's no Hezbollah. If there's no Iran, there's much less Hamas. If there's no Iran, at least for a long time, there was no Houthis. Now, they're pretty independent of Iran for a while, so we have a problem. But the targets that Israel has been targeting in Yemen are meant to cut off the supply chain from Iran to Yemen. That's why if you've been attacking the airport and the ports, it's not because millions of tourists are dying to go to Sana’a to see what Yemen has to offer.
I mean, they might be, but I don't know any of them. It's really much more about Iran resupplying Yemen. Everybody understands here that the key to all of this is Iran, that the Iranian attitude to Israel is a theological attitude. It's an eschatological, theological attitude that nothing to do with Israel gives up this territory and then they get happy again. Overwhelmingly, I think the sentiment of Israelis is that if this conflict ends and Iran is as stable as it is now, we failed. Because you hear that from people on the right, people on the middle, and even some people on the left, because this is not really a right. There's no right and left very often in Israel. There's no left here protesting against what's going on in Gaza. I mean, a few individual people, but there's no anti-war movement. I spoke to a journalist, I don't know, months ago. She was from somewhere in Europe, and she said to me, I'm trying to find all these people who were leading the protest movement so I can find out what they think about it, but I can't find them. I said, They're in tanks.
It wasn't like protesting Vietnam where you took flowers and stuck them in the guns of the National Guard and paraded around campus. It's a whole different ballgame. I think there's a widespread sentiment in Israel that this has to be stopped. There was some I thought maybe it'll happen before January 20th, so Biden will leave that legacy, and Bibi and Biden can get it done before Trump is President, so he can start with a clean slate. Look, it's only the 3rd of Januaruy. I don't know what's being planned, but I think there's certainly a sentiment that if the 20th comes around and Iran is still in the situation it is, then the Trump administration, that's the hope, the widespread hope, is that the Trump administration will enable Israel to fundamentally make a very big change.
As a follow-up, what is the role of the Saudis, if any? Well, first of all, your question is about the Saudis and the Abraham Accords and so forth. By the way, it's important to say that the UAE and Bahrain have not been criticizing Israel.
I mean, they have populations there that are not supportive of Israel, to be sure. The way, for example, the King of Jordan is always criticizing Israel, even though he's scared the death of Palestinians because he's got a majority Palestinian and a Hashemite minority, which he is. He says what he has to say for the cameras because he understands that he's got to keep his Palestinian population mollified. That's, by the way, also our longest border. Our longest border is with Jordan. We have a very strong, vested interest in what happened in Syria not happening in Jordan. Don’t have to love the King of Jordan, but he keeps the border quiet, and that's all we want. The Abraham Accords was successful. They did not pull out of the accords. They did not do what many other Arab countries would have done. By the way, neither did Egypt become that critical. Egypt's actually played a mediating role for a long time in this conflict. Some of these peace deals or normalization agreements are much more successful than people might have imagined. Saudi Arabia has always been looming as the next major normalization thing. Don't forget that Saudi Arabia is deathly opposed to Iran getting a nuclear weapon because Saudi Arabia is Sunni and Iran is Shia, and they are not interested in Saudi Arabia getting weapon.
They would allow us, presumably, to use their airspace. I don't think that they would join the attack, but clearly, the Saudis have a vested interest in us doing this also. The negotiations that are going on, I'm sure, between the United States and Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saudi Arabia normalizes. They probably get weaponry in return. They get protected from Iran. It's way above my paygrade. But the assumption in Israel is that this is an opportunity to end this mortal enemy of the Jewish people, because don't forget, they attack Jews around the world. They attacked Jews in Buenos Aires years ago in that very event. This is not only about Israel. This is eschatological. It's about the Jews. Well, the whole point of this country is you do not get to kill Jews at random anymore because we're done with that. So I think that we're going to be helped by Saudi Arabia's views of this. But how it's going to play out, stay tuned for season 2, as they say, coming in a few months.
