I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Okay guys, on the line, I've got Max Blumenthal again here, of course, runs the Gray Zone, the grayzone.com, and he wrote Goliath and the 51 Day War, and as I always tell you and recommend, he co-produced the documentary Killing Gaza, about the 2014 war there, with Dan Cohen, and it's free now on Vimeo and YouTube.
Used to cost three whole dollars, now it's free, you can go watch it.
It's really important, I think it'll really open your eyes.
And he writes a lot of great stuff, and he publishes a lot of great stuff, like Gareth the Great, for example.
So there's that.
Welcome back to the show, how you doing?
Good to be back, and we got a great piece by Gareth the Great up now, Son, 58 Taiwan Strait Crisis.
Yeah, I'm gonna see if I can squeeze him in here between interviews I gotta do and interviews of me I gotta do this afternoon, and try to get that on there, and of course, all surrounding Daniel Ellsberg and his big leak, and we're gonna have Dan on next week at some point, so hang tight to that, everybody.
So listen, let's talk about this thing that you wrote.
To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures anti-Semitism freak out.
Yeah, but there's some footage of some things where people were attacked, and the reports are that anti-Semitic actions of some type or another are up by large percentages, no?
I don't see any evidence of either claim based on a really close examination of the key incidents and of the data that is being used to claim this giant uptick in anti-Semitic activity.
You know, what the hell, I'm not gonna play devil's advocate, it's all a bunch of BS, and anybody with a critical eye watching TV news, it's just absolutely laughable, the propaganda of, oh, the Israelis have to hide in their bomb shelters, they're in such danger, when they are not in danger, and they never show you the other side at all, these people being bombed to smithereens, and then, oh, but imagine, and then they run commercials too during the breaks, please give to the fund and donate to the poor Israelis who have to hide in the basement from the attacks from the Hamas terrorist rockets, and just leaving you with the impression at all that these people are in danger and are being aggressed against, and that apparently no one will help them, we need you to donate today in order to help to try to keep them safe, Max.
We have to donate today, we have to, I mean, there's a huge fundraising component to this whole thing, especially from the ADL, which is one of the ultimate race hustling organizations in US history, stirring up the specter of the hatred of Jews across the world to generate this gigantic empire that is not just a civil rights organization, that is also partnering with Silicon Valley to institute social media censorship that propagandizes American police officers by bringing them on free trips to Israel to learn to treat the civilian population of the US like suicide terrorists.
They are a private surveillance firm that spies on Palestine solidarity activists the same way they spied on activists opposing South African apartheid in the 1980s, and this is the organization that's leading this, or is really responsible for generating this narrative of an uptick in antisemitism.
What the ADL has done, we can get into the specific incidents in a minute, but what the ADL has done in its report, and you can see it for yourself, just go look at the report, is classify everything from Palestine solidarity rallies as people in the Gaza Strip were being wiped out, entire families were being wiped out in JDAM strikes on civilian neighborhoods, to people chanting Intifada, and from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, as antisemitic incidents.
They basically conflated Palestinians standing up for their brethren in Palestine who are being slaughtered, mass arrested, beaten, dispossessed, thrown out of their homes, with genocidal Jew hatred, which is just the classic ruse of the Israel lobby to define anything criticizing Israel as antisemitism, and the media is completely lapping it up uncritically, except for the gray zone, and now Jewish Currents has done an article, obviously without citing me, because you're not allowed to cite the gray zone, but basically picking up where we left off by analyzing the ADL report more closely.
The rest of the media is just rolling out the red carpet for the ADL, yeah, come on, just make up any claim you want, and we will validate it.
You've seen Jonathan Greenblatt, who is now the CEO of the ADL, he replaced Abe Foxman, all over the media, just making shit up.
He's saying Jews are having to remove the mezuzahs from their home.
If you're Jewish, you're supposed to put up a little tiny signpost, or it's kind of like a small box called a mezuzah, and it contains a scroll of the Shema, which is like the Lord's Prayer, and you see it on many Jewish homes, including secular Jewish homes, and he is claiming that Jews are removing that from their homes in Los Angeles, because people are going home to home and attacking Jews in their homes, and he cites one claim by an anonymous caller on CNN, and they're just nodding their heads, like, yeah, this is happening, it's like the pogroms are happening, and then you have Don Lemon, who interviewed one of the people who's supposed to be a victim of a hate crime, and I'll get into the details of that, but Don Lemon, who is a CNN host, who, back in the Obama era, would smear Black Lives Matter protesters, now, during the Trump era, he celebrated them, but Don Lemon was claiming that his friends in West L.A. were removing mezuzahs from their doors, because they were being hunted in their homes.
I mean, this claim is just traveling far and wide, to the point where it's generating so much hysteria that we see Barry Weiss claiming, the neocon Barry Weiss claiming that she is hearing from friends that their editors and personal trainers are refusing to work with them because they're Zionists, and she thinks that that's not just transparently hilarious, number one, and not obviously bogus, and after she was mocked, she said this on Twitter, then she said, look at the replies, people are happy that Americans are boycotting Jews, but in the previous tweet, she said Zionists, so she's there conflating Judaism with Zionism.
The funny part of it is, like, how are the people who can afford personal trainers and who have editors, the victims here?
And that's what this is all about, defining some of the most affluent, entitled, narcissistic, hyper-privileged people on the planet as the real victims of the Israel-Palestine crisis and an 11-day assault on a dispossessed, tortured people in a walled-off ghetto.
Yeah.
All right, now listen, so we're going to talk about the war a little bit, I'm going to let you talk about the war a little bit, but I want to ask you this, because we're going to go through the examples here that you cite of these riots and fistfights and the different videos of things going on here, and go through what is exactly the reality of this, but, I mean, I think it's fair to say, right, that you would be sensitive to real anti-Semitism, right, you're from the big city, it's a tough world out there, and where people really are attacking Jews because they hate Jews, obviously you're on the victim's side and care a lot about that too, right?
Well there have been anti-Semitic incidents in this country where Jews have been attacked as Jews, the mass killing of Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh in, was it 2017 or 2018, by a neo-Nazi, that was an anti-Jewish attack.
