An Orgy of Savagery

Welcome to differ. The Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion, featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right, I’m Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and Policy editor at the Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Will Saletan, the Brookings institution, and the Wall Street Journal. Damon Lincher, who writes the sub stack newsletter notes from the middle ground, and Linda Chavez, of the Nescannon Center. Our special guest this week is Professor Gil Troy.

Gil is a professor of history and a leading Zionist thinker. He is the author of many books, most recently. Well, Not actually most recently. The second to most recent book was one he coauthored Will Saletan sharansky. I was called Never Alone.

And he lives in Jerusalem with his family. So I am thrilled, Gil, that you could join us before we get into the politics and the geopolitical implications of what has happened this week, I wonder if you could just tell us from your end what life has been like for you personally since Saturday.

Thank you. It’s an honor to be with you. And, you know, I feel very lucky to be alive. Yeah. The truth is that in Jerusalem, we’re quite lucky.

We have four kids, One of them was in Sri Lanka on Saturday morning, and he was praying in a very small, uh, abad with four other people. And an Israeli woman came in bursting with tears saying they’ve overrun Israel Jerusalem is being overrun and being ravaged as we speak. And you can imagine that my twenty three year old how terrified he was fortunately scrambled eventually, got in touch with us. And the news wasn’t that much better because our cousins and our friends down south were indeed enduring a just unspeakable explosion and orgy of savagery. And so it’s been a week of tremendous loss, tremendous mourning tremendous fear.

But I also have to say in a very weird way, it’s also been a week of tremendous pride. We’ve seen a moral clarity certainly in Israel. And in many parts of the world, I’m happy to say. We’ve seen a unity. We put all that nonsense aside that it consumed us for nine months.

And there were very serious issues, obviously, that we were dealing with, but also a lot a lot of tribalism and a lot a lot of insanity. And the sense of morale on the streets, despite what we’ve endured. I was at a funeral yesterday of a beautiful twenty two year old boy who was at that rave concert. And I have to say there was a a flip in my switch because, initially, I didn’t wanna know anything about how he died because he was such a kid full of life and such energy. And I can only imagine how terrible his last moments were.

And we discovered that at the last minute, his life, the last moments of his life, while he was running away, his friend was injured, and he stopped and took care of his friend. And then having been a trained army medic. He started helping other people. And somewhere along in that process of really being himself and being true to his values, he ended up being slaughtered. And I have to say that really changed things in a very profound way because rather than being stuck in that pogrom analogy from all those ugly videos, and that holocaust analogy where you feel powerless.

And you feel this is force that’s greater than you. It flipped me back into the Zionist script. And design a script, the story of Israel is obviously one with pain, with loss, with cruel enemies, but unlike those other scripts, It’s also a script that has building and has healing, has fighting, has has defending, and ultimately has living our best lives. And it reminded me that what we really saw today and this week was a clash between the death cult of Hamas and a Palestinian culture, a Palestinian political culture that is more about negation and destruction and death. And we saw a zionist culture and a liberal democratic culture lower case d of affirmation and of life.

And so I feel lucky to be alive else feel lucky to be a part of this amazing team. Team liberal democracy and team Jewish people.

So let us step back for a second because there are so many cliches that have become encrusted over the decades about the conflict between, the Palestinians and Israel, You know, the cycle of violence is one. This was not a cycle of violence event. Israel had done nothing to provoke it. It was a totally unprovoked savage assault. But even on places like NPR, I heard say this this week.

You know, they say first of all, they say this is about the occupation. So I’d like you to clarify the status of Gaza, vis à vis the so called occupation. And second, they say Gaza is like an open air prison. So Tell us a little bit about the history here and what people are missing when they say that this is about occupation.

Well, I’m sorry to say that too many of my colleagues in the university world and too many students say, indeed, it was a provoked assault because what’s the provocation that Israel exists?

Yeah.

And they hide their disdain for Israel’s very existence behind words like occupation. And obviously it’s a complicated conflict and I’m not gonna claim that Israel’s perfect But the key moment to understanding this horror and why this really was just an act of sheer destruction and not about territory or borders or good governance or how Israel behaved or quote unquote the occupation is because in two thousand and five, eighteen years ago, Israel withdrew from Gaza. And not only did it withdraw from Gaza, but there was a buffer zone called the Philadelphia line, named after Philadelphia, but Israelis’s, mangled the the name, And there was a big debate at the time. Do we withdraw from that? And the idea was, you know what?

We’re gonna give them in Gaza. Everything they’re asking for. Every last kilometer every last even inch. And not only that, but American Jewish philanthropists kindly bought some of the of the greenhouses that Israelis had established in the twenty one communities that were withdrawn from that day in in two thousand and five and August two thousand and five. To give it to the Gazans, to give them an opportunity to start afresh.

And at the time, talking about cliches, there was all this talk about how there was gonna be a new moment in a democracy and Ariel Sharon, who was very, very unpopular, went to the end and got his standing ovation. Those greenhouses were destroyed. The twenty one communities were, were were soon picked over and plundered. Fortunately, all the people had gotten out. And two years later, but first of all, during those those two years, there still was an attempt despite rockets coming because it was a promise that as soon as Israel removed its presence, then there’d be peace.

