Israel Moves to Finish Hamas in Rafah
House Speaker Mike Johnson narrowly survives a motion to vacate filed by Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Israeli ground forces enter Rafah in the final stage operations against Hamas.
And finally, more lessons from the Second World War concerning the World War III by proxy and status update on the conflict.
Welcome back, insiders. Your gregarious Vulcan. Fascinating. Your lovable landsman. Yours truly. Your mad genius. Be back again with another episode for my insiders. 20 IQ point bonus just for listening. And I certainly hope that you find that valuable. You know, something you like. Wow. It’s been quite a week. There’s been a lot going on.
I’m gonna dive right in here pretty quick, but just wanted to take a minute to thank you guys for listening. Obviously, this podcast is a labor of love for me. I don’t make any money off of it. I don’t know that that might not change in the future, but right now, I just make them to tell you what I think is going on in the world, and I am grateful that you guys listen, that you think that there’s something worth hearing here. So that being said, a gentleman has been messaging with me and I try whenever I can to engage with listeners asking about you know what books to read right, and the question has come up, what kind of books, what reading would you do in order to understand the history of the conflict? If you want to know more background information. And already, at least one listener’s been really wowed by the things that he’s found, things that he didn’t know. And there’s 76 years of history since Israel was founded, and another 30 years before that of violence, conflict with the Arabs.
going back to the 1920s. So it’s been about a century here. And, you know, there’s a lot to know. So that’s that. So anyway, the first book I recommend, if you’re interested in learning the background of the conflict, is Right to Exist, which is the subtitle is A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. Right to Exist was written by Yaakov Lozowick. And Yaakov Lozowick gives a very…
honest discussion of Israeli history includes the good the bad and the ugly and this is something that’s really important to me because this is a pro -israel podcast I’m not gonna lie obviously I support Israel and its right to exist but at the same time that doesn’t make Israel perfect or mean that the government has always acted correctly right Israel has made some mistakes they’ve done some things that they shouldn’t have done it’s a learning experience the United States has done a lot of things we shouldn’t have done
But, you know, history is about learning. You know, we make mistakes and then we’re like, hey, you know, we shouldn’t have done that, right? Or, you know, the generation before us couldn’t handle this issue, but now maybe we can. So, you know, Israel doesn’t have to be perfect. And as I’ve said before, the difference between criticism and anti -Semitism, you know, is a question of Israel’s right to exist, which is why this book is so good.
You know, you can say, hey, I don’t like the way Israel is fighting the war in Gaza. Okay, maybe Israel’s wrong to fight it that particular way. You can say, I don’t like Israel’s policy toward peace process. Either they’ve been too lax and they’ve been too eager to go, or they haven’t been willing to sign the difficult peace deal, whatever your opinion is. Fine, that’s okay. But if your opinion is, well, Israel shouldn’t exist, and look at all these bad things Israel did, that’s just proof that they shouldn’t exist. That’s antisemitism right there.
The people today who are shouting River to the Sea are calling for another Holocaust, right? Textbook anti -Semitism, you know, killing Jews. I don’t know what else to say, okay? So anyway, this book by Lozowick is really thorough, goes up to about 2003 when Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister. So yes, that’s 20 years ago and there’s a lot that’s happened since then. But you know, I cover the more recent history a lot more on this podcast. So if you’ve been listening for a while.
You go back to listen to previous episodes, you’re gonna hear a lot more about the things that have happened in the last 20 years. You know, I’ve been following Israeli politics basically since Yitzhak Shamir, so you know, since the 90s, so you’re gonna get a lot more detail out of me because those are the years that I remember. But anyway, so Losowick’s book is really good, right, to exist, and that’ll get you all the things up through the second Intifada. And a very honest overview…
the good, the bad, and the ugly. And one of the things that the listener brought up was that there were criticisms of Israel’s conduct in Lebanon. And I pointed out, well, a lot of the things that the author is referring to are issues that were raised by a commission set up by the Israeli government to investigate into the Sabra and Shatila, excuse me, massacres. And that report was scathing, right? It ended political careers, right? So, you know, that’s part of this sort of self -effacing honesty that, you know, when Israel does something wrong, you know, when they have their, you know, problems, they hold their leaders accountable, like most democracies do. And so, anyways, that’s a good book there that covers a lot of the history of the conflict back and forth, from Israel’s founding up to that end.
You know talks about some of the history before that the next book I would recommend if you really want to understand the question of Middle East peace is a book called the missing piece PEACE the missing piece It was written by Dennis Ross. He was ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration. He was very active in the negotiations back then between first Netanyahu and Arafat with the Clinton administration facilitating it, but then
after that with Ehud Barak, who was prime minister for a couple of years there. And he talks in that book about all of the details of the peace plan. So I mean, if you read the book, you just get this, it’s very thick. You get this really intense idea, like, look, they negotiated all the way, pushed it as far as they could. Ehud Barak was way out on a limb. He didn’t have a democratic mandate to concede the things that he was willing to concede. And yet, he was willing to go that far to get a peace deal.
And then at the last minute, Yasser Arafat scuttled the whole thing and started the second Intifada, right? A campaign of violence that led to the death of over 800 Israelis, overwhelmingly women and children. So that is there. But anyway, there were a lot of mischaracterizations of the peace process and what have you, and Dennis Ross sets the record straight. But that gives you a very thorough and going understanding also of the Oslo Accords, which are still in effect, right? The Palestinian Authority still controls area A.
in Judea and Samaria. Area B is still kind of this, you know, sort of limbo between the two and Area C was supposed to be open for Israeli control for security purposes and also for settlement, right, for Jews to move into communities in that zone. As I mentioned before, 20 % of the Area C now is occupied by Arab squatters and that’s a big problem, right. They’re trying to take land and influence future negotiations.
Anyway, so that’s a really good book and that just shows you how far Israel was willing to go to make peace. The book was published also in 2005. Last one, and this one is a little bit about more modern Israel and where modern Israel’s character comes from. It’s called Startup Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. It was published in 2011 and it’s a really great book. It was published right after I got back.
studying in Israel and I loved it because they wrote a book about what I experienced while I was there and going to school. I mean there were startup companies everywhere. I mean I you know was sitting down at a business talk somebody was doing a speaking engagement you know sat down next to this middle -aged woman you know a bit dressed up you know business business casual and what have you and we’re all chit -chatting and she spoke enough English that we could talk. My Hebrew is really broken really bad.
Anyway, we got to chatting and after a little bit, I then kind of like, you know, she’s like, what do you do? I’m here studying, getting my MBA and asked her what she’s, yeah, my company has invented a camera that’s a pill. Like you can swallow this pill and it’ll go through your system and look at all of your innards, right, from different angles and, you know, transmit that wirelessly and you can watch it then.
