UNLOCKED 936 - Permanent Midnight feat. Ryan Grim & Jeremy Scahill (5/22/25)

All I wanna be is El Joco.

All I wanna be is El Joco.

We can be the problems and pistols.

All I

Hello, boys and girls.

It's Thursday, May 22nd, and we've got some choppa for you.

A lot going on in the world.

We're going to jump right into it.

Our guests today are our good friends from Dropsight, Ryan Grimm and Jeremy Scahill.

Ryan, Jeremy, welcome back to the program.

Hello, bros.

Always good to be here.

Well, fellas, we wanted to have you on to just sort of like check in on the ongoing nightmare in Gaza Gaza and the state of ceasefire negotiations, negotiations with Iran.

But world events continue to intrude.

So I guess we should begin with last night's killing of two Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C.

Ryan or Jeremy, like

what do we know of this so far?

And just

what are your initial reactions to these killings?

Yeah, I mean, what's being reported so far is it's this is like a kind of

look like a hard left sectarian dude who was pacing outside of this event down in Penn Quarter in D.C.

that was, I think, connected to an Israeli embassy event.

And I guess waited until a couple people left,

walked up,

shot them dead, and does not seem to have made much of an effort to have tried to escape.

Captured really quickly, pointed.

pointed to where he had tossed his weapon, and then he chants free, free Palestine.

I mean, you couldn't wrap it up

any more than that in a bow.

So the motivation, assuming this is what happened,

seems quite clear.

Ken Klippenstein fairly quickly got a hold of what he said was his manifesto in which he talks about the genocide in Gaza.

Immediately,

you have people blaming Hassan Piker.

All of us need to call it out.

I'm thinking about the New York Times doing a gauzy profile a few weeks ago of this gamer, Hassan Piker, who regularly employs awful genocidal rhetoric against Jewish people in the Jewish state.

Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL went on CNN, and whenever he kind of name-drops somebody, it's always quite strategic.

And he name-dropped on CNN Hassan Piker and said that Hassan needs to be deplatformed because he, well, he didn't really give a reason why, but he's tried to connect him to this to this shooting.

So, I mean,

that's where we are now as a guy, a kid from Chicago.

Yeah.

I mean, I woke up this morning feeling like shit for a lot of reasons.

But,

I mean, like, what I will say about this is like, I just woke up with this bone-deep feeling that

if things were banned already, they're about to get much, much worse.

I mean, like, I think of this in conjunction with one of the members of NECAP being charged with terrorism in the UK or a terror-related offense for allegedly displaying a flag of Hezbollah at a concert.

And, you know, it's not like they needed much more excuse to criminalize any kind of Palestinian activism or even saying the phrase free Palestine.

I'm going to get it in now while I still can.

But I don't know.

I guess, like, I don't have too much to say about

the morality or like the, of, you know, stochastic terrorism.

I think the effects of this are sure to be disastrous.

But I will say, based on the moral and tactical standard of which Israel has been prosecuting this war, quote unquote, that they've been fighting,

these two people were definitely legitimate targets.

I mean, I'm not saying that's my Israeli shot at Israel shot at 30 fucking diplomats the same day.

So, yeah, I'll say that I regret their inconvenience.

Yeah, I mean,

this is the worst anti-Semitic terror attack ever, if you adjust for the population of the museum.

It depends on if you include the gunmen or not.

But 50% of the victims were Messianic Jews, aka Christians, which that led to a lot of edited tweets.

Yeah, this is also why

what Israel is doing in Gaza is so destructive because

it collapses norms and collapses our kind of principles about how we approach conflict.

They just recently

attacked just a completely random guy who was in the ministry of finance, the Gaza Ministry of Finance, and called him like like a, you know, a major Hamas figure.

That was the, that led to the infamous video that people saw around the world of the, the six-year-old little boy covered in ash on top of a building.

He was sitting on his father's lap.

You know, he was blown on top of a building.

His father is killed, most of his family killed.

His sister is then severed in two on the top of the building.

And you can see his father killed behind him.

That was a guy who was in the ministry of finance, just a just a civilian bureaucrat.

And they claimed that the reason they struck that house with like 15 people in it was to kill this civilian bureaucrat.

And it's preposterous to attack any civilian bureaucrats, diplomats,

what have you.

What they have done is just lowered the kind of bar for barbarism.

You know, we're watching

a Holocaust

being unleashed on the Palestinians of Gaza, where for 19 straight months, we have watched U.S.

weapons and political support and legal support and propaganda support facilitate a war against a civilian population where children are regularly decapitated, maimed, burned alive.

And

the world has either, in terms of major powers

from the West, has either been silent or is enthusiastically backing this genocide.

And when you look at the reaction to this shooting event that happened last night in DC and the politicians falling over themselves to issue their statements, and many of those same politicians have been some of the chief facilitators of American policy backing Israel, it shows you the world that they've tried to create.

where you can have 16,000 documented deaths of children at the hands of American weapons unleashed by a genocidal colonialist regime.

And there's cheerleading of the killing and mass starvation of Palestinians.

So, you know, my thoughts remain with the children being burned in Gaza right now.

I mean, yeah, no, that's certainly true.

But I'm not going to tell people what to feel about this one way or the other.

But this is, look, if you want to live in a world where people take the implicit, the implicit bargain of living in a liberal democracy where they go, oh, okay,

I'm not going to haul off with a gun and like blow down two embassy workers from a foreign nation because there are political processes and there are certain guarantees for me and for them.

there are ways to ameliorate disputes that work within the system, that there is a level of parity between me

and them or anyone else.

But, Felix, also, you know, just picking up on that, you know, these types of actions, if the motivation is

as it appears from the purported manifesto and other information that's been put out, this type of action doesn't help Palestinians in Gaza.

I'm not saying it does.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not debating you.

I'm just making an additional point.

I'm just saying that, you know, if you, the Palestinian resistance for the past several decades has not engaged in any operations outside of the borders of historic Palestine.

And that is a strategic decision on the part of the Palestinian armed resistance and the Palestinian liberation cause.

They have also said, like in the case of Edon Alexander, this American citizen who enlisted in the Israeli army was taken on October 7th, 2023.

in his Israeli army uniform from the base where he was stationed.

That is part part of the collective punishment operation that has existed since 2006 against the people of Gaza.

And

Hamas has said he wouldn't have been taken.

None of the American captives that Hamas was holding would have been taken if they hadn't made a decision to come into Palestinian territory as part of an apartheid occupation force.

And I think this is important

to talk about because strategically, the Palestinians have taken a stance against conducting any operations outside of their borders.

And so whatever, when people think that they're

taking the cause into their own hands, they're not even listening to the people that they purport to be supporting.

Right.

But I mean, the basic thing for all of this is if you are, you know, whether you are against it for that reason, or this is more speaking to the people who are, you know, they're saying, how did we get here?

How did things get like this?

Or, you know, saying that in reference to anything, anything that has happened for the past two or three years.

Well, this is what happens when people feel like that basic system of parity is no longer in effect, when there is no way to ameliorate conflicts or contradictions within the system anymore.

and that the implicit guarantees for their lives, for the lives of others, are no longer there.

You know, that there has been

the internal calculation by the West has been: okay, we can bleed a little bit of institutional legitimacy to keep this Israel thing going in its current form.

Well, this is what it looks like when

there wasn't a lot of blood left to spill.

And like speaking more broadly, like the context here, Ryan and Jeremy, I have not been able to stop thinking about a quote from the Israeli cabinet minister, Basil Smatrich,

that I saw quoted on drop site earlier this week in his comments about, you know, ongoing Gideon's chariot or whatever final solution they're cooking up.

The quote was, we are dismantling Gaza, leaving it in ruins with unprecedented destruction, and the world still hasn't stopped us.

Jeremy, could you give like some broader context for

those comments?

And just like,

what are we left to make of the comment, like the world still hasn't stopped us.

What are we to make of that in light of like the European powers sort of coming out of their shell in the last week or so to say, hey, this is too much, but not really doing anything to stop it or punish Israel for the things they think are supposedly unacceptable?

Yeah, I mean, let's...

back up for one second though and remember that Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement in January that Israel that was certified by both Biden and Trump as well as the regional mediators and Israel said from the beginning that it was going to violate that agreement, that it wasn't going to allow it to move past the first of the three phases.

And Netanyahu kept his word on that.

And on March 1st, when the first phase of the ceasefire ended, Israel responded by the next day putting a full-spectrum blockade on Gaza.

No food, no medicine, no fuel, nothing has entered the Gaza Strip now since March 2nd, up until 90 or so trucks were allowed in on Thursday.

You know, the bare minimum that's needed in Gaza is 500 to 600 trucks a day to even just address bare minimal essential needs of the civilian population.

And so Israel has implemented and celebrated openly a forced starvation campaign that the U.S.

has said almost nothing about until very, very recently.

And so what you're referring to is Bezilo Smotrich is not just a finance minister.

He's also a member of Netanyahu's war cabinet.

Both Netanyahu and Smotrich came out and gave public statements earlier this week where they were essentially responding to the hardest of the hard right

Israelis who are saying no food, nothing should enter Gaza.

