Modern Israel

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Merry Christmas and happy holidays to our listeners at the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is broadcasting on Christmas Day, so we have a special topic for today.

I would like to welcome everybody.

We're going going to talk about the modern state of Israel and much of the history of that modern state.

And that seemed like a good topic since Israel is the custodian of so many Christian sites on this Christmas Day.

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Welcome back.

And I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin Annely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wyana Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today we've got

and I'm Sammy Wink.

Thank you, Victor.

Yes.

And today we have what I find a very interesting topic.

And I usually find most Christians are interested in Israel and a visit to Israel just because of all the biblical sites that can be seen and the shared history of the Old Testament with the Jewish population as well.

So, you know, this is central, I think, to our Christmas experience and sites like, right, Sea of Galilee, Temple Mount, Jerusalem itself, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nazareth.

So all of these sites really resonate with Christians and the modern state of Israel is custodian over those Christian sites and they take that custodianship very seriously.

So it is a point of...

connection and you know agreement and really getting along with the Jewish people at least in Israel.

So I'm really happy to be doing this today.

How are you doing, Victor?

I'm doing very well on Christmas Day and I'm back on the farm and it's very quiet.

And thank God

it's raining and it's been, it's going to rain for a long time and the so-called climate change doom that we were all told

was inevitable is over for the brief time.

And more importantly, I've been looking this morning at highs and lows and drought years and wet years in the last 100 years.

And I find that

we've had a lot of wet, wet, wet, cold years more recently in the last 30 years.

And we've had a lot of dry and hot years in the 20s and 30s.

So

don't mention those 30s.

Those were depression years as well.

Maybe that's why they were so hot.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Let's then turn to Israel.

Myself, I find it has sort of a mystery, especially around its origins in 1948 in the Arab-Israeli war.

And so I was wondering if, as a first topic, you might let us have your version.

I know that neither of us are specialists in the state of Israel, but...

your take on the origins of the Israeli state would be very interesting to me.

There's two Israels.

There's ancient Israel.

Well, they're not two, they're one, but in the popular imagination, let's put it this way, they're two.

And the first is the ancient civilization from time immemorial that was in Israel.

And the Jewish population was relatively small.

And its neighbors, as it's true today, were relatively large, i.e.

the Egyptians or the Babylonians.

or the Seleucids or the Romans.

And so they fought for over two, three, four millennia.

They fought for their existence against these occupying powers.

And before we go on to the modern, remember that these three Jewish civil wars that ranged, you know, from about 63 to 64 AD all the way for the next 70 or 80 years, they were kind of like a holocaust.

The Romans proverbially took no prisoners, and that was the destruction of the Second Temple by Vespasian and his crew, the kids.

And my point is this:

that there was about 2 million people lost.

And after the Third Civil War, there was the so-called Jewish diaspora, where Jewish people fled the Holy Land throughout not just Southern Europe, but during the Middle Ages, especially up into Northern Europe.

And that was the situation essentially

until the 19th century.

There had been expulsions and pomegranes, etc.

There had been, you know, the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, etc., etc.

But

things started to change in the 19th century with the rise of the modern nation state,

the rise of national awareness and ethnic Chalvinism and technology and the power of firearms, etc.

And there were a series of devastating pom-groms against Jews in Russia.

and Eastern Europe.

And there was this idea by Herzl that there could be the resurrection of the state of Israel.

But the problem was that there was probably only, I don't know, 100,000 Jews at the most that were still in Israel from time immemorial.

And so it would require a lot of people to be so desperate,

many of whom had been assimilated, fully assimilated, especially in Western Europe.

to give up their national identity and adopt a language that didn't exist.

There was, you know, know, Yiddish,

and there was a colloquial sort of pidgin Hebrew, and then there was the refined and scholarly Hebrew language, but it was not spoken.

Sort of had the status a little bit like Greek today or Latin today.

And so people then had to invent words for modern technologies, modern foods, modern activities, and teach people how to speak Hebrew and recreate an identity that over that ensuing three millennia had been lost.

And they did.

And so the Zionist movement was the reclamation of Zion.

And by the way, when Israel was going to be founded in 1948, it wasn't sure it was going to be called Israel.

A lot of people argue it should be Judea or Zion.

But nevertheless, that Zionist movement picked up for persecuted Jews.

And then that coincided, Samuel, with the destruction after World War I of the corrupt, old, ossified Ottoman Empire, which had controlled that area.

And it treated subjugated Muslims and Jews not that differently, although Muslims didn't have to pay the tax as Christians and Jews did.

And there wasn't a lot of Jews.

But with the destruction of the Ottomans by the Allies, Ottomans being the Turkish-centered empire, it was on the losing side of World War I, then suddenly the British were in control as the winners, and they had a mandate from the League of Nations to run Palestine.

And that term was an ancient one.

It goes back to the Roman word for the area.

It's not an Arabic word.

It's not

an English word.

But it refers to what we would call today Israel and the West Bank.

And then there was another mandate called Transjordan, the eastern part

of southern Syria and Jordan east of the Jordan River.

And that was all under a British mandate, meaning they were going to control it and keep order and then see what would happen according to the League of Nations.

That was in theory.

And in

reality, they wanted to keep it.

And they were very pro-Arab.

They had to be because Jews were about 10% of the population at most.

And I guess there was 10% Christians and others, but 80% were Arabs.

And they were, you know, very anti-Semitic.

And they wanted this part of Lawrence Arabia and the Arab, first Arab awakening.

And they were promised liberation.

Damascus was the spiritual homeland of the area.

And that didn't quite happen.

The French and English

set a secret deal and they kept their colonial presence.

Okay.

And so the Zionist movement during this period was enhanced by the Balfour Declaration.

And part of their mandate said that while there will be an ecumenical Jerusalem and Syria will be, there will be someday an independent Arab nation, there shall be a homeland for the Jews.

I think that was 1922.

And so at that point, the Zionist movement picked up.

The Zionist movement, just a euphemism for, or a fancy word for trying to enlist Jewish resources and Jewish manpower to buy land inside ancient Israel to encourage people to go there, to flee persecution from these nationalist governments, especially in Eastern Europe and as I said, in Russia, but also in Western Europe.

Okay, so by fits and starts, Israel was not a country, we're not a nation.

And then then World War II happened.

