Will Trump & Netanyahu Let Gaza Starve?

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Then you'll hear Tommy's interview with Horetz columnist Amir Tibone about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, why a deal to end the war has been so elusive, and Trump and Netanyahu's relationship.

There were quite a few developments in Gaza over the weekend, so let's start there.

If you've been following the story, you've probably seen that since the Israeli government broke its ceasefire with Hamas in March and blocked all food or aid from entering the territory, Gaza has become hell on earth.

Israel has now destroyed most Palestinian homes, buildings, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and farms.

They've killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children, wounded hundreds of thousands more, and have displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians, almost the entire population.

In late May, Israel started distributing small amounts of food at four locations run by American contractors, but Israeli forces have shot more than 1,000 people who've tried to get that food.

And now the UN says that every single resident of Gaza is at risk of starvation.

The World Food Program says 100,000 people are in dire need of treatment for malnutrition, which has claimed the lives of 48 people in July alone, 20 of them children.

Israel has blamed the UN and Hamas for the hunger crisis, though senior Israeli military officials told the New York Times there is no proof that Hamas has been systematically stealing UN food and supplies.

On Monday, two of Israel's leading human rights organizations said for the first time that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

International pressure from some of Israel's closest allies, like the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and France, which chose to officially recognize Palestinian statehood last week, finally led Netanyahu to announce daily pauses in the fighting in three places so that Palestinians can get food, though even that small step doesn't seem to be doing too much.

And none of this has stopped Bibi from denying the reality of the atrocities he's committing.

Here he is on Sunday.

Israel is presented

as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza.

What a bold-faced lie.

There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.

We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza, otherwise there would be no Gazans.

And what has interdicted the supply of humanitarian aid is one force,

Hamas.

There is no starvation in Gaza, says Beebe.

As for Israel's closest ally and largest source of military aid, us, the United States government, here's a sampling of how Donald Trump answered questions about Gaza during his golf trip to Scotland over the weekend.

Well, you know, we gave $60

million

two weeks ago, and nobody even acknowledged it for food.

And nobody said, gee, thank you very much.

And it would be nice to have at least a thank you.

We do have to take care of the humanitarian needs

on what they used to call the Gaza Strip.

You don't hear that line too much anymore.

You don't hear the Gaza Strip.

But we're going to be getting some good strong food.

We can save a lot of people.

I mean, some of those kids are, that's real starvation stuff.

I see it.

And you can't fake that.

Real starvation, but no thank you notes from any of the starving children.

That was just.

Who did he want to thank you from?

Did some kid there have his number?

Did he want Hamas to give him a break?

I'm going to fire off a thank you note.

Just

maybe thank you for the bombs.

Those are the bombs.

Maybe.

It's like J.D.

Vance asking.

They all want people to thank them.

It's very weird.

Zelensky's got to thank them.

The kids in Gaza have got to thank them.

Let's start with you guys' general reactions to the developments in Gaza over the last week.

And Tommy, maybe you can tell us what you think about the pause in military activity that Bibi announced.

Yeah, I mean, I think just generally, I mean, you see these photos of these emaciated, literally starving to death or starved to death children, and it's just impossible.

It's the worst thing I've ever seen.

It's impossible as a a parent not to imagine that being your child and being incapable of protecting them.

You know, that's where my brain always goes.

And what is so enraging is that this was not just predictable, it was predicted.

Like taking aid distribution away from the UN, giving it to this brand new organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, that just emerged out of nowhere recently, was destined to fail catastrophically.

And every expert said as much.

One example why, you mentioned how the GHF has four aid distribution points.

The UN had 400.

And so what that does, this new system forces Gazans to make these long, dangerous walks through an active war zone to get food.

There are all these instances of the IDF or contractors shooting them or drones going off near these distribution points.

Hundreds of people have been killed, like 700, 800.

Gazans have been killed near aid distribution points.

There was a former GHF contractor who served in the U.S.

Special Forces did an interview with the BBC.

He said, quote, he has never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.

This was a guard for the GHF.

And he said he fought ISIS and the Taliban.

ISIS and the Taliban.

And it's, by the way, no longer anonymous, so they can claim, oh, these are fake or anonymous or this person on the record, on camera, describing this, someone who was there,

yeah, U.S.

Special Forces veteran.

Also describes it as like amateurish, right?

Like this is a thing that was just stood up.

It's just the processes are terrible.

The individual treatment of people are terrible.

So your questions about these

humanitarian pauses that are happening, the pauses in military activity, I mean, they're good, but it's like the definition of too little, too late, because there's no on-off switch for a famine.

Jeremy Kun-Eindike, the president of Refugees International, has been sounding the alarm about this, how difficult it is to control a famine once it reaches the tipping point.

And the tipping point is like you sort of see clusters of deaths.

That's how you know this is happening.

And it will require a massive surge of aid, food, malnutrition treatment, clean water, sanitation, healthcare, not just these bullshit PR airdrops or a few pauses.

And so I'm glad there is this like acute focus on the famine, but but we need to also focus just as much on permanently ending the war.

Because as you mentioned, like the death toll before this famine has been catastrophic.

Gaza Health Ministry says 55,000.

Other studies say closer to 80,000.

70% of structures destroyed.

And so like the only way the living Israeli hostages are going to survive and get out alive is to permanently end the war.

And it's going to take a massive diplomatic push to get there because Netanyahu is extending the war for political purposes.

Yeah, look,

Netanyahu blames Hamas for aid not reaching people, and yet under international pressure, he can get more aid into Gaza.

This happened repeatedly.

The Times published this long and deeply reported story about Netanyahu's conduct before and during the war.

And there's this scene that describes Netanyahu facing pressure from the right internally to not allow aid into Gaza and from the Biden administration at the time to allow aid into Gaza.

And he ultimately relented to the pressure from the Biden administration in that instance.

He responds to pressure.

How can it be that it is Hamas's fault or the UN's fault and not Israel's fault that aid is not getting to people who need it when under pressure, that policy changes?

It's happened multiple times.

Yeah, the...

The propaganda and the lies in the face of like what the entire rest of the world is seeing and has been documented, it's just really, it like drove me insane over the weekend.

The,

you know, like the footage of all the UN trucks and it's like, they're just sitting around.

And I think APAC tweeted this and Israel's going to talk about this.

And then as soon as he announces the pause, you see pictures of the UN trucks just coming on into Gaza.

So it's like, is anyone going to, you just lied to everyone and now you're just going to pretend that it was, you're not going to even correct yourself or anything.

They just don't care.

The other part of this, too, is.

If you only allow in a fraction of the aid that is required, it is not surprising that the people who will get that aid are the people with guns.

It is not surprising that you have chaotic and dangerous scenes among people who are starving and desperate.

And experts in this, former envoys to the region who've worked for Democrats and Republicans, people who have delivered aid to the region will say the answer is more aid.

If you have enough aid, it can't be commoditized.

If you have enough aid, if Palestinians are no longer terrified that today's truck will be gone tomorrow, right?

If people can trust that there will be enough food, then all of a sudden these distribution points by the u.

become less chaotic and by the way this new organization stood up by a uh uh uh the trump administration's allies right like they are

backing the idf and doing these extremely controlled distribution points where they're shooting at people uh and uh they claim they're shooting in the air but we lots of reports of hundreds if not a thousand people dying because of it um to to maintain control at these four points at other when the u n is distributing aid at these hundreds of places there are times where people are overrunning what do they do do?

They back off and let people take the food, right?

They don't shoot people under desperate circumstances.

Imagine you have a crowd of people where it's like you literally can't move.

And the IDF starts shooting in the air as warning shots to try to back people off, but you can't back off.

Like there's massive crowds of people and people are desperate.

And so, like, but the other, the thing I know that people are probably going to be tweeting at us as they listen to this is Hamas could end the war right now.

Just about to relieve the hostages.

And it's what I want to say to you is you can repeat that talking point or you can actually get them home.

Because

Hamas is a terrorist organization.

They're not good actors.

We should not trust them.

We should not expect them to act in this, you know, act in a way that we would want them to, right?

Like the hostages are their only leverage.

The only hope of releasing the hostages is through a deal.

And that deal has to include ending the war permanently.

And that is what Netanyahu refuses to agree to.

And that is that you can talk about it.

Like, Amir and I go through this.

There's all the sequencing and, you know, the phasing of hostage release and Palestinians and Israeli prisons getting released.

The big sticking points are Hamas wants a deal that permanently ends the war and Netanyahu won't do that because it will collapse his government and he will be out of power and he is facing corruption charges and he could go to jail.

That's it.

The idea that if only everyone who is criticizing Israel would call on Hamas to release the hostages, suddenly Hamas would release the hostages so all would be well.

It is fucking absurd that we're still doing this in July of 2025 as this war has dragged on, talking about what Hamas can or cannot do.

You know what?

We're not funding Hamas's military.

Hamas isn't accepting diplomatic pressure, international pressure.

The whole point, Bibi's stated goal when they started the blockade was to put pressure, the blockade of food into Gaza was to put pressure on Hamas.

Since that time, they've recovered one hostage, an Israeli-American hostage, and that was like a side deal with the United States.

So it was a, by Netanyahu's own, like, his own own stated goals, it's been a fucking failure to get to pressure Hamas to release the hostages.

And what it's done instead is just starved a bunch of people and led to like a staggering loss of life.

Hamas,

Hamas started this war.

Hamas has shown incredible disregard for the lives of the people it claims to represent.

It is a monstrous organization.

We should demand better of Israel and that it, yes, Hamas does not is Hamas could, could save Palestinian lives right now.

So can Israel.