But for the most part, Jews in the United States are living in a golden age, we are living in unprecedented privilege and protection with opportunities we could have never dreamed of when my family was living in Eastern Europe.
My name is Max Blumenthal, I mean, I'm sure that everyone who's listening to this knows that I'm Jewish, I don't have to introduce myself as such.
I've been all over this country, I've been to like every hen house and outhouse and flophouse in this country, I think there's only two states I haven't been to, one of them is Hawaii.
I've traveled across the country by car like three or four times, and then all the speaking tours I've done, I've been very much an intimate guest in the Muslim community as well, in mosques to speak about Palestine, and I just have never encountered this kind of wave of anti-Semitism that anyone's speaking about.
I've been all over the red states too, I never hide the fact that I'm Jewish, I grew up in a black neighborhood, the ADL is always saying black people are anti-Semitic, nobody cared that I was Jewish, it just wasn't a thing.
And so it seems so dissonant to me and to so many other Jews who grew up in this similar context.
Now, I can see ultra-Orthodox people experiencing more anti-Semitism, they tend to be targeted even inside New York.
It's partly because they're just othered, for lack of a better term, and they are completely cloistered, don't interact with other communities, and they are so visibly Jewish that they tend to get harassed more.
I would never deny that.
But here when we're talking about this current wave of anti-Semitism, what's being said is that Palestinians primarily, young Arabs are going out in mobs and looking for Jews to attack as Jews.
And you examine those incidents and you look at the video and you look at the context around it, the witness testimony, and I've gathered additional witness testimony, and it just doesn't add up.
What's happening here is a political dispute.
And in many cases, the people on the other side who are pro-Israel, who usually happen to be Jewish but aren't in every case, are instigating the violence or provoking the demonstrators because they're so upset and incensed and disgusted by the sight of a Palestinian flag in Midtown New York.
Now, can we start with the one where somebody threw some kind of firework or firebomb toward Jewish diamond dealers last week?
Is that right?
I mean, it was in the diamond district, but it just happened to be in the diamond district because that's where the march route was.
So it's not like hundreds of Palestinians got together and said, let's go to, let's go there to the diamond district because that's where the Jews are.
And then, so what was the situation with the firebomb?
Can you explain that?
Do you know what happened?
Yeah.
I don't know about a firebomb.
It sounds like there were fireworks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It really did look like maybe a pretty big Roman candle kind of thing or something.
Yeah.
I mean, first of all, like there's no question that there were some knuckleheads and just very angry young men going out to vent their anger at what they're seeing with, in some cases, their own extended families being killed or assaulted.
And I mean, I know people who are in the U.S. who've had family members, like distant family members killed or cousins killed in the Gaza Strip in the recent slaughter.
And they're encountering people on the street who are shouting at them, who are taunting them, who are throwing things at them.
According to several witnesses, this is all around Midtown New York, the violence was instigated by pro-Israel elements who began throwing bottles and whole bottles of juice and water bottles out the window at the Palestine Solidarity March as it proceeded down the street.
It might've been Third Ave.
And then everybody started attacking each other.
So that was the same incident with the firework?
I can't say.
What I can say is that in video that I examined, and according to witness testimony, in every incident, every incident was preceded by some provocation.
So there's one video that I didn't write about that shows a bunch of young ostensibly Palestinian men screaming at diners, and one guy spits on another guy.
And you can see there's no video preceding that to show what precipitated it, but there's a really heavy set white guy shouting at them, calling them cunts, who obviously had shouted something at them.
It wasn't as though, and the guy may not have been Jewish, and there was no way to tell if these diners were Jewish.
Obviously something precipitated that, where these guys were just simply marching down the street with Palestinian flags.
And in New York, you have marches all the time.
It could have been like a union march or something like that, but there's no way to offend people more strongly.
I don't know if you remember going out and protesting the Iraq War, but I remember being heckled, assaulted by passersby in Westwood in LA when we protested at the Federal Building outside the Oscars.
Right-wingers were throwing stuff at us, harassing us, taunting us.
It's the same thing in New York, and that's really what precipitated these incidents.
The main incident that everyone seems to be worked up about that I think prompted condemnations from Andrew Cuomo and Jamal Bowman, who replaced Eliot Engel, very pro-Israel legislator and is now a member of the squad, was the beating of a young man who was said to be wearing a Jewish skullcap or a yarmulke in this same area on this same day, in this same kind of atmosphere, very worked up atmosphere.
And I looked at the video there.
He was being beaten by a crowd of men, for sure, but I looked at the video.
That was shown on Don Lemon's show on CNN, by the way.
They just showed them beating him, and it looked like an anti-Semitic attack that could have been 1930s Europe or something, except that the men were wearing kufiyas and they looked Palestinian, so it totally supports the narrative.
How could you doubt that this incident was just a straight up hate crime by Palestinians who hate Jews?
Then you look at the aftermath.
The guy's wearing a hoodie.
His head is completely covered with a gray hoodie.
In the video, there are photographs of him wearing it as well.
There's no way to tell if he's wearing anything Jewish.
And he gets up after they're kind of wailing on him and tries to charge at them and attack him and has to be held back by police, and he's challenging them to fight him, which is something you don't do if somebody just jumps you out of nowhere and you're completely the victim.
And then there's all this witness testimony from friends of the one guy who was arrested because he was on crutches and couldn't get away, as well as bystanders and people I spoke to who interviewed witnesses.
And they say that there were a group of pro-Israel demonstrators who actually began throwing things at the Palestinians and actually harmed or hit the guy with crutches, and that prompted this giant brawl.
So the young man who was beaten on video, Joseph Borgen from Long Island, he goes on Don Lemon and other shows and says, I was wearing a kippah and I was just walking down the street and they just started beating me.
He was on his way to a pro-Israel demonstration.
That seems to be totally false to me.
And while maybe somebody's guilty of some crime for jumping him and beating him, maybe that's a crime.
This didn't appear to be a hate crime.
It appeared to be a political dispute that may have been provoked by Joseph Borgen himself, who seems to be misleading the media about his own appearance to create the sense of a hate crime.