And there was the murder of six million Jews.

And

there was this existential threat that there would be no Jewish people left in the world.

I think there were at that time about 3 million Jews.

Today there's about six in the United States.

But other than the United States, there were not very many Jews.

There was only probably three or two or three million that have survived, four million maybe in Europe and three million in the United States.

So they needed a national homeland and they couldn't trust governments.

And remember that Germany had not been the focus of anti-Semitism necessarily.

They were the fringe elements, but Jewish people had been traditionally as skeptical of Polish government or other Eastern Europeans.

They felt that Western Europeans were the product of the Enlightenment.

There was a tension between Catholicism and Protestantism.

And France, they were more Western European.

And then when National Socialism began and the stab the back theory to fob off on the Jews and socialists, the culpability of the defeat in World War I,

we had the Holocaust, six million Jews murdered, executed in systematic genocidal style.

Okay.

Then after that, the Zionist movement was out in the open, but the British mandate still discouraged it.

So you had, you know, Leon Urus and Exodus and all of this.

tension of Jews without money, without resources, without homes.

The Jews that had survived the Holocaust came back and they were often treated terribly because their homes were occupied or there was still jealousy.

You know, who do you think you are?

You don't have anything.

You're not going to come back and live in the nicest grand palaces in Austria and Vienna just because you were the world's leading ophthalmologist or something.

So there was a sense that that Hayson and Weissman and others, the architects of modern Israel.

Then in the early 40s, they had open hostilities hostilities with the British.

The British tried to stop it.

They blockaded it.

They sent people back.

And the Jews kept sneaking in.

And still at this time, there was still the idea they were buying land, but then the Arabs made it illegal to sell land.

So that population started to increase.

And the British then started arresting,

clamping down on...

violence between Arabs and Jews.

Long story short, there was some Jewish terrorism.

They blew up parts of the King David Hotel, Hotel, killed a lot of international officials.

There was a tit-for-tat

reprisals, Jewish organization, the Hagnaf killed, I think, or they were involved in the Urgen or one of the two, executed the three sergeants incident, executed two British soldiers.

And so there was an outrage, not just to Israel, but the idea that Britain had to be in the middle of all this.

There was also John Gill, and there was an effort of the British military to train top-notch fighters in Jordan.

And the Arab Division was considered to be the preeminent military force in the Middle East, 16,000 or so men.

Nevertheless, the war broke out.

And so when it ended in 1948, after about a year, end of 1948, early 1949, there was an armistice.

There was never a peace treaty.

And so there was what they always call a green line.

They have it in Cyprus.

They have it in places in Yugoslavia.

It just meant where the armies agreed to cease hostilities.

And that became what we now know is 1967 Israel or 1949 Israel.

And that was the official boundaries.

The problem with it was that when you go to Israel, you'll see that like the Hebrew University was on the other side of the line and Jerusalem was split in two.

And the Jordanian government did not honor the spirit or the laws of the mandated armistice

or going back to the Balfour in the sense that Jewish graves were desecrated.

Jews really weren't free to travel across the Green Line and go into

Jerusalem, et cetera, or go to Bethlehem.

If you were Christians, it was hard to go into.

So here's the point.

As immigration continued and as natural demography started to kick up, there was increasing pressures because the Jews were largely westernized.

There were some from Russia that were not as westernized, but they were very brilliant, capable people.

And you started to see Tel Aviv rise out of nothing and irrigation.

And there was a dynamism there that grew suspicion, earned suspicion and envy from the surrounding Arab population.

And after the 49 war, most of the Arabs had fled Israel, but not all of them had fled necessarily at the beginning.

They thought that the Arabs, having so many more resources, would win.

everybody thought they would win how could the small and they survived and then israel had about 20 of its population and it stayed that way as arab okay

and then there was a 56 suz crisis where france and england wanted to get back the suz canal and israel had been locked out of the red sea and so it kind of joined and that was a fiasco and then britain kind of got all completely not that they were legally but de facto they got out of the middle east and the united states was drawn in but we were not really involved.

We had had a kind of a bad record about letting Jews come to the United States under the Roosevelt administration that were refugees from the Holocaust.

So anyway, what I'm getting at is a 67 war.

And that started when

Arab nationalism and Nasser came to power and he promised the destruction of Israel.

And he wrote on this intellectual trend called pan-Arabism.

And pan-Arabism said, when you look at the Arab-speaking peoples that were Islamic, even though the Pan-Arabism in some ways was secular and Baathist and sort of Baathist, proto-Baptist and secular, communist, its great patron was the Soviet Union.

And it said from Morocco and Algeria and Libya and Egypt, Egypt, Cairo being the spiritual capital of the Arab world, the biggest city in the Arab world, and Syria and Lebanon and the Gulf monarchies.

Why don't we combine this into one huge empire?

And we can kind of be like the Soviet Union or China, the United States.

We have the common language.

We're all tribal peoples, but we're going to be united by, not so much by Islam, but by this socialist nationalist creed, and we will jumpstart it by destroying Israel.

And the Soviet Union was happy to do that, or at least...

even though there were a lot of Russian immigrants, there was a lot of socialism in the kibbutz movement, etc.

Okay.

And then they cut off, again, Red Sea shipping, so Israel could not go out of the Red Sea.

The Suez was barred to them.

And

if you look at Soviet weaponry that was in the hands of Syria and Jordan and

Egypt, which is kind of the United Arab Republic, they had various unions.

They tried with Libya and Egypt.

But the point I'm making is they were disunited for all that rhetoric of unity.

It was kind of like the former Yugoslavia.

So the six-day war started in June 6 when Israel decided that they were going to be attacked any moment.

And so they preempted and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian air forces in a brilliant surprise attack.

And at that point, the war was lost for the Arabs, even though they had, you know, five to one numerical superiority in artillery and tanks.

And the result of that lightning war that we always associated

with later luminaries, Yedin, Ariel, Sharon, Moshe Dayan, and they were brilliant and they were considered unstoppable and they took the entire Sinai Peninsula from the Egyptian Third Army.

I went to Egypt, Israel and Egypt, but right after the Six-Day War, and you went into Egypt and people were still terrified that Sharon might, he had crossed the Suez and they felt that he would go all the way into to Cairo.

And he could have.

I don't know what he would have done when he got there, but there were trophies of Phantom jets stacked up.