Right? So it’s not invasive. Like instead of having to poke you, prod you, or shove things in down your throat or other uncomfortable places, you can just take this pill and it will look at stuff. Now since then, of course, laparoscopic things have gotten smaller and nano and that kind of thing. But at the time, almost 15 years ago, that was still there. And so there she was. And I don’t know, two minutes later, I started talking to a guy who was working on, you know,
wind farm test kits, like people could do a home test to see if they had enough wind to put up a turbine. And everybody had a startup. A lot of them were in green energy, medical tech, and high tech, various kinds of software, hardware, and that kind of thing. So there were startup companies everywhere. Everywhere you turned, somebody was a CEO or a chairman or something, right? And so that was really great. So Startup Nation by Dan Saner and Saul Singer talks about basically once BB.
was finance minister under Ariel Sharon, he freed up the economy and Israel just boomed. It became the entrepreneurial state that Israeli founder Ze ‘ev Jabotinsky thought it should be. A free market entrepreneurial state with strong national defense where Jews and Arabs would live together in peace. That was his vision. That was the vision of the Israeli right. People always talk about, you know, Israelis are right wing and they’re all fascist or whatever, but Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right, wanted…
you know, a secular democratic Israel where Arabs and Jews lived together in peace that was free market and entrepreneurial. Anyway, so that aspect of Zeev Jabotinsky’s dream came to life and now slowly but surely it is kind of coming to the fore. Israeli Arabs are slowly starting to take up the mantle of becoming part of Israeli society. I’ve talked about that elsewhere. Anyway, those three books right there.
will give you a really good idea of A, what is Israel’s history, the good, the bad, and the ugly of the conflict, B, in right to exist, B, with the missing piece by Dennis Ross, you’ll have complete discussion of the Oslo Accords, the peace process, very thorough knowledge, how it was mischaracterized, how it fell apart, all that stuff, okay? And then finally, Startup Nation by Santorin Singer, this gives you an idea of Israel’s business climate.
what it has become as far as becoming a high -tech entrepreneurial state. So there you go. So people have asked and there you go, I have answered. Those are books that I would recommend. So, you know, it’s good to read up on these things and, you know, get a good grounding in the history. Of course, early in the podcast, in the first 15 episodes, I covered Israeli history a little bit, Israeli political history and the first election.
of this podcast, the third of the five elections that took place in so many years. Anyway, so lots and lots of elections. Actually, that was the fourth. That was the one I covered. The first one I covered was the fourth of four elections at that time, and then a fifth election has been held since. So anyway, lots and lots of elections they had from 2019 to 2023. Just so many elections. Anyway.
And so, you know, those first 15 episodes, you’ll get some history and some background on the political parties and the recent history and that kind of thing. Anyway, all right, moving on. American politics. So, Moscow Marjorie strikes again. You know, I’m sitting here like, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a foreign agent. Change my mind, right? You know, prove me wrong. You know, and she’s out spreading Russian propaganda, all the Russian talking points, you know.
Ukraine’s a Nazi state. Yeah, a Nazi state with a Jewish president. My hand, you can’t see me because it’s not, but my hand is on my forehead. Do you understand the basic definition of a Nazi? I mean, like, you know, anyway.
To Vladimir Putin, anyone who opposes Vladimir Putin is a neo -Nazi. Trump is a Nazi, Biden is a Nazi, Zelensky is a Nazi, Schroeder is a Nazi, Macron is a Nazi, Srinak is a Nazi, everybody’s a Nazi unless you agree with Vladimir Putin and then you are a great patriotic Russian comrade. Wow. No narcissism detected. It’s been said that really if you’re gonna be a politician, you kinda have to be a megalomaniac.
and a sociopath, it really helps, right? It certainly does in his case. Man is off his rocker in any case. So, you know, she’s out spreading this propaganda. Mike Johnson cooperated with getting the aid bills through. And as I talked about, those were necessary to get our industrial plant going so that we can produce enough weapons, not only to supply our allies in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, but also to keep our forces supplied, right?
We have to be able to have the war materials, the air defense missiles, Patriot missiles, for example, the air to air missiles, all of the things, all of the ammunition, all of the logistics that are required in order to supply a military in the field. We have to have all of that. And available in a continuous logistical supply chain.
that can supply all of our allies and our forces in a direct confrontation with these powers. Like we should have enough weapons that if Russia attacked NATO and China attacked Taiwan and Iran attacked Israel and North Korea invaded South Korea, all on the same day, we have to be able to knock the snot out of all of them at once and without using nuclear weapons, preferably. My God, what an unconscionable thing that would be. So we needed that passed and you know, Moscow Marjorie was against it.
So earlier in this congressional term, last year, they wouldn’t elect a speaker and they eventually forced a compromise where any individual member could file a motion to vacate the speaker’s position. So Moscow Marjorie filed it and they had a vote. I referred to it as a vote of confidence on X and somebody asked me, well, what do you mean? Isn’t a motion to vacate? Yeah, it’s about the same thing.
Right, essentially, you know, it’s a vote of confidence in the Speaker of the House. Well, as it turned out, Mike Johnson survived by 217 votes to 213. Even some Democrats voted for, I mean, you know, they helped out a lot. So, you know, Moscow Marjorie isn’t just working for the Russians, she’s also working for the Democrats, because that would have, if Mike Johnson had been ousted, that would have made Congress, you know, the Republican majority in Congress look even more ridiculous.
When you look at the national polls right now, you go to the RCP average, Donald Trump is getting 312 electoral votes right now, right? That 270 to win, 300, so he’s winning by a majority of 49 at this point. It’s huge, okay? The Senate, looking good for Republicans, right? The only place that is looking good for the Democrats is the House, because it’s been such an embarrassment, right? So we need to get on that. Anyway.
So, Mike Johnson survives. He had help from Donald Trump, he had help from Democrats, he had help from whoever he needed in order to avoid this being a joke. And this motion to vacate needs to change. You know, I’m on a lot of nonprofit boards and we have provisions in the bylaws. I’m that guy, right? Like I’m the guy who writes the bylaws because I’m very good with legal language and that kind of thing. Hey, you know, I’m a Yid, right? I don’t read all doctors and lawyers.
accountants and bankers. Anyway, that’s what Bubbie told me to be. So, you know, but here I am. I’m just a landsman. I work for a living, you know, doing really, really high tech stuff. Anyway, so, yeah, having a bit of a laugh on that. In any case, I do a lot of bylaws for the organizations that I’m part of. And one of the things that…
comes up all the time is, how do we, when do we call an emergency board meeting? Right? How many members of the board do you need in order to call an emergency board meeting? And it’s like, you know, if you have a nine member board, you know, you could have two or three, you know, if you have a 14 member board, maybe four, you know, you don’t just want anybody to be like, you know what, I need some attention today. I am not having a good day. I’m calling an emergency board meeting and we’re just going to, you can’t be like that. Right? You need more than one person to agree to have a board meeting.
you know, special meeting to handle some kind of issue. Same should be true in Congress, you know. Now, there is in the House of Representatives, a procedure called motion to discharge, petition to discharge basically, where a majority of the members of the House can sign a petition to force a bill out of committee and onto the floor. And I’ve often thought that maybe it should be less than a majority for the petition to discharge, like maybe 100 members of 435 or a quarter of the members total, something like that. I just thought that should be lower. But one person…
Any one of the 435 members of the House being able to call a motion to vacate is kind of silly, right? At least five, maybe 10. I mean, there should be a number that is small and small enough that it’s not impossible when you have a speaker that people feel is malfeasent or incompetent, but not so great that it’s impossible to do. Like, if you required 100 signatures for a motion to vacate it probably wouldn’t happen so in any case those are the kinds of things that you know I’d spend a lot of time working on these is why that issue comes up so anyway Mike Johnson survived good for him thank you Donald Trump President Trump for pitching in to help with that and what a what a disaster so hopefully we won’t get any more of this nonsense between now and the election and
Republicans can go into the election looking professional without the sabotage from Moscow Marjorie. And she’s not the only foreign agent in Congress. I mean, Ilhan Omar is basically a foreign agent of Iran. Rashida Tlaib, much the same. Now, in all honesty, all three of them should be expelled. If we lived in a moral world, if Congress did what was right, the House would expel all three of them.
Right, none of those three people has any business being in Congress. All of them are anti -Semitic, they’re acting on behalf of foreign governments, and that kind of thing. So the problem is if Republicans were willing to vote to get rid of Moscow Marjorie, the Democrats would never be willing to vote to get rid of Omar Tlaib, right? Because that’s how they are. So, you know.
Fair is fair, and it’s like, look, if they’re gonna have kooks in Congress, we’re gonna have kooks too, okay? So that’s how it’s gonna be. But honestly, these people should all be gone. I really wish the voters would stop returning people like this to Congress. Anyway, we’re living in really crazy times, my friends. So anyway, with that said, I’m gonna move on from that topic.