And that's across the board what we see.
I can go through other incidents.
Some are even more outrageous.
Yeah.
Talk about the one with the two Israelis.
Yeah.
This is, this is the most outrageous incident, or actually it's not.
In Canada we saw more outrageous incidents, but a pair of Israeli citizens named Sneer Dayan and Amit Skornick claimed that they were beaten by a mob of Palestinian American demonstrators for speaking Hebrew in Midtown Manhattan on the same, around the same time as the last incident I described in this same very tense atmosphere.
And one of them said he was just, they were just going to meet for lunch.
They didn't say where, but we're told that it was at a bagel shop.
So this is, was used to kind of enhance the narrative of an anti-Semitic attack that this incident just, but the incident just happened to have, take place in front of a bagel shop.
So I mean, I don't think any of the, anyone there knew there was a bagel shop nearby.
But anyway, one of them said that he had just had a, he put a little Israeli flag on his motorcycle to protest as a, as a quiet protest, but then he took it off, wrapped it around his fist and the video shows him and his friend actually assaulting the Palestinian demonstrators, initiating violence, punching them.
But they go on Fox News and local media claiming that they were, they were assaulted, that they were the victims and they were attacked just for speaking Hebrew.
The once again, the video shows Sneer Dayan throwing the first punch.
I went on their Facebook pages.
It shows that both men are experts in mixed martial arts.
One of them, Amit Skornick, is the son of a famous martial artist in Israel who runs a combat training firm and his grandfather actually helped introduce martial arts to Israeli society.
One of them was actually arrested, Dayan was arrested ostensibly because he initiated the violence and the police were there and they witnessed it.
And it turns out that both of them were Israeli soldiers who had served in the Golani brigades apparently in the 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.
This is a special forces division that helped carry out a massacre in the neighborhood of Shujaia east of Gaza city.
And then after this fight, while they're posing as the victim in English, in Hebrew they go on a right wing Israeli, a national Israeli talk show on channel 13 with this extreme right host and they brag about beating pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
The host even asked them, how many pro-Palestinian demonstrators did you wail away on?
That's the question that interests me the most.
And they just give details of the fight and they're portrayed as heroes in Israel for kicking the asses of the terrorists.
They even go on to set up a GoFundMe page with pictures of them hitting Palestinians that says Jews finally defend themselves.
Do not expect apologies.
And it's a GoFundMe to support the Golani brigade, the special forces brigade that's responsible for atrocities and war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
Once again, none of this is relayed to the American public and it's just registered as an anti-Semitic hate crime or assault.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
And now, so talk about the one in Toronto again now, would you elaborate on that?
On May 15th, which was Nakba Day for Palestinians, the day that they observed their dispossession, the Palestine youth movement held a protest and the assault on Gaza had just begun in Toronto.
And video surfaced or started to filter out into social media showing several members of this Palestine solidarity group with kufiyas on and signs, pro-Palestine signs, beating an older man, a gray haired man with a stick.
And so Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, brother of the great Rob Ford, late great Rob Ford, and the mayor of Toronto, John Tory, denounced them and called it an anti-Semitic hate crime.
He said, hate, anti-Semitism and violence have no place in our city.
Once again, the video was deceptively edited to show exactly what pro-Israel forces wanted.
And when you look at the complete video, which surfaced two days later, it shows that a group of Palestine solidarity demonstrators on their way to a demonstration were assaulted by a gang from the Jewish Defense League, which is a violent extremist organization that's been responsible for assassinations of Palestinians in the U.S.
Alex Odeh from the Arab Anti-Discrimination League, for example, Anti-Discrimination Committee was bombed in his office by this group.
They are a basically a terrorist organization in the West Bank.
And they even, I experienced them, I encountered them when I was in Toronto, I did a talk at the Toronto Public Library, and they attempted to besiege my talk and prevent it from happening.
The organizers had to bring riot cops to basically protect me from, I would say, 14 young men with shaved heads and combat boots in the front row of my talk.
So this is a notoriously violent group that had assaulted them, initiated the fighting.
And the video of these young men hitting this older guy with a stick was actually them defending themselves from that guy who was holding a giant machete.
I mean, he's holding a knife, attempting to stab them.
So actually the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC, did its job, which it hasn't been doing for weeks.
I mean, we're just hearing so many reports about this within the CBC about people being threatened with firing for even using the word Palestinian in the workplace.
I saw that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absurd.
But they actually called John Tory and Doug Ford and said, would you care to revise or retract these statements?
And both of them said our statements stand, you know, screw you.
And now I saw on Twitter going around where there was this long list of anti-Semitic incidents where even in the words of the ADL, well, somebody said Palestine, Palestinians also are humans or, you know, some banal, ridiculous, you know, Palestine will one day be free.
And this is and then they have like a collection of 12 of them.
And as you're saying, you're just supposed to presume the part about translation, genocide of the Israeli Jews.
But no one ever says that.
Well, no one ever reads the report.
You just you're supposed to trust the ADL.
And if you don't trust them, then you're an anti-Semite, too.
And they roll out the report through celebrities.
The NBA promoted the report on its official Twitter account.
Then you have, I mean, the most ridiculous.
I'm not in there, am I?
I gave a speech about this the other day and a lady in the audience got mad.
And the first thing she did was go on Twitter and tag everybody on the right in the world she could think of and lie and accuse me of issuing the blood libel and threatening her and terrifying her and all this stuff, which I'm not a crime victim.
I thought it was kind of funny more than anything.
But I hope I'm not on the ADL's list now, for God's sake, over that.
That would certainly qualify as an incident.
And the ADL doesn't attempt to verify the incidents.
So if that lady called the local ADL chapter in Austin, they would just say, OK, that's an incident.
They wouldn't call you up.
They wouldn't ask witnesses.
It's whatever the the constituent or the caller says.
That's why I tweeted video as this was kind of the narrative was being formed of this documentary defamation.
I know I saw that.
And I'm so glad that you did that.
And in fact, I think you even had it queued up to the best part to where he's at ADL headquarters trying to talk to a Foxman and figure out what the hell is going on around here.