We hold Israel to a higher standard because

it is an ally of ours who we fund, who we ostensibly believe has a moral and ethical compass that it at that at some point in its history claimed to believe in.

So the idea that like, oh, well, you know, it's Hamas's fault, okay, sure, I agree.

Hamas is responsible ultimately for the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people because they hold the hostages, because they committed an act of terrorism, that a monstrous war crime.

Fine.

Okay, so what?

So Palestinians have to die?

That's the answer?

Israel can, you mean, Israel can do better, so can we.

So can the United States.

We have the capacity to go and do something about this.

So does Europe.

So I mean, it's just.

Donald Trump could end this war with one called a Netanyahu.

Donald Trump has so much political capital in Israel after the Iran strikes.

Netanyahu needs him.

Netanyahu wants his political backing.

He also wants U.S.

military and intelligence support.

But instead of doing that, instead of getting the Nobel Peace Prize that he wants, Trump has made things exponentially worse by announcing a few months back a plan to ethnically cleanse the entire Gaza Strip and turn it into a resort town.

And what that did in practice was make it so much harder to get a deal done to end the war because the far right in Israel was like, that's on the table.

Ethnic cleansing is on the table.

Controlling Gaza fully, permanently is on the table.

We want that.

We had that heritage minister over the weekend last week.

He said, all Gaza will be Jewish.

The government is pushing for Gaza being wiped out.

Thank God we are wiping out this evil.

And I realized, you know, Netanyahu then later said, oh, he doesn't speak for the government.

Blah, blah, blah.

It's like, well, he's one of your fucking ministers.

He's also the same guy that said they should consider using nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip and then was, what, suspended briefly and then reinstated.

And now he's being could have, it took him hours for Netanyahu to ultimately come around to denouncing it.

And then anyway.

But Israel Katz, the defense minister, announced a plan to like focus everybody into one city in Gaza and then push them all out.

It's ethnic cleansing.

Yeah.

And they're like, they're like,

they're advertising their ethnic cleansing.

Yes.

But to your point about Trump, like, what do you make of his

shifting and typically incoherent comments just the last few days?

He did the thank you thing.

And then it seems like he had a bunch of meetings with European leaders.

And then we got, we're recording this Monday.

Then we got his comments today, which is like, oh yeah, the starvation is bad.

And those kids look really hungry and we got to do something.

I don't know what to make of it.

Like, he's just all over the place.

He's seeing it on television and he knows they're bad.

And he is a creature of television.

And he watches.

Cable news viewer Trump again.

He knows, he remembers the nation's biggest television fan.

The Feed the Children ads from the 80s and 90s that were all over television are seared in his memory.

He knows people don't like it.

He knows it's wrong.

And he doesn't want to be responsible for it.

He also said, we're going to set up food centers where people can walk in and no boundaries.

We're not going to have fences.

They see the food.

It's all there, but nobody's at it because they have fences set up that nobody can get in.

It's crazy what's going on over there.

It's so crazy.

He's just like a dispassionate observer.

It's somebody who was kind of paying attention to a briefing about the facts that we were, like, it's like that is the transmuted version of the facts we were just describing that he can barely hold on to.

So he's getting some information about this and about Israel's culpability for the lack of it.

Well, we remember it was either during the campaign or during the transition, but basically Trump's problem was like, I just don't want to see this on TV.

You know, I want BB to just finish up the war because I don't like the images because he doesn't like the mess.

I think real like military experts in Israel, like the former defense minister Yoav Golat, said a year ago that like the military value of the fighting has been exhausted.

You know, I heard today, I can't remember, I was listening to like a Haaretz podcast or something.

I think the IDF has destroyed 25% of Hamas's tunnels.

If the goal is 100%, like how long are we going to be there?

The organization is decimated.

There were something like 30,000 Hamas fighters when the war started, and there's been at least 55,000 casualties since.

Yeah.

His top generals told him a year ago that there was no longer a military advantage to continuing the war.

There are reports of them taking a hospital,

then withdrawing, then literally going in a circle.

Just taking the same circle.

Taking the same territory back, this time destroying the hospital.

There's just lots of, look, Benjamin Nanyahu, his coalition depends on these right-wing ministers.

And they told him if he

agrees to a truce or a ceasefire, he won't have a government.

And he put his own personal political interests against the interests of the hostages and Israel's long-term interest.

And here we are a year later.

Israel is a pariah nation.

The suffering of the Palestinians has continued.

Thousands, hundreds, if not thousands, have died since that truce was on the table a year ago.

He lifted the short-term ceasefire.

And by the way, you know,

like it is impossible to measure deaths caused by malnutrition and starvation.

You will have specific numbers of people whose deaths are ascribed to that.

But hospitals not having supplies, people being weakened to infection, to miscarriage, to all kinds of horrors, the toll is ongoing.

It is very difficult to measure just how many people are being hurt, if not killed, by the fact that food and medicine and aid is so scarce,

at least largely because Israel has prevented enough aid from reaching people in a sustained way.

I got to say too, I mean, you know, it's my fault for being on Twitter all weekend, but

the New York Post ran this story about

there's a picture that was in the New York Times about a mother holding her emaciated, starving child,

you know, and his stomach was distended.

It's a horrific picture.

And the New York Post ran this story, you know, actually, the boy is suffering from genetic disorders.

And so it wasn't just starvation and the boy's gonna get medical treatment.

And then Israel, you know, the Israeli Twitter account tweeted out the same thing.

And I saw, it's not just randos on Twitter, like actual pundits, other people being like, well, the New York Times ran this picture.

And I'm like, what, where,

what kind of lack of humanity do you have when you're like, oh, this kid, in addition to being hungry, also had a genetic disorder.

So therefore, all the other fucking pictures we've seen of like little babies dying, like we shouldn't take seriously.

I just, I don't,

it's horrifying that this is where we are right now.

This is where some people are.

I'll also say it's, it's, it's a form of like weaponized anti-Semitism unspoken because

the idea it's that, oh, all of these people that are saying this, all these reports, right?

These are people that hate Israel, hate the Jews, are anti-Zionist, and so they're reporting on what

the Hamas officials in Gaza are saying uncritically, or they're going with anonymous sources.

They will drum up anything to attack Israel, right?

And there is anti-Semitism.

There are people that are biased against Israel.

There are people that mischaracterize what is happening in the conflict.

But

it requires viewing

all of these organizations as lying.

It requires the images we can see with our own eyes

to deny them.

It just requires such a broad conspiracy to believe that this is all being cooked up to damage Israel.

And

they can try it, but I just,

first of all, Donald Trump doesn't agree.

Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't agree.

A lot of right-wingers are starting to understand

that this is wrong.

So, you know, they can try, but I just don't think it's working.

It's just dehumanization.

You know, I mean, there's just so much, the rhetoric, it's so dehumanizing.

They treat Palestinians and Gazans like they're not human beings.

Like, everyone's part of Hamas.

Like, everyone's a target.

It doesn't matter if you're a

enemy.

We don't feed our enemies.

Yeah, it's just, it's horrific.

And look,

I'll say it for the thousandth time.

I think what Hamas did on October 7th was an evil act of terror.

I think it's indefensible.

I think that no one can ever justify harming civilians.

But like the rhetoric you always hear, like when you talk about stats coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry, they're like, oh, you have to say that that's a Hamas-run organization.

It's like, sure, okay, it is.

But the numbers they've released have generally been viewed as trustworthy.

And in fact, independent outlets think the casualty count is much higher in part because so many people are buried under rubble.

And this war has been raging for 662 days now.

I also just like, yeah, Hamas is monstrous.

And you have Palestinians who have no advocate because you have Ben Nanyahu who's putting his own political interest ahead of the interest of the hostages and of Israel at the great expense of Palestinian lives.

And you have Palestinian lives in the hands of a terrorist organization that launched this attack on October 7th, knowing it would lead to untold suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

And so, yeah, it's like Hamas is awful.

These people

have no one who is speaking for them.

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I saw a group of 21 Senate Democrats are calling on the Trump administration to stop funding the GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, that's Israeli-backed and run by American contractors and put the UN back in charge of aid distribution.

I also saw Senator Angus King of Maine today put out a statement.

He said, I am through supporting the actions of the current Israeli government and will advocate and vote for an end to any United States support whatsoever until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy.

I mean, good for Angus King.

I don't want my taxes funding this.

I don't want the people who represent us voting for that funding.

I don't want the people who represent us taking money from APAC, APAC, who over the last couple of days accused Bernie Sanders of blood libel, just because Bernie Sanders was criticizing the war and the government.

And I don't think Democratic candidates

should take money from APAC or vote to fund military support for Israel anymore.

Like, I really don't.

Like, it's just,

this government, absolutely not.

And that especially includes, I think, the next Democratic nominee for president.

Yeah, I mean, like,

these are tall orders in the Trump administration, but the things I want to see Democrats at least calling for is cutting off military assistance to Israel.

It's a rich country, by the way.

They don't need our $3 billion a year.

And hands up, right, Barack Obama signed a 10-year MOU for $3.3 billion a year.

Like, so we're part of the problem here.

Let's correct it.

I would like to see.

talk about sanctioning Israeli government officials who use genocidal rhetoric or who talk about ethnic cleansing openly.

We should support a ceasefire resolution at the UN.

We should demand that international press be allowed into the Gaza Strip to report on what's happening without an IDF minder.

It's insane that the press still can't go into Gaza and cover what's happening.

And I also think like there has to be a total mindset change in the Democratic Party.

When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7th status quo where, because it's not where the party is, it's not where the world is.

We're not going to shovel billions a year in military aid.

We're not going to veto every effort to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN.

