Did Netanyahu know October 7th was coming Why did he fund Hamas Who are the se

how long have you lived in israel been there for about 10 years 10 years um so we're just talking off camera and i'm first of all thank you for doing this pleasure thanks for having me uh it's impossible to really understand anything from the united states because the filters and the propaganda are just so restrictive but it seems obvious that october 7th is the beginning of a global reshuffling certainly of of the middle east we haven't spent enough time thinking through what that was what was that i think to properly understand october the 7th you have to you have to put together kind of a timeline i think what's been lacking here you know i talked to a lot of palestinians and they tell me a lot about how they they portray the war as something that sort of began after october the 7th which is another problem we can get to at some point the israelis chalk it up to you know the act of a rabid anti-semite i have no doubt that he was he was quite possibly an anti-semite he you're speaking of yeah he has in water yeah the leader of now yeah now dead yeah um but it doesn't mean that there wasn't a logic it doesn't mean that this happened when it happened and how it happens for us so just to be clear about what you're saying so from the palestinian perspective everything we're seeing now is a result of the events after october 7th and from the israeli perspective october 7th happened just because they're hated unreasonably well i guess what i often find is when i speak to palestinians and they're not wrong to say that the backdrop of all this is that there has been an occupation for a very long time you know we've been occupied since 48 which i understand but it still doesn't explain the specifics of october 7th right it explains why at some point something like that could or quite possibly should have happened right um and so that's that's been something i focused on a lot and i think if you want to put together a proper answer you have to put together a timeline you have to go back you have to trace basically the existence and the trajectory of hamas from the rise to power but the real breaking point i'll say is uh 2021 what happened in 2021 three things happened in 2021 um 2021 you have tensions at al-aksa mosque um you have famously all the tensions that went on in shikhtarrah where there were settlers taking palestinian homes in east rusalem that caused a lot of tension uh what happened at at the al-aksa complex there were all kinds of clashes between uh israeli border police and uh muslim worshipers um and this went on for for some time it was also uh it was may it was may and what happened was that three things happened hamas fired rockets into israel killing about 14 israelis riots broke out in the middle of israel across the country actually internal riots between arab israelis and israeli jews and suddenly the west bank woke up from a very long slumber suddenly you had for the first time in a very long time militants who are firing at idf troops i remember seeing videos of of i think it must have been hundreds of palestinian men marching towards the border did i think they were going to enter no but i remember calling my father i remember calling him saying this video i'm seeing this doesn't look good this is an indication of something and in the israeli media if you look back at the reports the israelis perceive this to be an indication that we have a big threat from within this contributed also to the rise of the right in the years that followed um so the first order of business was we have arab israelis and they're they're a problem we have two million palestinians within our borders and the next thing that happened and you saw the borders of israel yeah within the board within the 48 borders yeah yeah between the sea and the green line yeah and then you had over the next year or two you might remember um increased operations by the idf suddenly in nablus which is i used to be called the terror capital of palestine suddenly there was a new militia that formed it's called lion's den suddenly in janine the refugee camps in the north of the west bank there are armed men doing military marches with m16s and masks on and that was the second order of business and the last thing that the israelis believed was that hamas firing some sort of like water pipe rockets into israel was an indication of something to come something much bigger to come so what was this i mean as you said you could trace this all the way back to the you know british mandate or whatever you could trace as far back as you wanted but you think this really began with clashes between is both israeli citizens arabs and jews within israel and um in 2021 so how did that lead to not exactly what i think is that and this is why you have to go a little further back sorry yeah this is a bit of a um i think that the internal rides were absolutely meaningless i think what happened in the west bank was somewhat meaningful and i'll and i can explain later why i don't think it had any end to it why it wasn't going to come to any significant end but what happened in 2021 why hamas fired rockets no one bothered to ask why are they suddenly firing rockets hamas came to power in 2007 i think it was 2007 yeah they come to power and this is a group that overthrew the pa right they tossed palestine authority they tossed them off rooftops took control of gaza and they came why would people why would people have wanted them or why do they think that the palestinians deserve them rather than the pa they were saying we're a resistance group we're palestinians we were exiled in 48 and the whole purpose of our existence in one way or another is to get back and so unlike the pa we're not going to sit and make peace with the jews we're not going to sort of like coordinate with them we're not going to arrest people at their behest we're going to fight and that's what they did from 20 2007 to 2014 i think you have three to four ground invasions if i'm not mistaken and so they were doing kind of they were fulfilling their promise they didn't win they didn't liberate palestine um but what did happen is that hamas didn't have a lot of political tension because they were either fighting being bombed or people were cleaning up the rebel but in 2014 just bear with me a moment in 2014 suddenly silence falls upon gaza i think this was a silence that i don't know if hamas even predicted that such a silence would ever come upon gaza the israeli certainly wanted it it's the last word called suketan in hebrew it's the last war the israelis you know bombed a bunch of tunnels there were some ground operations lots of strikes and it was kind of this thing where they came and said look we sent them back i think the quote from the general at the time was we sent them back 50 years or 100 years or to the stone age whatever it was but that's a bit of a problem for hamas you're you're a group of gritty sort of nitty-gritty resistance fighters you came to power you fought some wars didn't win you didn't get totally beat and now you're just bureaucrats now you have to go from grit to governance and that's fine maybe for a year maybe for two because the next big battle is coming what happens three four or five years later at some point people are sitting there they have a they have a much lower quality of life than people in the west bank palestines in the west bank at the very least can come into israel for years and years and years half of them illegally in work make an israeli salary go back home in gaza you know they didn't have a whole lot going for them and i think at some point in time maybe around 2018 it became clear that i think people were kind of starting to ask the question is like what okay if we picked you and you're supposed to fight and now we're just eating here we might as well get the pa back and you say that you don't sit down with the jews and you don't recognize the jews and you're not going to make peace with them but like you talk to them on a weekly basis you just have some egyptian guy in the middle playing telephone tag and i think that the leader of hamas i think yahya sinwar um i think he understood that i think around 2018 he began to understand that like this is not a sustainable this is not something sustainable can't keep going like this when do you think um the planning for october 7th began and what was the thinking look in terms of the planning if you're talking about the concrete steps look i'm not an intelligence analyst um from what we know i think from what was released uh we understand that sometime in october 2022 it might have the real planning could have been underway the conceptual planning for something of this sort i think had been working within sinwar since he was probably a teenager i mean there's a famous quote i think he did i think he did the interview in hebrew which is like all the more it's eerie it's crazy interview and he's sitting on a plastic chair outside and they asked him something about you know do you want to do you want to kill us do you want war with us and he goes listen right now you're strong you've got nuclear bombs i can't i can't i can't touch you but in 20 maybe 15 years you're gonna be weak inside and that's when i'm gonna strike you and in 2018 yaya sinwar gave an interview it's crazy because you know i think we were just talking about this before we started jeffrey goldberg of the atlantic he put out a piece called sinwar's march of folly i think it came out in the summer august september and he ventured an argument as to why sinwar could have done something so stupid and i'm bracketing morals here i'm not talking about whether he was you know good or bad i'm just talking about you know conceptually speaking like the pure analysis of it yeah yeah exactly and he had this line i wrote i read this i must have read this piece four to five times and unto this day i can't understand what he meant he said something to the effect of yahya sinwar fell prey to muslim brotherhood supremacy conspiracism and he lacked reasoning capabilities something out of like a first-year philosophy paper he wrote a couple books in prison didn't he in the decades he spent in prison he wrote one book one book a novel yeah yeah something of the road i forget the name the carnation and the eagle or something yeah yeah yeah yeah and he was reading quite a bit he'd have people he'd read a lot uh sort of like old right so he's not an illiterate savage whatever you think i'm not endorsing he could be a savage he could but he wasn't an illiterate savage he was definitely literate yeah he definitely had reasoning capabilities yeah you can use reasoning capabilities to do very very bad things people do all the time he did he did but again uh that's not the point it's probably pretty obvious by now that you definitely need the hallow app you need peace and the hallow app can bring you there and there's something pretty great starting on hallow starting april 13th mark walberg begins a new series called stay prayed up his message is simple go to church take your faith seriously and pray and hallow can help you with the last one millions follow that routine on sundays then monday comes your life gets busy the connection to god fades now with hallow hallow offers daily prayer challenges not just encouragement but structure a way to actually live out your prayers prayer is not complicated but it's hard it is a discipline it's about opening yourself up to god's will relinquishing control and letting god lead your life and that can absolutely change your life in fact it's the only thing that can change your life hallow helps users embrace the rhythm of prayer and scripture into their regular routines listen reflect let it speak into your day that's what it means to say prayed up showing up daily even when you don't feel like it and when you do that god meets you directly so stay prayed up download hallow today for three months for free at hallowed.com slash tucker there's nothing we recommend more strongly than this so goldberg's analysis which is to say again goldberg is not even like a real person he's like a symbol of the american ruling class's conversations with itself but he's reporting back to his masters there's no reason behind this he's just i don't know if he was reporting back to his masters like i don't know jeffrey goldberg i don't know who he reports to if he reports in the media ecosystem in the united states that's considered like the highest level of think peace so i don't know if he was reporting to anyone but i he certainly believes i would assume he believes he wrote a whole essay on it that this was all just uh rabid anti-semitism and a failed and the worst part about the piece is that he already determines the success he claims it's his march of folly meaning he failed not only was he stupid and he had did he have no logic whatsoever but he failed and with him all of his buddies hezbollah head on they all failed and it's over it sucks you had a good you tried but you failed um in 2018 and this is a very important quote there was an italian journalist who's since left journalism which is crazy to me but she went out with a bang francesca battery or something she did an interview with uh in gaza 2018 the interview was later published by ynet in a hebrew paper and it's a fascinating bit this was again if we talk about the silence that came upon gaza in 2014 this