And Smotrich lets the, you know, just puts the game out on the table and he says, listen, this is the way that we can

avoid any threats at The Hague, that we can keep the weapons flowing from the United States.

Netanyahu says, you know, I have Republican senators, our staunchest backers who are coming to me and saying, we want you to continue going after to kill these monsters, is what Netanyahu said.

But we can't have the optics of like starvation.

So Smotrich and Netanyahu are saying, look, let's do some really token symbolic form of quote-unquote humanitarian aid because it's going to allow us to continue to mass murder the Palestinians.

And so what they've, the system that they've created right now, what's happening is that there's an interim thing, as Netanyahu put it, where they're going to allow these trucks in and it's going to be distributed the old way that it was done during the ceasefire.

But this is only going to last a few days.

What comes next is a former U.S.

Marine sniper has

a pseudo-non-governmental organization registered in Geneva, Switzerland, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that is going to go in with American mercenaries, is going to go, look like Blackwater guys, they're going to go into Gaza and they're going to take charge of what Israel called sterile zones or humanitarian bubbles, where the Israeli army is going to create a perimeter.

You're going to have American mercenaries within it.

And they're going to give not, they're not going to be bringing trucks in to distribute flour to bakeries.

They're going to be giving what Netanyahu described as sort of food boxes to people that have been politically vetted, that go through biometric screening, and they're going to force Palestinians.

Most Palestinians are in the center and the north of the country.

They're going to force them essentially into

a trap where they go in to get aid, and and then the door shuts behind them and either then they get killed within that trap or the idea is to take that box full of Palestinians and ship them elsewhere.

Netanyahu is talking about a final solution.

He's talking about it in terms that are reminiscent of World War II era Nazi officials.

And

so what is sort of happening is that they're openly saying, this is all a mirage.

that we have to put forward so that we can continue the genocide.

That's what Smotrich and Netanyahu have been saying this week.

And they're also calling it Trump's plan.

They keep repeating it.

You know, Trump's Middle East Riviera that he floated on February 4th when Netanyahu visited the White House.

Trump stopped talking about that for a while.

And then at the end of his trip in Saudi Arabia, he like blurts it out again and says, it's going to be a freedom zone.

You know, yeah, I think we are going to take it.

He talks about the U.S.

doing it.

Now, Netanyahu doesn't necessarily like.

the idea of the U.S.

taking it.

He would want to just seize it for himself.

But what matters there is not that part of what Trump is saying.

What matters is that Donald Trump set an agenda that Netanyahu is running with now.

So Gideon's chariot, the aim of it is final solution that results in Palestinians being all killed or removed from Gaza.

This is also one thing to underline on that is that this is a window into how dark things have gotten in Israeli politics because Netanyahu's very savvy and Smocher for you know for his part is too.

Neither of them really want to be saying out loud, the only reason we are doing this is to avoid the Hague.

Like if you're a politician, you would prefer not to say the words The Hague kind of ever in your career in reference to yourself.

Yet they're doing it anyway because they're facing, like Jeremy said, so much pressure from their right,

not just Ben Gavir, but an Israeli population that is livid at the images of like five trucks getting into Gaza.

And so what they're doing is trying to placate that, to pander to that portion of of the Israeli public to say, don't worry.

Like, okay, we understand that you're upset about this, that there were only 155 Palestinians killed last night and you saw some trucks at the gates, not even necessarily going in, but we've said that we're going to let aid in.

We haven't let aid in yet, but we've said we will.

And that's infuriating a lot of the public.

So they have to then pander to them by saying, we're only doing this.

so that we can continue the genocide.

They don't want to say that out loud.

So the fact that they are shows how much kind of genocidal pressure they are even under.

But you know what, Will, one other thing about this,

and we can talk about the EU countries and Canada,

but one other element of this is that Israel has been at war against UNRWA, the main United Nations agency that is responsible for aid distribution, for schooling, but also its mandate represents the official promise that Palestinians have the right of return.

Israel hates the very existence of UNRWA, this agency, and that's why they've tried to fabricate this story that it's a front group for Hamas.

It's the single most important international entity that is operating and serving the Palestinians who have been expelled from their homes since the NACBA began in 1948.

And so by creating an alternative method of distributing a meager amount of aid,

what they're also doing is saying, we don't need UNRWA anymore.

This has huge implications.

And the Trump administration, although Biden participated in the demonization and attack against UNRWA, Trump, though, wants it abolished.

His administration supports that mission.

In terms of the European Union,

yes, it's welcome that the UK, which is not in the European Union, but that the UK, France, and Canada are taking these actions, that there's a discussion of more sweeping sanctions, that they're canceling some free trade talks and possibly debating the idea of actually hitting Israel economically.

All of those things are important.

But at the end of the day, Macron himself said it, that France can't stop this war as long as the Americans are giving them political support and weapons.

And that's true.

And that's why Hamas is in these negotiations.

When I talk to Hamas officials, you know,

they compare dealing with Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, that dealing with like Trump's people is like playing the stock market, that in the morning it's in one mood, in the afternoon, it's another mood.

And

before close, you have to kind of scramble to see, are you going to lose your shirt for the day?

And they said that it's like dealing with a kind of casino type atmosphere because you know that it's all sort of transactional.

And so they're having to navigate the American position.

There's been a big hubbub.

Oh, there's a, you know, there's a big fight going on between Trump and Netanyahu.

Most of that is exaggerated.

However, on a technical level, there is a tension between the Trump administration and Netanyahu because Trump views Netanyahu as starting to mess with his business.

You know, the Trump company has major business in those Arab Gulf countries that Trump was just in.

It's not just he's doing the business of America.

He's also doing the business of the Trump company.

And so I think part of it is, and it's a sick and twisted reality, is that the only possibility of stopping this genocide is that Donald Trump, for his own reasons, decides he doesn't want it anymore?

That's the only way this thing ends.

The European Union can do any sanctions they want.

That is not going to stop this genocide.

And most of them have been supporting it from the very beginning, anyway.

Yeah, like, could you describe, I mean, Jeremy, in your reporting, could you describe the sequence of events in negotiation that led to the release of the American hostage, a prisoner of war that you mentioned earlier, Edan Alexander?

This, like, could you talk about the circumstances under which like Hamas

decided to do a goodwill gesture and sort of like as a symbolic act of goodwill and like how that characterizes the Trump-Witkoff era of ceasefire negotiations?

Yeah, I mean, look, under Biden, we had, you know, really militant Zionist characters at the forefront of American negotiation, primarily Anthony Blinken.

And, you know, there were no direct talks with Hamas, and Blinken was constantly just deferring to the Israeli narrative.

Trump puts his billionaire golf buddy, Steve Witkoff, in charge as his envoy to deal with both the Ukraine war and Gaza.

And then he taps Adam Bowler, who was a college roommate of Jared Kushner's and a friend of the Trump family, to be the special envoy on hostages.

And Trump came into office saying he was going to get all Americans held in captivity.

released.

And Edon Alexander was probably the single most valuable living captive to Hamas and the armed resistance in Gaza because he was an American citizen.

And they did consider him a prisoner of war because he was taken from the military base where he was an enlisted soldier in the Israeli army.

And so when the original ceasefire agreement in January, when it was clear that Israel was going to violate it, the United States made a decision that they're not going to just sit around and wait for Netanyahu because Trump had put such a premium on getting Americans out.

And he'd done that.

He did this in Russia, did exchanges, you know, was talking to all kinds of people.

Trump really prioritized that.

And I think it's genuine that he wants those moments where it's like, I'm freeing Americans who are being held hostage.

Yeah, Rick Grinnell just brought one back from Venezuela this week.

Right.

And it's, I mean, it's one aspect of Trump's approach right now.

We could talk about this later too.

I mean, Donald Trump.

designates Ansar Allah, the Houthis in Yemen, a foreign terrorist organization.

Biden had reversed it from the first Trump term.

Then Trump comes back in.

He hits them with the foreign terrorist organization designation and then does a ceasefire agreement with them.

So, you know, Trump, Trump did a ceasefire agreement with a U.S.-registered foreign terrorist organization that Trump himself designated.

So, in terms of like talking directly to Hamas, he sends Jared Kushner's frat buddy to meet with senior Hamas officials.

And I talked to the two officials that did these negotiations with Adam Bowler.

And what Hamas said is like, the Americans approached us.

They basically said, we want to do a bilateral agreement with you for our citizens because Netanyahu has his own agenda.

So they go and they don't just talk about Edon Alexander, though.

Adam Bowler keeps telling the Hamas officials, and this is what they told me, you're so different than what I expected, you know?

And,

you know, they're talking about not just the history from October 7th, but talking about the multi-decade history and how Palestinian resistance sees their role in the world and the experiences that they had.

So they have this discussion with Adam Bowler that results in Bowler then coming out, infuriating the Israelis.

Ron Dermer, you know, Netanyahu's political hitman, was losing his mind because Bowler goes on TV.

Jake Tapper, the first question he asks him on CNN is like, what was it like to be sitting next to anti-Semitic terrorists?

And Bowler, to his credit, says

they were

reasonable people to talk to.