The next question is what role will Abbas play in the future of the Middle East?
Look, Mahmoud Abbas is a very sad story. He's a bona fide, old-fashioned anti-Semite who wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the Holocaust was basically a fabrication, who has argued that there was no temple on the Temple Mount. Now, some of it, of course, he says to please his crowds, but he has done absolutely nothing to try to move his people towards an understanding that you're never going to defeat us. I mean, that was never an issue. They can make things very miserable for us, but they can't defeat us. It's a failure. He's a failed president of a failed institution that's at the helm of what's largely a failed people for the last decades. That's sad.
It's sad for the Palestinians who could have been encouraged by a different leader to embrace a different future. It's tragic for us because we have guys who've died in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria in recent months, unfortunately, and because when we're not successful there, terrorism makes its way into our cities and so forth. Abbas is just a complete failure. There was an opportunity in 2005 for Gazans to embrace something different, and Hamas took control. I'm not blaming all Gazans for that. They did mostly elect Hamas, but they didn't necessarily elect Hamas to do what it ended up doing. Hamas had provided schooling, Hamas had provided food, Hamas had provided health care. So they were whatever. Hamas became something very, very different that I'm sure made many of them frightened and miserable. But what were they supposed to do? The Palestinian people need to decide that they want a different a leadership. Right now, a Palestinian leader who gets up one morning and talks about making peace with Israel or recognizing Israel's right to exist is typically a Palestinian leader who does not get up the next morning. And that's tragic more for them than for us.
And Abbas is old. I mean, he's in, I think, the 16th or 17th year of a five-year term. You got to do like Siri, remind me to leave office, thing, but he didn't do that. So I don't really think that Abbas is a major player here. The question really is who follows him? Is it Barghouti? Is it somebody else? Would Israel release from prison some of the people who are considered to be perhaps more moderate now? Are they really more moderate? Sinwar was in Israeli prison for a very long time and was saved from a brain tumor, which was not benign. He was saved by Israeli surgeons and so on and so forth. So I think who would replace Abbas is a very open question, and what role Israel would or would not play in making certain people possible is an open question. But the idea that Abbas somehow is a maker of any deal here, the people that I know, and they're much more expert than I am, see him as a pawn at this point.
Moving on to the next question, regarding American feelings of involvement in foreign wars such as in Ukraine and Israel when there are large problems at home.
Right. The question of Ukraine and people growing weary of Ukraine. Israelis have watched the Ukrainian conflict very closely for that exact reason. We don't really have a dog in the race between Russia and the Ukraine. And by the way, I mean, one of the things that makes it crazy for Israelis is that the Ukrainians are vicious anti-Semites, vicious anti-Semites. And many of us who live here have grandparents who left Europe because they were pursued by Ukrainians or were killed by Ukrainians. The Ukrainian story with Jews is a horrible, bloody story. They were enthusiastic participants in the slaughter during the Second World War. So Israelis have put that aside because we also, many of us, instinctively don't want Russia taking over other countries nearby. But I just want to point out that that's also another publication here that Ukrainian history with Jews is not a pretty one. Just look it up. But here's what I would say about it. We watched what happened with Ukraine, and we watched what happened in the world, growing very tired of Ukraine, and we watched about American isolationism when it came to Ukraine, and growing and growing with tremendous worry because we said, That's us next.
In other words, people saying, We don't want to keep pouring money in. It's taking away. Now look, America's inability to fight many of the things that it's facing, which are very real issues, whether it's the opioid crisis, or whether it's the homelessness crisis, or whether it's the borders, or whatever it is, they're all major issues. Every society has huge issues to deal with. None of those issues are not being addressed well because of America's foreign policy commitments. They're being addressed because nobody cares. If somebody came at the government who cared, you can make a dent. I know that you can’t stop the opioid crisis right away. It's so pervasive, and it's so horrifying, and it's so out of control. But you could probably begin to address it in ways that are not being done now. Same thing with the borders and so on and so forth. But I want to take this up not the 30,000 feet, but the 60,000 feet, and say this about America. The West has to start believing in itself again. Most of the people that I know who are my kids' age, my kids are all in their 30s. Most of my American friends' kids are not comfortable saying the Western way of life is a better way of life than Russia, China, Iran, whatever.