We should not take money from APAC.

And like, I will hold out hope for better political leadership in the U.S.

and in Israel.

But we have to also recognize that the Biden-era hug bibi Netanyahu strategy has to be thrown in the trash can for fucking ever.

Netanyahu is a bad actor.

He's continuing a war for political purposes.

He bombs Lebanon when he wants to.

He bombs Iran when he wants to.

He bombs Syria when he wants to.

The IDF, they literally bombed the Syrian army headquarters two weeks ago in Damascus.

Like this is not a partner we can count on.

This is not someone who is like leading to calm and stability in the region, which should be a core interest.

And like the only good thing is like that, you know, AIPAC calling Bernie Sanders blood libel or accusing of blood libel a few years ago, I feel like would have been a big deal.

But that rhetoric has been so overused that I think the effect has worn off.

And people are not scared anymore.

And I think that's good.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: They're not scared, but it's just, it's incredible to me how many Democratic politicians still haven't.

I mean, 21 Senate Democrats wrote that letter.

That's great.

That's not the whole caucus.

Angus King, like, you know, how many other Senate Democrats have called for cutting off funding?

Like, at this point, cutting off military funding for a government that is starving 2 million people and like advertising how they're ethnically cleansing the Palestinians seems like the least we can do.

Yeah,

it just, especially if we're going to head into a primary, like table stakes is going to be no more military aid for Israel.

That's, like, you know, I don't understand how the argument in favor of it.

And

beyond that, I do think, you know, France just recognized Palestinian statehood.

You know, I went and looked at the APAC memo on why that was so bad.

And the point it makes is for 40 years, Democratic and Republican administrations have made clear that recognizing the state of Palestine must only come from negotiations.

Where's that gotten us over

40 years, right?

Our being the staunch ally and the lone vote in the Security Council to

prevent.

Palestine from being recognized.

So I do think we need to like,

what does it mean for the United States to support Israel's right to exist and defend itself after this war?

And it will have to look very different.

And that will start, I think, by recognizing the profound shift in the power dynamic after Israel has leveled the Gaza Strip.

And by the way, as Netanyahu

has

promoted and sort of stood by as the West Bank has become even more settled over the last, what, how many, I don't know what percent, the expansion of settlement's been dramatic.

Yeah, and the violence and the violence in the West Bank.

Yeah, against the Palestinians.

So there will just have to be a shift.

And I do think that will mean being

putting far more pressure on Israel.

And that's what I think Democrats want.

By the way, that's what the country wants.

And

when you poll Israelis, they say they want a fucking ceasefire.

Like

Israelis want the hostages returned through

a negotiated settlement.

And by the way, that's the way in which the vast majority of hostages who were returned were able to be returned.

Yeah, I just will say, like, it's funny talking to Amir in the interview today.

Israelis talk so much more bluntly about their criticisms of their own government than Americans do.

Americans are so scared because of, you know, sort of groups like AIPAC accusing you of blood libel or people like Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL who accused me of anti-Semitism because I said Netanyahu started a war that he needed Trump to finish, which is objectively true.

I'm talking about Iran, by the way.

But, you know, I do think look, the Democratic Party is way behind where its base is right now and needs to catch up.

One.

Two, I hope that in this acute moment of interest

in the horrors of this famine and the need to end this war, that we can find a moment to build a broader coalition that goes well beyond the Democratic Party.

Because

the left got very mad at me on Twitter over the weekend for saying this, but I feel strongly that the coalition that has a chance of pressuring Donald Trump in this moment to end the war in Gaza or to force Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza has to be as broad as possible.

It's the furthest left to the furthest right, like the isolationist Rand Paul, Thomas Mastie types, and then everyone in between.

And that includes people who supported the war and now they don't.

That means people who are uncomfortable calling it a genocide because of the legacy of that word and the Holocaust and how it makes them feel.

And I'm mostly talking, my tweet said people.

I was talking about average people, but we should also recognize that politicians we don't agree with on shit, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, could be very influential and important allies.

in this fight because she is Trump's ear.

And so, like, what that means in practice is let's welcome people into the tent for the purposes of making this argument, this push to end this war.

Like, we got to pull the same direction for a bit.

That doesn't mean there's no accountability forever.

We're buddies forever.

We won't out, vote out.

People that supported, you know, shoveling money

to the IDF through the duration of the fighting, even when it got really bad.

But, like, just, can we just, I would love to see some sort of organizing effort around pressuring Trump and Netanyahu now.

Yeah, you know, it's classic story of politics is you start from the goal that you want to achieve and then you work backwards to figure out how to get to the goal.

It sounds simple, but it's like people lose that in the social media mess, right?

Which is the goal is to end the war and the starvation in Gaza.

And as you said, Tommy, Trump has a lot of power to do this.

And so then the question is, how do you pressure Trump to do it?

That's it.

And then you build the coalition to do that.

And just,

you know, right now, Benjamin Netanyahu has Trump, but Trump won't be there forever.

And

what Democrats are saying now about what they will do when they regain power matters.

It's funny.

In the same way, we need to be signaling to corporations that are capitulating to Trump that there will be an after.

We need to be signaling to allies and other countries around the world that there will be an after.

And I think the more that Democrats now are saying that there will be increased pressure on Israel, up to and including recognizing a Palestinian state, right,

that cudgel being real, like they were, Ben Yunanyahu responds responds to pressure.

And the same way people pretend Trump doesn't, people pretend Bibi doesn't, but he does.

It's happening internationally, too.

I mean, you mentioned the French example, but there's also a huge, there's a letter from like 220 or 240 MPs to Keir Starmer calling on him to cut off military support to Israel.

Because David Lamy, the foreign secretary of the UK, who's a good guy, a friend, he's been on Pot Say the World a bunch of times, had some really harsh words for the Israeli government, but they need to be backed by actions.

That's what we're all, everybody's calling for action.

Speaking of Keir Starmer, he was standing with Trump in Scotland during the press conference when Trump made the Gaza comments.

And then he also had to be there for Trump getting a few questions about his late friend and fellow Enigma, Jeffrey Epstein.

Here's how Trump answered.

I don't do drawings.

I'm not a drawing person.

I don't do drawings.

Sometimes he would say, would you draw a building and I'll draw four lines and a little roof?

I don't do drawings of women, that I can tell you.

Now, with that being said, they say there were many letters done by many people And many big people, you know, big, successful people, because he did something that was inappropriate.

He hired help.

And I said, don't ever do that again.

He stole people that worked for me.

I said, don't ever do that again.

He did it again.

And by the way, I never went to the island.

And Bill Clinton went there supposedly.

28 times.

I never had the privilege of going to his island.

And I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island.

In one of my very good moments, I turned it down.

I didn't want to go to his island.

So, you know, we went through the whole landscape there.

First, he was talking about the birthday message.

He doesn't draw.

He doesn't draw women.

Then we got to the island where he keeps saying that Bill Clinton went 28 times, which is not supported by any facts that we know of.

He didn't have the privilege to go there.

He was also talking about why he had the falling out with Jeffrey Epstein years ago.

And the White House has been saying that Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because he was a, quote, creep.

But Trump there seems to say that actually he kicked him out because he poached some employees from him at Mar-a-Lago.

I don't know, guys.

What do you think?

Yeah, so first of all,

there's been these sort of unsubstantiated anonymous reports that actually Trump kicked

Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because he was a creep and he was hitting on people.

And Trump doesn't seem to know that that story is meant to be true because he tells this other one it's like how dare you accuse me of being friends uh with this sex trafficker and pedophile i had a falling out with that sex trafficker and pedophile over an unrelated hr map he stole my butler it's absurd uh uh absurd yeah i like okay Just the initial denial about the drawing in the Wall Street Journal was, I never wrote a picture in my life.

Remember?

And then we learned that Trump donated a doodle to charity every single year, and he wrote about it in his book.

So now he's saying he doesn't draw women.

So there's another crisis comms masterclass there.

Pretty soon it's going to be, I've never drawn pubes

that are also my signature.

And as you pointed out, the White House has been saying, oh, yeah, he kicked Topsy now because he's a creep.

Now it's like, then there was a report that it was a fallout over a real estate deal that they were competing over.

Now he's just saying, you know, he poached my staff.

So it's like, does he just forget the previous spin?

You know what I mean?

It's how do you not have a handle on this?

Yeah, I feel like the White House probably did not really

line up their story with a compare him.

Yeah, on why he kicked him out.

And they probably said, oh, you kicked him out, right?

Yeah.

And then they were like, oh, let's just say it's because he was a creep.

You know, like, I don't really think there's a lot of rigor going into the briefings here.

Yeah.

The other part of this is the letter.

And now he's saying I don't draw ladies.

J.D.

Vance went on social media and said that it was fake news.

And Chris Hayes got into it with him because J.D.

Vance replies to a lot of people, present company included.

And Chris's question was: Are you saying the letters or the book is fake?

His letters fake?

Like, what exactly is your contention here?

And all J.D.

Vance can say is, well, they won't even show us the letter, which is exciting because it does mean at some point we're going to see that letter.

We're going to see their savings.

Because Jeffrey Epstein's estate has the book.

So COJ reviewed it.

Just waiting for that.

And we know Trump is worried about this because he's starting to refer to it as a hoax,

a witch hunt.

Yeah, Democrats, Comey, Obama, Brennan, you name them.

They all got together to put the fake pages in the book.

So now it seems like he knows that whatever we're going to see, if we ever see it, would not be good for him.

It was Brennan with the Sharpie.

With the Sharpie.

Brennan.

Yeah, Comey.

was the one who drew the pube signature.

The shell.

That's very much, very much a Comey.