They didn't have horns growing out of their head.

He says the same things on Israeli television.

He pretty accurately describes Hamas's proposal for a hudna, a long-term truce.

So then, you know, the Republican senators, the Israelis go bonkers over this.

and you think that bowler's finished and he was he goes away for a few weeks but then trump brings him back into circulation and they continue to have these direct talks witcoff steve witcoff was supposed to be the next step in that in those negotiations that started in february that were about edon alexander and and a long-term ceasefire the next step was going to be a direct meeting between hamas and steve witcoff The Israelis, according to Hamas, succeeded in their demonization campaign against Bowler of nixing that meeting.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, you had some back channel outreach from the Trump administration to Hamas, and the issue of Edon Alexander comes back into play.

And what Hamas told me was that Steve Witcoff personally promised Hamas that if they released Edon Alexander on the second day after his freedom, they would compel Israel, the Trump administration, to lift the siege blockade on Gaza and allow aid in immediately.

Well, the second day came and went, and nothing happened.

So then Hamas went on the record with me and explained

what went down.

And the other part of it was that Trump, and this was right before

he landed in Saudi Arabia, the agreement was Trump was going to publicly call for a ceasefire and for serious immediate negotiations to begin on an end to the war.

So the U.S.

did neither of those things.

And Hamas, from their perspective, handed over to the United States a prisoner of war that would have gotten a large number of Palestinian hostages freed from Israeli custody, and they didn't get one Palestinian freed.

So I think part of why there was this scramble about the aid is because Steve Wickoff made a promise that then the Trump administration broke and the regional mediators from Qatar, Trump just got his $400 million plane from Qatar, are saying to the United States, are you guys crazy?

You just made a deal for a captive with Hamas and then you didn't keep your side of the bargain.

How on earth are we going to convince them to release any more captives from Gaza?

So I think right now, as we're speaking, I think there is still a diplomatic scramble going on.

Trump is full in with the genocide, no question about it.

But for his own reasons, there are indications he wants this to wrap up.

And the question is whether Trump is going to force Netanyahu to make a deal that actually ends the genocide and results in withdrawing Israeli forces, which is what Hamas's bottom line is, or if they're going to do a charade again where they lie to Hamas and say, yeah, we're going to have long-term negotiations.

And then after a 40-day period or a 70-day period, Netanyahu just resumes the genocide and goes back in and just starts burning children alive again.

That's where we're at right now.

Jeremy, I think there's a point you made, but I think the people at the Nobel Peace Prize Committee should get on the phone with Trump and say, well, we got a prize for you if you can get this done.

Because, you know, he'd love to add that to the office.

You know what's crazy?

I mean, Felix, I'd be interested in hearing felix's read on this because of the because of the research felix has done about the saudis in the past but do you do you realize that if if the following had happened it would have been surreal and totally plausible scenario if any one of those crooked uh uh kings and rulers that trump met with if any one of them had had sort of the a tiny bit of spine and said publicly while sitting next to trump mr trump you're a man of peace you're going to call for a ceasefire right now right trump would have done it he would have done it.

He's just like, he would have sat there and he would have probably said it.

And then the whole dynamic would have shifted.

I also put it on them a little bit because these guys never say anything.

Trump leaves and then the Saudis are like, there should be an immediate ceasefire.

Well, why didn't any of you say that in front of him?

Well, yeah, I mean, no Saudi monarch since Faisal has

really wanted to, you know, put their own neck on the line with this stuff.

You know, all GCC nations do this, but the Saudis are probably the worst at just giving lip service.

The UAE has just given up now.

Though

Qatar does show

a little more willingness to

try to game something out, though they're not exactly courageous either.

Well, I actually wanted to ask you.

My reading of that $400 million jet, which, by the way, if you're Saudi arabia a great point if they had any spine what they could have got done everyone would have loved them they would have gotten this like uh sort of regional shine that they're always going for the reason they do anything they could have gotten him a hundred planes like that well you know when uh oil was more per barrel or whatever it is unfortunately a boeing i think their hands were tied they have to buy american but do you see that as them

basically going, okay, we see how this works?

If this gets you closer to a ceasefire, that we can then say,

hey, remember the guys who gave him a plane?

Yeah, absolutely.

And did you see

the aside from Cioro Ramafosa when he was in the Oval Office

getting leaved by Trump over white genocide?

He's like, I'm sorry, I don't have a plane for you.

Which is such a nice.

And Trump then is like, if you did have a plane for us, we would gladly accept it.

But you know who did actually adopt the rhetoric that Jeremy's talking about is our man in Damascus, Jolani Al-Shara.

I was at an event last week where his representatives put forward the

offer to get sanctions lifted, the offer that they were making to Trump.

And his guy, who was conveying Al-Shara's message, said Al-Shara believes that Trump is, quote, a God-sent messenger of peace.

That is Trump's language.

a god no no god's a god sent man of peace like and and what did he get like a week later he gets a meeting with uh trump and riyad and he gets he gets sanctions lifted and now uh

you know apparently there's a lot of effort inside the administration to stop that from happening well i mean that that's i'm just gonna say it's not as impressive because he's giving the gcc countries the choice between

the the palestinians just as a people and um their contras they're always going to pick their Contras.

I'm sure they were much more adamant about that.

Yes.

I mean, I think too, Felix, that

Qatar is, if you follow the evolution of kind of how it sees its role in the world, I mean, Qatar clearly wants to become a diplomatic power.

It certainly wants to be a business power.

And, you know, I think in terms of its role in the mediation

with the Gaza War, I think there's generally been a positive view of what Qatar has tried to do.

The Egyptians are a whole other

arena because Egypt, of course, borders Gaza.

Egypt has had this long-standing peace treaty with Israel, and Egypt has its own geostrategic interests in Gaza itself.

I mean, some Hamas officials told me off the record that the Egyptian deep state actually wants a weakened Hamas to remain in Gaza, but it wants Hamas to remain in Gaza, but for its own reasons of strategic tension with Israel.

Qatar doesn't have the same level of strategic interest in Gaza.

And I think that the, I don't believe that the $400 million plane was connected to the Gaza war as much as it is connected to recognizing Trump is transactional.

Trump actually

envies the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates, and

Qatar.

I mean, Trump was marveling at their marvel.

He clearly clearly was like salivating at the idea you guys don't have to have elections for being king like this is amazing

he really was like a it was like watching you know Charlie when he first goes into Willy Wonka's factory it's like he's just yeah it was I mean so I think that I think that with Trump you have to it's really hard to sift through which part of this is intended to benefit Trump's businesses Which part of it does Trump think is going to like

impress his

base

of funders and donors and his inner circle.

But I don't think that the plane had to do with Gaza.

I think there's been a huge smear campaign about Qatar being kind of the money bags behind Hamas and that they're calling the shots.

It's not that there hasn't been a

funding

now too, apparently.

I don't think it's connected with Hamas.

I think it's, you know, if you if it was connected to Palestine at all, it would be more so Qatar can get the

prestige of being able to broker an agreement where the Saudis were too spineless and the UAA just flat out doesn't give a shit.

I agree.

The framing of Qatar has been pretty ridiculous.

They're going to release protocols of the elders of Doha.

Yeah, well, I mean, I got to say, it's very disturbing to have a nation run by religious extremists known for human rights violation to gain such immense purchase over the United States government.

It's this lesson learned from Trump One.

We did some wild reporting on this back in back in 2017.

If you remember, Jared Kushner stupidly bought this 666 Fifth Avenue property for

an ungodly amount of money right before the financial crisis.

His entire business empire is about to go under just as he's getting into the Trump administration.

And he and his father go around trying to get money from the Cutteries to bail him out of this.

The Cutteries look at the numbers, and at the time, they thought this was on the up and up.

And they're like, sorry, this is like not an interesting investment.

We're not going to do this.

And weeks later, the UAE and Saudi Arabia blockade Qatar.

And Rex Tillerson steps in to try to stop this.

And Kushner goes straight to Trump and sides with the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

There was even

the organizing of an actual invasion, which I don't know how on earth you even try to pull that off.

There was going to be a coup against the Emir of qatar it was it was it was completely insane and you know we exposed all of this this stuff and then when we were talking to uh qatary officials later you know one of them said to us very high-level official said if we had known what was going on here that this was asked this was basically a shakedown we would have paid it it cost us much much more in the long run not to pay this you know their currency was crushed their economy was crushed they were they were blockaded all the way through the end of the trump first Trump administration, which people have forgotten.

Now they've made up the GCC, et cetera.

But so this time around, they're like, okay, we're not going to make the same mistake again.

Like,

where do we sign?

Like, who do we pay?

And so take a plane.

A quick digression on 666 Fifth Avenue.

Just a little story here that comes to mind.

In high school, the first time I ever did LSD, I didn't know how long it lasted.

And that evening, I had already committed to attend a advanced screening of the Steven Soderberg film Out of Sight with my mother.

I was definitely still tripping.

And then when I showed up at the address, 666 Fifth Avenue, I walked into the lobby and was like, oh, God.

Oh, you're with us.

This is Krishner Property that year.