Excuse me, I'm talking about the, I jumped ahead to the Yom Koop-Kipper War.

But my point is this, that just to finish the 67.

So at that point, I went too fast, but there was an interval.

So what I'm getting at from 67 to 73, Israel had the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip.

Sinai, and Jerusalem, all that

it had occupied after the 67 victory.

And at that point, we had a reification of a radical Palestinian movement under Arafat, terrorism, and a unity of we will not just get back these lands, but we'll destroy Israel.

And that was the precursor to the Yom Kippur War of 73.

Yeah, could I ask you something?

So they often say that that six-day war is the only time Israel had a preemptive strike.

Is that true?

In all of the fighting that's happened in the last 50, 50, half-

Yeah,

I once wrote a paper on the difference between preventive and preemptive war.

Preventive war means there's not a looming imminent threat.

And usually the preventive war is waged by the stronger power.

And that means they go to war to eliminate a possible bump in the road.

So Germany in 1939 claimed it was fighting a preventive war in Poland.

Not that it was a stronger power.

There was no doubt it was going to win.

And they were going to prevent the future.

But there was no preemption in the sense to stop something happening right away.

Japan had fought a preventive war.

It felt that it was stronger than the United States and the Pacific, at least in 1941.

And so it fought a preventive war.

And

it's a preemptive.

Preemptive is different.

A preemptive is

a sudden strike, often by a

supposedly weaker power, on the premise that if they don't strike now, they're going to be attacked any day, any second.

And they should choose the moment that's most opportune for itself, since the moment's going to be inevitable.

And so when you adjudicate these in history, you say, was this a preventive war?

Was Israel stronger?

Was it just trying to eliminate a possible threat at any time?

Or was it desperate to survive and it felt that the Egyptian Egyptian Air Force and Syria and Jordan were all going to combine and attack any day now?

And why wait and get, you know, have your Air Force hit on the ground, what, midnight or something?

I think you could argue it was a preemptive war, because if you look at what Nasser said, he had talked himself into an attack on Israel.

He kept threatening them that any day you'll be pushed to the sea, you know, Israel to the sea, the Jordan to the sea, we'll all be all of that stuff.

So they said, we take you seriously.

And it was a brilliant attack.

And remember, the United States was not a strong patron of Israel.

They were buying stuff from France.

And we did not get involved in the 67 War.

And we were not considered, even though the largest population in the world, I still think it was close to the size of Israel.

It was in the United States.

But we did not get involved.

We got involved after the 67 War.

And that was because the Soviet Union and the United States rivalry in the Cold War started to crystallize crystallize where they decided that the Arab, we didn't think that the Arabs would really join the Soviet Union because it was atheist and it was anti-Islamic.

But as I said, Baathism and pan-Arabism made it conducive to Soviet mentalities.

So a lot of Arabs, this is very ironic, that this whole pan-Islamic movement today and the radical Islam.

We don't talk about it, but part of it at least is not just a reaction against Western civilization, but the 1950s and 60s and early 70s 70s of the Soviet Union imposing through their surrogate sort of a secular Saddam Hussein Baathism or Nasserism.

Yeah, could I ask one more thing?

Did the Israeli Air Force actually take out the Egyptian Air Force almost to a plane before it got off the ground?

That's what they did.

They did.

They were very sophisticated MiG jets.

And if you want to read about it, Michael Oren wrote a Six Days of War, what a brilliant history of it.

And

Mubarak, the president that followed the assassinated Sadat, he was an Air Force commander, and he was kind of infamous for flying back and saying, don't worry, we've wiped out the Israeli Air Force.

So Egyptian radio, of course, as a preview to Baghdad, Bob of the First Gulf War, kept telling...

the Egyptian people they had wiped out the Israelis and they had been caught and they destroyed their airfields.

They destroyed their planes.

Any plane that took off could not land.

And so it was a total wipeout.

And the problem with the Six-Day War was Israel, after it pushed all of its enemies who fled, it was in possession of this huge amount of land.

It had a very small population.

So it was an occupying power where it really didn't have the capital and labor and manpower to control the entire Sinai.

much less the West Bank, much less Gaza and the Golden Heights.

It was a lot.

And then the second thing, it had kind of a victory syndrome where everybody in the world thought that Israel was going to lose this tiny military that depended almost wholly on reserves.

One of the reasons they preempted, they had to make a decision because they could get up to four or five, 600,000 combatants, but they had to do it through mobilization.

The standing army was not big enough.

You had to get a married guy of 28 or 35.

You had to get him to his tank unit, and that would take 12 to 18 hours to get organized.

So in that process, if they were preempted, they would be defeated.

And so, they made the decision that they were going to be attacked, and they needed a window to mobilize.

So, they preempted against the airstrikes.

But they felt that they were invincible.

And when you looked at the situation, they were still a tiny country in the middle of the Cold War, surrounded by adversaries with huge resources in oil who could leverage Western governments through

oil cutoffs.

They could, and they had a patron of the Soviet Union.

And more more importantly the United States in 1973 we were we were assumed to be occupied by Watergate and we were coming out of the hippie movement and the disillusionment over Vietnam so when you look at actual qualitative weapons when you look at SAM missiles surfaced air missiles and you look at anti-tank weaponry the Soviet Union had parity with us because they were always really good at close air support and armor so what i'm getting at is they had sold the Egyptian army, the Syrian army, but especially the Egyptian army, which was a huge army.

Its military alone was larger than Israel.

And it had sold them the ability to knock out Israel's tanks and to knock out its FAM jets.

So when you have

batteries, not just SAM batteries, but shoulder-fired missiles.

And so they decided that they were going to preempt.

But I think you would call that a preventive war, not a preemptive.

There was no danger that Israel was going to attack Egypt or Syria.

And it was Yomi.

The Yom Kippur

Kippur holidays.

And so they preempted, and unfortunately for Israel, for the first 36 hours, they lost a considerable percentage of their air force to Sam missiles, and their tanks were taken out.

And for the one time,

The Syrians coordinated their attack on the Golan Heights, the elder Hafas Assad did.

And the Jordanians put some people there.

And it was very touch and go

for two or three of the first 10 days.

And most importantly, Israel lost about, in that war, well over 2,000 soldiers from a tiny population.