is at the height of the silence 2018. not a lot of people remember the wars that happened four years ago and people are starting to feel a little antsy a little jittery israel's super happy because they're like we could if we just keep feeding them this will be great we can ride this way forever and she asked him this question about the next war and it's crazy that you know jeffrey goldberg didn't quote sinwad once in his entire piece seriously as far i might be wrong but i believe that he didn't quote sinwad once in his whole piece and there's a plethora of quotes and they're all very very useful in trying to understand what the hell happened and he says um he says something to the effect of and i quote the next war or in the next war victory for netanyahu for netanyahu will be worse than defeat this is a guy who apparently already knew that netanyahu would still be in power why you might ask because the next war is the fourth war which cannot be and cannot end like the third which ended like the second and which ended like the first and his closing line is they should take over gaza it's a quote who that's yahia sanwar who should take over gaza israelis the next war is the fourth that can't end like the third which ended like the second and the first so for those who aren't steeped in this why would the head of hamas want the israelis to take over gaza i don't know at that point if he wanted the israelis to take over gaza but i think he was pointing something i think he was pointing to something that's quite like theoretically elaborate like a very very high level understanding of how history functions sounds that way um which is he didn't want them to take over gaza but i think he understood that if there were to be another war that it would be a disastrous war and that would it would force israel into a corner where they would have two options either we destroy this entire place and or we occupy gaza but the problem is that the israelis already occupied gaza they already tried it and they left and they left for very good reasons it was economically taxing it was unsustainable israeli soldiers could die there were rpg attacks on settlements and i think he understood that he would in the next war if there were to be a next war put the israelis in a position where they would be forced to grope around in the gray for a very very long time even if it would appear otherwise from inside even if it could be sold to the population otherwise and along these lines there is a another quote if you don't mind about a year before october the 7th don't quote me on this but i think a year before october the 7th um sinwara did a speech and he convened the leaders of his factions and various imams in gaza and it's like it's a pretty boring speech and he and he has no rhythm and he's screaming way too loud but there's one point that tons of people have cropped and isolated on instagram um and he has this line and he says um he goes by the by god i see it with the side of my eyes a regional religious war that will burn with it the green and the dry you mean the one we're in right now yeah the one that will go on for a very very long time even it even if it appears to have ended yeah so you it sounds like you think that in planning the attacks of october 7th he saw the long game and understood that it'd be hard for israel to to deal with those consequences over time i think to put it a little more specifically i think sinwara understood that the status quo that fell into place after 2014 this long silence that it was poison for the palestinian cause yeah the notion of palestinian resistance but if your cause is that palestinians should just live go to work bring their bread home then it's certainly antithetical to that i think he understood that this was poison and that if he continued on this way what will the next generation say when they didn't grow up with any wars how long can you go on putting on marches for martyr children with cardboard tanks and fake rpgs how long can you go on convening your imams to talk about the day after who's going to be the next imam of al-aqsa after we liberate palestin how long can you go on with the with the foaming platitudes it can't go on and the longer you let it go on the weaker you get and i think he understood that one thing was certain you know when you shake a snow globe you can shake it shake it shake it the flakes fly everywhere and the one thing of which you can be certain is that the flakes won't fall in the same place that's the one thing you can know and i think he understood that in that that an attack like this it's like it's the 9-11 of the of this conflict yeah that whatever was before won't be after and that's why you call it a bloodbath you rinse the slate clean and it's having or likely to have similar effects to the effects of 9-11 on the u.s it draws the country into all kinds of unanticipated conflicts that weaken the country and cause internal division within the country yeah that'd be my guess um so to that extent it's successful it is strategic and it's effective in the short term it's been successful certainly and i think in the long term i think everyone especially israelis have to wait you know there's a status quo that dies and there's this notion israel now that status quo died and we and we immediately established a new one meaning they broke the last status quo where we had peace and they had we had these little boxing rounds every two years with hamas or whatever but now we're strong now we do whatever we want we bombed them we bombed them we bombed in lebanon we bombed it on we're in control but this but you don't decide when a new status quo comes into birth no that's history there's there are millions of variables that come into that decision gaza has not even been rebuilt currently hamas has control of i think 46 48 of gaza so israelis are groping around i think they're entering into probably what will be in retrospect the darkest and most fraught period since the establishment of the state they're groping around in the gray cost of living is already making it hard to live here and it's not getting any better unfortunately it's likely to get worse and a lot of americans fill the gap with credit cards not just for fancy dinners but to cover things like groceries and bills that is a disaster it's understandable but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect a survival tax of 20 interest or more why would you do that why would you hand money to the big banks when you can keep it for your family our friends at american financing have a better way if you're looking to buy your first home or refinance your current one they're helping americans achieve the dream of home ownership with monthly mortgage rates currently in the fives american financing saves its customers an average of 800 bucks per month that's nearly 10 grand every year back to you this isn't just a loan it's a total financial reset so debt is tough but there's a smart way to do it and a reckless self-destructive way to do it credit cards and so we recommend american financing they're salary based not commission based which means they actually work for you not the banks they're called america's home for home loans for a reason call 800-685-5696 800-685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net/tucker so i want to hear where you think that's going and why it is as dark as it's been in almost 80 years but back to october 7th itself yeah sure so that was well you you said you thought it was probably um in the planning phases for at least a year it would have had to have been just given us its scale i would think i think if you also look in in october 2022 this is what the israelis say i think they found some kind of binder on the border yeah october 2022 on it um but that was the year in which hamas repaired their relations with the shia axis yeah that's the year in which suddenly you had i think hania going to moscow right they repaired relations with syria and that was kind of i think the key into getting the back into the fold with people like nasrallah right suddenly you have islamic jihad and hamas or meeting with nasrallah on a regular basis i think they were they were invited to iran also at a certain point and i think so those are some pretty serious indications but i mean israeli intelligence uh being you know as effective as it is clearly must have picked up signals this was going on that's already been released yeah so explain if you would um i mean there are people who probably know this better than i but there there's there's a document that circulated within israeli intelligence called i think the jericho wall there was an intelligence analyst i believe she was a female who sort of saw what was happening in gaza that there were certain military drills certain speeches and there's an indication that they were planning something really serious and uh the story goes that her higher-ups i think roland bergman reported on this if i'm not mistaken story goes that her higher-ups basically said like yeah yeah um that's cute but no we don't it's like inadmissible trash um you had also soldiers at the observation posts along the border who uh i don't know when exactly i don't know if this was in the weeks or the months leading up to october the 7th but that were reporting to their higher-ups that like there were some strange little movements it commences and much has been written about and even more speculated about a so-called stand-down order or the israeli government response to it what what's your belief about what happened are you asking whether or not i think the israeli higher-ups wanted this to get out of control no i'm asking like what did happen what do you think actually happened like why why from an outsider perspective it seems like the response was inadequate it was certainly inadequate right why look i don't know but what's strange to me is that um i think it was in the week or two after tzachiyan negbi who was like the equivalent to the head of homeland security i guess or the national security council something like that um in israel uh he came out and admitted that i think three to four hours before the attack there you know certain intelligence officials and i think the general like they convened there was a discussion it's not like they woke up at 6 30 a.m um so there was certainly something that happened among the highest echelons one question i've had is why wait do we know what they talked about no but there's a quote that circulated in israeli media that apparently the general at the time got out of bed and his wife was sort of like what what's going on and he just apparently turned around and said gaza's going to be destroyed that's a quote that circulated around israeli media i don't know at what time this happens could have been at you know 6 29 i doubt it though because apparently the people were convened before i don't know i know what i saw on october the 7th i know where i was so what did you see and what's your conclusion one thing i'll say is that three weeks before october the 7th i met with a journalist he's a british journalist and uh we'd been he'd come like a year and a half before um and he's starting out fresh i don't think he knew israel palestine super well so and i wanted to become a mainstream journalist at the time so i thought he could help me scratch each other's backs and we would talk a lot about what's going on and for about a year and a half i was telling him that something's gonna happen like there's something weird that's going on and he'd listen to me and he'd help me out and about three weeks before october the 7th we met for a beer in jerusalem and that was the same day in which the palestinians i believe it was three weeks before were doing these marches of return you know when they flood the borders they throw incendiary balloons burn some fields and wait for the israelis to come back and be like okay what what will it take you what's your price what will take you to shut the fuck up um and he asked me he's like what why do you think this is happening and i remember distinctly looking at him and saying i don't know because after 2021 or 2022 i believe um bennett naftali bennett um lifted the permit uh what do you call the permit ceiling as it were like the quota it's like some 20 22 000 gazans received permits to come to israel um after years of them not having any um and so usually they would do these sorts of antics to get something we want construction materials we want work permits we want something but there was nothing really to ask for and so he when we said goodbye that day i remember i'll never forget this he looked at me and he said you know all right i think you're a really smart guy um and i appreciate you taught me a lot but i just think you've misunderstood this place i think you're a bit apocalyptic i looked at him and i said tom i think you've spent a little too much time with israelis um and so if i could have come to those conclusions with the limited amounts of information i had i'm sure there were many people within the intelligence establishment that had some idea do i think that bb allowed 3000 or 2000 hamas militants to enter the country and kill people a little a little doubtful but i don't know from an american perspective or the perspective of anyone who's visited that border which i have pretty secure border looks like the southern border so like how how how did that happen does anyone