Yeah, a Foxman, what's called defamation.
And Yoav Shamir, an Israeli filmmaker, goes to New York to try to investigate this wave of anti-Semitism that the ADL is claiming is taking place.
And they let him in their offices because they're like, oh, an Israeli.
We love Israel.
And so he gets access to their board meetings and their staff.
And he asked them, is there any incident I can follow up on with my camera so I can show my viewers about, you know, what Jews are going through in New York?
And he goes through all the incidents with one of the staffers.
And she's like, here a man is saying that he didn't get time off from work for Shavuot.
And that was anti-Semitic here.
Another person is saying that they heard someone saying mean things about Jews on it while they were talking on a pay phone.
And he said, well, can I track that down?
They said, we don't know who the caller, who the report came from.
Then a man said that there was anti-Semitic media coverage in the New York Times.
I mean, they just go down the list and it gets more and more absurd until he realizes there was nothing that the ADL had that was actionable that he could follow up on.
And that's what's taken place again.
Now, I didn't watch it again.
I just saw you tweet it and I remembered it.
The one that I remember was that jumped out at me for whatever reason stuck with me was a Jewish lady in New York was walking down the street and somebody in a car yelled something and she wasn't sure what.
And she was pretty sure it was something about, you know, let's have another Holocaust or something.
I mean, this all started, well, I mean, it didn't all start there.
The first major anti-Semitic attack was a car caravan and in the UK somewhere and some, you just saw, you heard audio from a megaphone of someone shouting something like, like rape their mothers or something.
Yeah.
I saw that.
Yeah.
Rape their mothers and their daughters.
Right.
And was that supposed to be, that was in New York City?
I thought that was in England.
No, it was in like London or somewhere.
Right.
But it caused like a national furor, like it caused, like I think Boris Johnson denounced it.
I mean, we have Joe Biden denouncing anti-Semitism here and Cuomo is sending out state troopers to guard synagogues and all Jewish institutions this week in response to this.
So it's gone absolutely bonkers.
You know, I mean, the thing is, too, is this really unfair to just regular Jewish people who are being made to be so afraid of a threat?
You know, it's like any one of these conspiracy theories where, you know, this thing is coming to get you, you better be afraid all the time and you got innocent people and a lot of times people who are like mentally ill and this is the kind of thing that pushes them over the edge into full fledged crazy is this kind of stress like, oh my God, they're coming for us.
You know?
Yeah.
It's sort of the way they did with the Russians taking over the country through their secret agent Donald Trump and all that.
A lot of, you know, well-meaning liberals were terrified out of their wits by that, you know?
No, you.
That's a great point.
I mean, I've always said that Zionism does brain damage and, you know, you're not able to look at the world as it is if Zionism is part of your identity.
And once you start questioning the reality on the ground in Israel, Palestine, you're quite, you have to question your own identity, which is terrifying for most people.
So it's much more comfortable to allow yourself to be put under psychological lockdown.
And in this, in this case, physical lockdown by a narrative ginned up by powerful forces designed to shield a far away apartheid state from international accountability.
And so, and I hate to say it, but, you know, in an ironic way, many Jews in the United States are, are being victimized, but not in the way they think they are.
They're just being, they're being turned into, you know, self-made victims who are frightened of their neighbors, frightened of other people.
They're being turned xenophobic and racist, and they're making common cause with people who, and forces that are not actually, they're friends.
Look at what's happening in the UK, Tommy Robinson, one of the biggest xenophobes and a literal neo-fascist shows up to a pro-Israel rally and he's welcomed like a star.
It's like a rock star arrived.
Everyone's trying to take a selfie with him.
He's the hero.
It was so embarrassing to the mainstream pro-Israel groups that planned it, that they actually had to denounce him.
But the people there have been so, have had their brains so hijacked by Zionism that they welcome him as their protector and hero, along with the English Defense League.
Tommy Robinson comes from the British National Party, which banned Jews.
No Jews were allowed to join and it officially denied the Holocaust.
That's where this is all leading, along with just the kind of perception created of Jews by other people, that we're all just being used as a human shield to defend this apartheid state that Jews are deeply divided on.
There's this fake image of a consensus over Israel, that that's part of our identity.
Imagine you're part of a currently oppressed minority group in the US, which is experiencing police violence, which is experiencing poverty and deprivation.
The best thing that the Biden stimulus did for you is let you pay off your landlord for another month.
You're getting nothing from the system.
Then you see these wealthy people, affluent people, or whatever, middle class people whining about something that is completely abstract.
You see them defending the brutalization of an indigenous people.
How is that not going to fuel antisemitism?
That's what happens.
That's what takes place.
That's something that the Israeli government wants.
It's something that it benefits from.
Benjamin Netanyahu wants antisemitism to take place and to grow in the West, because it's one of the only ways he can convince Jews to move to Israel, which is one of the most dangerous places for Jews to live.
It's why after the attacks on Jews in Paris, which were antisemitic attacks on the kosher supermarket in Paris, when Netanyahu showed up there, he didn't say, I stand with your community in 2015.
He didn't say, Israel will do everything it can through its embassy and its consular services to support you here.
He said, come to Israel.
There's no life for you in France.
Leave your country.
That's something that previous Israeli prime ministers have done and said as well, going back to Ben-Gurion, who said that Jews should all move to Israel and that he would aim to build a small kibbutzim across the Negev desert to accommodate them.
Under his watch, the Zionist movement in the Israeli state actually took steps to depopulate Jewish communities in and across the Middle East, specifically the bombing of Jewish community centers in Baghdad, which was carried out by the Zionist underground and blamed on Arab extremists.
That helped end the Iraqi Jewish community.
It was carried out with the knowledge of the Israeli government.
Yeah.
And that's all in Sheldon Richman's book, Coming to Palestine, by the way, too.
And that really, and when you say the end of the Iraqi Jewish community, you mean the one that had lived there for 3000 years, right?
Yeah.
The one that was- The last I read, there were eight left.
There were 80 at the time of Bush's invasion in 03, but this was 10 years ago now, Max, was the last note I could find on it.
There were eight Jews left in Baghdad.
Yeah.