And even though in the second half of the war, they were brilliant.

That's what I was getting at when I preempted, went ahead and said that Sharon had crossed the Suez and was on his way to Cairo.

He was.

So when I went to Cairo in early 74 and looked at parts of, you know, we went to Suez and everything, and you could still see wreckage of battle.

They had hauled in all these fam jets.

They were trophies.

They made a big pile of them in front of the Hilton Hotel in Cairo.

There was a sense of jubilation that Sadat had restored Arab dignity and the Israelis went into a depression.

How could our vaunted military, even though we were vastly outnumbered, how could we lose?

Even though they had fought very gallantly and recovered very brilliantly, Golden Air and all of that.

And there were people in the Israeli military that had come to the fore and saved the nation, and they were within a few tanks of losing the Golan Heights.

And so, at that point, after then, Kissinger came in, and there was the Carter administration, these series of courts.

And it was based on the idea that even though the Greenland had been ossified and inadequate,

maybe

Israel would withdraw back to the 67, pre-67 war border, the 48-49 border, in exchange for recognition of its existence.

And the problem with that is that was never a defensible border.

It was an armistice border.

So then the next, from 74 to the present, the negotiations have been on

what can Israel have that is defensible and will the Palestinians ever truly recognize its right to exist Or will they keep up the rhetoric that this is just an interlude where we build up resources and we attack it and push it to the sea?

The only thing that's changed recently is

that the Palestinians, I think, have made a terrible decision to align themselves, quasi-align themselves with Persian, Shia, Iranians, i.e.

Hezbollah and Syria, and that has alienated the Gulf monarchies, Egypt, Jordan, a lot of the moderate Arab states in North Africa on the premise that Iran

hates the Sunni, Muslim, affluent nations more than it does,

it hates them as much as it does Israel, and it's nuclear, or it will be nuclear.

I think it probably is quasi-nuclear now.

And so, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that has really changed things in the Middle East.

That was what the Abams Accords were based on.

So, the Palestinians now are not the central issue.

And then there's a second thing that's radically changed, and that is the oil weapon, the embargo following the 73 war.

And we all remember, I remember I was 20 years old and boy, when you wanted to go 200 miles, you had to leapfrog from station to station.

Some stations, you can only get two gallon, three gallon.

Everybody was, you know, carrying gasoline in their trunk and stuff because of these embargoes by Saudi Arabia.

And we didn't have fracking or horizontal.

uh drilling we were told there was peak oil it was all over with we were down to about 45 percent of our needs were being pumped.

It was very gloom and doom, you know, perennial daylight savings time to save oil, all of this stuff.

And so the Arabs were in control.

And now we are independent, or we were until Biden took over, but we were energy independent.

Israel has been absolutely brilliant in exploiting its own natural gas reservoirs, and it's energy independent de facto.

And so the Arabs don't have the oil cart over it.

And secondly, Israel's got a brilliant technology and military development industry now.

And it's well equipped in things like cyber war, drone, artificial intelligence, better than we are in some ways per capita.

And under Netanyahu, there was a lot of very important economic reforms.

So the kibbutz mentality is gone.

as that generation of Eastern European socialists aged.

And now it's kind of more of a free market economy and it's booming.

And that's had a lot of effects.

It's sort of that prosperity has told a lot of people in the West Bank, just by being near this economy, you will be more prosperous than you will be near to Jordan.

And the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arabs, even though they say they're in solidarity, they're doing much better off than any non-oil.

Arab country just by being in Israel and participating.

Although, you know,

you mean their solidarity with the other Arab nations and other Arab people?

In theory.

In theory, but in

that they are so happy to be in Israel.

When I was in Israel and I saw the construction of a wall, I saw a very startling phenomenon in northern Israel where there were Israeli Arabs that were protesting the idea

that maybe some area of 67 Israel would be cut out of Israel and the wall would dip in and they would find themselves on the Arab side of the wall in exchange for commiserate-sized land in the suburbs of Jerusalem that would be included in Israel.

And they were protesting.

So as I said, this IDF officer, so what's the protest about?

And he said, they're angry.

They don't want to live under Arafat.

I said, but they're Arabs and they cheer on Arafat.

He said, yes, Victor, I thought you were an intelligent person.

You're not.

They get pensions.

They get health care.

They've got great jobs.

There's security.

Would you want to live over there?

Would you want to live here?

And I said, well, I thought that their poverty was caused by exploitation by Israel and racism and Zionism.

He said, you can say that all you want, but just to ask yourself, look at the two areas.

And we went along the West Bank and Israel.

Where would you want to live?

And so why would you think that they wouldn't have the same preference as any other person?

And so that was kind of really startling.

And that's part of at the heart.

But just to sum up, What's confusing about now is we don't know, we the world don't know to the degree to which the Gulf monarchies or Jordan or Egypt have more solidarity with Israel because they're both deathly terrified of a new Shia crescent from the Mediterranean to Tehran based on Shia extremism,

Khomeiniism, and Persianism, which is antithetical historically to Sunni Islam, to the Arabs, and to Israel as a state.

And so that's one thing.

And

when there's no oil over our heads, do we have a commitment there?

Before, in an ironic way, the fact that we were exposed to Arab boycotts means we had to take an active interest as negotiators, or otherwise the Arabs would walk away and we'd get boycotted.

We had to pressure Israel.

We don't have to do that anymore, unless you're an American bipartisan elite who feels they owe it to keep the sea lanes open for Chinese commerce or for oil exports to Europe.

But in terms of actually needing natural gas and oil for the Middle East, we don't need it.

And so we're not as committed to the region economically.

We are for the survival of Israel, but not economically.

Except maybe utopian fashion.

We want the world in that place where 40% of the world's energy is produced.

We want it to be stable.

It's in our interest for that.

And then finally, the technology has changed such.

that Israel is a very, very, it's a much more powerful country.

It's almost 10 million people now.

Oh, they have amazing technology, though, right?

Remember, because I always remember that the jokes made about Ronald Reagan's Star Wars, and yet this new iron dome, I think they call it, is that similar technology, though obviously upgraded.

Yeah, they do that.

They always do that.

Even when they buy U.S.

weaponry, they adapt it.

And that Raytheon system

has been so adapted and improved because they're on the front line and they have daily experience, their acoustical ability to hear people tunneling, their radar,

it's just even their submarine capable.