And then it was the lovers who squeezed lemon juice on it, put in the toaster.

And made it look old.

But like, it's been, what, three weeks now?

This has not gone away.

I think Joe Rogan, there was the quote going around today where he said the Epstein files are a hardcore line in the sand and that the administration is going to gaslight you.

There's like, we talked about how the Congress, the House of Representatives went into recess early to avoid a vote on this Thomas Massey Rokana legislation that would require the full release of the Epstein files.

So that's going to kick back up when they're back in five or six weeks.

Ron Wyden Wyden is talking about how he's been reviewing all of these Epstein-specific bank records that are really shady.

Like Trump's superpower is his relentlessness and ability to repeat a line over and over and over again until he just bullies you into submission.

But it just doesn't seem like there's a process to make this go away.

No.

Trump said again in that press conference, too, that he's,

quote, allowed to pardon Ghelaine Maxwell.

He said this on Friday for the first time.

This is all after we learned that Trump's Justice Department gave Maxwell limited immunity to speak freely about the crime she committed with Epstein during her two-day, nine-hour conversation last week with Todd Blanche.

Just Ghelain Maxwell and Todd Blanche, the president's former defense lawyer, turned deputy attorney general.

That's usually what happens.

I don't know if you guys know in the Justice Department

that you send the number two in the Justice Department, the guy who's usually running the Justice Department, to go alone to hang out with a convicted convicted accomplice to a sex predator, sex trafficker.

And I don't know,

were any of the career officials who prosecuted the case there?

No, doesn't sound like it.

Well, also, as is normal, then the defense attorney for

that convicted sex trafficker says how great a job.

he thought the DOJ did in the conversation.

Those prosecutors, by the way, said about Maxwell that she previously lied repeatedly about her crimes, exhibited an utter failure to accept responsibility, and demonstrated repeated disrespect for the law and the court.

Blanche says that

he's showing great courage.

And for the first time, we're going to get answers from Ghelaine Maxwell.

She is in prison for 20 years.

A lot of these questions, presumably, were asked of her during the period of time in which she was being investigated, charged,

put on trial, and ultimately convicted convicted and sentenced.

We still don't know what Maxwell said during this two-day session, though her attorney told reporters afterwards she was asked, quote, maybe about 100 different people, and that she answered every single question.

That reminds me of just like Joe Biden in the debate.

She answered every question.

Maxwell's also asking the Supreme Court, she filed this today, to overturn her conviction on the grounds that she should have been protected from prosecution by the deal Epstein cut with former U.S.

attorney Alex Acosta, also turned Trump labor secretary briefly back in 2007.

What do you think?

Would this whole idea that Trump, like Trump's going to pardon Maxwell potentially, because she'll absolve him of any wrongdoing or just name other people and not him?

Do you think that helps or hurts his political problems with his base?

So

clearly they're trying to seed this idea that she could be a victim and she's like a good guy and all this, right?

Like Newsmax's Greg Kelly said on the air, she just might be a victim.

Like this seems like a trial balloon i just want to be clear for folks who don't totally know ghelaine maxwell's role in in epstein's crimes i mean so according to the u.s attorney's office for the southern district of new york Ghelene Maxwell recruited and groomed girls as young as 14 for Epstein.

She was present for sexual encounters between minor victims in Epstein.

And in some instances, Maxwell participated in the sexual abuse of minor victims.

She and Epstein would ID vulnerable girls.

They would find girls who were poor or from single mother households and prey on them because they were easy to give favors to and then pull into their evil shit.

This happened from 94 to 2004.

So this was someone who is evil and very much a part of this.

And Republicans have spent, what, the last decade, I think, calling all their political enemies groomers.

And now they are talking about pardoning a literal groomer.

You see, Mike Johnson said on Meet the Press Sunday that he thinks she actually deserves a life sentence and he hopes that Donald Trump doesn't pardon her.

Good.

So that's kind of interesting.

But

that's a quote that seems destined to come back and and haunt Mike Johnson.

Well, right.

Well, with Mike Johnson, it's like

he'll say something, and then he'll just sort of be sort of smacked back into submission, right?

He also says we should have full transparency on the Epstein matter and then has Congress leave the city

to avoid having that vote.

Like stepping back, Glaine Maxwell was charged under the Trump administration.

When Blanche says that we're finally going to get answers, he is saying that those those answers were not gotten under the first Trump administration when William Barr was attorney general.

He's saying Bill Barr was in on it.

Well, there's all the connection between Bill Barr's dad and Jeffrey Epstein.

Bill Barr's dad apparently hired him to work at this school in New York, right?

So that's all part of this conspiracy theory.

And so I agree.

Yeah.

I think he's in on it.

Yeah, it's interesting though.

But like the

like.

What makes it impossible, I think, for all of this to go away is that this whole story is so

right-wing shaped, right?

That's what makes it so hard for Trump to get it's he's never been on the business.

He's never been on the

losing end of one of these right-wing-shaped conspiracy.

Or when he has, it has sort of like blown up in his face, right?

Like

on Friday, he's like, I don't focus on conspiracies.

I'm focused on getting deals done for the American people.

Yeah, there's anything we know about Donald Trump is he is not focused on conspiracies.

But like, fundamentally, right, Epstein kills himself, and a lot of evidence and a lot of what would have come out in trial doesn't happen, right?

Because the trial doesn't take place.

And they turn this into

a global pedophilia ring of

Democrats, Hollywood elites, deep state operatives, and the Jews.

And it's now sort of coming back to haunt him because it turns out nobody is more implicated in that conspiracy than Donald Trump himself.

And I don't think you get out of it by pardoning a convicted sex trafficker

and Jeffrey Epstein's chief accomplice.

You guys see in the Washington Post over the weekend, we got a classic of the genre, a Trump fume story.

Trump fumes over Epstein, and it's got like a he's really angry kind of thing.

But there was a few tidbits in there that I think are worth mentioning.

It just kind of slipped in.

For weeks after the memo was released, Trump and Bondi spoke on the phone nearly every day, as they often do.

That's so weird.

Is that normal?

Just the President of the United States just calling up the Attorney General?

Remember when there was a big scandal over Bill Clinton saying hi to Loretta Lynch on the plane?

Can I make a neolibschial defense of norms?

Yeah.

One reason this story doesn't go away is

because everyone understands that Pam Bondi is Donald Trump's attorney before she's the country's attorney, she doesn't have the ability to make this story go away for him.

In another era, right, it could go to the attorney general and say, we're going to investigate this, we're going to look into this, it'll be completely independent, and it'd be accused of being political in all kinds of ways, but it actually would allow the story to progress, right?

It would go to a prosecutor, it would go into an investigation, and it would move off of like the Donald Trump plate into the legal plate, but it can't because there's only one big fucking trough of

Trump control.

And it means Pam Bondi can't save Donald Trump from this story because no one thinks she has credibility or integrity or any kind of separate political interest from him.

And in that trough is about a thousand FBI personnel.

Over two weeks, the thousand personnel had to scour, this is all the Washington Post story, had to scour more than 100,000 pages of Epstein-related documents.

Workers toiled around the clock and staffed mandatory weekend shifts for weeks to accommodate punishing deadlines from higher ups and were told to flag any mentions of Trump and other prominent figures.

This is a senior bureau official said in a whistleblower report to the Senate Judiciary Committee that was obtained by the Post.

After concluding that fewer than a tenth of those documents could be considered for release, staffers were asked to go through them at least four times more.

Again, what is happening at the FBI?

It's crazy.

And it's like, they're just, we'll never understand the opportunity cost.

Again, a thousand FBI agents working 24-7 to review documents that they then just sit on.

Like elves on December 22nd.

Just flag, like again, with the control F, could we not control F-1?

I don't understand why we're not.

This is, I look,

yeah, about to say, look, there are many problems with ChatGPT, but throw this bad boy up into the fucking cloud and get some names.

Well, apparently, there's a Microsoft SharePoint online collaborative file that Blanche's office put together of of mentions of Mr.

Trump

from the piece.

So there is an Epstein list.

You might call it a list.

It's a Microsoft SharePoint.

There is a list with Trump's name on it of how many times that someone has.

And Dick Durbin is demanding that.

Dick Durbin is also demanding the tapes of the Maxwell interviews that Todd Blanche did.

Doesn't seem like he's going to get them, but I don't know.

I think it's smart to make that part of the conversation for sure.

I wouldn't have thought that there might be tapes or might be a transcript or a record of it.

I mean, I was thinking about the Leratt-Lynch, Bill Clinton conversation on the tarmac, however, 2015, 2016, because Republic has never stopped talking about it.

We need to get these meetings sort of viewed in that way.

And I wondered if Rokana and Thomas Massey could include these documents that Durbit's going after as part of their release all the Epstein files legislation.

It feels like it would fall under that bucket.

Yeah.

And then you see all these kind of ways around releasing the Epstein.

It would be all credible information.

And I do like, to Tommy's point, too, like these were serious and disgusting crimes.

And

part of what can't be released is a lot of graphic evidence victims, right?

Like a lot of people were hurt.

And like to me, that just goes to

they turned like sort of

despicable crimes that were allowed to go on for years into this political cudgel.

And they never cared about the victims.

It was never even that real to them.

It became a kind of of like,

I don't know, abstraction about.

They thought Bill Clinton was going to go down.

They thought they were going to get some way to prosecute Bill Clinton.

They didn't care about the victims.

And this whole conversation about releasing Ghulane Maxwell or giving her a pardon, I mean, Epstein victim Virginia Jufrey said of Maxwell, she is a monster.

She's worse than Epstein.

She was vicious.

She was evil.

I know that woman.