let me rephrase has there been what you consider an honest and reliable accounting of how it happened like how did these guys get in here i think it's known what do you mean by how i think physically speaking people know how they got in i mean the border was largely i mean you know people were in their bunks sleeping it was also a jewish holiday right there's no increased level of alertness as far as i've heard you certainly didn't have drones or anything in the air which could have solved this entire problem of course like 15 minutes um so you have enough guys with enough rpgs enough explosives you break through concrete oh i know that but you just imagine that the border with gaza when there are you know credible intelligence reports something weird is going on maybe we don't know what it is but they would be on you know sufficient alert to have stopped this at the line why something didn't happen between that meeting which i've heard was between certain members of intelligence at maybe three in the morning why there weren't drones that were put in the air yeah or a helicopter or um heightened alertness like significantly heightened alertness i don't know but what i have learned over many many years in israel is that you would be surprised by what people can get away with i know people in the west bank who have fake israeli ids who slip in illegally in stolen israeli cars to smoke hash with their friends on the other side and then go back you'd be surprised so the myth of israeli government efficiency is a myth yeah i don't know yeah so it's not um it's the security security is not as competent as people imagine it is when it wants to be competent it's very competent yeah i mean if you ask yourself for example in lebanon and iran right now how is it that they have thousands upon thousands of targets that are readily available that's exactly right it's because they wanted to have them they set their sights on iran and lebanon and they neglected gaza yeah and that's the central question is why and um so once it's in progress there is a stand-down order what what was that like why did they do that well you can't flood the area with idf because look you're talking about a lot of troops especially for the holidays or maybe in the north it might be two three hours away yeah so i think it's a bit unreasonable to expect that they would have flooded the whole place with troops it's harder to get people have to get their guns and get equipment it's like it's logistic it's logistical mayhem there are soldiers in the first two weeks of the war that didn't even have helmets you had jewish communities that were sending like basic equipment because there were there were massive shortages the real question in my opinion is why if there was some kind of indication around 3 a.m why the air force wasn't involved why helicopters drones or fighter jets weren't involved because that doesn't take a whole lot of time as far as i'm concerned and we don't know the answer no i mean no i don't expect to know the answer at least for a very very long time so it's rare these days a company that actually makes things here in the u.s not just designed here or assembled here actually manufactured here start to finish in the united states brooklyn bedding builds every mattress in their factory in arizona not in the far east in arizona no middlemen no cutting corners no outsourcing to save a buck the founders started with nothing no degree no corporate backing just learned the craft built a factory created a product that actually works that's the american story we ought to support it and we do and here we love the thermo balance mattress collection it's made a huge difference in the quality of the sleep of a lot of people who work care no more waking up hot in the middle of the night thanks to their cooling technology your back feels better in the when you wake up they're endorsed in fact by the american chiropractic association so it's not just marketing it's real they'll give you 120 nights to try it out that's a lot if you don't love it they take it back or swap it out no hassle that's how confident they are visit brooklynbedding.com use the promo code tucker at checkout for 30 off site-wide this offer not available anywhere else once that happened once those attacks happened was it always inevitable the response was gaza always going to get leveled once that happened if that operation if that attack were to be successful and i think if we follow sinwaru's thread i think it's fair to assume that he knew well what do you mean by you know that this war will take with it or burn with it all the green and all the dry it's called scorched earth yeah i think yeah i think there was an assumption that something of this nature would happen the exact extent no one can predict right of course not no but that there would be massive change potentially even of borders long term potentially in gaza certainly i think the talk of border changes for example in syria and lebanon i think it's a bit overblown i think it's a bit overblown yeah i have no idea we'll see um but um you know things change um i just have to pause and ask what at this stage you know years later what is the plan for gaza do you think the netanyahu government's plan for gaza you got all these people living there he said on television this morning we're going to go with the trump plan to move them all out of gaza highly doubt that that's going to happen well i kind of doubt that too um i think i think there's this myth that certainly you know circulates in the arab world but definitely here in america too that there's a whole lot more strategy that there's a whole lot more foresight in israel yes that's but people definitely believe that this is part of a plan greater israel this is this this is a strategy i think i think you're overestimating the the foresight i wouldn't be surprised if i am not you specifically but i i don't think there's a massive plan in gaza there are certainly plans that have been thrown around but right now as far as you can see and this is precisely what sin water so i know that the israelis had zero this is a fact they had zero plan at least communicated to the united states for what would happen after the ayatollah was killed in iran they didn't have like a government in waiting or any kind of because it doesn't matter to them well clearly what matters to israel what's useful for bb netanyahu specifically is simply chaos and the more definition that is given to the chaos the more he has to account for the shape that it's taken right smart that's right the difference between iran and gaza though is gaza's like on your border so would they want would he want chaos in gaza well if you look at the border right now i mean you have you have a ton of buffer it's not really bordering israel anymore true and so in that sense i think and there's not a ton of chaos meaning hamas is i don't know if they're in shambles i think there are a lot of tunnels that are still left for example um they have light weapons they have ak-47s they have like tiny rockets they can sometimes send in they're collecting taxes apparently so they're functioning are they a threat to israel at this moment in time no and that since bb did the minimum he would have to do and still stopping short of actually determining a reality because then he would have to explain to the israelis why did i do x and not y so you don't think that there anybody has a clear picture of where gaza is in 10 years in 10 years no but i do think that bb and the administration and the idf alongside probably have an idea where gaza what they will do in gaza if x happens with iran if y happens with lebanon right bb bb's playing sort of musical wars why does he have a work why why did they time lebanon right now it's a failsafe for iran if trump decides to pull out of iran if iran doesn't go the way bb needs then he always has lebanon and if all of that doesn't go the way he needs he could go back into gaza so you're suggesting that he has to have a war at least until he gets elected next i think so you really think that's the motive i think there are many motives i think this is certainly the timing of a lot of things the thing the strange thing about bb is that look on the one hand there's a national interest that lines up with a personal interest it's not just that bb is doing something that is has no that wouldn't in any way benefit the national security of the country i believe that for as far as israel is concerned striking it on is is quite possibly a great idea you have one of the largest proxy networks in the history of the of the middle east that's bent on doing something to israel destroying them forever i don't know if that was exactly the case you have a massive paramilitary group on your border with lebanon those are valid relatively objective strategic goals but if you could tinker with them if you can time them and modulate them to serve your personal motives well it's a win-win so um have you heard anybody articulate plans for just to be totally clear on this for moving the more than one probably fewer than two million people in gaza anywhere no but i have something else that i don't think has ever been released actually um i was working with the washington post as of until they fired their whole foreign desk as you saw um and we were doing a lot of interviews on the day after specifically reconstruction and trying to follow the money because that's what gaza is about right now it's all about money and it's not just american money or israeli money it's the gulf countries it's egypt the pa wants to get their finger in there as well and i confirm this with two actually quite possibly three sources if i'm not mistaken but and this might not end up being the case but i understood that the um the center that was put together by the american army in kiriat gat to map out or sort of strategize about gaza and assist the israelis that they were making calls or that their lawyers were making calls to certain organizations to look into the status of private property in gaza basically the thing i among many things i heard that the plan was like as have you ever seen the flyers that the israelis drop in gaza or the evacuation notices yeah and they usually divide it into sort of blocks you have numbered blocks and those are private properties right now if you have an entire swath of territory entire neighborhoods that are upside down or backwards that no longer follow the logic of a grid um you can't expect that some qatari or saudi or whatever company is going to come in and rebuild gaza identically to the way it was before no so i heard that the plan was to have to sort of like rotate like take a population from an area move them away build a massive complex as it were could be condominiums could be apartments i don't know what um and then move them back and continue doing this rotation for however long it takes what does that mean it means that you are fundamentally altering the um the the urban planning and with the demography uh of and private property of gaza if you had if you have a building on a swath of land on a plot of land that used to have five to seven bits of private property you have to reconfigure and you have to suspend that private property and create a new precedent i was told by someone very very high up in the pa that this was intended that there was going to be a suspension of private property for a period of maybe seven years now what does that mean it quite possibly and this is the most cynical possible conclusion you could draw it could mean that it could mean basically that is look in the west bank it's it's sometimes israel struggles to take certain parts of swaths of land or to build actual settlements sometimes they'll have caravans in certain areas but not houses and the reason is that to some degree israel still beholden to ottoman and jordanian legal precedent and they can wiggle around you can maneuver yeah but it's it can't be nullified it's very hard it's in east jerusalem exactly all the time so what happens i'll pose you the question i guess what happens in gaza if you suspend all of private property and you're going to say in seven years we're going to revisit it or it will be reconfigured by legal experts who by then will have disappeared you break a massive precedent it's just a reset exactly um it's a golden opportunity will that happen i don't know but based on everything i've heard it is within the realm of possibility and it makes logical sense as well so it's a yeah um did people in israel take the trump administration's plan for redevelopment with casinos and beachfront condos they take that seriously uh like citizens in israel people you think the government did i don't know did you no yeah no that's not going to happen i highly doubt it yeah it's still run by by a militant group there's still some there's hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that have been dealt with by the idf which they also lied about i spoke to a general his name is yitzhak break have you heard of him no um it's strange because he's not i think his english is a little bad and so we don't hear from him a lot in the west but he was a guy who went on three months before october the 7th and said quote there will be a massacre here this is a guy who was a general reserve general who also audited he was tasked with i think for many many years auditing um troops he worked for the idf audit meaning