But rockets kept coming. Rockets kept coming. And and like the boiling water, no one did enough. And so the frogs ultimately got boiled. And two thousand and seven, two years later, Hamas, which has always been I have to say, I have a lot of criticism, but they’re extremely honest.

Read their charter. They’re anti Semitic. They’re, looking for the destruction of the state of Israel. They’re not looking for any kind of compromise, and they in a very violent coup showing what the

And they are a jihadi.

They are a jihadi.

Off shoot of the Egyptian, Muslim brotherhood.

Right. And they and they have an Islamic ideology. In fact, his ISIS flags were found on some of the keep it seemed today. They plundered. And so they’ve always been very clear about what they stand for.

And we know that violence begets violence. So, of course, they didn’t come in democratically, but they threw people off, the tops of Gaza’s tallest towers, and they kneecapped people and a Palestinian who came from the Palestinian Authority and lo and behold in two thousand and seven, Hamas took over. So for the last sixteen years, There has been more of a blockade, but the blockade from Israel is because understandably you have an enemy which every day is looking to destroy you. But for sixteen years, so many people in the world that I’m sorry to say so many people within Israel said no, we can deal with them. It’s pragmatic.

Let’s try to have some kind of balance. And we saw that in many ways it was just a ruse and they used all kinds of language and all kinds of faints. So that, Israelis’s underestimated just how vicious their vision was. And the result was this horrific rampage, which has cost at least thirteen hundred lives and the insane reality that we now have of potentially a hundred thirty, hundred fifty hostages, including Three year olds, five year olds, seven year olds if they’re still alive, including young women and most abominable kind of sexual slavery, including young men being tortured, And the whole world, while they seem to be up and outraged, doesn’t seem to be doing enough to save these young people, save these old people also who would take and it’s just abominable, but it came from that desire to have peace. It came from an assumption that we could be pragmatic and a realization that this is much more civilizational.

And much more now, the word that everybody’s using in Israel, these days, if you want the cliche of the week, it’s existential that this is a threat that isn’t about boundaries. This is this is liver die and do or die.

Okay. One more item that I’d like to hear you on, and then I’ll bring in the rest of the panel. So my sense is and tell me whether you agree with this My sense is that it has always been one of Hamas’s tactics that they would make their own people, the Palestinian people living in Gaza, you know, tools in their campaign to delegitimize Israel. So they would place their missiles and so forth in in mosques and in schoolyards and in hospitals This is demonstrated. This is proven.

This is that in order to maximize the number of civilian casualties, and thereby, you know, have the on the nightly news around the world that shows Israel killing civilians. But this seems to have been another step up because the very ferocity and sadism of this attack, including burning families alive and beheading babies and so forth. It is so clearly intended to enrage Israel to the point where Israel

will really lash out

with tremendous force against the Hamas and thereby against necessarily against some civilians in Gaza that the imagery this time will be so horrific that it will bring the Palestinians who are under the Palestinian authority on the West Bank into the struggle, and it bring Hezbollah and possibly even undermine Israel’s

current peace agreements with the Arab regimes,

Egypt, and Jordan and elsewhere, and, of course, scuttle the one that was being talked about with Saudi Arabia. What do you think?

So with this in three levels. When indeed geopolitically, this does seem to be a lashing out against the possibility of a Saudi peace agreement because when Israel makes peace initially with Egypt and then with Jordan and then with the UAE in Morocco. And there’s a possibility of a Saudi peace planned Two things happen. One is it shows that Israel isn’t this evil force. Israel is not an apartheid state.

Israel is an anti Arab. Israel only objects to those people who want to destroy it, which I think is quite reasonable. Second, it shows that the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian political culture, and I’m careful not to say the but certainly their leadership and their political culture are so unreasonable are so committed to delegitimizing Israel to demonizing Israel to demonizing as an ultimately destroying Israel that while other Arab countries are willing to play ball. The Palestinians even have a boycott in Israel. They didn’t even want the most basic loveliest liberal picnic reaching out and having some kind of cultural exchange because Israel is considered to be that toxic.

So indeed, the move, towards Saudi Arabia was terrifying to them. And frankly, this is all let’s also put another dimension to this, which is Iran. This seems to have been financed, orchestrated, trained by Iran because Iran ultimately sees Israel as a threat, sees the Saudi Arabia. Egyptian alliance as a threat and has used Hamas very effectively. So there certainly was that one dimension.

The second dimension is it’s I have to say it’s really hard for me. I mean, on the one hand, I I mourn every death and certainly I mourn the death of of young Palestinians. And there is a certain element in which you see that Hamas has been abusing its population for years and there taters and their destroyers. And so they certainly are happy to hide behind their own people, their own kids as human shields. But when we saw, and we’ve been seeing this for years, The celebrations on the street every time, six and an eight year old Israeli are run over as happened in Jerusalem just a few months ago.