I don't think it was at Krishner Property at that time.

I was in high school.

It's supposed to have been like 1998, 1999.

Yeah.

So you could have told him to stay away from that building.

Yeah, I was cursed.

That's for sure.

Going back to sort of the personal aside, but going back to the

sort of the shift from Biden to Trump, because like over the last couple months, as an observer of this, I've I guess tried to like hold out some hope that like a shift from a State Department and government run by totally ideologically committed zealots to one that were merely partially ideologically committed zealots, but mostly committed to the

mostly committed to doing real estate crimes and fraud and things like that and graft and patronage could maybe wedge open the door for something unexpected to happen or something to change.

But like all I've seen is the reality of the situation has gotten grimmer by the day.

And I, you know, I've tried to give give voice to, you know, the

horror that like we imbibe every day in terms of starvation and mass murder, which over the last couple of weeks or months has seemed to like somehow have gotten even worse.

And I'm wondering like, you know, dropsight, you have reporters, you have people in Gaza covering this still to this day.

And I'm just wondering if you could just like like try to render in some sense like the scale of the horror and just how dire the circumstances for human life are in that killing zone right now.

I mean, first, on the first issue you raised about the transition from Biden to Trump, you know,

anytime Trump does something ghoulish,

and there's, you know, there's been a lot of it.

I mean, he has stood by and continued to arm Israel as they implemented their starvation blockade.

He lifted what limited, symbolic restrictions there were on the transfer of some weapons to Netanyahu and has issued lunatic threats to collectively murder everyone in Gaza if the hostages are not released tomorrow.

You know, Trump posts these things on his Truth Social.

But in order for

the, if the Democrats want to wash their hands of it, it's impossible.

Because there is no worse than Joe Biden.

There could be catching up to Joe Biden.

There can be emulating Joe Biden.

There can be continuing Joe Biden.

Joe Biden was a half-century-long dedicated supporter of a Zionist colonialist project at its most violent all through history.

And you had Blinken and other U.S.

officials constantly allowing Netanyahu to get away with whatever he wanted.

to sabotage a ceasefire that Biden called the Biden Plan, which was in the summer of 2024.

And by the way, it was almost verbatim the exact deal that Trump forced through in January.

So

I don't have any illusions that Donald Trump is somehow the peacemaker that he makes himself out to be, but we have seen unorthodox action from Trump.

The re-engagement with Iran is very interesting.

The fact that he signed the ceasefire deal with Ansar Allah, with the Houthis, very interesting.

The fact that he authorized direct talks with Hamas, very interesting.

The fact that Trump has, you know, just a couple of months into his administration, made some stronger statements about the state of starvation in Gaza that go beyond what Biden was willing to say.

That doesn't mean that Trump is somehow a humanitarian deserving of the prize, but I think that there's real questions on whether Biden would have even been able to get that ceasefire signed.

had Trump not been the president-elect.

I don't think that would have happened.

But the question right now,

is Trump willing to actually put Netanyahu in a corner and end this war or not?

And there's real serious questions about that.

In terms of the scale of it, one of our reporters, Rasha Abu Jalal, has five children, and she's working as a full-time reporter, and she's having to be moved around in this dystopic game of forced displacement.

Not so long ago, she and her husband and their five children were very nearly killed when Israel launched a massive airstrike that hit

the rubble building next to the rubble building that they were staying in.

That night, they just happened to sleep in a different section of this blown out building than they normally would have.

If they had slept there, their entire family would have been wiped out.

Another one of our reporters just got forcibly displaced last night as Netanyahu went on television.

uh in israel to give one of the most genocidal speeches he's given of the past 19 months they issued massive forced displacement orders so you know our hamza our reporter, had to get his elderly mother, his family, and just grab what they could.

And they had to leave.

And they were lucky because that was the first time that they had been forcibly displaced.

This is all happening as Israel is waging a campaign of intense terror bombing, where they are not hitting Qassam Brigade battalions, but they're hitting tent camps.

of forcibly displaced people.

They're using suicide drones in direct hits on tents tents that have whole families inside of them.

They're like down to celebrating the fact that we murdered the deputy head of sanitation from the Hamas government of 2006.

Let's put out a press release because we got him.

We got the garbage collecting chief of Gaza.

Like that's what they are murdering civil servants right now and then putting out press releases as though they've killed Yahya Sinwar again.

And it's a mass extermination campaign, a mass starvation campaign.

No children have been vaccinated against anything for the past two and a half months.

No pill of medicine has gotten in.

No food.

It is one of the most horrifying

mass murder.

It's also murder.

It's not just a genocide.

Genocide now is getting thrown around.

It's a mass murder campaign within an overarching genocide, and it's a mass murder campaign targeting civilians for reasons of terror.

Real quickly, yeah, the case of Hamza, the report of Muhammad Saleh, who Jeremy mentioned, is worth highlighting because I had a nightmare about him last night because of the piece that he wrote for us recently.

He talked about how when they returned back to their home in Jabalia,

it was still standing, but standing in an extraordinarily rickety fashion.

And you can see some of the photos in the article that he wrote for us.

And he said they would pray at night basically to the Cinderblocks, do not betray us.

If there is a strike that is near enough, that shakes this building and knocks us down.

And so many people are living in these

half-destroyed buildings that could fall at any moment.

And that's where he was then displaced from, just going from crime to crime.

And just want to just shout out Sharif Abdel Qadus.

I think the best thing that we have done at Dropsight was bring him on board as our Middle East Bureau Chief.

He's the one tasked with,

oftentimes he's

the reporters are filing in Arabic and he's editing and translating as well.

He's done

just an absolutely remarkable job and the pieces

that he's been publishing have just gotten more powerful by the week.

Well, and on that token, remember that more than 200 of our colleagues have been killed.

Journalistic colleagues have been killed in Gaza,

many of them in deliberate assassination strikes.

Recently, one of the most, anyone who speaks Arabic and follows the news out of Gaza knows Hassan Islaya, who was one of the most famous journalists in Gaza.

And on April 7th, the Israelis tried to assassinate him and hit a tent where he and other journalists were sleeping.

And Hassan survived that assassination attempt.

He was badly burned and had to have multiple fingers amputated.

He then is in the burn unit at a hospital recovering.

And he himself even said, they're going to kill me even in the hospital.

And that's exactly what happened.

The Israelis did a direct

assassination strike and assassinated Hassan Aslaya, one of the most well-known and important journalists who I guarantee you, all of you throughout the past 19 months have seen video after video of Hassan's, even if you didn't know who he was.

He was one of the chief chroniclers of this genocide.

And then they accuse, they say, oh, this was a good idea.

Yeah, I was justified by the fact that he was like, I covered the October 7th attack or like was embedded with Hamas, so and so.

Well, if that's the standard, I got news about every Western journalist.

I would have covered the October 7th attacks.

Any journalist worth anything would have covered the October 7th attacks.

This is insane to say, oh, they didn't say, oh, he shot anyone.

They didn't accuse him.

They literally said that his crime was filming the operations of October 7th.

It's like all these Israeli journalists that the only journalists that have been allowed to come in from the outside is one time Clarissa Ward was allowed in for like a few hours at one point.

But other than that, it's been journalists embedded with the genocide forces.

Douglas Murray went in there.

And yeah, and then they call that he's an exponential.

That's why he knows what he's talking about.

Yeah, I mean,

this latest round seems to be targeting journalists, especially.

And

that is an excellent way to put it.

It is an assassination ring that is taking place

amidst a genocide.

I remember that they used small diameter bombs, which are they're incredibly small, incredibly precise

glide bombs that they have a JDAM kit affixed to them.

And they're much smaller than most things that

people affix JDAM kits to.

So they are purportedly used for, you know,

targeted killings or taking out a very specific thing that does not, it doesn't have a lot of protection, layers of protection that you need to go through.

The marketing around them, of course, is these are small, but they're so precise that you can use them to take someone out with minimal collateral damage because they have a CEP of like one meter, I think.

But

they deployed those on refugee tents

almost as if they were just releasing them in volleys of dozens at a time just to make sure they hit every single one.

And that, of course, caused a tent fire that was horrifically fatal.

It seems in this grim round of assassinations that they're targeting anyone who is capable of documenting any of this and getting the word out.

And before that, though, it was that they were going after doctors and nurses and medical personnel, both Palestinians and people who'd come from abroad.

And with the Palestinians that they targeted, the thing that I thought was so especially horrifying, even in this context, was when when they couldn't confirm where the doctor was,

where the nurse was, where any of these people,

the medical personnel themselves were.

They knew where their families were, and they would take them out under the reasoning that if we just kill enough of their family, they'll be too heartbroken.

They'll be too hopeless to help out in any way.

I mean, I think you're zeroing in on something really important.

You know, if you look at the journalists that they really have hunted

and killed have been visual journalists, the ones with their cameras.

I mean, one of our reporters, Hossam Shabbat, was assassinated by Israel, and we now understand more details of what they did.

Hossam

was a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubashar, which is in Arabic, it's sort of their live station where it's a lot of just raw video from the ground.