he would go between fronts between units and assess troop readiness routines equipment he knew the idf inside and out and he worked under several generals leading up to october the 7th and for years he was screaming that we are we're not really ready for anything and we're cutting our ground troops because we want to be a compact technologically adept army but we're basically rendering ourselves naked on the ground and he went down to the gaza border and he sees that basically the the soldiers treat it like summer camp you have girls and you know you know doing tiktok videos it's like summer camp it reached the point again back to the status quo where israelis genuinely believed that that the conflict was kind of over this is just it's going to be this way there's going to be a big wall they're going to be there we're going to be here and um it's how big i sat with him a lot about a year ago and he was telling me he was getting calls from a lot of soldiers who work in the tunnel units and i spoke to several soldiers who either worked in the tunnels or were guarding tasked with guarding them supervising the work um that there was tons left tons left he said this general said 75 i don't know if that's definitely true but i heard from a lot of soldiers that the material used to totally destroy tunnels is very expensive and perhaps in short supply and so a lot of what was happening was sort of sealing the tunnels you pour concrete inside and it just takes probably some dudes however many days later to come and undo the concrete break the concrete and i also heard from soldiers that the hamas was repairing tunnels during the war in the midst of fighting there were tunnels that were being or shafts that were being repaired for decades russell brand was one of the most famous actors and comedians and agnostics in the world today he is one of the most sincere christians we know a follower of christ his personal transformation is remarkable we saw it up close he has now recounted it in an amazing book called how to become a christian in seven days and it recounts what happened to him and it makes the case to all of us for stepping away from our secular assumptions and returning to the only thing that matters which is god i've read it it's amazing and right now there's only one place to get it tuckercarlsonbooks.com this is the first release from our new publishing company we created tucker carlson books to bypass the censors and bring you things that are actually worth reading and sharing and we're starting this venture with what matters most and that's russell brand's message of the promise of forgiveness and joy through jesus we're proud to launch our new bookstore with russell brands how to become a christian in seven days it is the message this country needs most find us today on tuckercarlsonbooks.com there was a big debate in this country about uh whether or not the israeli government sent money not its own money but the money of the united states in qatar to hamas whether or not who did that um and then it seemed to have been confirmed will you tell us what you know about that and what the motive was what are we talking about the money that came in before october the 7th of course before october this oh the suitcases of cash exactly yeah well yeah i know that they were there was tons of cash i don't actually have the numbers i forget what what was the thinking i mean i think it's confirmed now that was considered very controversial there are pictures of the there are pictures of the suitcases and of the money going into gaza yeah it's definitely confirmed um the thinking was we keep them happy and fat and they don't bother us which is again the logic of the marches of return we're going to come we're going to make some noise until these raiders come and say what's your price what will it take to get you to shut up more money more work permits construction materials it was part of maintaining a status quo and someone probably said water realized that this if i get too fat if we get too fat we won't be able to move anymore right i think i think it's that simple so from thousands of miles away it seems like but israel seems like a pretty tough project to keep going over generations because of the numbers just tiny countries surrounded by people who don't like it or recognize its legitimacy some of whom are motivated to do harm so that's like that's not a good ratio over time like it's hard to maintain that it's like from the israeli perspective do people think ever think of that no but i think there's about there's maybe two or three ways of looking at this on the one hand there's a demographic perspective where yeah that's what i mean yeah the numbers that's one perspective and and if you look at the numbers so like how many jews are there in israel i think there's seven seven something like that um you have two million palestinians yeah uh who have citizenship but i think the proper calculation is within the area under control under israeli control what's the population divide and at that point you have 50 50. if you take west the west bank where there are also jews living but also gaza because these are all areas that are that impinge upon israel and which are under israeli control tacitly or or actually you have seven million palestinians two in israel three in the west bank two in gaza so seven you have seven million jews it's halved right now it's split half half demographically speaking that is a problem do i think that will be what brings israel to its knees if it he's ever brought to his knees no i was thinking more the macro demographic problem of the arab world the muslim world almost two billion so when i hear netanyahu say we're fighting a seven front war whatever number of fronts it was seven fronts recently yeah i think you don't have the economy you don't have the manpower and you no longer have the good will to sustain that for very long at all like ultimately if you have enough enemies and there's too few of you and enough of them you're going to lose people have been saying that for a long time well it hasn't even been there 80 years so i think uh they bet on a few things they have nuclear weapons they have a great intelligence agency and they bet on the incompetence of the muslim countries around for sure for sure i but there's also a sense in which you can't fight everybody and so i don't see when i talk to israelis and just when i watch i don't see any long-term strategy that rests on real alliances like you have to have this is true not just for israel but for each one of us as a person in this world you have to have more powerful friends than you do enemies or else ultimately you get destroyed and i don't see that realization at all it seems almost arranged i guess we have who cares if you have nuclear weapons so does everyone else like so what everyone else doesn't have nuclear weapons but i mean a lot of people have a lot of people including in your region that's true um but i think right now you have this logic being pushed around by bb which is you know peace through strength i think the israelis have this sense that if we push long enough let's say we do manage to change the regime ahead on not topple it but change it we can have an arrangement the gulf countries because they've felt very exposed right now maybe there'll be tension there'll be tension with the united states maybe this will also bring other gulf countries closer to us there are already tasset relations between saudi arabia and israel they exchange intelligence among other things but maybe this will bring them closer i think they have pretty yeah well the saudis have been pushing for this war exactly and in the same side as israel basically on this question and in lebanon what was the aim when israel went into lebanon in the 80s the aim was we want to change the demography we're going to change the government we're going to put the christians in power and make peace the opposite happened opposite happened and what are they doing now i believe that in some dim recess it might not actually be an active strategy but i do believe that in some dim recess israel would like civil war in lebanon because between you and me if i'm being totally honest the only way to deal with hezbollah hezbollah is not just a paramilitary group they are a demographic they're demographically entrenched in the country they are south lebanon and they are the shiite population that was also oppressed for a very long time there are a lot of shiites in beirut now it's not just the south yeah yeah and so i think uh there is a desire for potentially civil war in lebanon for sure and that i mean you've seen this well you saw it in syria you know you've seen in a lot the same strategy i'm just saying and i'm not attaching values to any of this like what's right or wrong or even what's good for the united states or any of that i just think as a general principle that's that's day trading that's like a short-term strategy that doesn't work long-term but maybe people think it does work long-term like you can do that forever i don't think you can no probably not i think they're hoping that either this all turns out exactly the way they want it which is highly unlikely or that you have enough chaos there's a desire for chaos right that every that all these places should be at least uncertain if we can't determine what the best the best possible reality for us and the very least the reality should be indeterminate it should be in flux right no i get it i totally get it and again i'm not even judging this or that's wrong i'm not this is not a lecture i just mean like as a as a kind of almost a physics principle in the end or over time chaos is bad for you it's bad for everybody it's bad to have chaos nearby you it's bad to have your neighbor get divorced that actually increases the chances you get divorced there's a way in which chaos is a virus and it it hurts you in the end even though you think you can control that you can't that i i think that's a pretty stable principle of history i think the big weak point of israel um i think sometimes when you look strategically or at the surrounding countries um there's another point here which is israel on the interior israel psychologically right israeli psyche exactly i think that that is the actual weak point if anything brings israel to its knees which doesn't mean it will be exterminated or extinguished that it will die as a state but the thing that will fundamentally shatter the foundation either to end the country or to start a fresh status quo for the country um it will be internal i believe that and if you want to understand that dynamic i think you have to look to the west bank well can i just say this is so often overlooked yeah the one only like real genocides in history was the romans in 70 ad in jerusalem and one of the reasons that they were able that siege was successful is because of the almost unbelievably barbaric fighting between jewish factions within jerusalem like the romans got through because the defenders were fighting each other i just think that's also another principle it's like if you destroy if you don't have a unified country you're much weaker than you think you are i guess i mean yes yes and no sometimes i do think about that on the other hand israelis do at least until now they've shown a pretty serious ability to just put all of their problems aside right i mean if you look at bb's opposition your lapid he was asked i think two weeks ago about greater israel and he couldn't even he couldn't even reject that as a political position yeah um he talked about scraping away at lebanon which is fine if you're bb or if you want to be with bb that's the doctrine um but you have this thing within the israeli opposition that bb has put them in a corner that over the course of the war they have had no choice but to parrot his speech yes to use his language and he buried them in so doing no that that's certainly what it seems like looking from the outside can i ask though but the i mean again this is an outsider's perspective non-hebrew speaking perspective but it seems like the core division is religious non-religious or it has been is that still true where is that the idea that you know a certain percentage of the country doesn't serve doesn't participate meaningfully in the economy and there's deep resentment toward them by people who do that has been true for a while is that still true is it more true less true i think it's where it was a year ago probably where it was two years ago tensions they rise and they fall i'm also not like the greatest expert on on that but i think you live there or does that seem like a like a crisis in the country i don't think it's reached the point of a crisis it could it could um but again i don't think if you'd permit to go back to something else i think there you were mentioning the romans and it reminds of exile and i think what you see in the west bank if you're talking about long term in the darkest depths of the israeli psyche what is going to affect the longevity of the country it's the the interplay the psychological interplay between the israelis and the palestinians in the west bank it manifests itself most in the west bank because in tel aviv you know you have like a bunch of schmucky lifestyle yuppies in tel aviv who just want to forget tel aviv is the subconscious of the subconscious of israel right but the west bank is where the the complex is at the