This, I was mentioning the polls. I mean, this last week has been, it was really funny to see the Hill headline, you know, Trump has an embarrassing week. Actually, the last couple of weeks have been one long Trump campaign ad. Like, I mean, I’m telling you, from the withholding of aid to Israel by the Biden administration, which I’m gonna talk to, speak to a little more in the next segment, to…
the lawfare, the judges and their gag orders and this kind of nonsense, to the campus protests with the fruitcakes, neo -Nazis on our campuses. It’s just on and on and on. It has just been everything out there. It’s been one long ad saying vote for Donald Trump. You can’t make this stuff up. I couldn’t do it. We had…
you know, border insecurity and all this, anyway, it’s just, you know, I’m gonna speak to that in a little bit, but it’s like, it’s an election year, right? 65 % of the American people want a secure border, whatever the costs, right? 77 % support Israel, 72 % of Americans want Israel to go into Rafa and finish this off now, right? So, you know, it’s like you get overwhelming majorities supporting these things. On the border, there’s a plurality of 18 to 25 year olds.
That’s right, young numbskulls, the youngest of the population, even a plurality of them, so not a majority but more than those who oppose it, think we should have a secure border. And increasingly, as I talked about in a previous episode, Rasmussen reports, polling, they’re finding that young voters are moving away from Biden, even with his student debt relief and all the things he’s tried to do to buy votes. It’s a very complicated issue, but let’s just, you know.
with Biden trying to buy votes. We understand this, right? This is typical politics, right? That’s not even working for him. Like, he can’t even buy their votes. And, you know, Bill Maher jumped on this thing, you know, young people being, you know, a lot of Zoomers thinking that Donald Trump would shake things up for the better. So, anyway. So, just that’s just how it’s been. I mean, like, you know, it’s tricky times.
So, you know, Ryan Macbeth and I, you know, we all have our disagreements and our little change of opinion. He thinks that the withholding of aid for Rafa was a 4D chess, right, for, you know, Biden brilliantly having the strategy to try to earn Muslim votes and make Israel do the right thing. And then it comes out that, you know, the State Department says that Israel had already complied with all of the requirements, humanitarian requirements that were required for that. And it’s like the State Department is not a right -wing organization. So, you know.
that was embarrassing to the administration. Not that anyone reports on it. Media is always on Biden’s side. In any case, so there’s Biden going after 1 % of the vote, right? Muslims make up 1 % of the US population. And yes, they’re prominent in swing states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, right? Now, the Democrats are probably gonna, Biden’s probably gonna win Minnesota.
it’s possible Trump could win there, but usually there’s just enough votes there that, you know, especially with Minneapolis, that that goes Democrat. Wisconsin, that’s anyone’s game right now. So is Michigan. So I understand a desire to get voters there, okay? But flip that to the other side of the coin, right? We have an increasing number of political strategists talking about the flood of Jewish voters moving right. Now, you know, I’ve talked about the Jewish vote before, but not recently.
Dennis Prager has this point that he makes that half of the Jews that in America are secular leftists that just don’t want to call themselves white, basically, right? Their grandparents were Jewish, and now they’re intermarried and they’re not really, you know, they don’t participate, they don’t go to shul, they aren’t part of the Jewish community center, they don’t have anything to do with anything, and they don’t, you know, support Israel, and they’re not culturally Jewish, like they have no connection to the Jewish community. But their grandparents were Jewish and they call themselves that.
Whereas among the half that do care, a majority of those people are actually Republican voters, right? So about 30 % of Jews vote to the right. And that 30 % is, you know, six tenths of the half of Jews who care. But the thing is, a lot of those, well, not a lot, some of those secular leftists are also Zionists because Israel is, to a certain degree, a secular left state, right?
And so they identify with Israel’s leftism and the freedom that is embodied there, right? Like if you were homosexual, you can walk down the streets of Tel Aviv. I know, when I was down there, I was walking with a good friend of mine, and his gay brother came up and said hi. And he was walking down the street, holding hands with his boyfriend. It’s a free society. You get onto the beach, the women are in bikinis, some of them a little too stringy if you ask me, but my wife and I got quite an eye -opening walk down there. And we grew up in a beach town.
near a beach town, so you know, it’s like, I grew up near Santa Cruz, but I was getting shocked. It was a little different. In any case, you know, it’s a free society, right? And that’s the kind of freedom that at least the classically liberal or, you know, like pre -woke liberal American culture favored, right? Where it’s open and everyone can do whatever they want and everything’s cool, right? So that crowd is a little bit more Zionist than you would think. So some of them are moving over.
And actually, I know because some of them listen to the podcast. A number of secular Jews who have come back and, you know, they’re like, Isaac, how come I didn’t know this? How come I didn’t know that? And I respond to their message like, look, you know, a lot of our communities have become, you know, a lot of people in the community have become disconnected, unplugged. You know, I’ve walked into synagogues when I travel and, you know, I’ll go in for Shabbat or for Friday night services or whatever, whatever’s going on. And there are people that they don’t know anything about Israel.
They don’t understand any of the issues and they’re asking me questions and I’m the stranger issue of it. He’s like, yeah, I’m a Yid, but I’m not part of the community. So a lot of them have ended up listening to the podcast. So Jews make up, if you round up, about 2% of the population, but we’re also a lot more affluent than the Muslims in our country, right? So yeah, you’re going after 1 % of the population while another group that’s 2% of the population, and pretty affluent is moving the other way. They’re looking to Trump. That might not be too smart. And then, you know, there’s the whole part where to get trying to go after 1 % of the vote while you’re ticking off, you know, seven out of 10 Americans. So it’s like, you know, Biden’s trying to win Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. And to do that, he’s conceding basically Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Florida, right? You know, Jewish vote in terms of the Jewish vote, you know, Pennsylvania and Florida have significant Jewish community.
Yeah, a lot of them are in San Francisco, a little bit in Los Angeles, New York, places where it wouldn’t matter. But you better be careful. It’s an election year. You should do what’s popular. Okay, enough of that. So moving on, and I’m going pretty quick today. I want to keep this episode relatively short. Lippmann’s logic. It is time for Lippmann’s logic. Walter Lippmann.
the journalist and writer who was a proponent of liberal democracy in the early 20th century, in the mid 20th century, when it was very much under attack. In the beginning of the 20th century by autocratic regimes like the German Empire. Then after that by ideological regimes like the Soviet Union and the Nazis. And of course, you know, in the middle of the 20th century by this sort of post Stalinist Soviet movement.
of Khrushchev after that. So, you know, he wrote in a time when there was a big debate about the good, the bad, and the ugly of liberal democracy. So he would know a lot of things. I also talked last episode in the first Lipman’s Logics segment about Jacobitism, right, about, you know, just saying, well, you know, there are those people, if those people are in the game, if we just get rid of those people, everything would be great. And, you know, then that doesn’t work because you have to take responsibility for…
you know, your good decisions and your bad decisions. Maybe you voted for people that were wrong, right? And you have to recognize that just getting rid of the bad people doesn’t make policy perfect, right? It’s not pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows just because we got the globalists out of the government or the Jews out of the government or, you know, whoever, the woke people out of the government or the, you know, this or that, whatever, name a group, okay? So, you know.
He says very wisely, we need to take a little bit more responsibility for ourselves and our votes and our actions and as a community, work together to learn and grow together. And not just be like, you know, well, we just have to get rid of this one group of malignant people. You know, it doesn’t work that way, right? And you have to think about what a good policy would be after that. Speaking of policy, in today’s Lippman’s Logic segment, I’m gonna talk about the limits of public opinion.