It's all very sophisticated and it's based on a garrison state that they can't be complacent.

And so

they're amazing instead, huh?

Well, it's very funny when you go there because

In the West today, you do not associate democracy and capitalism with a population that believes in patriotism, military readiness, security, national unity.

I know there's a hardcore left in Israel.

It's just as hardcore as ours.

But you get the impression that these people believe Israel is far better than the alternative.

They're lucky to have their country.

They're not going to give it up without a fatal fight if necessary.

And I don't find that anywhere in Europe.

And in half the United States, I don't find that.

So they're sort of a model in a way to us that you can create Western traditionalism and pride and nationalism.

And it's not incompatible with successful free market capitalism and constitutional government and freedom, as sort of Spingler or Nietzsche or Hegel said would be incompatible

eventually.

It's a fascinating place.

And I don't think militarily Israel can be defeated except

except when you have people like Laugh and Johnny, who supposedly the Iranian spiritual leader, prime minister, I should say prime minister, at one point said, remember the infamous one-bomb state.

That is that roughly 50% of the world's Jews, I think they have about 10 million Jews in Israel.

There's six or seven, six and a half in the United States, and the other 4 million are scattered over Europe and Russia and the world.

But the idea he called the one bomb state, this is great for us.

We can eliminate half the Jews in one bomb.

And that's something that we don't have any inkling of.

And so when we keep have this lackadaisical attitude toward Iranian proliferation, it's not just Iranian missile.

They can create a bomb and then smuggle it in to Syria or Lebanon and get some Hezbollah suicide bombers in a truck and let that thing off.

And they would do that.

So that's why everything has changed since those wars.

The next war will will not be, the 2006 war was another type of war that was atypical.

They're always asymmetrical is what I'm trying to say.

Israel knows that if they are attacked from an office building on the West Bank and they demolish that office building, the world will blame them.

The world will always blame them.

And so they have to cell phone or text warnings to people in the building to leave as if we're bombing, you know, Dresden or Tokyo and we're dropping not just leaflets, but we're sending radio signals to individual Japanese citizens.

Hey, you're going to bomb, please leave so we don't hurt you.

Or the idea was we want to hurt you for what you did and what you're building against us and munitions factories.

So it's very different.

And then the world's reaction is so bizarre.

Because take every issue that we accuse Israel, we being the West or the United Nations or the Europeans, especially.

Occupied land.

Okay.

When's the last time you heard somebody say Free Cyprus?

That Turkish Cyprus absorbed Nicosia, half of Nicosia, or most of it, and Belopai is the most beautiful parts of Cyprus.

They illegally occupy it right now.

Does anybody care?

No.

I haven't heard anybody talk about it.

It'd be as if, I remember Edward Seed would shake his hands and say, These were the keys to my ancestral home that was annexed by the Israelis in the 67 War.

Whether that was true or not is under contention, but my point is: 13 million Germans, Prussians, the Sudetenland Germans, and not that they were not culpable as being part of the Third Reich, but my point is that from 1945 to 1947, they were forced by the Red Army and the liberation communist movements that would take hold in Eastern Europe to go back to Germany.

And they left Poland, they left...

Prussia.

Prussia ceased to exist.

There was no longer a word that we usually associate Prussia.

What does that mean?

It just meant a martinet or a disciplinarian.

And so what I'm getting at, I don't see any Germans today saying, this, my apartment in Prague, my big ancestral estate in northern Poland, that was my Prussian heritage.

I want it back.

No, and then they say, we had it since 1500.

Well, no, that's not the way the world works.

Unfortunately, I wish it would.

So you don't get third, fourth chances, and that's what happens.

And so my point is, and then they say, refugees, refugees, refugees, the Palestinians are home.

Well, they were displaced to the people who fled Israel about the same time, a little bit before,

as I said earlier, nobody's talking about all these refugees that are living in Berlin today or Munich that can't live and they can't function because their homes are gone.

They've been completely assimilated within the German population.

But my other point is that there was about a million Jews in these ancient enclaves of old Cairo or or old Damascus or old Baghdad.

And after the 67 war, they were ethnically cleansed throughout the Middle East and throughout the Arab-speaking world.

And they had nowhere to go but Israel.

No one said, well, how about these refugees?

Because they just accepted that the Israeli government would take them in and absorb them, intermarry them, integrate them.

And what I'm getting at is that we have this really strange dichotomy where every other issue in the world when it involves Israel, it changes and it becomes specialized.

And during the 80s and 70s, about half the UN resolutions were aimed at Israel.

And they were things like, you have refugees on your conscience.

You're an occupied land, and you look around the map and they all do this, you know.

And

where is...

I don't see, other than Richard Gary, I don't see free Tibet.

Do you?

Long live the Tibetans.

Where are the Tibetan refugees?

What's China doing?

Yeah,

where are the Uyghurs?

Look at the Uyghurs.

They're in camps.

Nobody says anything like that.

And so that raises the ultimate question, doesn't it?

Why, why, why do the Western intelligentsia and the so-called third world and China, why do they pick on Israel?

Is it because they're envious, it's so successful, or is it because they're anti-Semitic?

Why does Israel get blamed for the supposed same things that the Chinese do or the Russians do?

And if they say inordinate force,

Putin

went in to break away Islamic areas of the Soviet Union and just bombed them, artillery stripe, and just wiped out the resistance.

If you remember that a few years ago,

and no one said a word.

And China systematically does that whenever they have a problem.

And the Israelis become Gandhi-like compared to Russian tactics.

And no one said a word.

No one said a word.

Speaking of that, I remember that prisoner of war, Shalit, and when they made that trade for the Palestinians that the Israelis had captured, and there was like a hundred of these captured

Palestinians.

And they exchanged him.

And poor old Shalit was as skinny as a rail, thin, like he had been starved to death.

And the Palestinians were all happy, round, and bouncing along as they got out of their imprisonment from Israel.

It's just weird, just really weird.

Yeah, it is.

The problem that raises so many issues that are taboo in our cancel culture, but a lot of Israel's enemy strategy is based on that asymmetry.

We have more people than you.

We can lose more people than you can.

You will deal for hostages in a way that we won't.

That's true of the West and the non-West in general, North Korea and et cetera, et cetera.