I mean, they live in almost in secret and there are about 20 in Egypt, which suffered through similar incidents, the Levant Affair.
But the Jews in Iraq, they were part of the community that has a direct lineage to, for example, the allegorical story of Jonah, or in Arabic, Yunus, in Nineveh, Nineveh, Iraq.
Jonah and then the whale.
That's how deeply connected they were to that civilization.
And for those who don't know what the Levant Affair was, David Ben-Gurion recruited Jewish Egyptians as spies to place bombs in theaters and other public areas as a means of blaming the violence on the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists, the two main groups that were enemies of Gamal Abdel Nasser, in order to spark a British intervention that would prevent Nasser from nationalizing the Suez Canal.
The spies were caught.
All Jews were held collectively responsible and seen as potential Zionist spies.
And it was sort of the final blow to the Jewish community of Egypt.
And this is something, again, the Zionist movement welcomes.
Zionism cannot continue on unless they win the demographic trench battle with Palestinians.
That's why, you know, freeing Soviet Jewry was so important, because this brought 1.5 million Jews, many of them with no connection to the Jewish religion, from Russia to Israel.
That's why it was such a priority of the Zionist movement.
And so creating a specter of anti-Semitism where none exists serves the goals of the contemporary Zionist movement, whether it's to prompt Jews to make what's known as Aliyah and emigrate to Israel, or to just simply ensnare them in the Zionist mentality of xenophobia and fear and rallying around the Israeli flag as a pillar of your identity.
And think about how sick it is, right, that you have the Zionists and then also, and I'm not being broad brushed with this, I mean, the literal actual white supremacists who agree that, yeah, Jews are always aliens wherever they are, and they're not real Americans.
The average American, that would be news to them.
Who would have thought that?
Only the worst Zionists and the worst Nazis agree about that.
I mean, it's a terrible thing, I think, for a hardcore Zionist to see how normalized Jews are in American life, how cherished we are, how much a part of the culture we are.
And I think it's a reason why we don't have a Jewish American museum, an American Jewish museum in Washington.
It's a museum we deserve for all the contributions we've made to this country.
I think we played a defining role in this country.
Instead, we have a Holocaust museum about a genocide that occurred not in the United States.
There were genocides here that didn't take, they didn't consist of Jews as victims.
Why is that?
And why is the Holocaust museum used as a platform for promoting war?
Why is Elliott Abrams on the committee of conscience of the Holocaust museum, along with the who's who of war criminal neocons?
It's just absolutely disgusting and shows the kind of terminal phase of Zionism and where it's going, using, weaponizing the Holocaust to make the case for war on people in the global South.
Hey, y'all check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone, but this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive Libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show interviews, 2004-2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
You can find them all at LibertarianInstitute.org slash books.
Thanks.
All right.
Now here's something that keeps coming up.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Well, that means it won't be Israel anymore.
It'll all be Palestine.
And then that means that they're going to kill all of the Israeli Jews.
And you would be stupid and insane and naive and crazy to think otherwise.
And so you're siding with the enemy.
Right.
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And so when you're calling for it to be free, you're simply calling for a binational state where everyone enjoys equal rights.
And those who think that that chant is an anti-Semitic slur are saying the opposite, that there must be an ethno-supremacist entity or an entity that defines one ethno-religious group as superior to the other according to the law, in the eyes of the law.
And yet those people tend not to feel the same in the United States when white nationalists call for a white Christian state in the US that recognizes white Christians as either superior or seeks to create ethno-exclusive domains for that group to live, and calls for the ethnic cleansing of minority groups as, for example, Richard Spencer called for, this cartoonish white nationalist.
They oppose that with all their heart.
I mean, the ADL fights those groups, but that's the project of Zionism.
That's the project in apartheid Israel.
And so when you're chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, you have to really stretch your imagination, or your imagination has been completely warped by Zionist indoctrination.
You have to do that to see that chant as a call for Jewish genocide.
And that's what the ADL does.
Well, so are you being naive about the danger to Israeli Jews if they tore down the wall and just said, fine, everybody between the river and the sea gets full citizenship and nationality, which in Israel, Sheldon Richman always emphasizes this, and this is, as far as he knows, unheard of anywhere in the world, where you do have people inside the so-called 67 borders who are Palestinian Muslims and Christians who are citizens of Israel, but their nationality is Muslim or Christian or nothing, and only Jews can have the true Israeli nationality.
And that's this weird double standard.
And it's on their passport and in their papers, right?
Yeah.
They used to be on Palestinians or on Arab citizens of Israel's passports, it used to say their religion.
And so, okay, I always bring this up, but it's the most apt kind of comparison, I think.
It's this stupid old Thomas Jefferson at his worst in, I think, Notes on Virginia, where he says about the slaves, well, we have the wolf by his ears and we can neither safely hold him nor let him go because, oh, then he's going to bite my face off.
But of course, we're talking about human beings, not wolves, and he got no right to hold them.
But I guess the real question though is, Max, is there real reason to fear that these Palestinian Muslims and Christians are then going to bite the Israelis' faces off and push them all into the sea and genocide them and destroy them?
Or they're going to say, nah, bygones are bygones.
Let's all share this by national state with civil rights for all.
I mean, these are the questions that I hate getting into.
I remember I was doing some talk.
That's what people are terrified about, right?
So that's really the crux of it, because they'll do anything to prevent that.
Well, I would say that that's the mainstream Jewish-Israeli mentality that Netanyahu has successfully appealed to.
It's at the heart of his appeal, is that if we give one inch, they will commit genocide against us.
And that mentality has given rise to policies for so many decades that you have a generation of Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip, who have never met a Jewish person who was not in a drone or an F-15 attack jet.
They don't see the Star of David unless a Merkava tank or armored personnel carrier enters their neighborhood and starts killing them.
I was standing in the ...
I was walking through the rubble of Shuja'iyah, this neighborhood that was destroyed in July 2014 by an Israeli invasion and then basically carpet bombing of the neighborhood because the infantry forces, the Golani and Givati brigades, got routed by the local resistance forces.
So they just bombed everyone into smithereens.