bottom of the israeli psyche it's where they play out and so at the end of the day you have a strange problem which is that the israelis come back the jews come back after two to three thousand years as you know they were exiles we don't have to debate when exactly how many years um but what happens is you have people who have a kind of not a native right but a kind of native claim who come back in colonial costume there's a reason why the relationship between the palestinians and the jews is different than that between the palestinians and the british and the ottomans because ottomans never came and said like this is our homeland we're coming back now it's all ours nor did the british that's what the israelis did but the jews did um and again i don't want to debate sort of like what is right or what is claim i think by and large it's fair to say that the jews have some kind of relationship with the land meaning there are many palestinian villages that have that you could trace their names back to jewish ancient settlements does it mean that an israeli or a jew can come and take it no but what it does mean is that you can't understand the conflict between the israelis or the jews and the palestinians without realizing that this is a struggle for nativity and that in some way they are the mirror images of each other and in many ways the palestinians are the the new jews and neither one really wants to admit it especially the israelis and so in the west bank i've been in the west bank a lot the last few new jews in what sense the people who have the moral authority of victimhood like the world looks at them and says we feel sorry for you you've been mistreated not about that it's a tale of exile and nostalgia right the difference is that the palestinians are exiled on their own land which also makes it very hard for the israelis to deal with this problem for them it's a problem we have people and i always i always say to to jews to israelis in israel i'm like look if you guys if if if if the jews came back after two to three thousand years and didn't forget though there were periods of forgetting why do you think that the palestinians won't do the same and they're right on the borders they can see it couldn't see israel from europe but you can see it from gaza you can see it from the west bank what do they say when you say that usually just go silent they don't want they don't want to understand there's a point the problem in israel is that you know i used to have a lot of i used to have some israeli sort of religious friends who would come to my dorm when i'd have my arab friends with me and we'd have some really nice conversations they even befriended each other but at some point my israeli friends stopped speaking to them because there's a point in any israeli dialogue there's a point at which an israeli has to make a decision left to right am i going if i go down this path and really try to understand the other side i risk exposing certain things with the grounds of my own identity here about the foundations of the country that that they risk my identity and the other option is i'm just going to stop it here turn around and forget this happened and so in the west bank right now there's some very very weird trends um you have you know the number of outposts in the in the west bank has increased i don't know by i don't know by hundreds of outposts every almost every other hill in the west bank has a shack on it it's it's it's it's it's the scale is insane and i visit some of these outposts and what you see is a is a is a little bit of a strange thing you have something called the hilltop youth have you heard of this of course so this is like the third mutation of settlers the first settlers were kind of like kibbutznik people right right what's their goal the call the goal the kibbutznik is i need to revive some kind of relationship with the land the first generation settlers were not going down the hill and like pug roaming people they had their hill they had their barbed wire they have their shacks you know self-improvement seemed like one of the main goals of the first of the kibbutz generate generation yeah we're gonna like improve ourselves by you know making it green and growing things i think a lot of it also had to deal with the exile thing that we haven't been here it's like a prisoner who comes home after 30 years walks into the kitchen sees his wife and kid and says like hey honey how you doing sits down as if nothing happened that was the design you know but there's 30 years to make up for in this case you have two or three thousand years to make up for and so part of the kibbutznik ideologically was like we have to revive some sort of connection with the land but my point is that the third mutation of the settlers which is now the hilltop youth they're strange i mean they now wear palestinian kofi is the palestinian headdress that used to wear they're wearing those things black ones the white and black with the palestinian ones yeah which is kind of strange because if you even dressed up for halloween like that in tel aviv people would say things people very sensitive it's a symbol of terrorism in israel and you have the settlers running around throwing stones wearing the very thing that once frightened them as children and you have another trend which is now they want donkeys or there's a lot of shepherding but with machine guns or you have you know settler chic which are like young outpost women who are what they call um israelite fashion do you see where i'm going you see where i'm going be more specific for those of us who live in the united states what's israelite fashion you know it's kind of like in hebrew they use words like sort of um villagey israelite or pastoral yeah which is also the word in hebrew used to describe the vibe you get in areas that used to have palestinian villages that are now either forests or or towns lots of wild natural shrubbery and foliage the point being is that what you see in the west bank now is an attempt to double down on nativity and so i was in a palestinian village it's called it gets attacked quite a bit i don't know if you saw there was a report maybe six months ago if i'm not mistaken of like three to four thousand olive trees that were cut down yes so it was a big story and i was there when this happened that weekend by chance and i remember sitting with one of these palestinian guys and we were attacked by settlers once and they went back they burned about four houses down right in front of me um i saw it they stabbed a bunch of sheep um it's the first time i ever saw this with my eyes i saw videos all the time but i i actually saw the smoke billowing out of the houses and the guy said something pretty interesting he looked at me and he was he was very calm and he said you know they they want they wanted all at once so what do you mean he goes he goes you know they kind of want to be like us you know they want they want shepherd but they also have to have machine guns and they want they want the olive trees but they don't see that we we pave our roads around the olive trees they want all at once they want to slice the mountain you get the barbed wire on you put your houses there they want they want to compensate for three thousand years they want to get back to some point where they were three thousand years but they want it all at once they want it now and they don't want anyone to be there to disturb them and so it it puts the settlement movement into a strangely i'd call it an autoimmune position sort of autoimmune because these people are simply taking hill after hill after hill hoping that there will come a day one fine morning when they wake up and it's empty and they have quiet but even when that happens they don't have enough people to populate it people don't want to live in the west bank why the average israeli does not want to be sitting on a hilltop surrounded by palestinians the average israeli wants to you know sit in tel aviv blacks maybe smoke a joint make money buy house in greece the keffiyeh is very confusing to me settlers dressing as palestinians so is the message were the real palestinians i think what's going on is subconscious i don't think they're actually conscious of it because i went to a settlement i went to a fresh outpost a few weeks ago um i'm surprised they let me in someone pulled a gun on me when i went in and then they realized i you know know my name is aria high influence right and they're like oh here you're all right come in we got to talking this guy's wife is one of these settler chic influencers and i wanted to talk to her about the fashion i wanted to hear like how do you explain this so that i could then put it into a piece and her husband is also sort of this lumberjack guy he's got blue eyes dirty blonde hair he's like towing the the fields which i'm pretty sure belong to people just down the hill and um where are they from originally one of them is actually from the west bank was born in another settlement in the west bank and i believe she is from somewhere inside israel maybe jerusalem but i might be wrong times of israel did a piece on her actually like a week before i was there um and they got real weird with me real weird um they asked like what do you want i was like i'm just here to talk about fashion and then her husband gave her a look she walked off went completely silent and he sat down with me alongside the guy who pulled his gun on me and the guy's kind of looking at me like who are you what do you want i was like i'm a journalist he's like can i see your work i said yeah i write about like security matters this is for a magazine piece long story short they kicked me out they said you should probably get out of here and when i went outside to smoke a cigarette before leaving the guy who pulled his gun on me is just sitting there and i said can i ask you a question he goes yeah i said why can't we have a conversation ju to ju because i told them like i'm wondering about this nativity thing and this the coffee is and the guy looked at me and he was kind of he knew something was off because he's like it's not that many people who do that now so the fact that you know it that you're aware of it probably means that i struck a i i triggered him a little bit and when we're outside smoking the cigarette i asked him why can't we talk he goes you know it could have gone a lot worse for you today i said what do you mean he goes you know what i mean i said are you threatening me he said no but there are people who would do a serious number on you and i said even even to a fellow jew and he said it's beyond ideology he said this is beyond ideology and i spent the whole car ride home thinking about what he could have possibly meant by that what is it about then when he said this is beyond ideology and i already laid out sort of like the nativity dynamics but within the settlement movement what could he possibly mean by this is beyond ideology i haven't the fact are these religious people that's another question about the settlers in the west bank they're not entirely religious you know you have a lot of religious there are religious people um there's also a lot of people who aren't that devout or pious that religious the religion in certain cases becomes a kind of aesthetic thing or a vehicle for sort of nationalistic ends right i mean the settlement settlement that i was in with this sort of uh the the settler fashionista a week after she had a dj at the outpost it's an outpost there's two people living there it's a shack a dj and a bunch of women dressed in israelite clothing doing a meditative and like like trans um disco kind of like party what yeah it was kind of strange so i'm having trouble fitting this into a category so the two yeah motives that you always hear here in the us or when i've been in israel are either these are you know religious people who are sort of acting out some kind of millennialist vision or there are people who want cheaper housing and housing in israel those are two separate categories of settler right so yeah but you're describing a third category that's kind of like cosplay kind of like like what are you describing what why are they doing this what i'm describing is a part of of the broader category of settlers who are there to at the forefront who are forwarding the set who are pushing the settlement yeah yeah yeah forward as opposed to the people who want cheap housing who just literally go into tel aviv you know yeah yeah no i got it i've seen that yeah um where it all comes from i don't know but i think that it's a big commitment to move to a hilltop surrounded by concertina wire like you don't do that by accident but if you're 14 15 16 17 years old if you're in your early 20s you want to be king of the hill want to play cowboy yeah so is that what you think it is i think in many cases again like the the hilltop youth i found them once you know these snot-nosed beady eyes like kids with their heads shaved driving a stolen palestinian car on the sabbath tell me to get the the fuck out or i'm gonna get beat like it's it's fucking weird it's weird where where where the israeli authorities sometimes absent sometimes present and even when they're present they can be quite absent if i'm running israel i'm i'm paying a very i'm paying close attention to these people because they could be a threat to me you know armed people who are increasingly radical and nobody's kind of