And Hossam was a correspondent for them, and he started writing for Dropsight, and he told us that he had never written a print piece before, but that he really wanted to be a writer.

And Felix, I have to tell you,

when we would get

his reports filed in Arabic and Sharif then would go about translating them, he was lyrical.

I mean, this was a guy that would have been a very famous writer at some point.

He had raw talent.

And you can read on our website, you can read Hossam's reports.

I mean, we did very minimal editing of them.

He was a beautiful writer.

And he was talking to us.

He was saying, he told us he was so proud that we were making his work available in English and that we took a chance on letting him write.

And he really wanted to be a writer.

I mean, we were having human conversations and he was saying, I don't want to always be doing this.

Meaning, what is this?

Reporting on the genocide of my family, my people, my country.

Jeremy, I want to write.

I think about the young man and drop site employee who's just been able to make it out into Dublin.

I forget his name.

Alubakar Abed.

Alubakar Abed.

Yeah, a young guy in his 20s.

And he wanted to be a sports journalist.

He wanted to cover football matches.

And

he wrote a great piece about what it feels like to leave Gaza and

how heartbreaking it is, how guilty he feels, but also just like he knew that he was next on this list.

So what are you going to do in that situation?

No, I mean, yeah.

Felix, let me just close the list.

I wanted to tell you guys about Hossam, though.

So, I mean, what happened is that Hossam never left the north of Gaza, which he was one of the only journalists.

And I mean, an epic journalistic hero, Anas al-Sharif of Al Jazeera, is remaining there and is just constantly reporting.

I mean, this is one of the most horrifying periods of the past 19 months.

And that man has not taken one break this entire 19 months, Anas al-Sharif.

And Hossam, who was his colleague, also never left the north.

And he had stopped that morning that he was killed, he had stopped on the side of the road and gotten out of his car.

to film some people that had just been forcibly displaced and they were pulling a donkey cart.

And when Hossam got out of his his car,

an Israeli drone, a smaller scale drone, was above him and it dropped a munition that exploded directly on Hossam and severed his legs.

And that's, it was a direct assassination hit on Hossam Shabbat, who was a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubashar and Dropsight News.

And we put out a statement that day saying we don't just hold the Israelis responsible for his assassination, but we hold the United States government also responsible for his assassination.

And shame on all these Western journalists who stood silently by as there's been a mass murder campaign unleashed against our Palestinian colleagues.

This is one of the most shameful, if not the most shameful episode in American journalism history where all of these high-paid, makeup-faced

infotainment warriors.

will talk endlessly about let's free

Evan Gershkovich from Moscow.

I also wanted Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, freed from Moscow, but they won't say a word about the systematic assassination of the largest number of journalists in history.

They won't say a word.

I remember years before, even October 7th, remember Ann Applebaum had a piece where she literally said that, like, Palestinian journalists in quotation marks can't really be considered as such because they're combatants in terms of advancing a narrative that is contrary to the U.S.

State Department and Israeli government.

No, and of course, Ann Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg, the former Israeli prison guard,

he's clearly a journalist, but 21-year-old Hossam Shabbat, who spent every single day of his life since the genocide started filming Israeli war crimes, he's not a journalist, but Jeffrey Goldberg and Ann Applebaum, who are combatants.

He's a combatant because when those images are released into the public and like, you know, gain purchase in like a sort of information environment or it penetrates people's consciousness, that is an act of war against Israel in the United States in their view.

I think that's, I don't think I'm not exaggerating any in any sense.

I think that's exactly what these people think and feel.

I think that

what you said,

both, you know, the man who escaped to Ireland, who wanted to be a

sports reporter,

this is something you hear a lot with people who are both in Gaza, people who've made it out.

And it is, you know, it's similar to that,

the Jay Gould quote.

How many great minds were, you know, toiling away in existences of just, you know, occupational subsistence.

you know it's not the single most horrifying aspect of this uh compared to the loss of life and sheer brutality but it is that is something i think about a lot i mean i i saw this interview with a guestamagrads fighter who said i want i want to be a gym teacher i want to i want to like teach and coach young people on exercise and playing soccer.

I didn't want to do this, but I had no choice.

And, you know, even

if, you know, regardless of what your opinions on armed resistance are, the same thing is true for people who feel that they have to document these

massive world historical crimes against them, against their neighbors, against everyone that they've ever known.

Everything that they would have done, that they wanted to do, that they didn't even know that they wanted to do, that has also been taken away from them.

If you listen to Abu Bakr speak, you know, this was the first time he's ever left gaza in his life i see people say that that's impossible he speaks with a british accent like he learned a british accent just from maniacally watching european football like that's how passionate he is about it and was about it uh and right that's all he then and that's my that's my hope for him that when he fully grows up and emerges from this um after everything he's been through he can he can pursue that dream if that's what he wants to do he should be able to do that well just uh don't don't let him cover the world cup next year in America.

I don't think he'll be able to get in.

Yeah.

But

in terms of learning to speak English, I mean, in this conversation,

my thoughts go back to what seems like 10 years ago now when they assassinated Rafat Al-Arir.

And I remember learning.

about him and learning, you know, I think through Ali Abunima, who told me that if you've read anything in English from someone who's lived in Gaza, chances are nine out of 10 of them have been taught to speak and write English by Rafat.

And like, there's this idea that the English language is, even if you're not allowed to leave this siege concentration camp zone, the English language is a passport to transport you, like your thoughts, your beliefs.

The walls can't hold it in.

And I think I'm sure that's one of the main reasons they assassinated him, too.

And Rafat knew, you know, and he also predicted his death.

And he actually said publicly that

Barry Weiss, that Barry Weiss should be held responsible because she, with her posts about him, he was very clear that she had put a target on him.

And I remember him talking about it in the weeks leading up to his assassination, describing how they were moving in on him.

And he knew that they were going to kill him.

I mean, one fact about Gaza that I don't think many people are aware of, it's one of the most concentrated places in the world of people with higher degrees.

It's a highly educated society.

And this is also, by the way, true when I interview officials from Islamic Jihad or Hamas, so many of them are doctors or veterinarians.

Osama Hamdan,

one of the top people that was negotiating directly with the Trump administration officials, was a chemist.

And all of them, they talk about, oh, they're staying in the four seasons, which, by the way, is a lie.

All of them have had family members killed.

Basim Naeem, who I interview fairly often, he's one of the top English-speaking spokespeople for Hamas.

He's on their political bureau.

His mother was killed in Gaza.

His siblings were killed in Gaza.

His nieces and nephews were killed in Gaza.

His family is still in Gaza.

All of those guys have lost basically their entire families on the ground inside of Gaza.

And, you know, there are legitimate discussions to be had about Hamas's political outlook, the way that Palestinians may view them.

You know, polls before October 7th, Hamas was the governing authority for much longer than it thought it was going to be.

They won democratic elections in 2006.

Ismail Hania was, and they didn't just win them in Gaza, they won them in all of Palestine.

And Ismail Hania was supposed to be the prime minister of Palestine.

And then there was a, you know, a civil war with Fatah, and Hamas consolidated power in Gaza.

And then Abbas further consolidated his rule of the occupied West Bank.

But as a governing authority,

people in Gaza had the same problems with their government that a lot of people around the world do and you know hamas has said repeatedly in recent months they'll relinquish power in gaza they don't even want to be the governing authority uh in gaza you know and and and so i guess part of what i'm getting at here is so much of the way that palestinians are described is distorted to a record historical level of dishonesty.

The very foundation of how Palestinian resistance is talked about, the notion that it constitutes terrorism is an epic lie.

If you know anything about the 77-year history, if you know anything about the fabric of Palestinian politics, then you understand the centrality of armed resistance as a primary principle of the Palestinian liberation cause, because without it, they would have been wiped out long ago by what ultimately was a European settler colonialist project aimed at removing them from their land.

So we can have debates about the tactics of the second Palestinian Intifada or what Hamas's political agenda looks like.

But let's be factual and let's keep it in a historical context that doesn't strip the Palestinian people of the very rights that many of the same people demonizing the Palestinians act like are sacrosanct principles of Ukraine's fight against Russia.

The Palestinian people have a right to armed resistance.

You can debate tactics, but what you can't debate is that fundamental right.

To go back to a second for like the sort of the wildcard nature of the Trump administration and their unpredictability.

You described it like negotiating with the stock market.

Do you think it's because of that unpredictability in terms of like you said, opening up direct negotiations with Hamas or Iran that Israel is not happy about?

Do you think it's because of that?

Because it does seem to me like anytime there is a possibility that we're getting close to like what could be a cessation of at least immediate violence and bloodshed, the Israelis go even more insane.

And

the killing is ramped up to like an even more, just like, like, as I said, like the last month or so, the scale of the killing increases.

And like,

this is part of like, I guess, Israel's negotiating stance as well, right?

Like, it's just.

Well, Israel ratchets up the massive.

They don't want an end to this war.

They like, they don't want to stop this ever at all.

But think about it.

Think about it also a different way.

Israel is a nuclear power that has an unending supply of weapons from the United States, Germany, and others, primarily the United States, though,

and enjoys the full spectrum support of the American Empire.