So everyone's kind of hanging out in the rubble of their homes, making these little ... they're barbecuing or whatever they can.
It's like an apocalyptic scene.
And I start talking to a nice older man, he's like 60 years old, through a friend who speaks fluent Arabic.
And the guy's telling me about how he used to work in Israel.
And he used to go up to Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, and he would work selling ... he'd sell fish and work in the markets there.
And he spoke fluent Hebrew.
But that's closed off.
And then the youth around him were saying things about Israelis that was ... it was like they weren't speaking about humans.
They were speaking about just like a completely abstract enemy that represented Judaism as its essence.
So the mentality, the difference in the mentality or the psychological perception of Israelis and you can extrapolate from that, Jews, between these two generations was enormous.
It was a gargantuan ... there was a gargantuan gulf there.
And that's the gulf that Israel has created first through its own mentality of seeing Palestinians as these genocidal Nazis who have to be held behind walls.
And then the policy that has been implemented for decades now.
Those generations are going to be harder and harder to actually reconcile with one another.
Then look at Israeli youth.
Every Israeli Democracy Index poll consistently shows Jewish-Israeli youth far more racist than their parents and grandparents.
And that is part of the Israeli curriculum.
They teach them to hate.
Is that right?
They teach their children to hate.
Nurit Pele Delhanan is an Israeli academic who has done a great study of Israeli school books that shows how Palestinians are perceived.
And when they teach them to hate, it isn't just because they love to hate Palestinians.
It's because Jewish-Israeli youth have to be convinced to conscript into the military and to carry out the burden of occupation enforcement.
And so there's pretty much no other way to do that than to instill anti-Palestinian, fear-based mentalities and to tell them that the Holocaust is something that we're still living through and it can happen at any time.
So I mean, these are the victims of Zionism.
There should be a Victims of Zionism Memorial Foundation in Washington someday because they've all been subjected to this political project that's completely failed.
And this is the mentality that's been created.
And it is a project that aims to separate people and prevent them from having any reconciliation project.
It's actually much more difficult than South Africa.
What I was told by white Afrikaners and Jewish South Africans is that one of the things that made reconciliation possible was that so many white South African families would have black service workers or like black maids.
They would have some kind, and they would get to know their families.
You don't see that very much, although there are some like a lot of Arab doctors in Israel, for example.
You don't see that kind of contact.
You see more and more separation, and especially after the current round, where inside...
You're not talking about just among the occupied territories, but among the one fifth of the population that are Palestinian citizens of Israel too?
Well, after the current round, I mean, you saw mobs of organized extremists attacking Palestinians in Bat Yam, which is a mixed city, 15 minutes south of Tel Aviv.
Okay, but if we just rewound to like, I don't know, eight months ago, do Israeli Jews live in fear of the one fifth of their population that's not Jewish?
We're talking in so-called Israel proper here, not the occupied territories?
Or they see them as what, domesticated, but somehow totally different than their brothers on the other side of the wall, or what?
Well, they had this idea that they could be domesticated, and it's...
What I always say about the Israel-Palestine crisis is it's very simple to understand the conflict between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, but the internal dynamics of Jewish and Palestinian society are the complex parts.
You do have parts of Palestinian or Arab society inside Israel that have been co-opted or absorbed into the Israeli state, like the Druze, for example.
Some of the Christians in the Galilee are way different than Palestinians in the West Bank, for example.
They're doing very well with their businesses.
They don't want any trouble.
In Jaffa, where I spent a lot of time, I spent several months there, the Palestinian shopkeepers don't want anything to do with any protest activity.
But for the most part, Jewish Israelis view the 20% of their population that is not Jewish as Thomas Jefferson described slaves, as a tiger by the tail, a wolf by the ears.
And while they really want to absorb them, and they want them to be more, I guess, integrated, the fear is that they're going to rise up and eject them along with their brothers and sisters in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
And that nightmare of so many Jewish Israelis, it was realized this time, this month, when you saw what the mainstream media has called intercommunal violence, which is just an absurd way to put it, because Palestinians were rising up against the occupation that they feel internally inside Israel, and the police and the security forces of Israel were overstretched because of what was already happening in Jerusalem and the escalation in Gaza.
And so they worked with Jewish extremist groups and even brought them in from the settlements in the West Bank through WhatsApp groups, and used them as paramilitary forces to attack Palestinians in the streets of all the mixed cities, Haifa, I mentioned Bat Yam, but Haifa, Akka, way in the north in Israel.
There were mobs just rampaging, and you saw video footage of Palestinian storefronts being smashed by Jewish youth in a night of broken glass.
The police were there.
There's copious reporting in alternative Hebrew language media and Israeli media about the role the police played in presiding over this violence or helping to coordinate it.
It played a purpose, getting that monster back in the box, getting the wolf back by the ears.
And now what we've been seeing for the past three or four days is hundreds and hundreds of arrests, particularly in Jerusalem, of Palestinian youth at their homes and processing them through the quote unquote justice system to ensure that this never happens again.
One guy during the victory celebrations, Palestinians considered what took place in Gaza a victory.
I would consider it definitely a political victory.
They were parading through Jerusalem, through the old city where they had just been humiliated, and the border guards there were outnumbered.
They were, I mean, you could see they were being humiliated.
One guy filmed himself giving the finger to a border guard, and that video went viral.
The police came for him just for giving the finger to a border guard on social media, and they prominently arrested this young guy.
So in the mind of Jewish Israelis, they were just subjected to a pogrom.
They were just, they were victimized by these anti-Semitic haters who live among them.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, I'm sorry I'm keeping you over time at this point.
Can I get another couple of minutes and you give us a quick and dirty summary of the aftermath and the casualties from the recent slaughter in Gaza here, Max?
Well, the opposing sides measure success by different metrics, and anyone listening to this will understand that, and understands how guerrilla warfare works.
It's a protracted battle.
The escalation was part of a wider war between the armed factions in the Gaza Strip, led by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, and the Israeli military that has been waged since the Gaza Strip was placed under siege and Ariel Sharon withdrew Jewish settlers from the area.
And they're waging all out military ...