So Lindman points out, what is public opinion? And I’ve read several of his essays and chapters and what have you on the subject. And he points out that, first of all, public opinion is often fleeting. The public thinks this way today and that way tomorrow. But it’s also interested. So you have farmers who are interested in issues that relate to farmers and bankers who are really interested in…
interests related to bankers, veterans for veterans issues, and so on and so forth. Any group of people, realtors, any group of people you can find have interests. And then they want to identify those interests with the public. The people want this. The people want that. And sometimes people are led. Public opinion can be led. You can convince people to go along with something. How long they’ll go along with it and to what extent is not necessarily clear. At the same time, there are a lot of
when even when the interested groups are out, the public opinion is very much against, right? Just we’re against it, we’re in opposition, we want no part of it, right? And so that balance there, like between people holding opinions and people being influenced to opinions, right? And that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I mean, you know, there are times when people don’t know what to do, right? Like, you know, the immigration issue for years, people just didn’t know what to do about it. What?
How are we going to stop them? Donald Trump came along and said, well, build a wall. And that shook up the debate. Like, wow, hey, what says secure the border better than build a wall? Simple, easy to understand, brilliant strategy. So the point is, there is some influencing. But people already had the opinion that the border should be secured. The soundbite, build the wall, that ended up being a policy, actually tried to do that. Amazing thing, huh? Politicians actually tried to do the things that they said they’re going to do. Anyway.
You know, that, that creates it. So those are interesting. But we also have to account in public opinion for those who brought us to this point, our ancestors, right? You know, my grandfather who saw and did things at Okinawa that tortured him and tormented him for the rest of his life. And then my family down a dark path of trauma for several generations that we’re just recovering from. He went there and did that not just for his own sake, but for ours, like to preserve.
this thing we call liberty, to preserve freedom, to preserve our power to vote and our constitution and our rights. So yeah, we might have public opinion that would say, well, we could trample on gun rights or we could trample on free speech, but we also have to consider, look, let’s show a little bit of gratitude to those who brought us to this point and their wishes, right? They didn’t wish for us to become an impoverished, woke state that’s weak and doesn’t promote good moral values in the world, okay?
At the same time, we also have to think about future generations, right? Hey, we could vote ourselves a party. Let’s triple the national, quadruple the national debt, quintuple the national debt. Borrow, borrow, borrow. Spend like there’s no tomorrow. That’s great for us. we had a party, right? But then what about our children? What about our grandchildren? What about those future generations, right? What’s left for them? Okay, so you have to consider those things in public opinion as well. And the fact that public opinion will change. You know, sometimes people are for this today and against that tomorrow.
So those are the kinds of things that are there. And obviously that balance between people who are self -interested, people who are influencing from a self -interested point of view, people who are influencing in general, and of course the general public who do actually hold certain opinions, right? And they just generally be against, for or against a certain proposal. So that’s something to consider. And you know, Lipman.
being a liberal, classical liberal from his era, if you really look at it, I mean, John F. Kennedy was massively influenced by Walter Lippmann. When I started reading Lippmann, I got JFK all the way through, like everything he said, everything he tried to do, yep, now I understand where JFK is coming from. He had read a lot of Lippmann, and so he’s very much a Lippmannite, right? He’s following Lippmann’s sort of popular liberal. Classically liberal approach of free and open society. Anyway, so those are some thoughts. And these are interesting things to consider, right? Because on the one hand, I spend a lot of time talking about popular opinion. If you want to be elected, an easy way to do that is to support popular policies, to say, hey, let’s secure the border, let’s support our allies, let America be strong but not involved in every war in the world. And…
you know, let’s do what the people want, right? And then Donald Trump comes out and says that, and all of a sudden he’s persona non grata, number one bad guy, orange man bad, he’s awful, he’s whatever. Why? Because the Democrats don’t care about popular opinion anymore, right? Anyway, so that’s that. So there’s your Lippmann’s logic. When I come back from the break, it’s time to talk about the Rafah operation, some Israeli politics, and things going on in the Middle East.
On to Israeli politics and the Israeli situation. Last episode I recorded with Israel on the verge of launching the RAFA operation and unfortunately when I released it the operation had already begun. That’s one of those things where if you record on Monday and release on Wednesday let’s just say you know the news cycle continues. So I have a little more news about that. I want to note and this is…
Another example of media bias. So Egypt and Qatar had been negotiating with Hamas and the Biden administration had given their tacit approval to this. Some kind of ceasefire, right? Israel had not been involved. Israel had not been consulted. But the idea was, you know, they will work on a plan and then present it to Israel and let the Israelis negotiate on it, okay? So on the eve of the Rafah operation,
Hamas goes out and says they’ve accepted the ceasefire. Right? And the media are like, Hamas accepts the ceasefire on the verge of Israeli operation.
They didn’t accept a ceasefire. They accepted a proposed deal that was developed by governments that are not Israel, that are not parties to the conflict, to present to the party to the conflict. So once again, the media just jumps right out there and Hamas accepts ceasefire and this kind of thing.
And it’s just, it’s back to like, you know, when they said Israel bombed a hospital, right? The media generally, Israel bombed the hospital! And then we find out that actually it was, you know, a rocket fired by Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization in Gaza that fell short in a parking lot of a hospital. And meanwhile, you know, when we say that babies were beheaded, we had to have journalists come out to Israel and see them.
Right? We had to prove it, which is a ridiculous and asinine thing to have to prove. So, you know, we’re at this stage where, you know, we have to prove everything on our end, and they’ll just cut and paste whatever Hamas says, right? The terrorist organization is supposedly more trouble. But of course, I mean, you know, Jews are sniveling and eyeing trolls, horns on our heads, eat blood motsen of secret space lasers. So of course, we would be the kind of people who would do these things.
But I’ve been trying to point out the anti -Semitic bias in the media for a long time. And a lot of people have said, you know, Isaac, we like that, but you take it too far. They’re not totally anti -Semitic. They’re not.
Now, here you go. Okay, I’m not wrong. Maybe you just needed to see it out there like it is now, where it’s blatant. So, another example of that. There was no ceasefire agreement. Hamas has rejected every ceasefire agreement that Israel directly proposed to Hamas, and they said they couldn’t find 40 hostages alive to trade. So, I mean, God, you know, they’re…
still we have 133 people unaccounted for at this point, including Noah Agamami, including Noah Naama Levi, including Kefir Bibas and his brother. I mean, Kefir is a one -year -old baby who’s held in captivity. If they can’t find 40 people alive out of that group, it’s…
Forgive me, it’s heartbreaking to think that we’re ever gonna get these people back. And then we have to justify why we’re going after Hamas. We’re gonna pound these people into the ground, my friends. This is biblical retribution. But we are still a moral people, and so we’re not gonna kill people who are non -combatants, in theory. They’re theoretically non -combatants. So, obviously there’s collateral damage. So…
Israel dropped leaflets and encouraged people to move out of Ra ‘afah and the non -combatant population to leave. It’s hard to define civilian there because 80 % of Gazans supported October 7th. they’re all complaining about it now, right? But they supported it then. And the Hamas fighters dress up in civilian clothes. They’re out in their soccer jerseys and jogging pants or whatever. And…
You know, these people look, you know, Israelis are killing civilians. Yeah, you know, guys dressed like that, but they’ve got a gun in their hand or they’re next to a mortar, right? These are not civilians, right? These are people who were firing at Israeli forces. So there’s that kind of thing. The UN has revised the numbers down by 50 % now. So even fewer people have died than claimed. And really great post that Dr. Elie David, great account to follow on X.
pointed out, you know, it’s like, you know, a 50 % reduction in fake death toll numbers, you know, imaginary numbers generated by a terrorist organization is still imaginary numbers invented by a terrorist organization, right? So, you know, there’s that. Like, we don’t have very accurate numbers from them. And, you know, when the UN is even realizing the number down,
You know, so some genocide, right? Tiny percentage of people dying, most of them fighters, you know, and unfortunately there are collateral damage. There are unfortunately non -combatants killed in these things. That’s why we try to get them out of the area. And Israel goes, you know, has not been going as far out of its way as it has in the past to avoid civilian casualties, as was raised in the debate, or the interview with Ryan Macbeth, and see.