And for 19 months, they have been waging a war where their own soldiers have died, where they haven't been able to fully exterminate the Palestinian people, where there still is an armed resistance against them that is armed by homemade weapons.

that have been manufactured underground in Gaza, sniper rifles, bullets, grenades, rockets.

The weapons, they're on a full spectrum blockade.

People talk about, oh, there's smuggling, et cetera.

That's a minuscule portion of the weaponry that's there.

So, what Netanyahu does is

before he's ready to make a deal, he'll unleash a double-scale mass murder operation.

But the question now is:

Is that what is happening right now?

Is it that they know they're going to have to stop?

And so they're trying to do as much murder as possible, as much destruction of infrastructure as possible before they sign a deal?

Or is this truly what Netanyahu sees as the the final solution?

Where he has Trump, Trump wants him to make a deal, but is okay if he doesn't.

And we're going to move full force to exterminate the Palestinian people.

It's

either scenario is plausible.

And to bring it back to the Trump issue, I think what Hamas people feel like is that kind of anything is possible when they're dealing with Trump and that he can be swayed quite easily in one way or the other on, you know, if enough of the people in his inner circle plant it as a good idea in his head.

And I think it's pathetic, but they feel like they have a better shot with actually ending this thing than they ever had with Anthony Blinken being the lead negotiator for the United States.

That's how twisted this is right now.

Yeah, I unfortunately, like, and this is just like you said, not a defense or

endorsement of Trump's way of doing things, but with Blinken, it is a definite no.

You know, Blinken is just like a disinterested West exec shithead whose, you know, stepdad helped organize the Epstein Black book.

He's not going to stick his neck out to do anything.

With Trump, there's at least a chance that

someone somewhere like Khabib Nurmagamedov gets in his ear.

I'm not even kidding.

Like that is

the type of thing that would happen.

Obviously, he's incredibly venal and

beholden to Miriam Adelson's checkbook, among others.

And he, you know, before Joe Biden was probably

the most Zionist U.S.

president.

But what options do they have?

Well, I guess, like,

this gets me into like where, where, you know, one of the reasons I'm feeling so depressed at the moment, because it used to be like over the last year or so, like, I've, you had to consider or tried to consider the fact that, like, at some point,

this killing will end either with, either if Israel gets their wish and all Palestinians are just exterminated or expelled to another country, let to be someone else's problem.

But that like at some point, like this has to end, either through ceasefire or total extermination.

But the thing is, like, I'm getting to the point now where I think the most frightening thought is that this just never ends.

And by that, I mean, like, yes, the conflict in Gaza could end one way or another.

I mean, one of a number of our horrible outcomes there.

But what I mean is it never ends in that, like, what this has created has, like, birthed something into this world that will not end.

And I mean that like in a like directly, directly affecting America as we're seeing now, but that just like the standards by which like

the demons that this is midwifed into our reality, which are certainly not new or like novel by any stretch of human history, but I really feel that like we have entered now

I don't know, like something else where like what we're seeing every day on our TV just will not end.

And like it will just continue in one form or another for as long as we're alive, as long as there's killing to be done, and as long as Israel, the United States wants to do something.

Well, right.

There is that assumption.

Yeah, go ahead, Felix.

I think Israeli and in general Western policy towards Syria is one of those things that

I think is underlooked as a way to extrapolate

an MO for our current time.

It is seen as like, you know, the portrayal in

most Western media is,

oh, you know, Bumbling Empire, the Pentagon's rebels are fighting the CIA.

When really, I think it's incredibly instructive, especially Israel's aims in Syria, because none of it makes sense unless their objective was to create maximum chaos and see

how long can you keep something like this going?

How fractured can you make a population?

What level of death and despair are people willing to put up with for however long?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Western states, the GCC and Israel especially, use Syria as a petri dish.

I mean, there have been long-running civil wars before, but ones like this, where

there was so much foreign participation, it still kind of is.

I think

we'll may unfortunately really be onto something here that they're going, okay, this was our test run.

Now we can we can do this right next door, yeah.

And yeah, what I mean is, like, even though the Gaza Palestine conflict may end one way or another, I feel that like the playbook has been set now, and like the pay, the tone and pace has like a new standard has been set for where they're going to be like, they're going to be Gazas everywhere.

And like, this is the new standard by which, if there's a country or a people that are just inconvenient for you in some way, or a large group of refugees, for instance, that like this is the new way, extermination, expulsion,

concentration, that like it doesn't matter that we're going to see this carried out over and over and over again.

I mean, that is real, that is me at my bleakest right now.

And the transition Syria took at the end, I don't want to call it the end because who knows where Syria is going next, but it kind of vindicates the Israeli GCC-U.S.

approach.

So, okay, they got a decade plus of the chaos and suppression that they wanted.

And then now they have the former al-Qaeda guy just saying, you know, what do you want, boss?

Asking, you know, how he can be a more pliant client.

So, from their perspective, it's working out just great.

Can I just say one thing, though, about the situation in the West Bank as well, which doesn't get anywhere near the attention that it should, given the gravity of what's happening.

But right now, Israel is in the midst of the largest forced depopulation campaign in the occupied West Bank since 1967.

And, you know, Marian Barghouti, the great journalist, has done a lot of good reporting for Dropsight on the situation in the West Bank.

But you have this messianic wackadoodle Mike Huckabee, who is now the U.S.

ambassador to Israel,

who has said before that there's no such thing as a Palestinian, no such thing as the West Bank, who clearly supports expanding dramatically illegal annexations and the expansion of the illegal settlements.

You have

Maryam Adelson, who was the single greatest donor to the Trump election campaign, who also has that same agenda.

The attacks against Hezbollah, which began in an intense way with the Pagerbomb plot that killed hundreds upon hundreds of people and maimed many others, including children.

But the kind of wiping out of large parts of the upper echelons of Hezbollah's leadership, the regime change in Syria, pressure that Israel and the United States have put on Jordan to further tighten the border with the occupied West Bank, and then the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas going in and doing pre-raids against Palestinian resistance centers, seizing weapons, snatching people, that then was followed by the Israelis doing a full-on invasion of the Jenin refugee camp.

We're looking at a situation now where

I think we're going to look back and recognize that this was the start of Israel's attempt to fully wipe out any notion that there's going to be Palestine.

And the question is, what sort of resistance is going to rise up against this?

Because no Arab country is going to intervene.

There isn't going to be a military intervention against Israel.

The only countries that have been willing to do anything are Iran, and they're a very rational, logical actor.

They do calculated, coordinated, largely symbolic strikes on Israel when they have attacked.

The poorest country in the Arab world that is governed only in part of the country by Ansar Allah has been the only

relatively state actor to intervene in any direct way.

And

they operated a highly effective maritime blockade, and they've been able to repeatedly penetrate the so-called Iron Dome and other air defense systems that the Israelis have had.

And they endured an American bombing campaign that was largely a failure at everything except killing civilians in Yemen and forced Donald Trump into a ceasefire.

It's quite astonishing that it's basically just Yemen right now in terms of any

almost state actor that is doing anything other than issuing press releases.

And so there's a real question.

I think a lot of Palestinians that I talk to are deeply deeply concerned that

this is the, you know, a sort of massive push to try to erase them once and for all.

And, you know, and so the fate of all of this for now lies with Donald Trump in many ways.

And that's really

a disturbing reality when you understand that their overarching view is Palestinians should be relocated to places like Somaliland and Libya.

I mean, I go back to the quote from Smotric where he says, and the world still hasn't stopped us.

And it's that word still in there that I found so stunning because it's almost like, are they expecting to be stopped?

I mean, like, they seem almost giddy that like they've gotten away with this.

And that's sort of what I find so horrifying about all this.

And like, you know, sorry to use the example from history, but like the reason why the Holocaust springs to mind here is that like, it just seems that like The standard has been set where like if you can just declare a group of people like unpersons without rights and then like through the media, basically justify their extermination or just be like, well, they had it coming or it's complicated or yeah, those kids probably would have grown up to be terrorists one way or another.

And then like, look, a lot of people will be disgusted by it.

A lot of people will protest it.

A lot of people will try to stop it.

Occasionally, a couple of people might get assassinated in DC, like the sort of Herschel Grinspan style incident that just happened.

But ultimately, that like it cannot be stopped.

The people in power cannot be stopped and they will not be stopped.

And I fear that like that is the lesson that they are taking: that, like, public opinion doesn't matter.

Uh, like, you know, sporadic acts of violence, violent resistance can be dealt with.

Uh, and that, like, yeah, like, most people will just kind of go along with it or throw up their hands.

And, like, that's what I mean.

It's like, I really feel like we're entering a world where this will never end.

And, Felix, I think you made this point maybe like a year ago or more that the way that Israel has always ended its assaults is with a phone call from an American president saying, okay, it's a wrap.

Like, this, this is over.

And that's why they didn't have a quote-unquote day after plan here.

You know, they came in after October 7th, and I think we're for a while genuinely expecting the U.S.

leadership to pull the leash at some point, be like, okay,

it's a wrap.

This is done.

And so they just structurally, systematically have no process for ending a war.