So you're vulnerable because we're willing, you know, you live, we live live to die and you die to live or something like that.

And it's an asymmetrical philosophical cultural point of view.

And Israel has been very, very successful and sophisticated in dealing with it.

And it has a carrot and stick approach.

I mean, it has a...

pretty high standard of living for Arab-speaking Israelis and the economy flows into the West Bank and the wall has stopped.

By the way, when people say walls don't work, I was in Israel during the construction of the wall, and I can remember suicide bombing happening almost every other day.

And it was quickly cleaned up, and it was amazing how quickly it was repaired.

But once the wall was installed, and there was sophisticated acoustics to detect tunneling, it has vastly disarmed the Palestinian terrorist, the suicide bomber.

Just like people said Trump's wall would not work on the southern border, and wherever there is an opening, there is illegal immigration en masse.

And wherever there isn't, there's not.

It's very funny, too.

Speaking of walls, first of all, that they pretty well work.

And the locus clascus is always the maginal line didn't work.

Well, the imaginal line, they went around it.

Had they built the maginal line and made a left turn

and fortified the French border with Belgium.

and not depended on the so-called rugged Ardennes forest.

When you go there, it looks sort of like lower Sierra Nevadas.

It's pretty tame.

But nevertheless, it worked.

And they went around it.

They didn't go through it.

One army group did later, but it was only because the French army had collapsed.

But my point is, when I always see these critics,

and I've gone up to the Napa area and driven by Nancy Pelosi's house.

I've driven by Mark Zuckerberg's house.

When I was a visiting professor at Pepperdine, I'd go down the PCH and look at Barbara Streison.

You know, they all had one thing in common.

They had huge walls, huge.

So I thought, well, people who say that walls don't work, why do they have walls?

Because they do work.

They always work to a degree if you're willing to defend them.

You know, it's just all the left-wing producers and directors and screenwriters of the Game of Thrones series, it's all based on castles and walls.

The wall.

Remember the big white wall that keeps the wild?

Well, I know they finally breached it, but that was because they screwed up and got that crazy dragon that turned zombie on them.

But my point is that there was the assumption of left-wing people that the war would be predicated on who had the nicest fortification.

And so the Israeli wall really worked just like ours would if it had been completed.

Isn't Texas talking about completing it?

Yeah, they are.

They are.

You know, another thing, just to get off the topic, Sammy, when everybody said Trump was lying because he said Mexico is going to pay for this wall.

Well, in a way, they did.

If you think about all the concessions he wrung from Mexico, he got vastly reduced immigration.

And a lot of economists have looked at the cost of an illegal immigrant in terms of taxes paid versus benefits received.

And it's not a U.S.

win-win situation.

So for each immigrant that the wall stopped from Mexico, Mexico ended up paying us because they had not only did we save money on social service, but they had one fewer remittant who was sending thousands of dollars per year to Mexico.

It's the greatest source of foreign exchange to the Mexican economy.

And that was not just the only concession he got.

He got the idea that if you were a refugee, quote unquote, then you stayed in Mexico and apply for refugee status.

So he was able by the use of the wall to wring a lot of concessions out of Mexico and to reduce illegal immigration.

And that, in the long term, saved the United States a lot of money until this year.

And that money more than paid for the wall.

Trump's problem was that he didn't say that.

He just said that he acted as if they were going to write him a check.

Okay, Don, you're right.

We love the wall.

Why would they do that?

I mean,

the wall was their worst nightmare because Central America and Mexico together had over $60, $70 million in annual remittances.

It was a safety valve for popular displeasure with those governments.

They were expatriate populations that would be very pro-Mexican and pro-Central American, and they were sort of useful for the democratic leftist La Raza ethnic chauvinism agenda.

And so

there was nobody but the American taxpayer and people that wanted the border closed.

And the Latino community, let's be honest, the Mexican-American community especially wanted the border closed because they didn't want to be told, well, you're Latinos and therefore you're going to host all these illegal aliens from Guatemala and Honduras in your schools and your facilities, in your communities.

All right.

Well, we've gotten a little far from Israel.

The efficacy of walls is well taken here.

Let's just take a moment for a word from our sponsor, and then we'll come right back to talk a little bit.

I had a question at least on peace negotiations for Israel with the Arab state.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, I've been talking about Israel and its amazing military, and of course, its defense.

But the other part to that is peace negotiations with the Arab nations.

And I was wondering, my question is this.

The peace negotiations go on and on and they never seem to be successful.

And I don't know if you feel like you want to answer it, but why is it that you just really can't get any success?

And it doesn't seem like the Arab states are ever going to accept Israel as a state.

Boom.

That's my question.

Why not?

Well, part of its pride, this small population that came from Europe, largely from Europe, and then later from other Arab nations, was supposed to fail.

And they not only failed, they exceeded like nothing imaginable.

So when you look at the 22 or 23 states of the Arab world and you look at how many are democratic and how many are fully capitalist and how many have equality of the sexes and independent judiciary and a firm commitment to rationalism, there's only one.

And it's the most successful of all of them.

And yet until recently, it had no natural resources.

And so when that

is there and you're of the arab community and you have to explain that and you can explain it two ways you can say they're evil and they're mean and they're thieving murderers and they take things from us or you can say this is food for thought we are a self-reflective japanese like people who learn from their neighbors and enjoy self-criticism and self-reflection Maybe, just maybe we should ensure that women in the Arab world have full rights.

Maybe we should try constitutional government of some sort.

Maybe, just maybe, we should make sure that Islam does not infringe on rationalism and free speech and natural inquiry.

And maybe we should really have a transparent bureaucracy, protection of private property, and free market capitalism.

Okay.

So, Sami, what's it going to be?

Are you going to say, yeah, the problem is inside me and my culture, and I'm going to look in the mirror, or I'm going to blame the Jews?

It's no-brainer so that's what

so that's what they do and then the more that israel reaches out and says but we're going to help you with a road or we're going to build a clinic or we're going to do this and we we want to live in peace and let's negotiate these borders all we want is our protection And if we give you back the Golan Heights, this generation will say, good.

Well, Israel has a right to exist, but we know what's going to happen in 30 years.

The new zealots will take over and they'll be shooting down from the heights again at us, et cetera, et cetera.

Or if we give back all of Jerusalem, it'll be just like it was before 1967.