I mean, this is one of Epstein's victims.

It reminds me, too, like, you know,

they spend all this time saying they're going to,

you know, they're going after criminal aliens and then they, uh, uh, in order to get the innocent people out of El Salvador, they release a murderer, a triple murderer onto the streets of the U.S.

They spend all these years claiming there's a cabal of people protecting uh pedophiles and their accomplices, and then they're sending the deputy attorney general down to kind of st start the process of a sweetheart deal with one of the like basically a serial predator.

Really don't like them.

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Well, you know, Trump and the White House are celebrating a big development in the president's global trade war.

A A new permanent 15% tax on most of the stuff we buy from Europe.

The quote-unquote deal Trump announced with the European Union is lower than the 30% tax he initially threatened.

And in exchange, the EU said it would spend $750 billion on American energy and invest another $600 billion in the U.S., whatever the hell that means.

As a reminder, U.S.

tariffs are at their highest since the 1930s and about six times higher than when Trump took office, which is probably why the BBC went with the headline, winner Donald Trump, loser US consumers.

Here's what Trump said about the deal on Monday.

No, I said, you know, I sort of know, but I just want to be nice.

Deals, first we're going to have deals, all the 90 deals in 90 days.

Now there's no deals.

It takes too much time, So I'm just setting a tax.

What's the tax based on?

What's the tariff rate based on?

We don't know.

Big victory because now other countries aren't paying tariffs, but we're paying tariffs here in the U.S.

What's going on?

What is the point of all this?

These are not really deals.

They're framework agreements.

The details are just not ironed out.

And you know this because the Japanese are signaling, if not outright saying, that Trump's team is just making shit up.

Like Scott Besson went on Fox, I think Laura Ingram, and he was like, oh yeah, they're going to buy all this stuff.

We're going to have an implementation process where we review it every three months.

And the Japanese trade negotiator responded, In my eight trips to the United States, during which I held talks with the president and the ministers, I have no recollection of discussing how we ensure the implementation of the latest agreement between Japan and the United States.

In other words, bullshit.

And the White House is saying that, oh, this is a $550 billion investment in the U.S.

and the U.S.

is going to keep like 90% of the profits.

The trade minister from Japan said, no, one to two percent of the $550 billion is actual investment.

The rest is loans and loan guarantees.

So it's like, it just, it's bullshit.

Like the EU part of it is a little weird.

I was surprised they didn't put up a little more of a fight given that they have some real heft in terms of economic leverage, but it's probably harder to get a big block like that to negotiate as a group.

And maybe they were just nervous, or maybe it's all bullshit, too.

And we're going to see more details of the EU deal and realize that.

I do think like big picture, all these countries benefit from knowing that Trump cares about the day one headline, not the implementation.

Remember six months ago when Trump had that press event with Sam Altman and the head of SoftBank and Larry Ellison, and they announced a 500, a half a trillion dollar thing called Stargate.

Remember this?

So the company said, we're going to invest half a trillion dollar on like data centers and infrastructure for AI in the U.S., including $100 billion right now.

Well, the Wall Street Journal the other day reported that they haven't completed a single data center deal yet.

It's like all scaling back the ambitions completely.

In the first Trump term, Trump made this deal with China where the Chinese promised to buy 200 billion in additional U.S.

goods and services above the level they purchased in 2017.

And then China ultimately bought none of that additional $200 billion.

So I just, I don't trust that any of this is going to happen.

Or, or that any of it is not investments that were already on the table.

I mean, that was like Mexico and Canada, that was their move, right?

Like, just, let's just label shit we were already doing.

And it's like, oh, yeah, Trump, you got us.

And so, like, you know,

we have our EU and the United States, Japan and the United States, our economies are incredibly intertwined.

There's billions upon billions of dollars moving between our countries.

You can ascribe, oh yeah, we're going to buy a bunch of American energy.

Oh, yeah, we're going to invest in a bunch of factories.

They are every day.

That's why this is so fucking stupid.

Markets seem happy these days with the trade war.

I think that's maybe because the period of uncertainty is coming to a close here.

And

I guess Trump didn't go with the full Liberation Day tariffs.

But Morgan Stanley says they don't think we'll have a recession, but we still believe the most likely outcome is slow growth and firm inflation.

So it's like, great, we're going to have inflation now and slow growth.

And, you know,

again, we've said this before, but a lot of these companies have so far either been eating the tariffs themselves or still have goods imported from before they went into effect.

So the price increases really haven't set, they're about to set in, but they really haven't even set in yet.

And I still remember that quote from our friend Jason Fuhrman, who we used to work with on Derek Thompson's podcast.

He was like, look, if you asked everyone in the country to come together and set fire to $1,000, it would seem like a phenomenally stupid idea.

And we'd all remember forever who came up with it, but it wouldn't crash the economy.

It would just be a bunch of people lighting $1,000 on fire.

He's like, that's about what's going to happen.

Like, there's like a half a point of growth that we're going to lose that we would have had otherwise

without the tariffs.

Right.

Yes.

Like, the United States economy is strong enough and robust enough to survive a stupid policy from Donald Trump.

And by the way,

you know, even as a lot of people will end up paying more for things that they need, right?

For, you know, at first it'll be washing machines, right?

We've seen that before.

The price of washing machines just goes up.

They pass the price on to consumers, right?

And then you'll see a bunch of wealthy people be like, hey, they said this trade war was going to bankrupt the economy.

I'm not feeling it at all.

Well, of course you're not.

Of course you're not.

You're not impacted by the daily cost of necessities.

That's not what you do.

That doesn't hit you in the same way it hits a person who will actually be impacted by this.

Speaking of light and money on fire, you know what it's time for, guys?

A corrupt date.

Nice.

Oh.

Corrupt date.

God, that sucks.

Just sucks.

Terrible.

You guys remember the Qatari Jet episode where everyone freaked out for a few days over Trump accepting a free gift from a royal family that funds Hamas?

Turns out that Qatar may have built the plane, but guess who's going to pay for it?

We are.

The New York Times reports that the cost to taxpayers of renovating the plane for Trump's use might be around $1 billion.

And the reason we know this is because the Times discovered that the Pentagon made a secret transfer for that amount from the program intended to upgrade our nuclear missiles to an anonymous project that's believed to be refurbishing the Qatari jet.

But wait, there's more.

The Washington Post is reporting that in the original draft of the agreement that transfers ownership of the plane, Qatar included language that stipulated the plane would belong specifically to the Air Force.

But the U.S.

pushed back and removed that language so that Trump could take the plane with him when he leaves.

As a keepsake, of course, from us, as a $1 billion thank you to Mr.

Trump for making America great again with his Middle Eastern Sugar Daddy plane.

Tommy, why isn't this a bigger story right now?

This is incredible.

This is incredible.

We're paying for our president's...

plane that he gets to keep.

He gets a little doggy bag with a plane in it from the Qataris when he leaves the White House and it costs a billion dollars and it comes out of the nuclear missile fund.

I mean, if we take back the House, this list is getting longer, but this has got to be like top three items on the oversight, relentless focus list, right?

Because remember, the Republicans figured out that Hillary Clinton had a private server and a private email because they did 700 Benghazi hearings.

That's got to be the focus here, just like relentlessly to ban documents, investigate this stuff,

all kinds of oversight over corruption, the crypto, the Qatari plane, all the real estate dealings, all of it as we kind of sell a message about what MAGA has become.

Yeah, it's not, even just, we were talking about this when we on the earlier, that

it's even being framed like, oh, the U.S.

is getting a weird gift from the Qataris.

No,

there's a plane that Donald Trump is receiving as a gift that the U.S.

government is fixing up for him for free.

He is stealing a billion dollars from the U.S.

government to fix up a present he's getting from the Qataris.

It's making a brief stopover in D.C., but it's ongoing.

Its final destination is Trump's, quote, presidential library, but it will be his to fly around the world.

It may be never done in time for him to use his present.

And by the way, just.

I mean, hopefully it's done in time for him to leave the White House.

Otherwise, he's going to miss out on that gift.

Well, you know, all of you.

Right.

Well, right, on that.

I think what they won't just get.

What happens if he leaves before it's done?

That's what I'm saying.

Well, if it's not done, who cares?

He doesn't need all the special comms equipment and stuff.

Oh, then he just takes it.

He's just like, yeah, he can't take it half finished.

So none of this makes sense, right?

Like, obviously, this is all stupid.

They're going to have to finish up the other Air Force ones that they're already building anyway.

So it's just an add-on cost.

But by the way, like...

Did anyone keep the receipt for the other two?

But like, everyone's like, oh, my God, it's a billion dollars.

They don't know how much it's going to cost to fix up this.

No one in human history has ever taken a 747-8 from a Middle Eastern government, stripped it down to the studs, and then rebuilt it at Air Force One.

It's all like, how much did this cost the last time we did that?

It's never been done before.

We have no idea what it's going to cost.

And we need the gold plating too.

Everything needs to be gold.

How much is that going to cost?

You guys know the Pentagon.

They usually come in on time under budget, sort of thing.

Famously so.

Famously so.

Well, now that they've been doged, you know.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so that's great.

President Charlie Kirk is going to be getting this at the end of his term.

Jesus Christ.

He's lucky.

All right.

When we come back from the break, you'll hear Tommy's conversation with Amir T-Bone.

But before we get to that, here's the news that I teased earlier.

Big announcement.

What do we got?

Dan's in the Epstein files.

So got to get ahead of that.

No, that's not it.

We're here to announce something.

It's called Crooked Con.

In November, it will have been a year since Donald Trump won again, and everyone has had some time to sit and think about what we've all done and what we haven't done.