They will just carry it on as long as they are allowed to.

And people like Smotrich

are like waking up and saying, well, they still haven't stopped us.

We can actually keep going.

So let's just keep going.

And then it's just day after day of slaughter.

But I mean, Ryan's making an incredibly important point.

You know, we used to, we were saying this, you know, from the very beginning, that Biden can end this with a phone call.

And I still firmly, I mean, maybe it would have been somebody who would have had to help Biden talk, but if they thought that they were talking to Biden and whoever they, whatever imitator they got to tell Netanyahu it was done, then it would have been done.

But it's a serious point, though.

If Biden's administration had multiple opportunities to end this, and they, it's not that they just fumbled it, you know, or that they weren't competent.

They were actively supporting it.

They were enabling it and they were facilitating it.

And then they pulled that business with making Kamala Harris the nominee.

And then Harris goes out and says she wouldn't do anything different.

And the, you know, the Democrats, I mean, Ryan did this story about it too, showing that it was actually a quite defining factor, particularly in

voters that would have probably been inclined to vote for the Democratic candidate in this election.

It actually was an issue, no matter what the so-called strategists want to say.

And they did that knowing that there was a high likelihood that Donald Trump was going to return to the White House.

So history needs to

be very clear that this is the butchery of Joe Biden that we're watching unfold here.

And the point Ryan made is such a good one.

Netanyahu, I think, watched that with both eyebrows raised quite high and realized like,

oh my God, we were allowed in the hen house here and no one is going to stop us.

Let's get out the knives and go to town on everything inside of here.

There was no one is going to come to stop us.

And so it's ironic that it's Donald Trump.

that forced that ceasefire.

It's ironic that Donald Trump may well be the one who ends this thing.

The Democrats should forever have this on their record, that the premier genocide of our era and the overarching multi-decade narrative about Palestinian resistance being terrorism is a huge part of this.

You know,

the calls for military intervention to stop Israel are non-existent.

No one is saying that at all.

But throughout history, these very kinds of activities have resulted in calls to do something.

But with Palestinians, it's like, well, they're terrorists.

No, actually, they're not terrorists.

They're fighting against terrorists.

That's the narrative is completely upside down.

The Palestinians are in a fight for their very existence against a terror state that is bankrolled and armed by a bipartisan consensus in the United States.

There is, among some like left liberals that I know, like people of the,

you know, the,

who's the lady with the whiteboard?

Katie Porter.

You know, that type of cohort.

There is this

idea of

who herself got taken out by APAC.

Yeah.

Like, there's no winning, but go ahead.

Yeah, no, there's nothing you can do or say.

We're seeing that today.

Where they're, you know, I would talk to them, they go, well, I'm kind of where you're at now because, you know, they, Israel ruined the Biden administration.

And they, they're the reason we have Trump now.

uh

and they took out katie porter and her her whiteboard and the thing is you know,

Israel did not initially do this despite Biden, even though that was an added benefit for them.

Biden sacrificed everything for Israel to get nothing in return, except his own satisfaction.

That is the most

unbelievable part about all this, was that this was all out of Biden's personal conviction.

If you look at his personal history, his history of statements, and just what the White House did, this is what he wanted.

This is what he always wanted.

He probably, you know, the pattern of Israel

doing

a month worth, two months worth of horrific crimes and getting their chain yanked by HW

or Obama or W or whoever.

Biden probably saw that and said, I would just let them keep going.

And now he finally got to do it.

And all it cost him was his legacy, his his successor winning an election.

And he doesn't give a shit about that.

He can just say he won.

He would have won.

Yeah, no, the framing among that crowd will be he got taken advantage of or they screwed him.

No, you've screwed you.

Oh, that's right.

Actually, literally, Jeremy has written about this.

There's a video of Joe Biden in the Foreign Affairs Committee talking to Menachem Begin, telling him that Israel is being too soft in Lebanon in 1982, that they need to be going harder.

And

Biden actually gave up.

He was back against it.

Remember, too, Menachem Begin was a death squad leader.

He was named as a terrorist by who named him as a terrorist recently?

He goes, oh, yeah, that's right.

Yes, it was in a,

it was Stanley McChrystal,

former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, said, you know, oh, Menachem Begin was a terrorist.

But Menachem Begin, who was a terrorist, he comes to Washington.

He's the prime minister of Israel during the early stages of the invasion of Lebanon.

And he tells this, Begin tells this story when he goes back, when he flies back to Tel Aviv.

He's like, well, there was this one senator who stood up in the meeting that we had and started talking about how if Canada had invaded the United States, that it would be defensible to kill women and children.

And he's like, and I told him, no, no, sir, we must respect our morals and our values.

And he's like, and he was talking about Joe Biden.

I mean, Joe Biden says to Menachem Begin, it's fine to go murder a bunch of women and children.

It's okay.

I mean, it's like, that's the kind of ghoul that we're talking about that was presiding over, you know, the, this, this genocide.

It's, it's, whatever.

You know, 30-second hallway meeting in 1972 or whatever.

When the two of them went to free Martin Luther King from South Africa.

Also, just not only is it insane.

When Cornpop and I I went over to free Menachem Began.

Yeah, when me and Grandmaster Flash, we were sitting in our cell in Roban Island and we invented breakdancing and be-boyed.

No, like, it's already insane to cause Menachem Begin, like, to give him pause to go, I don't know if you should say that in public.

But saying, like, out of all the things that Israel has done in the last 40, 50 years, to say that about their actions in Lebanon in the 80s, I mean, they did things that were so bad that dry bones made cartoons condemning Israel for it.

I'm not like, oh my gosh.

Yeah, like, and Biden saw that.

Biden saw Sovereign Jatila and all of this and was like, leaving something on the table, huh?

Like, horrified Reagan.

He's like one of those fucking Balkan guys that killed people too fast for the Nazis.

You know,

as long as you're vending here, Felix, I really got to give you credit for an observation you made to me the other day about like the cottage industry of these phony like fascism experts in American public discourse.

They're like, who, you know, see a meal ticket in Trump and they like all they do is talk about how evil and fascist America is and how we're becoming a fascist country.

But like the prime engine driving all of this and the most currently Hitler-like country on the planet, they all seem to have this massive blind spot about, or they're like, well, it's actually more complicated than that.

Yeah, my cousin actually lives there.

Yeah,

I went there on a middle school trip.

Yeah.

It has drifted into complete and total fascism.

Anybody who lives there will tell you that.

Where were these fascism guys

along the way?

And apparently now they're in Canada, which is kind of an amazing thing to do.

You see this fascist threat and you're going to go underground and sneak out to Canada, but you're going to announce it in the pages of the New York Times.

Yeah.

Shouldn't you just slip underground?

Like just supposed to disappear and change your name and a little gnome de guerre?

But, like, no, they're like giving out their address.

It's just like, you know, like, if you want to talk about, like, you know, the, the, the alt-right,

online neo-Nazis, Kanye West, you know, like, all, all of the, like, you know, sort of like increasingly more and more open flirtation with Nazism and fascism in this country.

Yes, that's all quite disturbing and nauseating.

But like,

if you put all those groups together combined, they haven't done even one one millionth of the scale of violence and fascism that the United States government and their number one client state, Israel, has done just in the last two years.

Yeah, these people wrote these books that were like, I'm really going to need to

go to therapy after this because for my next book, I spent six months on the dark web's craziest website for Chan.

And it's like

there were like 20 books like that during this time.

And then there is no state on earth

has more in common with nazi germany's society the total capture of institutions uh the fact that maybe there's one or two people in their legislature who are not totally on board with the subjugation and elimination of palestinians and they're like well i you know i went there and i my cousin lives there i it's complicated one of the most insane things that i i hear on this angle is like i've seen it from one of these fascism guys who's Jewish, and he'll go, Are you seriously asking me to commentate on this?

Because I'm Jewish.

And it's like, no, because you write about fucking fascism, but I also, if I go back to your Twitter to like 2020, you'll say, it's the duty of all whites to condemn white supremacy.

But you don't have to say anything about this.

Yeah.

And like, and we've talked about it before, but like, this is what I mean, but like the horrorism leash will not stop.

I mean, America is just like the people in charge of it now very clearly want us to be more like Israel, and we're becoming more like every fucking day with our treatment of immigrants and refugees, with our outright criminalization of the First Amendment, which, like I said,

will likely get much worse following this, like I said, the Herschel Grinspan style incident in D.C.

this week.

And I guess, like, Ryan, John, me, I guess, like, my last question is to you.

And, like, I know we talked a lot about, I don't mean to like center it back here on, like, you know, how are American journalists going to deal with this?

But, like, you know, you guys at drop sight, like, you, you cover Palestine, you do real journalism about this, like, you speak out about this.

Have you had conversations like with lawyers or just internally about like what it's going to be like to continue to do the work you do in the coming months and years?

I mean, yeah, I mean, we are, you know, we're trying to, you know, think through those things.

And, you know, certainly that comes with, you know, making sure that your legal structures are as solid as possible.

You know, a lot of that comes from public and political power.

They're going to take out the people that they think they can get, and they're going to kind of shy away from those that they can't.