But it is. Let's see whether or not the West believes in itself well enough to, A, believe that it's right and better, and then, B, go fight for it. The idea that we were able to put some box americana in place post-World War II, and that 70, 80 years later, we should expect it just to be an autopilot thing, the world has never worked that way. I have to say, by the way, that I don't know how many young Americans would do what happened at Normandy. Now, they were cannon fodder. They were just cannon fodder, but they believed that the West had to survive. They got out of those boats and they climbed up the hills and they died, and the ones that came after them died a little bit higher up, and the ones that came after them died a little higher up than that until they got to the top, and then the world was saved. If America does not have a younger generation who would do the same thing at Normandy that it did back then, then the West is sunk. That's a function not of this president or that president. That's a function of American society's failure to inculcate in its young people a sense that we are actually better.
We are more moral, we're better for women, we're better for gays and lesbians, whatever your own personal view as that might happen to be. We're just better for individual rights and freedoms and so on and so forth. We should say that with great pride. But the West is on retreat. The joke in Israel is why do French tanks have forward gears? In case the enemy attacks from the rear. In other words, there's just this sense that nobody actually has the gumption to stand up and fight for what they believe in. This is really about the opening shots of really a world conflict, which might be fought economically, it might be fought territorially, it's going to be fought in skirmishes militarily here and there, and that could spread, or it could become a huge third world war. Who knows? We don't have any idea yet. But the question really is, do we have the... The first question I would say, the first answer to people that say, We're tired of all of this and so forth, is none of America's domestic problems are not getting addressed because America has foreign policy commitments. None. They can all be done at the same time.
America has got a fairly large budget. That's number one. Number two, when it comes to Israel, Ukraine, whatever, the first question is, do you believe in democracy? Do you believe in liberal democracy? Liberal, not meaning left wing, but liberal democracy in the Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian sense. Do you believe in it enough to actually put the resources of your country and the lives of your children on the line for that? If you don't, then forget it. It's just a matter of time until it goes over because the Russians will put those soldiers out there, and the Chinese will put those soldiers out there, and the Iranians will put those soldiers out there. If the West doesn't believe in itself well enough to fight, then the future of the West is fairly bleak. That's number two. Number three, here's a huge difference between us and the Ukrainians, and I'm not in any way disparaging the Ukrainians. These are not analogous forces. We are not arrayed against Russia. We're not fighting Russia. What I'm about to say is not meant to be a critique of the Ukrainians. It's just meant to be a comment about us. You poured a lot, a lot, a lot of money and a lot of arms into Ukraine, and they might lose.
You poured a lot, a lot, a lot of money and arms into us, and we are decisively winning. In other words, I'm not saying that our kids are braver than their kids or our kids believe in our country more than their... I'm not saying any of that. They're in an entirely different conflict. But you cannot argue that the money and material that was sent here was wasted. The idea was to enable Israel to, A, survive which it has, and maybe even to emerge from this much stronger. So whatever exhaustion people are feeling about Ukraine, which I totally understand, even though I also support the Ukrainians instinctively, I don't think the analogy that people make, well, we did this with Ukraine, and it's not working. Why should we do it with Israel? Because it is working. We are the canary in the coal mine here. I mean, we really are. If the world cannot understand that Israel as a democracy and as a Jewish state needs to be defended, then the world does not believe in the rights of any minorities anywhere, and the world does not believe that the ways of the West are better, more moral, more caring, more honoring of individual human beings, women, men, this, that, the other than anything else.