That’s my point about, you know, you can disagree with the way a battle is waged. You can disagree with tactics and that kind of thing. You just can’t say that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist or to defend itself, right? You know, Ryan McBeth is a guy who wants to see Hamas gone as bad as you do, you know, but anyway, and I’m gonna come back and talk about my interview with him again in here in just a minute. So, anyway, Israel is going into Ra ‘afah. That’s the southwestern corner of the Gaza Strip. It’s where…
the Rafah crossing is into Egypt. Israel now controls the Palestinian side of that. And that’s, you know, that’s where the operation is. That’s the last stronghold of Hamas. And they’re still firing rockets from there at Israeli civilians, you know, at schools, homes, and hospitals in Israel, which, you know, apparently that’s okay. But, you know, if Israel were to accidentally bomb a hospital or something, that would be horrible, right? Even though it hasn’t happened, but whatever. Anyway.
So Israel’s moved into there. They need to finish that up. And then Israeli forces are going to have to wheel around and deal with Hezbollah. There’s also been some operations in Jenin and Nablus over in Judea and Samaria. What the international community erroneously refers to as the West Bank. West Bank of what? It isn’t quite clear. But that is, it’s been called Judea and Samaria for thousands of years. So anyway, that.
you know, those operations are a little bit more precision, you know, go in, find the particular terrorists they’re looking for and come out. But, you know, Israel needs to be able to finish up in Gaza and wheel around and deal with issues going on up north. And this brings me to my main criticism of the Israeli government, referring back to my interview with Ryan Macbeth, and I’ve talked about it a lot on X, Dennis Ross just posted, speaking of the ambassador who wrote the book, that Israel doesn’t have a plan.
for what happens in Gaza. And this is made evident by the fact that they’re still fighting in northern Gaza, places like Can Yudis and Gaza City where Israel has theoretically cleared those areas. They’ve already fought Hamas off there and they’re still having to fight there, right? Hamas is behind the lines, right? So Israel has not done a good job of preparing for an alternative. And during my interview with Ryan Macbeth, we talked about the possibility of like a sons of Palestine is what he calls it, like the sons of Iraq that were.
trained in Iraqi army and police force, trained to police and protect Iraq from its enemies, well, you know, do something similar there. I call it the Tahrir Force. The Tahrir Square protests in 2013 inspired the people of Gazans. In 2014, 2015, a lot of Gazans were getting organized to protest against Hamas in the name of the Tahrir Revolution. And Hamas cracked down on them.
So I think that Tahrir Force is a more appropriate name. But in any case, start gathering young men in Gaza, and even young women, and sending them to training camps, possibly in Israel, possibly outside. I mean, you could set up training camp in the UAE. But get Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, other Arab countries that are now allies of Israel, friendly nations, have them train these guys, right? And I’ve talked about how there’s an Arab cultural concept of uprightness that can be used there.
to promote a sense of, you know, you guys are gonna be, you know, a moral, you’re gonna use power morally to protect the people of that area and allow it to be rebuilt, right? Not allow water pipes being dug up to make rockets, not oppressing people and murdering people who you disagree with, not flinging homosexuals off of the rooftops of buildings because they aren’t what they are, but instead maintaining real justice and allowing the people there to prosper without being.
you know, beholden to terrorists. That can be done. Believe it or not, it can be done. I mean, you know, when you look at Japan in 1945, that we had to bomb the snot out of them and level them versus Japan today. I mean, even in the 60s. I mean, Japan is a completely different country now. You know, turns out most of the Japanese people once disillusioned of the things that they had been told that weren’t necessarily correct about the God Emperor.
you know, their conquest of China and their manifest destiny, their Yamato Damacy to conquer the world and all this kind of thing. Once disabused of all of that, the Japanese people turned out to be pretty cool. Turned out to be people that are a lot like us. Funny thing, human beings being a lot like. And they became very industrious and focused on other priorities. And Japan’s a different country. Same thing in Germany, right? Everyone saw what the Nazis brought down on Germany. They saw what, what, what that.
particular agenda earned and the Holocaust and all of that. What that earned for Germany? You can see all of that in the pictures of Berlin and Dresden in 1945. Right? It’s not pretty. Okay? So, you know, those countries were rebuilt and are completely different today. You know, Germany today is not the same country that, that in any way, in any way, shape or form. Nothing like it. So, Gaza can be changed too. It can be done. But we have to have a plan. So, Prime Minister Netanyahu, BB.
Please, please, we need a plan. I don’t even care who puts it together. I mean, you know, I’m talking about politics here in a second, but Yair Lapid, who’s the leader of the opposition, have him take a role in it. He did a great job as a diplomat reaching out to Arab governments and what have you. This is a way that he can contribute to the war effort without joining the government or being part of the war effort. And, you know, he could be just as critical of Bibi and still perform the role, but do something, all right?
If you need my help, I’m here. I’ll help to the extent that I can, giving what knowledge I have. I’m no expert, but you know, Ryan, Maybeth and I are ready to go over there. You know, to speak, I don’t know about, you know, he’s ready to go. But you know, the point is we are ready to contribute our expertise such as it is. I’m sure they can find, you know, better minds than me. But the point is, you know, whatever I can do, I’ll help, you know? So it needs to be done. We need to have a plan. And so that needs to be.
the priority right now. What will replace Hamas in Gaza? And it needs to be somebody, a group of people who will fight Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and all these groups to establish something else. And it can’t be the Palestinian Authority that’s run by Fatah. It’s another terrorist organization. They’re the diet coke of terrorists. You know what I mean? Like they’re just, you know, less terrorist than Hamas, but still really bad, you know? So.
Anyway, with all that, Israeli politics. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So pros and cons for Bibi, I’ve talked about a lot. You know, politics in Israel has recently kind of split into pro and anti Bibi camps. And you have Bibi Netanyahu has, you know, a little bit of egg on his face to speak, so to speak, you know, it’s a pretty serious thing. You know, the security lapses that led to October 7th.
A lot of people still upset about that. At the same time, the war effort seems to be going well, relatively speaking. There’s a feeling, a lot of people in Israel, that Bibi isn’t handling the diplomatic situation as well as he might. And again, someone like Yair Lapid would handle the diplomatic situation better, but he’s not in the government, he’s in the opposition. So there’s that. And of course, Benny Gantz joined the coalition for the emergency war effort, and that’s made him more popular.
He’s a former Air Force general and he’s got Giddy Eisencote and working with him and his party. So they joined together with, with Joav Galant, who’s the defense minister and also a former general. And the three of them are running the war. And from that point of view, they are the best political leaders to be supporting the generals and the commanders in the field, right? And so there’s a, there’s a strong feeling there. And that’s been very positive for –
guns to be part of the coalition to be helping with the war effort. So I’ve talked about polls before. There’s just been a few updates. In most of the polls now, national unity, which is Benny Gantz’s party, is leading. There is one by direct polls, you know, channel 14 poll, and it shows Likud Bibi’s party with 25 seats over national unity with 23. I mentioned, you know, this is a
a parliamentary system, a multi -party proportional parliamentary system. So you’re gonna have people voting for parties, not for individuals. There are 120 seats. You get your proportion of the vote. Any party that receives more than 3 .25 % gets their proportion of seats in the Knesset. And then you have to knit together a coalition of political parties to reach 61, which is a majority, right? Okay, so at the moment, so the Channel 14,
direct polls poll and I like that one because they tend to be a little more accurate. A lot of the polls underestimate right -wing turnout and the right does tend to get a few more people out to vote than the left, than is shown in polls. Polls do tend to favor the left. Also, you know, of course, as I’ve talked about before, it’s really hard to poll the Arabs. You know, you’re basically pulling, you know, a guess, you know, you’re pulling it out of your ear.