And we wanted to get everyone together who doesn't want Donald Trump or someone like Donald Trump to be president again

to talk about the path forward.

Republicans have their CPAC.

Oh, yeah.

This is DPAC.

Oh, yeah.

Why don't we need a better name?

Truthfully, Republicans have been really smart about this, and they gather everyone together.

And sure, at the beginning, it seemed like a bunch of fringe crazies, but guess who's now running the government?

Those fringe crazies who started CPAC.

So we need to get together.

talk about what's going on, get smarter, get better, maybe try to figure out how we screwed up so bad in the past, move forward.

If you have seen the intra-party debate in the Democratic Party play out on the internet and in the media, you've probably noticed that it's maybe not the most constructive thing to do.

Not always.

So a real constructive thing we thought would be to get people together in person and have a bunch of conversations with organizers, strategists,

politicians, the cool ones.

If you work in politics at any level, from Capitol Hill to in your community, this is the place to go to learn what's happening in this country, to learn from some of the smartest people out there, and meet the people who are on the front lines trying to beat MAGA.

Plus, we're going to figure out a way to stop those text messages.

Truly, like, if there's one thing that can come out of this event, it is stopping the text messages, Dan.

I don't think we should put that on ourselves.

The measure of success can't be attend this event, never get an annoying text from a Democratic politician again.

It's a high bar.

And it's going to be in DC.

We're going to gather at the ellipse.

Gonna be wild.

It's gonna be wild.

It'll be wild.

It'll be wild.

No, it's gonna be at the

wharf.

Wharf.

It's gonna be at the wharf.

We're calling it the wharf?

Are we calling it a wharf?

It's the wharf, right?

It's the wharf.

It's gonna be a place that's so new that when we lived there, we didn't even.

It was just a dock.

It was just a dock.

Now it's a whole wharf.

And in case you guys think it's gonna be just us neolib Obama shills, we're gonna have

people from across the political spectrum, if that political spectrum is from the left to the center-right.

It'll run from the left to Tim Miller.

Basically, that's the, and Sarah, that's, that's really the bounce.

We're going to get everyone together and we're going to have some fun.

We're also going to do a Pot Save America show the first night, uh, just to kick things off.

And then the next day, we're going to all get together and get down to business, you know?

Yeah, get down to business and fun.

There'll be alcohol.

Yeah, Dan's going to do shots.

Dan's going to do shots.

If we can solve the text message problem, I'll definitely do shots.

Yeah, what happens if the wharf stays at the wharf?

Is it even called the wharf?

We don't even know if it's called the wharf.

What is it it about called the wharf?

Anyway, get your tickets.

Crookedcon.com.

Is it crookedcon.com?

Yeah, hey, great job getting crookedcon.com.

Crookedcon.com.

Stay tuned for more information, but we're going to be announcing our lineup soon.

November 6th and 7th, Washington, D.C.

Yeah, be there.

Grab tickets.

Go online, crooked.com.com.

I can't believe we're getting

crookedconf.com.com.

Crookedcon.com.

CrookedCon.com.

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Hi there, it's Andy Richter, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

Each week I invite friends, comedians, actors, and musicians to discuss these three questions.

Where do you come from?

Where are you going?

And what have you learned?

New episodes are out every Tuesday with guests like Julie Bow and Ted Danson, Tig Nataro, Will Arnett, Phoebe Bridgers, and more.

You can also tune in for my weekly Andy Richter Call-In Show episodes, where me and a special guest invite callers to weigh in on topics like dating disasters, bad teachers, and lots more.

Listen to the three questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm excited to welcome to the show my friend Amir Tibon.

He is a reporter for Ha'aretz.

He's the author of the book Gates of Gaza, a story of betrayal, survival, and hope in Israel's borderlands.

Amir, great to see you.

Hey, thanks for having me.

As usual, terrible circumstances, but great to see you.

I wanted to talk with you about this horrific humanitarian situation in Gaza, why a deal to end the war has been so elusive, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's legal and political challenges and his relationship with Trump, among other things.

But first, I did just want to help listeners understand kind of who you are and your perspective on these issues.

You have been a harsh critic of Netanyahu.

You've been a critic of the war, but you also spent eight hours, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, hiding from

a safe room on a kibbutz on October 7th.

So this is very, very personal for you.

I mean, can you just tell the listeners a little bit about your experience?

Well,

first of all, it's important for me to say that October 7th for me is very personal.

October 7 is the day that started this nightmare, started this terrible war, this disaster, catastrophe that we've been dealing with for 662 days now.

And because my family and I, we live in a community, small kibbutz, right on the border with Gaza, on the Israeli side of the border, within the internationally recognized borders of Israel.

Our community was attacked by Hamas on October 7.

16, one six,

16 of my neighbors, personal friends of mine, people I would see every day, were murdered and killed on that day.

Another seven were kidnapped into Gaza.

And one close friend of mine, Omri Miran, father of two young girls, is still held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza today as we speak,

separated from his wife and two young daughters, like I said, for 662 days.

So this is the background and I come to this issue from what I describe as a liberal Zionist perspective.

I'm a proud Israeli, proud Zionist.

And I can tell you that in the early weeks and months of this terrible war, I thought it was terrible but necessary.

Today, I think it's much more terrible, and also that we have to end it, and that we really should have ended it many, many months ago.

And that the fact that it is still continuing, it has brought so much suffering and despair.

And,

you know, I look at it with great frustration because the war's continuation, this is what's keeping the hostages over there in the tunnels of Gaza, including my friend Omri.

This is what is causing all the suffering in Gaza and in Israel.

It's time to end it.

And this is the reason I'm talking to you, my friend, honestly.

I mean, I love seeing you, Tommy, but this is the message I want to send through to people.

We really need to put an end to this.

I think it's a very important message.

So, you know, the images that have been coming out of Gaza are horrifying, especially quite recently.

I mean, there's these images of starving children.

There are these massive crowds of desperate people just trying to get food.

There's all these reports of mass casualty incidents after the IDF or security contractors fired on the crowds of people who are just trying to get food.

Can you help us just explain or understand how the aid distribution process got so bad, especially what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is and what it is supposed to be doing?

This is going to be a bit of a long answer, but trust me, it's important for understanding and putting all the pieces together.

So in mid-January 2025, half a year ago, right around the time that the transition from President Biden to President Trump was taking place, a ceasefire agreement was reached in Gaza after 15 terrible months of war.

And that ceasefire agreement had several components.

One of them was the release of Israeli hostages.

in return for Palestinian prisoners.

Another was a partial evacuation evacuation of Israeli forces from some areas of Gaza.

And another one was pushing up the amount of aid that goes into Gaza.

And at the time, the mechanism was that the aid would come through different UN agencies and humanitarian organizations.

And that ceasefire was supposed to have two phases.

Phase one, 60 days, a release of 33 Israeli hostages.

like I said, partial withdrawal, Palestinian prisoners.

And then there was supposed to be phase two,

which was supposed to include the release of all the remaining Israeli hostages in return for a complete withdrawal from Gaza of the Israeli military and a formal end of war agreement

and in March 2025 Prime Minister Netanyahu decided that he doesn't want this deal anymore even though he signed it and he decided to renew the war in Gaza break the terms of the deal he tried to offer a new kind of agreement

which is a weird thing to do, right?

You sign an agreement, putting up, you know, and I'm not here to advocate in any way for Hamas.

These are monstrous terrorists.

I told you about my own background with them, but we signed a deal.

And to try and impose new terms in the middle of that deal being implemented is not something you would usually do.

Hamas didn't accept the new terms that were supposed to be basically a prolonging of the temporary ceasefire instead of ending the war.

And then what Netanyahu did, apart from renewing the war, he said, we are going to put a blockade on Gaza.

We're going to stop all aid from coming into the Gaza Strip.

This was in March.

He said it on the record in Hebrew at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.

He said, we're going to stop all the aid from coming in.

Now, at the time, this happened right after the two-month ceasefire.

So there wasn't any shortage of food or aid in Gaza because during those two months that there was no war, you had hundreds of trucks coming in every day from Israel, from Egypt.

But once this blockade started, you had a clock that was beginning to tick tock, the humanitarian clock.

For how long will the supplies that came into Gaza during the ceasefire actually last for a territory with 2 million people?

and a territory that most of the agriculture and the food production and the fishing and everything else that used to exist there in order to feed people, a lot of it doesn't exist anymore because of the devastation of the war.

And around May, the clock was

ticking very fast and there was a real concern that you would have severe food shortages and hunger.

And that's when this new player arrived on the scene, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

An organization that was set up from the best of my understanding in Switzerland.

And now there is an investigation going on over there about the origins of this.

And it involves a lot of people from the United States.

It is led by someone who's a prominent evangelical leader with strong ties to some political figures in Israel.

And this organization says, we are going to take over the aid distribution in Gaza.

We're going to take it from the UN and we're going to run this.

And they set up four

aid distribution centers in different parts of Gaza.

Now think about it.

a territory of 2 million people

getting all their food from four locations.

How is that even supposed to work?

Yeah, I heard the UN had like 400 subscribers.

Yes, and I'm not saying the UN system was great or perfect.

And there is

something that we all here in Israel have been saying and watching and hearing that Hamas would steal the supplies that came in through the UN and then sell it on the black market in Gaza.

And this was a huge problem.

But the idea that you would replace the UN system with all its flaws and all its problems with these four distribution sites, to me from the beginning, it sounded impossible.

And these distribution sites became the sites of horrendous scenes, you know, of crowds packing and pushing and shoving to get to whatever food was being distributed.