controlling their behavior they could form a militia overthrow my government that would be my thought if i were netanyahu i'd be worried about them i've thought about that quite a few times i mean it's there's a few things going on here right in the security establishment in israel there are a lot of voices who are very concerned and this is just what you hear publicly you can imagine that behind closed doors there's a lot more talk they are concerned um bb in order for his coalition also has to keep serving them right whatever they want the real problem in the west bank is that you have these guys who are armed and that you know you had avraham on the other day and he said that i believe that at some point or another the settlements will be collapsed i would agree with him but the question is not whether or not they'll be collapsed the question is what is going to have to happen for that to happen what will have what will happen on the way before you reach that point where the settlements are collapsed will it be some sort of civil chaos will be a third intifada there's a lot of talk in israel but a third intifada but my sense is that what happens next is not something that follows the sequence of intifada but you know kind of like what happened in gaza this shattering of the status quo i think there will come a point where something analogous in like logically speaking happens in the west bank will it look like gaza not at all but will it be equally as cataclysmic maybe quite possibly that's my sense but i mean there's it's a different dynamic in the west bank i mean isn't it i mean it's first of all it's richer than gaza ever was i mean it's more kind of established series of towns which is why oh in terms of the settlements you mean no no no no the the palestinian population in the west bank i mean it's not i don't know it's just harder to imagine something like that happening there because i don't think as i said i don't think what happens there is going to look like right be like what happened in gaza but i think if you permit me a few minutes you know the there's a reason why october the 7th came from gaza and not from yeah the west bank i spent um i spent last summer i was in the janine refugee camp if you've heard of it of course um and i sat with the who was then the leader of islamic jihad he was the emir the prince of islamic jihad and i sat with a few other guys from the various other factions and what i understood was that the resistance in the west bank basically there's a thread going all the way back to 48 you're exiled and you want to get back and you want to fight and then there is serious amounts of terrorist attacks and then eventually there's a political process and you'd assume that any resistance movements or any kind of you know terrorist operation whatever you want to call it that they would eventually want to yield some kind of political outcome but oslo eventually fails you have the first intifada you have the second the second intifada is basically a lashing out meaning the thread has reached its end and the west bank at that point was faced with the factions in the west bank were faced with sort of two options either we pause and take a breath and figure out what the we're doing here or we're just going to keep shooting aimlessly just like shooting to make it look to make it look like we're doing something we're going to do military marches we're going to act really cool but the guys are just like hood boys they're just putting on headbands and like with a marlboro red in their mouths and just shooting usually not even to hit the aim is usually just to die the logic of the camps the logic of the resistance in the west bank is completely backwards which means i don't think there's going to be like in october 7th in the west bank but when i was in these villages that were getting attacked by the settlers there's one line that kept coming up and i'm talking about a line i was hearing from your your average palestinian farmer or peasant which was there will come a day there will come a day when we are pushed a little too far and at that point the question is how many minutes does it take for a bunch of people to run up to a hill and maybe overwhelm the settlement an old man told me that we're going to chew them like dogs i would think that's coming i mean based on the behavior you're describing it's quite possible i wouldn't discount it um what do you make that the two most fit in the us the two most famous cabinet ministers in the naiyahu government are smotrish and ben gavir are they powerful figures in israel how are they regarded what's what's their motive strategy plan i don't think that they're close to as popular as they were i think bb's popularity has increased actually over the course of the war because israelis have a very short memory um especially when it comes to warfare um but i don't really know what to tell you about smotrich and ben gavir it's not really my specialty um i guess it just seems unimaginably radical from an american if you think of israel the post 67 israel that most americans you know learned about visited all of a sudden you have these guys these two ashkenazi guys sound really really radical or it seems like a departure from anything americans have ever heard in this really government officials say i think what you're hearing is what you often hear behind closed doors all over israel what you can hear at a cafe in tel aviv meaning the notion of yeah maybe they could go somewhere the palestinians maybe they just like they could be gone the question of uh those are questions that come up you hear it regularly these aren't like completely insane conversations to hear you can hear it from like a hippie at a cafe in tel aviv smoking a joint that's what it changed is that suddenly you were hearing it more and more on tv i remember i heard one news commentator news anchor ask about transfer and i was like this is a bit insane like imagine if someone on cnn came on and sort of talking about transferring another an entire other population who aren't illegal right people who are born there been there for thousands of years maybe hundreds maybe thousands i don't know but it doesn't matter they were there when when when the israelis came yeah it doesn't matter how long they've been there for um so yeah what about i mean it used to be in my living memory there was a significant population of israelis who who had totally different views are like no that's wrong human rights or a thing you can't do that that how big is that an oven berg i think is the kind of israeli i remember from 25 years ago there are a bunch of people like that how many are left i mean the left is dead the left is dead the israeli left is dead and the question as to why they died it's because they spent a i think a bit too much time beating the horse of oslo dead oslo obviously failed and the left was unwilling to concede that fact which meant that for many many years i think unto this day the left never reevaluated they never came with another proposal or another plan or another way of thinking about the conflict they kept beating the the the horse of oslo dead meanwhile the israeli right continues to churn out active propositions we're going to reform the judiciary we want to take the west bank very concrete things that a right winger in israel will tell you what they want a left winger in israel will tell you how they feel yeah and uh yeah i think that's i think that's the long and short of it that's good explanation what do israelis have a sense of what the rest of the world thinks of israel yeah i think they have a sense the question is is how deeply do they think about the sense and how much merit are they willing to give do they care i think they don't care no one like no one likes to be hated i don't think anyone likes to be hated but i think the more you feel like you're hated the more you want to hate everyone else or just completely discount them you the more you want to dig your heels and then double down huh that's interesting yeah i mean i feel like i'm often attacked for hating israel i don't hate israel um at all i feel sorry for israel i think they're in trouble they don't seem to agree but i think they are but whatever my views um i mean a lot of people hate israel like around the world i hear it a lot when i travel i feel like the moderate one and i think that's a big change and i always wonder do the israelis know that do they care i think the israelis are probably the most hated people in the world right now that's my impression full stop yes um one of the greatest things i ever did was not get an israeli passport and i feel bad for friends who have them i would be scared i'm going to be totally honest i would be scared right now i'm i'm sometimes scared to even say i'm jewish i'm lucky enough that i have arabic and if i'm in europe i just tell people i'm palestinian which some people might not like but i think i put in the time to warrant it um sometimes i'm scared to say that i'm jewish and i'm i'm i would definitely be scared to have an israeli passport i think that's totally fair that's fair and i'm not i'm the last person to whine about anti-semitism but i think israel is literally hated so i agree with you completely i just i just oh again just once more i just want to be clear you don't think israelis have the sense that that's a bad thing and we should be worried about it or that we played any role in that at all i think the israelis there are israelis who you have a small liberal population of israelis many of whom i hear talking about the fact that they don't see a future for themselves in the country anymore right a lot this is about two to three years in the making even from the judicial reform i had a lot of people telling me left-leaning decent israelis who were like i i don't know if i can have more kids here or i don't want my kids to be in the army or i don't want my kids to have to deal with whatever the consequences of the judicial reform and now this entire war um the rest of the israeli population i think by and large are bent on they've all doubled down really i think a lot of people so bb reflects the population he represents you think i don't think a lot of people have problems with anything that bb represents i think people have problems with the fact that he might have a corruption case which i think is right right negligible but you're never at dinner and people say man i can't believe all those kids who were killed in gaza that's bad i'm sorry we did that i don't hear it a lot but what you can say no you might hear it sort of it might be a symbolic gesture like a virtue signal um but it's immediately followed with you know that's what you got to do i mean they came to kill us or they're anti-semites um yeah where do israelis think anti-semitism comes from i often hear an invoked so-and-so's anti-semit you're anti-semit what how do they define it and what do they think its root is i think the root is is age old as far as israelis are concerned people hate us because people have always hated jews you hear this all a lot in synagogues also across north america you have a message being pushed constantly that people just hate us and i think there are a lot of people who just hate jews and there's a lot of people are waiting for an excuse to hate jews but specifically why do they hate jews but the question is is there a distinction between those people and palestinians are the palestinians fundamentally anti-semitic you can spare me quotes from like an imam here or an imam there or the fact that they conflate jew and israeli by and large are these are these is this a people who has premised its existence on killing jews as jews and i do not think that that's the case yeah i would i wouldn't know i mean i um i wouldn't know but i just think that there are a lot of anti-semitic people and they hate jews i agree with that and i think it's wrong that's what i think um but i also think it's worth at like what is that is it a spiritual thing i mean we say well it's always existed i believe that but what's its i mean what's its cause and i've never heard one person ask that question and i think i believe in asking or trying to understand the the cause of everything you can't often but it's it's always worth doing i wanted to know why al-qaeda attacked the us on 9-11 i thought it was horrible i had a friend killed but i still want to know why and i never heard anybody asked that question you haven't heard anyone ask about the the sort of like the the bottom root of anti-semitism never not one time other than to say and by the way i'd be willing to believe i'd be willing to believe that it's spiritual in nature what does spiritual mean that there's you know a belief among jews and some christians that jews are distinct among peoples because god made them distinct and distinct and that there is a spiritual reaction that is a religious belief that some people have many people have and i'd be willing to believe i don't know if it's true that there this is like a reaction against that from evil so that's one explanation but i never even hear anybody ask the question like where's what i hear instead is people say it's just it's always been there it always will be there what does that mean i guess that's what i'm asking i mean within the european context and look i'm not an expert on anti-semitism i'm not um within the european context you have a people who are also forced