let’s just say, they just assume that Rahm is going to clear the threshold and have seats in the Knesset because you really can’t poll the Israeli Arabs. It’s difficult to know whom to poll, who’s gonna turn out, and for whom they’re actually going to vote. In a segment of society, they’re difficult to poll. Anyway, so in the direct polls poll, Likud had 25, National Unity 23,
the governing coalition as it is now, that is with the far right parties, with the religious parties and Likud, Bibi’s party, they have 57 seats in the current poll. I think that’s pretty accurate. And the change block, the opposition to Bibi, including Benny Gantz, has 59. And as I said before, and I’m gonna repeat myself, I hate to do that, but I wanna make it clear, if there were an election today, everyone knows what the result would be. No one would win.
and they’d have to form another emergency government just like the one there is now with the far right, the religious right, Bibi Netanyahu and Benny Gantz in order to finish the war. So, you know, there’d be no point in having an election, right? And when there’s an election, 2025 at the earliest, then the results of the current conflict and the situation at that time are going to be the primary issues at that election, right?
things that are going on right now, past issues, they’re all gonna change, like I talked about. The 1940 election was as different from 1944 as 1960 and 1992. I mean, very different issues, very different things going on in the country. 1944, you had a war on, then by 1948, the war’s over, but now you have this Cold War going on, so it’s a different thing. So anyway, so that’s…
that, right? Other polls show Benny Gunst’s party having 30 or 32 seats and Likud down as far as 17 in some polls, 18, 19, 21, depending on where you’re at. And some of them show the change block having a majority. But a lot of those polls are really left biased, you know, they’re just leaning a little too far to left wing voters.
And I just don’t see that being accurate because there’s still a very strong core of right -wing voters in Israel who haven’t changed their mind. There might be some swing voters who have swung this way or that, but most of the people haven’t changed their mind. So the other thing with the change block is, you know, so in the direct polls, they had 59 seats, but six of those seats are Ram, an Arab party. You can’t really count on an Arab party to join the government in the middle of a war like this, right? So you have to be careful about that.
Right, so you see, stuff like that. Anyway, so that’s kind of where things are. Bibi has certainly taken a hit, right? But at the same time, he’s been in this limbo for a long time where he’s the most popular candidate for prime minister for the most part, but he doesn’t have a majority and the other parties won’t sit in government with him. But anyway.
So that’s the political situation there. All right, real quick, this arms thing, it’s so inane. I hate talking about stupid things, my friends, I really do. Like I talk about some of this stuff and it’s like, I feel like I’m losing IQ points. Like there it goes, 151, 150, 149. No narcissism detected, right? You’re a mad genius at work. It’s not the IQ points, it’s the madness. Anyway.
Anyway, joking with somebody, they’re like, you know, Isaac, you’re so smart. I’m like, yeah, but you know, I’m a Yid, I’m an Ashkenazic Jew. The average Ashkenazic Jew has an IQ of 120 or something like that. I mean, you know, you really have to stick out to be smart in this group. Tough crowd. Anyway, just being funny, just being funny, okay. In any event, you know, so the…
the weapons that are being withheld are precision weapons and kits to make quote unquote dumb bombs more precise, right? JDM kits. So we’re talking about dumb bombs, so to speak, can be directed pretty accurately. Like you could put them in, just with the technology we have today, we have optical targeting systems and this kind of, the plane, just by flying, can put a bomb on a particular building. But with,
laser -guided munitions, you can put it in a particular window in a particular room of a building. And that it’s those kinds of munitions, precision munitions and kits to make, to improve bombs, to make them a little more accurate, that’s what’s being withheld. Now, Israel already has the weapons it needs to fight Ra ‘afah. This could potentially impact a future conflict, for example, Hezbollah, possibly this summer in Lebanon. And so that’s a big problem there.
Again, the State Department came out so that the excuse was, you know, Israel doesn’t have a proper humanitarian plan for going into Rafah, you know, for some reason the Biden administration has been shilling for Hamas, trying to protect Hamas and keep them from being destroyed. You know, they’re also not putting the toughest sanctions on Iran. They’ve been really nice to Iran. Ted Cruz is out there now. Granted, he has a political self -interest to promote his particular viewpoint, but he makes some valid points.
If the Biden administration were truly against Iran and for Israel, why are they allowing Iran to sell so much oil? Why are they not putting tougher sanctions on Iran? Trump squeezed Iran and he had them under thumb for a good while there. You know, until he got voted out of office and now all these conflicts here. You know, mean tweets and world peace, right? Anyway, so, you know, it’s just a dumb thing. It really doesn’t do anything.
That’s, I think, part of why Ryan Macbeth described it as, you know, 4D chess and an attempt at being, you know, strategic because it doesn’t hurt Israel, but it might encourage some Muslim voters to see him as being fair or even -handed or something like that. But again, it’s Biden playing to this extreme, nutter, crackpot, you know, woke crowd on the far left. And back to that point that, you know, they care more about that crowd and their transgenderism and climate.
the climate Nazis and all this kind of stuff, then they do about, you know, voters. You know, the vast majority of voters who want a secure border and are tired of inflation, right? The economy and that kind of stuff. Those are issues that are far more important to people than these other issues. So anyway, it’s just dumb. And then the State Department comes in. Actually, Israel did comply with all of the humanitarian requirements. So the administration’s excuse turned out to be bogus.
And they are acting against the popular will, right, in this particular instance, and this kind of thing. So it’s been an embarrassment for the administration. Like I said, this last week has been a big, long campaign ad for Trump. So I think it was just a stupid move. Just me. I mean, it’s back to the administration being half -hearted, and one foot in this room and one foot in that, right? You can’t run a foreign policy that way, right? You have to be all one way or all the other, right?
You have to choose the side. They don’t, that’s really a complaint I’ve made many times. They don’t understand World War III by proxy. They don’t understand the situation we’re in. They don’t see where we are historically. And if they do, if it is that they see the situation as I understand it, and as I explain to you guys, but they’re still doing this, then it means they’re not on our side. And that is a terrifying thought, but not too terrifying.
I mean, you know, they don’t, they refuse, you know, they refuse to say that Ukraine should win and just say that we should keep sending weapons over there. And they support Israel up to a point, but then let Iran get off easy. It’s like, this is not how you win a war. This is not how you handle a conflict. And anyway, more on that in the next segment. But that’s that. So, covered that kind of stuff. If you guys have questions, of course, find me on X, message me on Facebook, wherever you find Inside Israel News.
reach out and let me know. I’d love to talk about this stuff. So in the next segment, I am going to talk about World War III by proxy, how it’s going, a few lessons from World War II, and then wrap this up.
Alright, so I’ve been trying to keep episodes shorter, so I’m going to try to keep this brief, but there’s a lot going on in the world, you know? Talking about what’s going on with Israel and Ra ‘afah and Iran and all of that stuff, you know, that’s one front in World War III by proxy, right? You know, the goal of the Axis forces, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, is to weaken U .S. power, to make us look weak by attacking our allies. And, you know, if they think there’s an opportunity, they’ll attack us directly.
as well, you know, and that kind of thing. So I’m gonna talk a little bit about Russia and Ukraine. You know, I wanna start by making this point, and I keep this, this is something that drives me nuts sometimes because it’s so narcissistic, it’s so self -centered. The green -haired college students for a long time have been out there talking about how we’ve made all the problems, we are the problem in the world, right?
America’s everything that’s wrong in the world. We’re white colonizers, we’re bad. We want to have a better world, we have to make America less white and less colonial. And so everything that goes wrong in the world is our fault, right, first of all. And everybody who hates us hates us because we’re bad people. And we should just be better people. And this kind of nonsense. And now we’re seeing that on the right. And that, my friends, is terrifying.
I mean, I don’t know how people can be that naive. Okay? The school bully doesn’t pick on the vulnerable kids because those kids are bad kids. Right? I was bullied terribly in school. And it wasn’t because I was a bad kid. Okay? It’s because the bullies choose to be horrible people. They choose to victimize other people. All right? Just like it is not the victim who is responsible for the crime.