And those firing incidents and shelling and, you know, these contrasting claims that Israel says Hamas was killing these people to keep them away from the GHF distribution centers and other eyewitnesses, including Israeli soldiers, saying, well, we were given orders to open fire in the vicinity of the distribution centers, it just became a total disaster.

And people didn't want to go there because they were afraid for their lives after hundreds of people got killed.

And the humanitarian situation, instead of improving via the presence of this humanitarian foundation, it only got worse and worse and worse.

Until in the last few few weeks, even officials in the Israeli military and government began to warn that we are facing the prospect of hunger, of starvation in Gaza.

And this became an international issue and a lot of pressure was being placed on Israel from the US, from European allies.

Now remember, the whole point of this policy of blocking all the aid from coming in and then bringing in this American foundation to run the aid distribution supposedly supposedly in a way that wouldn't reach Hamas's hands, right?

This was the selling point of GHF as presented by Israeli and American officials.

The whole point behind this was to pressure Hamas to compromise in the hostage negotiations, accept Netanyahu's terms for a partial agreement, because what Hamas wants, they keep insisting to go back to the January ceasefire terms, which is all the hostages for end of war.

And what Netanyahu says, no, I'm willing to do a partial agreement, temporary ceasefire, some hostages come back, and then I renew the war.

So the whole point of this effort to block the aid and then to impose the aid distribution through these four apocalyptic distribution centers was to get Hamas to compromise.

Well, guess what, Tommy?

We are now at the end of July.

Okay, it's four, it's going to be five months soon.

Hamas hasn't compromised.

We haven't had any hostage deal, any breakthrough.

Only one living hostage came back during this entire period, Idan Alexander, the American-Israeli dual citizen.

He was released as part of a separate side deal between the Trump administration and Hamas.

So this entire thing, not only is it creating terrible consequences on the ground and people are dying, it didn't serve any strategic or national security goals for Israel.

The opposite.

What Hamas started doing is that they saw where this was going and they used it in order to turn the world against Israel.

And now Israel is being accused of starvation and keeping food away from hungry children.

And this caused Hamas to harden its positions in the negotiations.

They feel emboldened.

And over the weekend, after so many people warned and so many people raised red flags, the Israeli government began to change course, again, in kind of a panic mode, usual behavior for Netanyahu.

And now they're trying to bring more and more aid into Gaza, which is good.

I mean, this is the right thing to do.

But you ask yourself, what was it for, this entire thing?

What purpose did it serve?

And look, I agree with you.

There are these sort of temporary ceasefire, not ceasefires in place.

There's pauses in place in the fighting.

Now they began to do it like 10 hours a day.

And again, you know, think about it from an Israeli perspective, Tommy.

For 10 hours a day, we're stopping the fire in large parts of Gaza, and it's not part of a a hostage release deal.

This is like from the Israeli perspective, the ultimate failure, right?

The whole argument was we'll renew the war so we get back the hostages.

And of course, it was a lie.

The way to get back the hostages was to continue the ceasefire from January.

But look what's happening now.

And just to point out, like, look,

there's also, so Israelis are allowing some airdropping of supplies, which is just completely insufficient, not going to work during the Biden administration.

It's just to show that this doesn't solve anything.

You need trucks.

You need tons of trucks.

10 airplanes is like one truck, just to give people a perspective in terms of the amount of aid.

Right.

It's totally insufficient.

And also, the time to prevent starvation is weeks ago.

People are now at a state of such severe malnutrition that it can be irreversible.

And what it is going to require is an exponential surge of aid because the deaths we are starting to see are the weakest, the most frail people, right?

People who are sick or young or elderly.

And there is very likely to be a wave of deaths next if there isn't a massive surge of aid.

This is true, but I don't want this to discourage

anybody with influence from pushing aid in, because if you push enough aid, you can still save a lot of people.

And by the way, also from the Israeli perspective, flooding Gaza with food and supplies is

better than the rationing that was created under GHF because what Hamas is doing, when they steal some of the food and some of the aid, they're selling it for a lot of money on the black market in Gaza and food is being sold for ridiculous prices in Gaza.

And then they use that money to pay their

fighters, their terrorists.

If you flooded Gaza with such amounts of food that the prices would go down, right, if you bring down the price of wheat, the price of bread, the price of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, cigarettes, whatever, you bring it down by flooding the area.

So Hamas, whatever they get their hands on, they wouldn't be able to sell it for so much money.

So again, this is, you know, just, it's a stupid policy and it created horrendous consequences on the ground.

And we have to reverse it.

We have to reverse it.

And the time to do it, like you said, was weeks ago, but now at least it's being done.

Yeah, I think both of us fully support flooding aid in.

But, you know, longer term, I mean, like you mentioned, there have been these two ceasefires.

One ended in March after Israel resumed military operations.

You and I could get into all the details of like, you know, sequencing of, you know, hostage releases versus prisoner releases and aid distribution and, you know, where both sides want the IDF to pull back to in these, in the process.

But I really feel like, yeah, but I really just feel like it boils down to one massive difference that can feel unbridgeable, which is Hamas wants to negotiate a permanent end to the conflict and Bibi Netanyahu does not because he worries it would collapse his government, but also because I think a lot of Israelis, I think understandably, would view that as a quote-unquote win for Hamas.

Is that accurate?

And if so, like, what is the pathway to bridging that gap?

I think in this war,

you're not going to have, at least in the Gaza theater, you're not going to have a real winner.

Because Israel lost so much on October 7, and the people of Gaza lost so much since October 7.

And both sides continue to lose so much every day

that this is just a disaster for everybody.

You can argue that Israel won the war with Hezbollah in the north.

You can argue that Israel won the war with Iran.

And I think those are correct interpretations of what happened in both theaters.

I think there is a tendency to exaggerate the magnitude of the victory.

And I am always on the side of caution and not being arrogant and not underestimating the enemy and underestimating the desire for revenge that comes after humiliation.

But I do think overall you can say Israel won the Lebanon and Iran fronts.

I think the Gaza front, the promise of victory over there is fantasy.

And we are losing every day because we're losing soldiers there.

You know, an entire generation of young Israelis

that, you know, these are people who were kids like 18 on the verge of enlistment when October 7 happened.

They're losing their friends

and so much over there and we have the hostages still not coming back.

Our reputation as a country is just destroyed as a result of the events of the last few months.

It's tearing our society apart.

And

the moral consequences and the questions that rise from it, this is something that we will have to contend with perhaps for years.

At the same time, to say that Hamas won anything, I mean, look what they brought upon Gaza.

Look what, you know, entire cities have been erased because of what they did on October 7.

So I don't think this is a question of victory or loss.

I think

there's a lot of politics involved here, but at the end of the day,

you need to make a deal.

You get all the hostages out, end the war, start rebuilding the IDF because our military took a serious hit on October 7.

We lost a lot of soldiers since October 7 to death and injury and PTSD.

We have some burning internal problems inside Israel that have to be fixed.

One of them is the question of who serves in the army, who is exempt from military service.

This has been a big political question here in Israel because certain segments of Israeli society that have a lot of influence in the Netanyahu government are exempted from service and it's extremely unfair towards those who do serve.

So we need to focus on these issues.

Instead of chasing the last Hamas fighter and the last AK-47 and the last rocket launcher in Gaza amid the rubble and the destruction there and as we are destroying our own society and our global reputation.

And this is what's at hand here and I think most Israelis understand it.

I think a lot of Israelis who supported the war in the early months of it and I include myself in that group Today they are convinced that we need to make a comprehensive deal to finish it.

But the challenge remains, right, that Net Yahoo maybe does not want that deal,

largely because he has this coalition of far-right ministers and they could collapse his government.

I think it's important, Tommy, to explain in just a minute or even for a second, Israeli politics are very different than American politics, right?

In the US, the president is directly elected, as are the senators, the members of Congress.

You know, you choose a person for a job and they have a term.

In Israel, we have parliamentary politics, which means you vote for a party.

And then from those parties that make it into the parliament, you need to build a ruling coalition, because you never have a scenario where one party actually has an outright majority.

You need different parties to cooperate.

Netanyahu's governing coalition relies on far-right, messianic, fanatic elements that oppose ending the war, oppose the hostage deal.

They almost resigned because of the previous hostage deal, even though it was a temporary, partial ceasefire.

And they are threatening to pull the plug and bring down his government if he actually makes a comprehensive deal.

And this is a frustrating situation because most Israelis, in return for all the hostages, will support ending the war.

But this minority government, they're literally a minority government now because they don't even have a majority anymore in the parliament.

They lost it because of other political issues that got in the way.

They are dictating the continuation of this war and these, you know, the daily grind and death of soldiers and and suffering of the hostages and the catastrophe in gaza and by the way it's also impacting the border communities like my kibbutz a lot of families are not coming back not going back to live in the kibbutz until the war ends people don't want to bring their children back into a war zone so this is creating so much frustration and and it is driven mostly by political interests of one man who wants to remain in power.

Yeah.

And so, look, you know, there's a question, I think, in the U.S.

of how to bring about political pressure on Netanyahu to force him to change.

Because, you know, when Biden was in charge, there was this mantra from the White House you hear all the time that you need to hug Bibi to get him to do what you want.

And that meant never disagreeing with Netanyahu publicly, giving Netanyahu political cover at the UN, funneling weapons to the Israeli government.

And look, full disclosure, like that kind of hug BB

shit drove me crazy.

I thought it was a terrible approach then.

I think it's a terrible approach now.

Now, Trump is in charge of the relationship.

I would argue that Gaza had a huge impact on the 2024 election.

Now, Trump, interestingly, has been more willing to break with Netanyahu on certain issues, like, you know, the Houthi rebels.