into the margins of society they're easily scapegoated they are they also maintain a certain level of distinction from the rest of society and those are people that are very easy to hate um but i can't i can't give you an historiography of of anti-semitism um i can tell you why i think it's on the rise right now i can why is it on the rise right now we have a bit of an issue right i mean you have israel doing what israel does is getting record amounts of attention there's record amounts of sympathy with the palestinian cause i mean there are many people if you have asked them 20 30 40 years ago if they understood what actually was the fate of the saling the palestinian people they wouldn't have understood they wouldn't have known you know there's a famous quote by ben-gurion who following 48 you know there were 600 some 600 villages that were destroyed yes i knew that um and i remember there's a there's a somewhere in the archives there's a quote which says you know people are soon going to come visit this country and we don't want them to see have superfluous thoughts to use the word superfluous meaning you got to clean up the mess either like destroy them or plant trees put parks in their place which is why you have many parks all over israel um and people didn't really understand i didn't know that how do i not know that so parks you see in israel are often on the physical spot of a former palestinian village in many cases yes in many cases yes uh which is also bound up with the jnf the jewish national fund yes um and so i remember hearing from someone in toronto that i think the the government was going to start sanctioning the jnf and people were really up in arms about this and i said sort of the end of the day you have to decide what your relationship with israel is you can't it's hard to have it's hard to to expect people from without to understand why at a synagogue you also have an israeli flag there if you don't also want to bear the brunt of what's happening israel take some responsibility and i'm saying from without you can't expect people to understand that i think there's a sense within the jewish american community specifically but also in israel people expect everyone else to understand them from within it's why it should be very obvious why israelis believe it should be obvious what we're doing all this should be obvious and the fact that you're asking questions is itself potentially an indication that you are against us that you just want our demise when i ask people questions in israel the first thing is like why are you why are you asking if i want to interview someone as a journalist in israel i have to be very careful with the language i use if i use the word west banks of the judea and samaria within a certain demographic you're axed it's over seriously um i tend to say we and not you because if i say you they're like what do you mean you i thought we're all in this together like no i'm not an israeli citizen even that is a bit sensitive you're describing narcissism the belief that other people should just understand what i'm feeling in a health a healthy person understands that each one of us is sort of locked away in our own private traumas and that's why we communicate and i need to understand you it's very important to understand you and i want you to understand me but it's not natural right that's the basis of a relationship it's an isolated and solipsistic society solipsistic is a better word that's exactly right in many ways yeah there's something in many cases i find this thing a bit delusional about the mentality um it's just the fact that for example arabic isn't spoken in the country it used to be i mean those were because they were arab jews who came from arabic countries but i think there were also ashkenazi jews who spoke arabic i think that was more common i'm just i think that was my impression not a whole lot maybe if they were there for example before the establishment of the state but as of the establishment of the state you didn't have people really learning arabic i the changes that have taken place or maybe it's just a change in my perception but i just remember a country that was much more open to the world but you know a lot has happened um in that time by the way i should ask you uh since you you live there in israel um how much damage has been done during this war we get no sense of it at all or i don't trust anything i see on the internet but do you get a sense it's a country at war there rubble you know rubble on the street in tel aviv or no no in fact i think the last round during june for example you know i'm based in jaffa at the moment yeah yeah there are massive strikes in in a place called batiam just south of jaffa where you saw i think there was a three block radius of damage look you do have damage relative the stakes um minimal damage within israel right now does life seem normal ish yeah ish really the jews like the ish yes it's true i'm pro-ish myself um so you do it doesn't feel like a country under siege under siege yeah no the war is being fought about two thousand two thousand kilometers away correct yeah certainly not besieged is there a sense that there's a physical risk do people you know feel like wow we could get like hammered by missiles drones no i don't think there's like an apocalyptic yeah that's what sense um but there is a sense like damage can be done these are ballistic missiles people can die but if you're smart if you take the necessary steps if you go down to your shelter you're probably going to be fine like a 99 chance that you will be just fine do you talk to people who have a sense of how this would be resolved do people expect it to end soon the war with iran i don't think so i think people want it to go on i think people want the job done but what's a bit strange to me what's a bit ironic here is that in america it strikes me the perception is more zero-sum in america i think there's the sense that if we went through all this and the regime doesn't fall then this was for naught we wasted our time we jeopardized our for the gop jeopardize our base or whatever else you're better expert in this than i am within israel though it's not a zero-sum game if israel if this war ends because trump decides it has to end because of internal pressure economic pressure and the regime hasn't fallen bb is none the worse for it it's not the ideal outcome it's not the best possible outcome but it's something he can work with it's a good enough show it's what you call in hebrew an image of victory it's the phrase that netanyahu has been using since the beginning of the war an image of victory part of our problem in the u.s may be that we take our own rhetoric more seriously or perhaps too seriously and so in order to justify this and the the previous exchange in june we had to endure like weeks of hearing that we were all about to be killed by iran by this regime which you know some people didn't believe including me but some people did believe and we have a whole tv channel devoted to telling americans their single biggest risk is iran so if that regime is still there it's kind of hard to walk down from that if you see what i mean i think i think in america there's the big problem is that americans are fundamentally divorced from history they forget that they're actually inside of history yeah that's for sure i think that's a uh for a non-american that's a perceptive observation and the jews think that history is over is over yeah i think israel believes that sort of you know we got back to the land we have our state and it's kind of done now history's over i think that's the distinction between israel and america america forgets that they're at the center of history and israelis believe that they're enjoying the aftermath of history as if there can't be another exile as if there can't be another catastrophe and that's the short-sightedness interesting where does um among is there any discussion of like restoring the third temple that would seem obvious at least from my reading of no the torah no that's not even no but i personally think if you're gonna ask me i personally think it would be great to build a third temple just on like another hill i don't think you can do it on another hill i bet you could get a rabbinical precedent you could definitely pay some guy off to let you if you're gonna have a third temple i'm strongly in favor of putting on another hill just because then you avoid global religious war yeah but it would also be a shame to come back to the homeland after 3 000 years and leave potentially without having built something you know sweet but is is there any effort to do that that you know of no no no but there are a lot of people recently it's funny there's uh you know the messiah patches on that a lot of israeli do yes there's now on the back of cars there are these stickers now that are sort of like the image it looks like a greek or like a roman temple but it's a temple image oh i've seen it oh you've seen the sticker yes i have so that's blown up as of the last year or two do i think it will actually happen no but before the last year or two or let's just say before october 7th there there was none of that that you saw you had the guys trying to like secret in like red heifers every now and again they're a serious minority in the country um and as avra mentioned you had people there were attempts several times to five he said five i didn't know that yeah i knew i knew about one i didn't know about five um but again i think this is not there's no state level or institutional policy that's working towards the construction of a third temple i mean look at the buildings in tel aviv i don't think the israelis right now are in a position to build a big beautiful temple the best buildings in tel aviv were built by arabs in the ottoman era i knew that i knew that there's been a um i think israel's you know it's an amazing society in some ways they built a lot considering how young it is architecture has not been on the the top of the of the achievement list i would say that's why you put the city beside the sea yeah no it's it but it's still not uh it's yeah so yeah i i share i share your view of the local architecture um it's fascinating so how has the country just big picture how has it changed so in the seven and a half years you were there before two and a half since yeah october 7th like what changes have you noticed to people's attitudes you know there was uh at the height of the war i went to to buy a new laptop from a kid he was like 18 19 years old and it turns out that he's a soldier he works with the navy and so he's like young thin he looks very very young i went and we started talking and i explained that i'm a journalist that i do some work and he said listen after october the 7th we can't can't trust the arabs i said really like like none he's like none i was like i have a question like where do you travel within israel and he goes you know back in the day my father would go to a place called kalkili which is on the other side of the green line and he goes but we with the family would go to a place called qafor qasim which is on the israeli side of the green line but like right snug on the line and he said but ever since the war i stopped going to qafor qasim and i was like do you go to another place called tira which is even closer to tel aviv and he's like no i i won't risk it i don't even like going to jaffa and i told him i said like i what what's going to be left to you if you keep operating this way like you're you're king of the hill as it were you're the landlord but you're scared it's like it's like owning a house and being scared to walk into four out of the five rooms in the house it's not a way to live it's not the way to be a homeowner right you have this thing benigvir's big platform when he was running for elections was we're going to be the landlords now in hebrew balei bite the landlords actually yeah that was that was how loud he said that yeah that was a platform there there were signs in the west bank about that we're the landlords now yeah we're going to be the landlords and the problem in israel is that especially in the west bank is that there's a lot of folks on lording over the land and not really dwelling ben gavir's election slogan was we're going to be the landlords so we're we're dealing with lack of self-awareness now to say something like that out loud quite the opposite he was very very aware it was very strategic very tactical especially within the settlement population of course you're you're in a place where you don't feel like you're really the lord you really you don't feel except for the gun you don't feel like i'm really the king of a hill there's a guy who's saying i'm gonna make you king i'm gonna put the crown on your head it's tempting especially to like naive young potentially troubled youth who are yeah you know running around the hilltops interesting yeah how long can israel go with all this territory that's not part of their country but that they control like what with gaza and the west bank and now southern lebanon and parts of syria like does that just go on forever do people envision a time where the official borders of israel expand and like this is our country like no i mean look if israel can't manage gaza i don't think they can manage south lebanon um i don't think that what's happening in south lebanon is going to be permanent there might be a post or two