I mean, it's gotten to the point where these are almost two conventional militaries fighting each other.
The Al-Qassam Brigades are confident enough to actually confront Israel directly.
And while Israel killed something like 250 Palestinians inside Gaza, mostly civilians, including over 60 children, they scored no ...
There were no military successes of note.
They achieved nothing strategically.
Hamas politically- How is that possible in what's essentially a canned hunt, in where the Israelis have all of the intelligence capability in the world to target their forces, right?
Well, that should be the case.
They have a really strong snitch network inside the Gaza Strip, where they claim to have like a collaborator on every block.
They've compromised so many people there.
That's how they conduct a lot of targeted assassinations, and determine where Hamas leadership is.
They have drones overhead that can see everything.
Israeli intelligence possesses the entire civil registry of the Gaza Strip, so they know where everyone lives.
And yet, their major operation failed, which they had been preparing for for years, which was to fake an invasion of the Gaza Strip, which I thought would have been insane, because they always get smashed in the face.
And these Israeli infantry troops don't actually do anything but beat up popcorn salesmen in the West Bank.
And for the record, that story broke when we were in the middle of an interview last week, and I said, oh, they're saying they're invading, and you said, nah, they're not.
They're just attacking from the ground, probably calling out artillery.
But you called that correctly from the beginning.
Yeah.
I mean, I just thought it would have been an act of desperation.
I mean, that's exactly what the Al-Qassam Brigades would have wanted, and it would have led to a major humiliation of Israeli forces.
But I didn't know what the logic behind it was.
It was a feint in order to trigger Hamas leadership, including the prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and the chief of staff of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Daif, who's the top target of the Israelis there, along with all of their forces to go into this tunnel network that the Israelis had spent years figuring out.
And they believed that the top targets would go into these bunkers around the Al-Shifa Hospital in central Gaza City.
And so after they faked the invasion, the JDAM 5,000-pound bunker busters came raining down on the hospital and all across the Gaza Strip.
Over 50 sorties were flown by the Israelis.
They bombed the main highway going from north to south in Gaza.
They bombed all over the Gaza Strip.
And at least 50 civilians were killed, two families were wiped out, and zero important targets of Hamas were killed.
They did not go into the tunnels because, I mean, look, if it took me, if I, sitting in Washington, D.C., with my knowledge of the Gaza Strip, can figure out that they're not actually taking that step, I think that these guys who've lived there their whole lives, and this prime minister who has spent 24 years in an Israeli prison, I think they can figure out that something's funny as well.
So that was it.
They failed.
And from that point on, the Israelis were just attacking civilian towers.
As an Israeli pilot said, he was quoted on Israeli Channel 12 saying, we attacked those targets because we were just venting our frustration because Hamas kept hitting us and we couldn't stop them from hitting us.
And their rocket capacity was unprecedented.
It showed the failure of all of the previous wars that Israel waged on Gaza, all the previous assaults, because they were able to hit Tel Aviv with sustained rocket fire throughout an entire night.
They hit, as far as Netanya, which is north of Tel Aviv, the rockets were, they had evacuated the city of Ashkelon and hit an oil refining facility.
There were constant, there was constant rocket fire.
And in some cases it exposed flaws in the Iron Dome system.
So the Israelis being unable to achieve any military goals in the Gaza Strip was forced into a unilateral ceasefire.
And then everything else that we have talked about for this whole conversation was unfolding as well, where their global support was bottoming out.
And these rallies, which we saw in places in the U.S. where there haven't been rallies.
I mean, you're talking about speaking at one in Austin.
It's not a place that I- No, mine was in, this was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, actually, a Libertarian Party event.
I mean, that's still remarkable.
I have not heard of anything much in Pittsburgh, and I heard about rallies in Pensacola, Las Vegas, Kansas City.
This is a, Israel's also waging an information war.
To be clear, Max, it was not an event about Palestine.
It was just, that's what I chose to speak about at a Libertarian State Party convention there.
Right, right, right.
Okay.
Well, so we lost Pittsburgh, but the point stands, which is that the political defeat Israel suffered was a serious blow, even though obviously the Gaza Strip suffered enormously in terms of human and infrastructure damage.
And the mentality of the two populations is totally different.
Palestinians are fighting for their liberation.
Israelis are fighting to maintain a first world lifestyle in a settler colonial setting.
And so Palestinians can weather losses.
I think what the ultimate outcome for the political factions and the armed factions in the Gaza Strip was a confirmation of the correctness of their strategy of military confrontation as a means of liberation.
Their alliances that have been consolidated since the end of the Arab Spring with Iran the overall resistance axis, Hezbollah, Syria, and a rejection of the so-called peace process, the idea that the West might broker some kind of agreement with Palestinians that would allow them to have a decent life without occupation.
That is completely over.
Also an end to the strategy of protests at the border or the frontiers of the Gaza Strip, like the Great March of Return that we witnessed, where so many Palestinians had their legs shot out.
They were killed, shot in the heart, shot in the head.
Yasser Murtaja, a very renowned Palestinian journalist, was shot in the chest and killed with a press vest on.
They're not going to suffer that humiliation again.
From now on, it's just straight up military confrontation.
We can take the Israelis.
And then the final point that registered, I think, was that Hamas can change the reality on the ground in Jerusalem, because this war began, as we talked about in the last conversation, it began over Jerusalem, over the status of Al-Aqsa, as Israel supported these extremists, religious extremists, who want to actually destroy the Al-Aqsa compound and replace it with the Jewish temple, and also over the home thefts in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
The war began over that.
Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem as a statement about that.
They broke out of Gaza.
So this is a new reality.
And Israel has no military means of changing the momentum.
And that's, I mean, if Israel has no military means, they don't really have any other weapons at their disposal, because they've also lost the battle for public opinion.
And as we can see in Washington, the momentum is fading.
Well, you know, Max, I never have really studied the IDF's order of battle.
I guess I should look into this, but they must have vast armored divisions that they just have not used, right?
The kinds of military strength that they would deploy in the event of another war with Egypt, for example, is they don't use that against the Palestinians.