Okay, I was walking down the street and this guy robbed me. Let’s just say, you know, well, it’s my fault because, you know, I’m a white person, you know, Jewish, but anyway, I’m a white person. Therefore, it’s, you know, I’m a colonizer. It’s my fault. What nonsense. There are bad people in the world. There really are. And there are people who are going to be against us regardless of what we do, right? It doesn’t matter.
what we’ve done, you know what I’m saying? So who we are and what we’re about and all of that are irrelevant to this group of people. They have an agenda and they’re willing to kill people for that agenda, right? And it doesn’t matter what we’ve done, right? No matter what we do, we can’t stop them from thinking that way, okay? So that is…
reality of the world. The Iranians don’t hate us because we’re bad people, colonizers and we’ve been hurting the world. They hate us because they’re fascists. They’re neo -Nazi, pseudo -Nazi, like this is Islam a fascist agenda. They want to kill the Jews, they want to dominate the Middle East, and we’re in their way. They want more October 7th. They want to kill more people, torture more people. They want to do more horrible things, commit more crimes and atrocities. Right?
not because we’re bad people, we mistreated, we did something wrong, because of who they are. The same with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and also Kim Jong Un for what he’s worth. The North Korean regime really isn’t much to talk about anymore. So these are bad people and they have these agendas. Vladimir Putin is watching the ethnic decline of great Russians in Russia and the…
the overall birthrate decline in Russia and he sees that Russia is dangerously close to losing its industrial capabilities and its ability to defend itself.
Isaac Kight (00:02.83)
He sees that this is going to lead to a decline in Russia’s industrial capability and its ability to defend itself. So like all Russian leaders throughout history, he wants to control the access points to Russia. Russia is this wide open country. You have the plains in the south, you’ve got the Pacific Ocean to the east, you’ve got plains to the west. Russia is wide open to invasion, right? From the Mongol hordes to…
you know Napoleon and Hitler like lots of people have invaded Russia from various directions and the Russians feel insecure about it the only place to defend Russia is you know the only places in Europe to defend Russia are Poland and Romania okay so Vladimir Putin has to take Poland and Romania and the Baltic states and everything east of that in order to for Russians to feel secure right and with their imperial ambitions they feel that that belongs to them so we didn’t cause
Vladimir Putin to become what he is, he had that agenda. He invaded Ukraine, he chose to commit horrors there, he chose to send his soldiers in who were raping girls and women. He sent his troops in to mass murder people and bury them in mass graves. That’s his doing. They’re firing missiles at apartment buildings and firing indiscriminately at civilian targets. They blew up the Novgorodka dam, that’s a weapon of mass destruction.
you know, that caused hundreds of deaths, most of them on the Russian side of the river, of the Dnieper River. I mean…
I can’t even believe I’m having to say this. So that’s called being a bad guy, right? He wants to invade other countries. He wants to murder their citizens. He wants to oppress people. That’s bad. And we, as the good guys, should oppose that, right? Poland is our ally. The Baltic states are our ally. So is Romania, right? People of Ukraine overwhelmingly want to be our ally as well, at the very least part of Europe, if not the EU, if not part of NATO.
Isaac Kight (02:05.198)
and now their support for joining NATO is much higher since they’ve been invaded. So that’s the situation. He made that choice. He acted, engaged in an act of aggression. Just like Hitler invaded countries, just like Japan invaded countries. And as I talked about in last episode, there were all of these opportunities in the Second World War where we could have stood up. The Japanese,
invaded China several times, but in 1937, for real, there was the rape of Nanking, Nanking, depends on how you pronounce, right? And the horrors committed there. And that was the time to put an embargo on Japan, to stop selling oil and steel and iron and all of that stuff to Japan, right? And if we’d done that then, then within a short time, Japan might have been forced to negotiate their way out of it. We’ll never know, because we didn’t stand up.
You know, when Hitler invaded the Rhineland, remilitarized the Rhineland along the border with France, if one French division had entered, Hitler had already issued orders for them to retreat if they encountered any resistance from the French, right? And that would have embarrassed him. But he got away with it, right? So then there’s the Anschluss with Austria, Austria, right? And again, he got away with it, right? Now, if Roosevelt had started after that, you know, after the Anschluss,
had said, no, we don’t accept Germany invading Austria. We fought the First World War and we’re not gonna let this stand. So we’re gonna start negotiating with France to put US troops in France. US Army was small at the time and Americans definitely did not support that type of thing. But his being willing to start talking about that could have put Hitler on notice, could have stopped him right there. Maybe he wouldn’t have asked for the Sudetenland, but he did.
they’re German speaking people. We need, you know, the Sudetenland should be part of Germany. And, you know, it’s the most defensible land in Europe. Czechoslovakia had the seventh largest army in the world at the time. You know, if the allies had just said no, and Hitler had tried to invade Czechoslovakia anyway, we could all have supplied Czechoslovakia, Britain, France, the US, everybody. Even the Soviets would have had a vested interest in supplying them. And Hitler would have, you know, probably would have fallen. We know that General Oldendorf had a plan.
Isaac Kight (04:31.118)
to overthrow Hitler if he tried to invade the Sudetenland, right? But again, the Allies caved and gave it to him, and those opponents of Hitler lost face because he was successful, right? Once they had the Sudetenland, they conned the rump parliament in Prague into inviting Germans in and taking up the rest of Czechia as well and leaving Slovakia as a rump state. In any case.
That was the time to stop him. By the time he invaded Poland, it was too late to declare war and all of that. It was too late to stop him easily. We saw what happened in 1940. He defeated France. That was a mess. This could have been nipped in the bud a long time ago. Well, let’s look at our situation now. China started remilitarizing and really building up in the early aughts, and we did nothing. We said nothing.
We were like, we don’t worry about it. And we kept trading like it was normal. They stole our intellectual property and manipulated the currency to injure our economy. And we did nothing. We let it all happen. There were no consequences for that. They got away with it until Donald Trump was president and finally started the quote unquote trade war that forced China to start behaving itself a little bit. But that was the first time there were consequences with Russia. There was the Second Chechen War.
And we looked the other way. Well, he massacred the Chechens, right? No more Chechens, no more Chechen nationalism and separatism, right? We let him get away with that. Then he invaded Georgia, and we basically let him get away with that. And he invaded Crimea and the Donbas and Luhansk, and we let him get away with that too. So he had every reason to expect once Donald Trump was out of office, because he’s unpredictable, right? He was arming Ukraine and warning NATO that Russia was a threat.
Anyway, once Trump was out of office, and Biden’s much more predictable, and then the US was forced out of Afghanistan, we’re in a position of weakness, so he moved in. And what have we done? Almost nothing. We haven’t said that Ukraine should win. It should be the strategic goal of this country that Ukraine should defeat Russia, a total, complete defeat of Russia, the driving of Russian forces out of all of Ukraine, of its 92 borders.
Isaac Kight (06:56.238)
Crimea, Dunbas, Luhansk, all of that goes back to Ukraine, right? If that were our stated goal, then we would have a firmer position and Putin would have to take a look at that and see the popular support for that and realize that he can’t divide people. The Russians are masters of propaganda, my friends. They are really good at convincing people that their governments have no legitimacy, that their leaders are incompetent. They’re really good at dividing people along various lines.
And so they’ll put all kinds of stuff. the Maidan revolution was the CIA. No, it wasn’t. Believe it or not, people in small countries do actually have just a little bit of agency. Just a little bit. I mean, they actually want things. The CIA doesn’t just punch up an email and 10 ,000 people go sit in the Capitol in Maidan Square and go and fight police and get beaten up and killed.
by Russian shock troops sent to protect Yanukovych’s regime, okay? It doesn’t happen that way. The CIA doesn’t just make a phone call and all of a sudden people are going out to get themselves killed, all right? Those people wanted freedom. They wanted an end to the pro -Russian regime. That was what they were protesting for. You know, people are, Victoria Nuland got involved. Yeah, she went out there being the usual incompetent State Department type that she is and tried to convince the protesters to go home. Don’t make trouble.