on the border like you could potentially expect that are they going to take a large swaths of lebanese territory no but what they will do is render them uninhabitable which is a kind of way of you know doing not this but not that how do you do that it's the art of indecision which is bb's art you know you you don't occupy it but you leave it unoccupiable unoccupiable because it's just there's nothing there well that's the lebanese border is right now in many cases not across the border but there are many spots on the border in which everything is completely raised um those were also houses used in many cases by hezbollah so like i kind of get that um in syria as well like i don't think that's a permanent decision i think it's leverage that could potentially be used against jolani to come to some sort of agreement which i think will eventually come not a peace deal but something an understanding jolani being the new head of syria exactly who a lot of people assumed was installed there with the agreement of israel i assume that i still think it but now they're against him how what is what is the truth there who said they're against him i don't know i've heard recently that the israelis are troubled with johnny i don't know if that's true or not i don't know if they're i mean he's moved troops toward the lebanese border and there are rumors that he would be willing to fight hezbollah there's a common enemy um i think i think the israelis fear jolani long term and they also used to have a very good understanding with asad the problem is that asad was also embedded with iran and hezbollah so there's a bit of a problem i don't think israelis ever had a problem with asad i think as far as i know before the civil war there were also secret talks going on the israelis were also preparing to make some kind of agreement with asad um in the short term i think jolani and the israelis these can work together relatively well because he it'll take jolani a very long time until he will be able to build or or as it were cement the ground beneath him yes he can't start problems with israel right now but in 20 30 years he might be able to what's the typical israeli view of the united states i think avram got it right like stupid americans stupid around they sometimes want to live like you you know i think they want to they want to speak english they want certain certain kind of american lifestyle but they don't want to be they think you're naive is there affection or mostly contempt a lot of affection from what i hear a lot of affection i mean definitely over the last year or two i think this has a lot to do with bb there has been a kind of rhetoric of like you know who's the united states to tell us what to do they shouldn't be telling us what to do um and israelis get frustrated when there's talk of that like bb's gonna bend to trump or that america says like biden says you can't do this this is the red line i think there's a deep frustration inside of israel because they want to have their cake and eat it they want the money but also total they want they want support but also i think they want america to acknowledge that like we're in a way doing your bidding i think a lot of israelis believe that we're doing your bidding we're doing something good for you doing the hard work that you won't do yeah they feel that way i can't speak for the whole country but i mean you hear that i hear that yeah what about trump what's the view of trump love him really yeah a lot of israelis love trump again i'm speaking from my experience what do they like about him they like that he's willing to take the gloves off for once i think they saw biden as a pussy yeah um as a feckless pussy who wasn't willing to to make a decision wasn't able to do it for example bb is willing to do even though bb was also a pussy for a very long time um and so yeah i think it's refreshing to them and i think they don't see look as as avram also said israelis don't have a very good understanding of what happens on the american interior of american culture most israelis do not speak english i think this is like a delusion people have because they go to tel aviv and people speak english outside of tel aviv there's not a whole lot of english being spoken and so there is a sense in which all they see trump as is what he has done for us for the fact that he would be more willing to help us and that's what matters if you're an israeli you care about israel just like you are an american and care about america that's right that's always been my favorite thing about israel is there a nationalist yeah what's the view of the gulf states you have to be more specific what do they think of dubai and abu dhabi uae they love the uae they love the uae the uae also loves them but i don't think the government is a big fan of israel i've heard from people for example that like emirati diplomats are a bit shocked when they come to israel and they're also in some cases mistreated at the airports um i think they find israeli society a bit shocking in its rudeness at times i think they're not given the kind of respect that they're accustomed to having within gulf countries that have pretty you know standard royal hierarchies and different manners those are elaborately polite societies with all kinds of rituals around manners yeah no i think they are shocked yeah yeah so israelis love the uae and there are very very close relations between the uae and israel what do they think of the saudis i don't know couldn't tell you qatar i couldn't really tell you i think that you know a lot of israelis i mean they house hamas as far as a lot of israelis are concerned um i don't hear people saying that qatar as a country is our enemy i don't think israelis think a whole lot about qatar yeah i believe that i just don't think they think about them what do they think so israel is a lot of high-profile defenders in the united states are they well known in israel like who well i don't know ben shapiro or no no no unknown mark levin no no one's ever heard of him i'm sure there's many people have heard of them are there do you have like the average rarely average israeli listening to mark levin or ben shapiro absolutely not because also ben shapiro is speaking in the name of if anything american jewry right his conversation is maybe about israel but it's between western jews or english-speaking jews it doesn't really impinge upon the israelis to israelis what's their view of american jews specifically i don't know if i could give you that in in a sentence or two i don't there's there's all kinds of different relationships i'm avoiding falling into like certain kinds of banalities or stereotypes totally totally i just of course well you can't generalize actually about most cats but i'd say if there's like an overwhelming and they're a mix and they're also mixed feelings yeah they're mixed feelings i have issues with with american jews but they're also my people right and and this is i think the overarching sentiment at the end of the day there are many disagreements between the two peoples but they are also a single people it's just like you have disagreements with your family i'm sure but they're still your family and that's uh by and large if i had to sum it up that's the dynamic but there's certainly a generational break right now i think the younger generation of liberal jews um i think they're beginning to see and this isn't the majority of jews right now the majority of younger generation jews i think are still following in the footsteps of their parents but there is a significant population of young jews who i think are looking at israel and saying we don't like what you're doing and it doesn't necessarily matter about your family what changed that view do you think gaza yeah and the fact that it's also unpopular if you're a liberal jew in a liberal circle you don't want to be the guy who's liberal on every single point but stops at gaza it's socially awkward in many cases it's a social decision i don't think i don't think it's a major theoretical decision right this is not a question of principle it's just like it's becoming unacceptable to be pro it could be both but also you know principles in america are a big part of sociality or social life they certainly are right it's true for any society i think especially america you think so i think people like touting their their morals quite a bit in america yeah really yeah i've never sat with an arab and he tells me like you know i believe in this and i believe in that and i think like this is really wrong i don't i don't i don't hear i don't hear that you know like on like the subway in toronto you can hear people talking through each other about their their various moral beliefs that they've never had to act upon in their lives that is that is a very wise observation i've never sat with an arab and he's like i think this is wrong getting in your yeah it's a bit like i'm sure the arabs have moral opinions of course they do of course they do it's not that they don't have standards but they're not throwing them at you at dinner they don't but there's just not the foundations of their identity yeah well there is a certain self-righteousness in the west that's not necessarily the same as righteousness i mean it's just yeah definitely there's a posturing that goes on here's my last question how do you think and it's impossible to know but like in five years what does the landscape look like is in the middle east is the united states still as closely allied with israel as it is today is lebanon territorially intact is israel safer have we gotten the seven front war down to two fronts say or no fronts is bb still in power like what current trends continue what what does it look like i think bb very well could be in power in five years i think i think he'll probably get elected in october yeah i think i think it's highly likely that he'll get re-elected and i think everything that's happening right now is in some way or another engineered for that to happen again as we said you know the the personal ambitions of bb happen to align with some of the strategic ambitions of the state and if you can just modulate that then uh it's a perfect recipe to win elections um in terms of lebanon do i think the israelis will be highly active deep inside lebanon no and i think a lot of these bb doesn't want a ton of war i think after bb gets into if he gets re-elected i think you'll see lebanon sort of come to a close even iran could come to a close he'll want to just sort of like bring in a new status quo that will be useful to him and when he has to turn up the heat he'll turn up the heat um yeah do you think again purely speculative but if donald trump went to bb tomorrow and said we're shutting this down with iran it's terrible for markets it's terrible for me my political party yeah could he make bb stop i think he probably could but bb would probably want to find a kind of middle ground meaning they had a ceasefire in lebanon but there were still israeli strikes in lebanon on on an almost daily basis right yeah i think you could call that the israeli ceasefire yeah in hebrew you call the war between the wars um so funny when you know growing up here we were taught that israel had wars in 48 56 67 73 82 and then the intifadas yeah that that's the official like history of it right yeah and then you get older and you realize that there was kind of a war continuously i don't know if i'd call it a war but there is fighting there's fighting or there are strikes like there's activity i don't know if i'd call it a war um but i do think you could potentially see a situation and it depends on the conditions of the end of the war if there's an agreement what the stakes are and the stakeholders but there could be a situation i can envisage a situation in which israel for example is still striking not necessarily on a daily basis but that they operate in the skies of tehran that they strike as needed um and there's still a lot to be seen i mean i i don't i think there should be there's probably going to be some attempt to activate people to try to get protests stirred up again i wouldn't be entirely surprised in iran yeah i find it hard to believe that the israelis put all this together without the hope or without some expectation that when things quiet down things internally will begin to sort of move again yeah um i don't know if you can expect people to go and protest while there are strikes the strikes should i think they would expect lay the groundwork for something to happen do you have any idea how the israeli government winds up with so many agents of influence and just agents in all these hostile countries how many there's so many people in iran working for israel same in syria same in lebanon like how do they do that people are easy to buy people are easy to buy apparently they are i mean i like to say that the best spies in the arab world all work for the mossad that's what they don't that's why they don't have good intelligence agencies how do they do that i mean it's just remarkable i don't think the united states pulls that off they could if they wanted to i think the cia is probably just lazy the stakes aren't as high in many cases yeah you find someone's weakness we're homosexual we only do that in the senate here we haven't bothered to do it in iran i guess that day might come you never know all right thank you very much that was interesting as hell thanks for having me