They really do seem their target right.

And also, it requires

defending everyone.

You can't hunker down and hope that they don't come for you.

And so, for instance, right now,

they very clearly are targeting directly Hassan Piker.

That is their ambitious life.

Absolutely.

Like I can only imagine Jeff Bezos' phones getting lit up with text messages and emails and letters from legal letters and

telling him you've got to de-platform this guy.

And so

that's where the press freedom fight is

at the moment.

But this will also pass.

Whether we pass

through with it is always an open question.

But

right now, he's the one that's kind of in the barrel.

Also, Will,

when I was doing,

right around the time when I first started getting to know you guys, and when I was doing like investigations into the Obama drone wars and wrote this book, Dirty Wars and made a film of the same name, I was on the watch list for a few years.

And

I would always get taken for secondary screening, the kind of questioning that Hassan went through recently.

But in all of the times when I was questioned, it would happen almost every time I flew back into the United States.

And just a funny side story, the way I got off that list is I happened to get the same

customs and border patrol agent twice in a row on trips, and he remembered me.

So he was like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to deal with this now because I had gone through it like just a couple of weeks earlier and I happened to get the same guy.

So that's how I ended up getting taken off the list, which was kind of a strange story about bureaucracies.

Big ups to that.

Yeah, it was a really kind of, you know, odd thing.

But, you know, I would go into the screening areas and it would be, you know, I knew I was going to be out of there before the other people sitting in there because, you know, many of them were people that had come on flights, you know, from the Middle East with me and they would get, you know, taken in there.

But what I was getting at is I never once thought like they're going to hit me with material support charges.

And at the time, remember, like I was interviewing people from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Taliban, al-Shabaab, but I never was like, okay, they're going to prosecute me because as deeply heinous and flawed as so many aspects of the American system are, I really believe like, you know, if they dared to go that far, we would win that court case.

Now, under Trump, they're trying to use this backdoor way of expanding these material support laws.

Well, the Project Esther.

I wouldn't even get the chance to talk about that now, but yeah, that's like, you know, a big element to this, where they want to make basically public support for Palestine into a material support charge.

That is true.

And one of the most disturbing parts of what happened to Hassan is that according to him, they were asking him if he had ever done interviews with any of the H's, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis.

And

so...

when Ryan and our colleague Naska and I, when we talk about this, I mean, we're looking at it from the perspective of there are dire issues facing vulnerable people in the United States right now, and we're now seeing some indications that they're going to expand that.

And I think that all news organizations should actually be interviewing people from the other side of the barrel of the gun because it's the journalistically ethical thing to do.

It's journalistic malpractice not to do that kind of reporting.

I wish that the New York Times was doing that level of

explanation to their audience about what is the actual perspective of the people on the other side of this.

You know, it's journalistic malpractice not to do it.

But what I think we're looking at is an attempt to dramatically expand material support laws and to go after nonprofits, nonprofit news organizations, media outlets that have the audacity to do actual journalism, including by speaking to people that are forbodened.

You know, like we never can, what are you doing speaking to them?

Well, I'm doing journalism.

You You know, so and if and if we if we don't have other news organizations willing to do that kind of reporting,

you know, then I think it's it's problematic because it's against the public interest, but also it somehow encourages those who abuse power and are trying to trample on core aspects of those constitutional rights.

It gives them a freer reign to do it.

And the irony is it's not actually in the interests of the United States to be ignorant.

Like it is actually helpful to the United States to know what the Hs are thinking.

And

one example is this story that Shue, our colleague Shu Abin Jeremy, wrote, where they interviewed a top Houthi official who said of Donald Trump's kind of offhanded offer, where Trump and both Hagseth had said, look, if they stop bombing American ships, you know, we'll stop bombing them, which was absurd because they had never bombed American ships in the first place until we started bombing them.

But okay, it's absurd.

So, you know, Shue

puts that to this top Houthi political figure.

And he says, yeah, absolutely.

We'll accept that deal.

Like, if you stop bombing us, we'll stop bombing you.

And that, and we know that that article circulated at the very highest levels.

After that, these talks

go on in Oman.

And a couple of weeks later, they come out, and that's the deal.

You stop bombing us, we'll stop bombing you.

So without that, interview, maybe they get there anyway, but it was beneficial even to the Trump administration to have journalists who are speaking to the other side if the U.S.

doesn't have channels to them now.

But yes,

these are dark times and who knows where they're going.

Yeah.

Just one last real quick practical

question to Jeremy.

If to any of our listeners or even myself, if you were selected for secondary screening upon re-entry to the United States, should you answer their questions?

I mean, I said this to Hassan also.

I mean, you don't talk to the cops.

And that's especially true in an airport because courts have upheld this insane notion that constitutional rights don't really exist in an airport.

You know, back when, you know, years ago, when we started the intercept, one of the first stories we did, we obtained the 180-page government rule book for how people are watch listed.

And, you know, it's shocking what courts have allowed the government to do in an airport.

You know, a Palestinian-American friend of mine who's a journalist recently flew from Germany back into the United States, and her husband is not an American citizen?

He's a doctor in Germany.

You know, they're Palestinians, but he's a German citizen.

She's an American.

And they forced them to unlock their cell phones under threat that her husband and their children could be immediately deported from the United States.

These are people with German passports.

And, you know, so.

Look, my baseline advice to people would be: if you are a political person or you're engaged in any kind of political or journalistic activity, you do not set foot in a U.S.

airport

with data on your phone.

You can wipe your phone, put things in an encrypted cloud, download it when you get there.

You don't walk into the airport with anything on your phone, with your contacts, with your chats.

None of it.

None of it should be on your phone.

In terms of questions, you have to answer basic biographical questions, you know, in terms of what's...

indicated on your passport, where you came from.

They do not have the right to be asking you your political views.

You do not have to answer those questions.

This becomes tougher, though, if you're a vulnerable person, including if you're a legal permanent resident of the United States, you should talk to a lawyer before you travel and ask for their advice.

You know, I'm looking at it as I'm a U.S.

citizen and I would fight them on that.

Vulnerable people don't have the same luxury as Hassan or myself, where we're walking around with a U.S.

passport.

Doesn't mean we're not vulnerable, but my advice would be to anybody who is political or has things on your phone that you don't want the government reading, do not set foot in an airport with it.

Don't talk to the cops in the airport, except to answer the basic questions that they're allowed to ask you.

And that doesn't include what are your political views or let me look at your Twitter feed.

I do just want to say in defense of Hassan, and I know that you're not attacking him with this,

but yeah, no, I think don't talk to the cops, especially in this bizarre legal gray area that airports are,

where there are every, even if it's in fucking idaho it's a border i will say that the calculation for for doing that on reentry is probably much different for a public figure but for 99.9 of people listening to this uh that is not a calculation they have to work yeah i mean hasan i was on hasan's show right after that happened because he had called me that day and you know and i didn't mean this at all it's bashing him like he had his own he's his own man you know and he had his own philosophy about what he was doing there.

And I respect it.

I was just, I mean, I felt like Will was lobbing a softball to sort of say, like, what would your general advice be?

I mean, Hassan himself has laid out why he did what he did.

And, you know, and I think he wanted to tell that story too, to kind of educate people on the extent of what's happening right now.

But I think in general, for most people, you know, you should, you should really assume they're going to get into that phone and they're going to look at everything on it or download everything on it.

And they may be asking you invasive questions.

And you should, if you're a political person, you should be talking to a lawyer before setting foot in an American airport.

Yeah.

No, yeah,

100%.

That is news you can use.

All right.

Gentlemen, we should leave it there for today.

I really want to thank Ryan Grimm and Jeremy Scahill.

The website is Dropsite News.

Everyone, please check them out.

You know where to find them.

But, Jeremy, Ryan, really, thank you so much for your time today.

I know this was a very, a very downer episode, but I couldn't think of two gentlemen I'd rather discuss such grim affairs with.

Grim indeed.

Always good to be in the trap house.

Thank you guys so much.

Yeah, Jeremy, I was very glad to have you back because it's been like almost what, like

eight years or so since you were last on.

Maybe no, I was on a few months ago, but you may have been on something.

Oh, no,

you were doing the LSD at the 666 building.

No, but

yeah, I think I was having Windows windows 8 problems

no no i mean the last yeah i remember that time when i was with you guys at i think it was at will's apartment yeah and then we went we went out on a bit of a bender after that

i'm clean and sober now so uh you know but good time we did we did agree and it uh that i would come back on when dick cheney died so

we went we went to one of those um

you know those incredibly um like pitch black like survival horror game lit restaurants in brooklyn yeah it It was fun for me because,

you know, if anyone has a-cause I paid.

Well, yeah.

But yeah,

I've been condemned for that.

You know, I've had to pay for so many meals for all types of jokers over the years since then.

But no, I, I, um,

due to my pancreatic affliction of not being able to drink, I got the survival horror experience of watching everyone get funky in this dark car.

Oh, my God.

I can totally believe it, man.

You were in sober shell shock.

All right.

Yeah, that's it for today, everybody.

Till next time, we'll talk to you soon.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.