What they do, far be it for me to call it measured or limited or anything like that, but sort of the same thing with Hezbollah in 2006, where if they'd given it their all, then it would have been a different story.
But as it was, Hezbollah was able to hand their ass to them with what they were willing to deploy at the time, which was only, I don't know what percent of their actual strength.
Am I wrong about that?
I mean, there should be a competition for the most useless weapons platform between the F-35 and the Merkava tank, because I can't think of any good use for the Merkava tank.
They barely were able to make it, the Israeli tank battalions were barely able to make it into Southern Lebanon before they had to go into full retreat and blanket the area with missiles and artillery fire.
It was a turkey shoot.
The reason is that these tanks, as well-made as they might be, I mean, we all know they have a soft underbelly, but they're very well-made tanks.
Their cannons are great.
It's one of the few platforms actually the U.S. allows Israel to make, because we insist that they buy our F-15s, but there's nowhere for them to operate within the kind of settler colonial situation Israel's created.
They're not going to have this massive battle over the Sinai Peninsula with Egyptian tanks, and so it's not very good for occupation enforcement or for fighting these guerrilla forces like Hezbollah or Hamas that have the cornet anti-tank guided missile, which is just freely available now.
In the Gaza Strip, there's this vast ...
I wouldn't call it a vast area, but there is an area of farmland and kind of a no man's land right outside the fences around Gaza.
For the first time, Hamas has been patrolling these areas with drones that were created inside the Gaza Strip, the Shehab drone.
You can go on some of the telegram channels of the factions in the Gaza Strip, and they'll show footage that they filmed from those drones.
They were able to detect Israeli armor coming within the range of cornet missiles that could be fired from sand berms on the Palestinian side of the Gaza Strip.
On May 15th, as soon as a Merkava tank got near the Gaza Strip, there was no one in it.
It was being towed.
It was hit.
We saw towards the end, an empty bus got hit with a cornet.
The Israelis were not actually even able to bring their armor or vehicles as close to the Gaza Strip as they had in the past.
The dynamics are constantly shifting, and it highlights the weakness of the Israeli military.
This is why so many Israeli ministers and politicians are calling for an all out assault on the Gaza Strip, kind of like a Stalingrad assault on Gaza City that crushes Hamas once and for all, that rounds up or kills all its leadership.
That means basically a reoccupation of the Gaza Strip.
It would go the same way as Stalingrad.
It would provoke an existential crisis for Israeli society.
I really see no way out of this for Israel.
Israel has only been able to bomb its way out of crises, and it can't bomb its way out of this one.
I saw a thing where Norman Finkelstein, I guess it was with Katie Halper, said, look, they could have gotten away with it if they just let the Palestinians have the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and East Jerusalem and have their independent state and let Palestinian refugees in the other countries come home, at least to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, if not Israel proper.
The entire world, as far as the national government of every other power on earth is what he's referring to, would have let them get away with it.
Every power on earth signed on to the Israel project over there.
The only crisis is this whole thing where they kidnapped all these Palestinians and they're holding them in the dungeon.
They don't have a way to let go of them because they want that land, and they're not willing to give up that land.
Yeah.
I think that's sort of a fundamental misreading of the Jewish-Israeli mindset and history.
There's a great chapter in Tom Segev's book, 1967.
He's a revisionist Israeli historian who's produced a lot of important work on the myths of Israel.
It's about 1966.
This is such a seminal year in Israeli history.
Israeli society was coming apart at the seams.
Mizrahi Jews, Jews from the Arab world were leaving.
They didn't feel any place there.
It was a small society filled with people from around the world who had very little in common with one another that was uncertain about its survival.
The 1967 war was basically this cathartic release for religious Israelis, or even Israelis who were not that religious, who were struggling for some kind of unifying symbol, had really nowhere to go.
Young men were initiated into the Israeli military at Masada.
It was one of the historic sites they could access.
The whole West Bank, with all of these sites, religious sites that were rich with meaning because of their connection to the prophets and the fathers and mothers of the Jewish people and the Bible, were just sitting there in Palestinian hands, or you had the old city in the hands of the Jordanians.
All of that was suddenly opened up in 1967, and it totally transformed Israeli society.
It was a cathartic release of just pent up political, religious aggression and frustration.
You saw labor Zionists, who previously were atheists, become religious nationalists in waves.
The access to Hebron was so seminal.
That's where Abraham and Sarah were from.
You see what a wretched, apartheid hell it is now, and that's because they're protecting these little springs where Abraham was said to bathe.
That was so meaningful for Israeli society.
Meanwhile, the minds of the military intelligence apparatus believed that if Palestinians were to enjoy any autonomy in core cities in the West Bank, that the desire for autonomy would spread to Palestinian areas in what was Israel.
Moshe Dayan said that explicitly.
He said if we give them Nablus, the next thing they're going to ask for is Haifa and Jaffa.
That mentality prevails today.
There will be no Palestinian state.
There will be no right of return.
There will be no capital in any part of East Jerusalem until there is a binational state.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
We're just going to have to make that the subject of another interview right there, but it certainly is the consensus now that's represented by the Human Rights Watch report and the B'Tselem report now that the game is up as far as pretending there will be a two-state solution and the peace process toward independence and all that.
So now that that's over, here comes the crack up, and that's the big controversy.
So we'll continue to interview you, Max, and keep up with all of that and read you at The Gray Zone, too.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Really happy to have you on.
Hey, everybody, that's Max Blumenthal, and listen, I screwed up at the beginning.
I meant to say also that he wrote the book Management of Savagery.
People ask me about my book enough already a lot of times.
In fact, this has come up many times.
People say, well, what other books go along with this real close?
And I say, well, there's Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East, and of course, Max Blumenthal's Management of Savagery is almost the same book as mine, only different, but it's about all the same stuff and is really great, and you guys really like it.
And of course, he runs The Gray Zone at thegrayzone.com, and Killing Gaza is the documentary from the 2014 war.
You gotta see that, okay?
Do me a favor, go watch that.
And then Goliath is his Goliath of a book about the state of Israel and the 51-Day Wars, the book he wrote about that 2014 war, too, and I think that's all I got to say about that.
Thanks, you guys.