Like, we don't have to get to all the details, but he's sort of been willing to.

Yeah, he's been willing to kind of give Netanyahu the Heisman on certain issues.

Gaza has not really been one of them, with the exception of that first ceasefire.

But let's say that Trump or the next president or the U.S.

Congress, they really wanted to pressure Netanyahu.

What steps could the U.S.

government take that would actually matter?

I want to say something specifically about Trump.

President Trump is very popular in Israel because of the attacks in Iran that he conducted, which were viewed by most Israelis as something that significantly improves the national security of Israel.

because of some things he did in his first term as president when he moved the embassy to Jerusalem and recognized the Golana Heights as part of Israel and things like that, Abraham Accords.

And also because of that first ceasefire deal in January, because President Biden tried for many, many months to reach that ceasefire and bring back those hostages.

And I want to give credit to President Biden for the first ceasefire and hostage release deal, which happened in November 2023.

That deal brought us back 100 living hostages from Gaza.

Because remember, on October 7, Hamas kidnapped 250 people, including women and children and agricultural workers from Thailand who are not even Israeli.

And so Biden's deal brought us back 100.

But then the January deal, I gave a lot of credit to President Trump for reaching it because after that first agreement, Biden failed to get another deal for 14 months until Trump came in and boom, it happened.

And that also gave him a lot of popularity.

President Trump could easily use that popularity among the Israeli public to go out and say it's time to end the war in Gaza.

It's time to make a comprehensive ceasefire deal.

Enough with this,

excuse my French, but bullshit of temporary deals, partial deals, five hostages today,

five hostages two weeks from now, two hostages 50 days from now.

We'll discuss the end of the war during the negotiations.

No, why does it have to be so complicated?

Because that's what Netanyahu and Ron Dermer want.

If Trump came out and said it's time for a comprehensive agreement, end the war in Gaza, release all the hostages in one,

you know, put them all on one bus, okay?

20 of them, including my friend Omri Miran, are alive.

Put them all on one bus.

30 are assumed to be dead.

Put all their caskets on another bus and bring them to Israel and finish this nightmare.

And

have a plan for the day after in Gaza.

Hamas will have to give up the governing powers.

There will have to be a different Palestinian government there.

You have an Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati plan just on this issue that with some tweaks and corrections can be accepted by Israel and can be a good solution and can create better security.

Trump can get it done just by the fact that he is so popular in Israel that it would be difficult for Netanyahu to face up and confront him over this.

But he refuses to do it.

And instead what he's doing, he's adopting Netanyahu and Dermer's temporary, partial ceasefire plan.

You know, this idea of a 60-day ceasefire.

Several hostages will be released in the beginning.

Another few hostages will be released after 50 days.

The rest of the hostages will wait for the 60-day mark and you will have negotiations in between.

And Netanyahu is even insisting in the negotiations that the aid into Gaza will keep running through GHF,

this organization.

And you know, I ask a simple question, Tommy.

Are we getting everything mixed up?

I thought, based on what Netanyahu said, that the purpose of GHF was to pressure Hamas to compromise in the hostage negotiations because they will not have access to the aid or whatever.

Why are we instead

pushing off the hostage deal in order to keep in place GHF?

That's just twisted logic.

Trump could cut that entire kind of Gordian knot in a second.

He just needs to decide that he wants to do it.

And he will get a lot of credit for it internationally.

And I believe also in the United States.

I think most Americans, as far as they follow this war, they just want it to end because they think it's tragic and heartbreaking.

And he will also get a lot of credit for it in Israel.

But he needs to decide that he wants to do it.

As long as he keeps allowing Netanyahu and Dermer to set the terms of the negotiations, everything is going to remain stuck.

Well, and also, I would say, you tell me if I'm wrong.

He didn't really help matters by promoting this plan for the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and turning it into a resort town, which is just ludicrous on its face and a war crime and, you know, crime against humanity.

But it's also normalized that position in the government.

That plan is not going to be helpful because now you have the far right in Israel say, well, why should we make a hostage deal if we can get this plan from Trump and the military in Israel says this plan is a fantasy that is never going to be executed and then the ministers in government tell the generals no you you just lack imagination and and it's become a sticking point that is getting everything again stuck in place and and Trump again you know he has the leverage to put an end to this nightmare.

He really does.

But he needs to decide that he wants to do it.

Yeah.

And what other challenge here, which is that, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu is on trial for all kinds of corruption, accepting gifts, skipping favors to, you know, powerful people for media coverage,

regulatory favorites.

Breach of trust.

That's basically the allegations.

And the gist is, for folks listening, he needs to stay in power, T-Thinks, to keep himself out of prison.

And so that keeps his lock on the government even more, you know, white-knuckled.

It's helpful as a defendant to have the schedule of a prime minister and he's been using it to avoid the trial almost on a weekly basis.

I have to go to Washington.

I have an urgent phone call.

I have urgent business related to the war and he skips testimony after testimony.

And that's a big part of it.

So as you mentioned, Amir, the world is

global opinion.

has shifted enormously, you know, against Israel, just given the scenes we're seeing and the stories and just the horrific death toll in Gaza.

And one recent example is French President Emmanuel Macron recently announced his plan to recognize Palestine as a state.

France is the first G7 country to recognize Palestine.

Now, in practice, this doesn't magically create a Palestinian state, but it could lead to more countries following France's lead.

It puts diplomatic pressure on Israel.

What is the reaction to this move by the French been in Israel?

Of course, the government is against it, and also most of the opposition because once another country takes a diplomatic initiative against your country and that's how it's perceived by most Israelis,

everybody comes out against it.

But also

at the same time, this is more of a symbolic move.

I think the real problem for Israel is the shift in public opinion that legitimizes a move like this.

There's a reason why France decided to do it now and why Britain is considering to do it.

And, you know there's been talk about Canada, Australia, other countries.

There is a shift against us in global public opinion.

Everybody knows it.

Everybody feels it here in Israel.

And this is the big problem.

The step that Macron took is a reflection of the problem more than or you can say a phenomenon of the problem for Israel more than significantly in itself changing so much in reality.

And this is another reason.

I wouldn't make it the first or even the second or the third reason, but it's another reason to strive to end the war because we are losing very bad.

We're bleeding in terms of the country's reputation every day that this continues.

And that plays into the hands of Hamas and all of our other enemies.

And we have enemies.

Israel is not

Switzerland.

It's surrounded by people who don't like our country.

And right now we're playing into their hands because we are

every day losing more and more support.

And this is one example of it.

Yeah, and I fear that this war is just a driver of global anti-Semitism, which is obviously a centuries-old problem.

It's not just the Holocaust.

It dates back farther back.

Anti-Semitism never needs reasons.

But I do think that on a generational level, this war is going to cause problems for Israel and for Israelis.

And tragically, also for Israelis who are not supportive of this government, who are not supportive of its actions, but for someone who's stupid and hateful,

you know, will become immediately affiliated, just like not every American necessarily supports everything that the Trump administration is doing.

But this is something, this is going to be a problem for a long time.

This, again, another reason to put an end to it.

Yeah, and unfortunately, I think potentially a problem for America and Americans because we are rightly seen as Israel's

full-through partners

in this war.

So, Floke, finally, Amir, anyone listening to us,

it is easy to feel hopeless about not just what's happening in Gaza.

I think as a parent, it's hard not to see those images and just imagine what it would be like to be a mom or dad and not be able to protect your kids.

It breaks you in a way.

And it's also, it's hard not to feel hopeless about the hope for a Palestinian state or the broader, you know, that

Israelis and Palestinians could live side by side in peace.

Your government is run by terrible people.

My government is run by terrible people.

Is there anything you are seeing as someone on the ground in Israel who is coming at this from far left in Israel?

Yeah, well, the peace,

one of the horrible

irony is the wrong word, I don't know, one of the horrific things that happened on October 7th was

a lot of peace activists were murdered.

Yes.

Yes.

People most committed to peace were many of the ones targeted on Kiblitz, right?

So again, another reason to feel hopeless.

Is there anything you are seeing that gives you some sort of hope?

I think, you know, right now,

I agree with you, man.

It's really hard to find hope.

And the situation is really, you know, just kind of despairing.

But I'm very close to some of the families of the hostages.

And

including the family of my friend Homri, but also other families that I know from different circumstances.

Their struggle, including, for example, the struggle of John and Rachel Goldberg Pauline, who lost their son Hirsch.

He was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 and he was murdered last summer when Israeli troops got close to the tunnel where Hamas was holding him together with five other hostages and they were executed so that the soldiers wouldn't get them.

The struggle of those families that they've been leading for now 662 days to end the war, save their loved ones and stop.

all the killing.

To me, it's a source of inspiration.

I don't know how they find the strength to get out of bed and continue fighting, whether it's families that still have a loved one held by Hamas or people like John and Rachel who lost their son, but they continue to fight for others.

But when I see them doing it every day,

I tell myself, okay, I can't quit.

I have to keep speaking up and writing and saying and talking to anybody who would give me a platform, including yourself,

to advocate for this.

Because if they have the strength to do it, who am I to sit on the sidelines?

Yeah, well said.

Well, Amir, thank you for doing the show.

Everyone should read Ha'aretz.

I'm told I always say it wrong, but I'm doing it.

You got it right this time.

And also by The Gates of Gaza, a story of betrayal, survival, and hope in Israel's borderlands.

Just a truly unbelievable story about

everyone, just buy it.

Read the book.

And thank you for doing the show.

Thank you, Tommy, and let's hope for good news.

That's our show for today.

Thanks to Amir Tibon for coming on.

Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday.

Talk to everybody then.

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