You know, don’t try to overthrow the regime. Just go home. You’re fine. You know, it’s okay if Russia dominates your country. Don’t make a big thing out of it, right? And they didn’t listen to her. They kept revolting. No one supported them. They had absolutely no help. And finally, they overthrew the Russian regime there and won freedom for their country. And ultimately, they elected Vladimir Zelensky to fight corruption. And he has. Hundreds, 700, 800 people have gone to prison.
crane for corruption. He’s fired several ministers for corruption. But of course, Zelensky’s a Jew, right? So that means he’s a sniveling, conniving little troll with horns on his head, secret space lasers. You can’t trust him. He’s shifty. Right. Why would that be? Why can’t we trust him? Why is it? What about Zelensky makes him untrustworthy?
Isaac Kight (09:19.63)
And then of course, Ukraine’s a neo -Nazi state, right? With a Jewish president. Wow. Tell me you don’t understand Nazism without saying so. My friends, you can tell the Russian propaganda because it’s stupid. It’s all conspiratorial and it’s all, you know, Ukrainians have no agency. They just work for the CIA and this kind of thing. You know, just stop and think a little bit, okay? Think it through, just a little bit, right? Just try.
So anyway, so just beware. Okay, now, the Biden administration does plenty of stuff to make our government, our leaders look malfeasant, incompetent, and corrupt all by himself, all right? They don’t need help from Russians. That is true. But, you know, this is still America. We’re still the good guys, and the bad guys are the bad guys. That’s why we have this situation. Anyway, what worries me?
friends at this World War III by proxy, you know, right now is China and how they’re taking advantage of the situation. Let me, well, let me just briefly, a little bit more about Russia’s logistical situation and the strategic, the tactical situation, and then I’ll go into the China aspect because it’s relevant. Obviously Russia’s trying to launch this offensive where their troops are getting slaughtered and it’s horrible to hear about even, you know.
I mean, I’m no fan of the Russians, but I don’t like people being killed. That’s not what I’m about. I’m all about peace, love, and stop with the negative waves. But these human wave attacks, these meat grinder attacks, this is so Russian. This is how the Soviets fought. I mean, it’s, anyway. So they’re on this offensive. They’re trying to attack around Kharkiv again from across the Russian border and this kind of thing.
trying to launch this broad offensive. And because Ukraine went six months without aid, they’re on the back foot right now on the defensive. They’re getting their aid, they’re getting more supplies in, and the Russians know that. So they’re trying to press the advantage while they can, right? And Ukraine’s about to get 19 F -16s from Denmark shortly. They’re saying that they’ll be flying within a month. We don’t know if that’s necessarily true. A lot of European countries are planning to hand over their F -16s to Ukraine as F -35 orders start to arrive. So…
Isaac Kight (11:48.91)
You know, that’s part of the plan. But let’s face it, the Russians, you know, Vladimir Putin has bet the house, he’s bet the farm. He has, he’s wagered Russia on this war. And so he’s not going to stop until he’s no longer able to wage war. And the Russians are rearming and rebuilding at an amazing rate. There are some estimates that say that Russian, the Russians will think that they are restocked and ready for war against even NATO by 2027.
So in their imaginations, they’re remilitarizing and rebuilding their military, even though they’re really not. That means Ukraine needs to be able to strike at weapons plants in Russia, and they’ve been doing that with behind the lines operations, you know, special forces and what have you, and long range missiles, but they need to be able to do more of that. And they need to be able to have air supremacy, and they need to be able to provide air support. It was the big problem with the last offensive.
back in 2023 was that they lacked air support. So Russian helicopters and Russian planes were able to bombard Ukrainian forces and they didn’t have proper mine sapping equipment. You know, they needed more of that. So there’s that. So this summer is going to be a rough time of Ukraine fighting back a Russian offensive. And then maybe this fall as aid begins to arrive, if they’ve halted the Russian offensive and had time to lick their wounds, they may be able to launch another counter offensive and we’ll see how that goes. But I…
As I’m telling you this, it just feels so much like I’m talking about Verdun. Like, you know, we launched this offensive, and then they launched that offensive, and then we launched this offensive, and then we launched that offensive, and then we launched this offensive, and then we launched this offensive, until the very end, right? But you know, so anyway, that’s kind of where that is. But the point is Russia’s gonna fight on until they cannot fight anymore. And that’s where China comes in, right? Russia’s already the junior partner in the alliance with China, and they are very close to becoming a vassal state to China. At this point, China is supplying a lot of their technology, a lot of arms, a lot of, well, equipment that goes into their arms. North Korea is providing a lot of ammunition.
There’s a lot of that stuff. So very quickly here, as Russia becomes weaker and weaker, China becomes not just the senior partner, but the liege lord, right? And Russia becomes the vassal state. That’s not where Russians wanna be. I mean, Iran is definitely the junior, junior of juniors partners here, right? They’re more like the annoying brat of the coalition that goes out of the Axis forces, that goes out and…
and makes a little trouble to distract the world and draw resources away from the main conflict. But China is definitely prospering from this situation and profiting from it. And, you know, they continue to antagonize Vietnam and the Philippines and continue to threaten Taiwan. And what worries me is that every day Xi Jinping gets up and he makes this calculation in his mind.
could I attack Taiwan today? And maybe right now he’s got a little hesitation. A lot of US Naval forces in the area, I might, you know, now might not be the right time. But when that calculation goes the other way, when he decides, hey, I could bomb, you know, Taiwan, I could invade Taiwan, I could attack.
then World War III by proxy ceases to be World War III by proxy. And it becomes World War III very much the way that December 7th brought on World War II for real. At that final moment, at that moment finally, all of the combatants around the world in the major wars were at war with one another, right? Japan was at war with the US and Britain, Germany and Italy were at war with the US and Britain, US and Britain and…
Other allies were at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Soviet Union was at war with Germany, but not with Japan. So the point is, that’s when it became a world war. So we don’t want this to become a shooting war. And the way to prevent that is to show resolve, is to stand our ground, okay? To support Ukraine. If you are opposed to China, you support Ukraine. And if we lose in Ukraine, China is going to take Taiwan. This is going to become a shooting war for us. Honestly, folks, I don’t want my sons to have to go and fight.
You know, I have other plans for them. They have other career paths they’d like to take. I don’t want to have to sacrifice more. My family has sacrificed plenty. And if we’re smart, we won’t have to sacrifice more. Other families have sacrificed a hell of a lot more than we have. So, you know, than my family has. So, you know, let’s not, okay? Let’s just win now. Let’s just hold the line and stop this thing now while we can, okay? And that’s the point I keep trying to draw up with the other situation.
Let’s make sure that every day that Xi Jinping gets up, that calculation does not come out in his favor. And he thinks, well, I better not invade. With that, it’s another great episode. Thank you guys for listening again, as always. I had thought about doing some rebranding. Should I change the name? I think I’ll just stick with where I’m at. I mean, it is what it is. No, I don’t live in Israel, I live in Kansas. But I was looking for insider.
you know, Israel insider or something like that, but that was already taken on Google. You know, you could find that elsewhere. So I thought Inside Israel would be kind of unique, you know, gives you the inside perspective, right? And the podcast has slowly expanded then to European politics and now world politics and a little American political commentary as well. So anyway, fun stuff there. As always, please check out the Etsy store and get your…
Inside Israel News bling, your swag, your cool stuff. You can be a son of a mensch, right? And likewise, you can find Inside Israel News on X, formerly Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, that kind of stuff. So look up the show. I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, thoughts. You should do this differently, do that differently. Don’t like when you do this, do like when you do that. Hey.
Whatever, you know, I have thick skin. Tell me what you like, what you don’t like. I’m always looking for ways to improve the show. Anyhow, with that as always, goodbye, L’hitraot.