So they know that.

And Israelis are Westerners, so they're hyper-self-critical.

I think, as I said, self-criticism is good, but not to the point of national suicide.

It's not a pact of suicide.

But that's part of it.

And so we get these negotiations.

And ultimately, the Americans usually blame the Jews.

They usually blame the Jews.

They said, you know know what, you're not willing to give back all this land.

And that's kind of like saying, well, we shouldn't have had the Mexican war.

Let's give back all this land to Mexico or something like that.

And it's just not going to happen.

I think the Israelis have made certain decisions that southern Lebanon was not in their interest to occupy.

The Sinai was not in their interest because the friendship or at least the neutrality of Egypt was worth more than occupying the Sinai.

And Gaza, that's a tough one because Gaza is a mess after the Israelis pulled out.

But I think you could argue 51% of the Israelis don't want any part of Gaza.

And so now we're down, I think, to the Israelis saying that these portions of the West Bank, along with the Golan Heights, are necessary for our survival.

And we're not going to give them up.

Now, if you want to negotiate about areas that we could cede over so there's a rough exchange, maybe we can talk, but we're not going to do it until there's some kind of legitimate government there.

And you look at Hamas, non-democratic, you look at Abbas.

I don't know what Trump said when he loved Abbas,

but

he's not an elected leader in the sense of real, fair, and free elections that are scheduled without exception on a two- or four-year basis.

So they don't have a government that's transparent.

How can you negotiate?

I mean, you can negotiate, but you can't negotiate a perpetual peace.

And so for now, I think the attitude on both sides is just sort of shrugging.

And I think what will happen is the Israelis, if they can deal with the Iranian existential threat, their economy is so vibrant and their science and technology and still for all of their problems with this hyper-left wing, I think

just by osmosis that a lot of Palestinians are just sort of rhetorical now and they see that the money and the opportunity is lapping in all over the West Bank.

And it's not necessarily in their interest to go the Hamas route.

That's a logical trajectory, but it doesn't mean that that is the trajectory because people are not logical, especially in that part of the world.

So people, the Hezbollah people and the Hamas people, if they think Iran is nuclear and they have a nuclear shield and Syria ever gets back to normal, I mean, gets back to abnormal, put it that way, then they will consider doing things they would never consider before because if they've got, I don't know, 100,000 rockets on both sides of Israel, if they were all to let them out and Iran were to say, okay,

if you kill any of our people, we're going to nuke you.

And we want to nuke you.

And Israel says, well, in negotiations, well, we could take out half your country.

Well, good.

We still have 10 to 20 times more people than you would.

We still have the other half.

We don't.

It shouldn't say 20, but it might say we still have, you know, eight or nine times more people.

And we would like to lose that number many people to be famous throughout history as the Shia, Persian, Iranian nexus that destroyed the Jews when the Arab Sunnis would not do it or could not do it.

And for the next thousand years, Tehran will be the capital of the Islamic world.

That's what they think, at least some of the people.

So, what is it?

Just to finish, what is Israel's long-term strategies?

There's a lot of hope.

Maybe, just maybe this corrupt, ossified, medieval inefficient terrible government in Tehran will just be overwhelmed by circumstances and at some point will crash I doubt it but that's a possibility or maybe just maybe when you have a new administration in there then this Abam's Accords will evolve so you'll have eight to ten or twelve Arab countries with their economic clout especially the wealthier ones and mampa on the side of israel and that would be very tough for iran just to single out israel although it would be possible.

Or just maybe, maybe, maybe

the United States would give up certain of these delusions.

Under the Obama administration, the delusion was, we don't like these fossil fuel exporting right-wing autocracies in the Middle East.

So we've got a brave new world idea.

And that is, let's empower the Iranians, the Shia, the Persians, and let's

have this Iran deal.

Winknaw, they'll get a bomb, but it won't be for until we're out of power and it won't be for 10 years.

And then that will scare Israel and scare the

Arabs in Riyadh or Kuwait City.

And there'll be tension.

There'll be a balance of power and that'll be great.

And then the underprivilege will be...

That was the idea.

That's crazy.

It was crazy, but they almost pulled it off if Trump hadn't been elected.

And now we're back to the people that crafted that insane idea are back in power.

And the first thing they did is restore aid to a lot of radical Palestinians via the United Nations.

And they're already suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the Golden Heights are not Israel.

And there's a lot of people in this administration that are nakedly anti-Israel.

And this is also brings up this whole bizarre, complex, intricate question.

of American Jews.

It's starting to resemble politically the status of Greek Americans.

When I was in Athens, when the 74 war broke out between Cyprus, boy, the United States cut off aid to Turkey, which was a NATO ally for invading Cyprus.

And why did they do that?

Because there were some very, very influential Greek Americans in the House and Senate, Paul Sarbanes, people like that.

And when you look at today, the Jewish robbing, the reason I'm getting to this, there is a contemporary angle here, Sammy, when Trump said that it used to be the Jews ran Congress, now Congress runs the Jews.

It was a crude thing to say.

But they were going to tag him as an anti-Semitic person.

But when people started to think about it, what he was saying in inarticulate and crude terms was the Congress used to be a friend of Israel and it protected Israel.

And Israel had influence on the Congress.

And now the Congress is an enemy of Israel and dictates to Israel.

And I think what he meant was the squad is sort of, and they can't stand Israel.

And there was nothing like the squad.

Although he said a lot of things that sounded terrible, but I think you could find people in Israel that publicly would say, why did he say that?

And then privately say, yeah, he's right.

What I'm getting at is that the secularization of the Jewish American population, 75% of which vote Democratic,

has been very problematic for Israel because Israel likes to have both Democrats and Republicans.

And Bibi Netanyahu was exactly right that when he congratulated Biden, he had to.

And Trump got offended at that.

But Israel can't play politics because they never knew who's going to be in control.

They have to be on good terms.

But the problem with being on good terms with the Democrats is it's very ambiguous.

75% of American Jews vote Democratic.

So you think that the Democratic Party would be, as it used to be,

very pro-Israel.

When I was growing up, a young kid, I never met a Jewish person person until I was 18, but I would talk to fruit brokers of all different backgrounds about the, quote, Jews.

They would tell me, hey, Victor, your grandpa's not going to get a fair price for those plums.

I said, well, why not?