You don't want to be gay in China, and you don't want to be gay in Russia, and you don't want to be a dissident in China, and you don't want to be a dissident in Russia. While I hate a lot of the stuff that's getting said in American college campuses, I'm very proud to be from a country that allows them to say it. Now, I wish they didn't say it where they did. I think the university president should have clamped down on tense and all that much before. But that they have a right to say it, I think, is a sacred right. Do you want to live in a world in which you have the right to say what you think? You do. If you have a religious faith that leads you to believe in certain things, you don't want Russians ruling your life because they don't buy that. You don't want Chinese running the world because they don't buy that. You don't want Iranians running the world because they do believe in religion, but not in your religion. In other words, the liberal democracies that make up the West are, I think, an anchor We're on a basis in a foundation, I believe, of a world that's worth living in.
The question that Americans have to ask themselves, this is not Trump versus Biden or Trump versus Harris or anything of the sort. This is about the future of America. Do we believe in the values that founded this country, this country meaning America for a second, enough to say that we believe in it, to say that we think that it's better to raise our children, to be willing to sacrifice for it, and so on and so forth. We are the proof, and I'll just end with this. I think that we, Israelis, understand now that we are the proof that you can raise generations of people in a liberal democracy, many of whom are not at all religious, but who understand the gifts that their country represents for their people, their ethnicity, their history, whatever, to the point that they will throw themselves into the line of fire. I think the number, as of yesterday, there was 890 something soldiers, I think, have been killed. The number of wounded is, I think, 18,000. The number of widows in their 20s with children, because people in the religious communities tend to get married a little bit younger here.
The number of widows in their 20s with children here is an I don't know what the exact number is, is an unthinkable number. 40 something kids lost both parents in the attacks of October 7th. I mean, this is a bruised, hurting, bleeding, limping society, and it's going to be that for as long as most of the people who are alive now, especially the 20s and 30-year-olds, they're going to carry this with them. This is a dark, horrifying period that we've gotten a little bit used to, but we should not allow ourselves to forget how dark and how horrifying it was, and in many respects, still is. Even after all the guns are quieted, those widows are still going to be widows, and those orphans are still going to be orphans, and the people with no legs are still going to be people with no legs. And the people with PTSD who number in the thousands and thousands and thousands are going to have lives that are going to be very curtailed for as far as the eye can see. And yet, despite all of that, we are the proof that you can raise a generation of people which is now no longer remembers the generation of the founders.
In that regard, we're very much like the United States. We have a few people around in '48, but very few, relatively speaking. You can raise a generation of people who believe that this way of life is worth defending, who believe that their people is worth defending, who believe that if you're not willing to sacrifice your life at the end of the day, then you don't believe in it enough. I think the question that America should ask itself, and with this, I'll stop, is as it raises its younger generation, ask themselves, what do you actually believe in enough to give your life for? I don't mean your spouse or your kids. Forget that. Something that's beyond you and your immediate family. What do you believe in as a value enough that you would not happily die for it, but you would willingly die for it? If the answer of that is nothing, then the educational system at the core of what is still, I think, the greatest country on Earth is a deeply flawed, stumbling education system, and no less important than the opioid issue, and no less important than the border issue, and no less important than the homeless issue, and no less important than poverty, and no less important health care are no less important than any of the other huge issues that America has is to figure out a way to raise future generations of Americans who believe in themselves and in their country to the same extent, to the same degree, with the same passion that we have now discovered that we've been able to raise generations of Israelis who believe in and love this country.
I'm really delighted that you're here. Really honored that you made the trip. Very, very privileged to spend some time with you. I'm grateful. I am going to sprint home because as I mentioned, my partner in this particular relationship is not a negotiator, and candle lighting is relatively soon. We had grandchildren over before I left, so the house probably looks a little bit like the site of a terrorist incident. We got to get it all cleaned up before Shabbat and get candles lit and get dressed and go to school. Thank you once again. Have a safe trip home. Thank you for being here. Thanks for who you are. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you. Thank you.
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