Them Jews back east that run all the markets, the brokers, they always screw the farmer.

That's how Armenian Americans talk.

That's how Greek Americans talk.

That's how everybody talked about the Jews.

And when you look at isolationism, let's not go in, and conspiracy theory, it was largely on the right, a lot of the anti-Semitism, going back to the KKT.

It's not anymore.

The right has dealt with that.

There's not very many, and partly it was the ecumenical, evangelical, Christian movement that absorbed the same causes and histories and heritage as Jews.

And part of it was admiration for democracy and muscularity on the part of Israel.

And at the same time, the incorporation of so-called marginalized people, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, all these different groups in the Democratic Party, they

felt they were now going to have affinities with the Palestinians.

I could see it.

I went up as a kid in, I think it was 1970, I wasn't a kid, I was like 20, to the Berkeley Free Speech Area.

And I'd always thought everybody was pro-Israeli on campus.

And all of a sudden, I saw this guy handing out this Palestinian liberation organization, you know, and then there was stuff on hating Israel.

And I thought, wow.

And the people who were doing it were all minorities.

And so the Democratic Party then, I don't know if they were aware of it, but their base constituency of the so-called oppressed, marginalized people of America were not only, I don't know, pro-Palestinian, but in many cases, anti-Semitic.

And as we said on another podcast with Jack Fowler, what is one thing that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan all had in common?

It was either saying, tell those Jews to get on their yarmuke and come over here.

That was after the Freddy's Market murder.

Or, hey, I'm in Heineytown.

That was Jesse Jackson.

Or Louis Farrakhan, the gutter religion rants.

And so there are members of the African-American community and members of the Democratic base.

especially the squad.

And what do the squad have in common?

If you look at what Omar said and AOC said and Talib said, there's a history of anti-Israelism and even anti-Semitism there.

So what I'm getting at is.

is the Democratic Party cannot support Israel as it used to, and the Republican Party can, and the roles have switched, and that reflects switched constituency.

If I go out here in the countryside and I see some grizzled farmer that's 75 and I ask him, does he like Israel?

He'll say yes.

If I go to Cal State Fresno and see a student that's been indoctrinated, he'll say no.

And that's the difference.

That's all you need to know.

And so it makes it very hard.

So when you say the Jewish lobby, there is no Jewish lobby.

There's 75% of Jewish people vote left-wing Democratic, but they don't do it because of Israel or because they're Jews.

They do it because, like other very accomplished people who were minorities, I don't think they even see themselves as minority.

I think they become so secularized and assimilated that it's hard to see that a young Jewish American Democratic voter will have the issues of Israel at heart, at least to the extent that he's going to go on campus or at his job and be offended at people that attack Israel.

He's not.

And so Israel is in this situation where theoretically they've got to be very considerate of the Democratic Party, where 75% of their American voters, which is the largest Jewish bloc outside of Israel, as I said, six and a half million Jews.

But on the other hand, they all have, so, well, why are they all voting for a party that's now flipped and is very hostile to Israel?

And the answer is that they don't consider themselves Jewish in the sense of Jews to support Israel.

Victor, I think we're coming to the end of our time here.

And I just want to say thank you for all of the reflection on Israel.

I think that Israel, you were just talking about parties.

And I think that constituency that Israel has become very important to is the traditional Christian, I think.

You go about this country and you run into Christians, they're very excited to be able to go to Israel.

And partly it's because of the Christian sites there.

And I want to, on this Christmas day, be thankful for the custodianship of Israel, of all of those sites.

I think we should.

And I think it's true.

One of the reasons that I supported Donald Trump, there were two reasons.

One, I felt that he didn't reflect the elitism of the Republican Party and he was worried about working people in the Middle West, especially the deplorables.

And second, one reason was he was not afraid to say and do things vis-a-vis Israel.

He said he was going to recognize the Golan Heights.

He said he was going to move the embassy to Jerusalem.

He had members that were Jewish in his family, and he was pretty tough.

And he didn't care what people said about him.

That wasn't just the only reason, but those were two reasons that I thought he was worth supporting.

I'll just finish.

I was very upset because when I wrote the book, book, Case of Trump, and the original title had been Why Trump Won, but nevertheless, the people at BASIC were probably right with changing the title.

But I got a lot of flack.

And there was an article in the Never Trump venue, The Bulwark, by Gabriel Schoenfeld.

And he's somebody at commentary that I had a lot of respect for because he was a very gifted editor.

And I had been working with him and another gifted editor, Gary Rosen.

But he wrote, I don't know, 150, 1600 words review of that that book.

And at one point, he compared me to a Nazi by supporting Trump, who he said was anti-Semitic, and therefore I was anti-Semitic.

The day that review came out, I was at the Hudson Institute in New York, where he was a member, and I was arguing in support of Trump's outreach to Israel and the recognition of the Golden Heights.

So I thought, this is really crazy.

We've got these people now that are so absorbed with hatred of Donald Trump that they're renouncing their prior positions on the Middle East.

The lenses are so fogged with Trump hatred, they can't even see who they are.

And this guy has now called me basically a Nazi and an anti-Semite when I've devoted my entire life at a lot of personal criticism, but I don't even care about the criticism because I love Israel.

I like Jewish people.

I think that if something were to happen to Israel, the United States would be profoundly injured by it And that our allegiance is to the survival of Israel.

And then have somebody say you were a Nazi.

It just, for me, at that moment, and I wrote a long reply to it, I was done with any sympathy for the Never Trumpers at all.

These were people I had known my entire life.

And that was one issue.

I just thought, you know, this is a president, whether you like him or he's orange or he's got funny hair or he's got a Queen's accent or he's buffoony.

You can say what you want, but you go down the line on issue after issue after issue.

There's been no better friend of Israel.

And to suggest that he's an anti-Semite and are the people who supported or voted for him are Hitler-like is a commentary on the poverty of the Never Trump movement.

Well, my dogs are wishing everybody a Merry Christmas.

I know.

So we're going to have to say goodbye here and wish everybody a Merry Christmas.

And we too like Israel, are friends of Israel.

And we hope everybody enjoyed the podcasts on Israel.

I thought it was a perfect subject for today.

So, thank you, Victor.

We both dogs, Sammy.

I know that.

Thank everybody for listening.

Yeah.

All right.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.