When we saw this past Saturday and Sunday, the glee in the videos, the way they were spread, they weren’t just spread. By the fifteen hundred to two thousand or twenty five hundred terrorists. They were spread by many, many people within, let’s call it Palestinian political culture, within Gaza society. And those people also who are driving around and my cousins, kibbutz’s tractors and using my cousin’s son’s wallet and cell phone. They’re implicated in this too.

So they’re not also innocent. And the third dimension is ultimately Here’s where Hamas overplayed its hand. They were so brutal, and they were so proud of their brutality, and they advertise it every which way that we’ve actually seen many Israeli Arabs stand up and say, you know what? I’ve always had a conflict in my identity. I’m realizing today I’m Israeli.

They’re smart enough to understand, and they’ve seen the numbers, and we’re gonna see more horrific numbers as they come out. Many people who were killed were bedridden. Many people were killed were were Palestinians were Israeli arabs. The rampaging was so vicious that of course most of the victims were Jews. But there are at least fifteen Thailand workers who held hostage.

There are many, many more who were slaughtered. The explosion of violence and the delight in the violence went so over the top that we’re hearing not only in much of the western world, which more or less before was very happy to join the bash Israel firsters or just, blame Israel for everything. We’re not only hearing in, the Jewish world, but we’re also seeing parts of the Arab world and certainly in the Israeli Arab world saying, whoa, That is not me. And the other thing that Hamas underestimated is they thought these videos would demoralize Israel Not just in rage Israel. And in fact what they did was they brought a moral clarity and a unity that had often been lacking.

And I think they also made it easier for Israel to say, you know what? The gloves are off. And I think we’re seeing already in the campaign. And today, I I read a a story which was complicated because palestinians were running out and saying, Hey, wait a minute. You used to warn us before you bombed.

How come you’re not following those rules anymore? And what we’ve unfortunately learned in the last sixteen years of dealing with Hamas is that anytime you follow Western rules, it’s ultimately seen as weakness and it’s used against us. And for these next couple of days, unfortunately, because I’m not a violent man. And I love the vision of a Middle East of peace more, not peace now now, but the more peace we can get, the sooner we can get with people who reasonable, the better. But unfortunately, we’re gonna see a lot of unfortunate Palestinian deaths because they’re caught in the middle.

But many, many, many of them have enabled this. Many, many, many of them have celebrated this. Many, many, many, many of have been addicted to this form of hatred, and so they’re guilty too.

Okay. Will Saletan, I’m not going to tee up a quest for you. Just invite you to, give your thoughts or your questions for Gil.

Well, I have a lot of friends in Israel, and my wife and I have been talking to them. I have some professional contacts I’ve been listening to briefings from Israeli military leaders and politicians And I have never seen such an overwhelming consensus in Israel. And I’ve been going there for a long, long time. And the consensus is simple and stark. The status quo anti cannot be restored, and we cannot allow it to sustain itself through in action.

We have no choice. The consensus continues. We must go in and destroy Hamas. Whatever the cost to us, whatever the cost to them, because allowing them to run free as the dictators of Gaza for a day longer, is a formula for another disaster down the road. We have to create a new reality.

We have to create it first by force of arms and then by what comes after. People frankly admit that they don’t know what comes after. I listened to a panel discussion, involving Israeli journalists and One of them was asked, well, what comes after? And he shrugged and say, first, we will do, and then we will think. And I think that’s pretty close to the consensus that the first steps are clear The consequences of taking those first steps are hard to calculate.

That bridge will be crossed you know, when the IDF reaches it and when the, war cabinet reaches it. But that, in the meantime buckle up because Israel is going to do something it has never done before. It’s not going to be pretty. It will erode the easy short term surge of sympathy for Israel. The language of moral equivalence will soon be heard around the globe.

Calls for a ceasefire will soon be heard around the globe. And Israel will not listen. And can Israel rule Gaza, at least for a while? Well, it tried two decades ago and decided that it was a losing game and gave it up with results, that soon proved disappointing and now have proved disastrous. So, if I were to sum up the thinking of the Israelis that I’ve talked to and listened to and read about, it is we have no choice.

Linda, among the things you hear are that, you know, while Gaza was an open air prison, That’s one thing. They never seem to mention that Egypt was the, co enforcer of a blockade on military goods. By the way, food medicine, etcetera, did go through. And, of course, electricity, which Israel is now cutting off. Now, and does not say Israel is blameless, and I think we’ve all on this podcast been quite critical of the Netanyahu government and of the crazy right wingers that he is currently in alliance with.

Some of whom are just unspeakably awful and racist, but the idea that the reason that there is no two state solution is that it’s just Israel’s inflexibility and unwillingness to live side by side with Palestinians, you know, when you see what happened in Gaza, when Israel did withdraw and give them their internal autonomy. It does shed a little light on why they might be hesitant to do the same thing with the with the West Bank.

Absolutely. And by the way, you know, we’re going to see some pretty awful stuff coming up in the next few days in the next week. I think Israel is going to go into Gaza. I will not say invade. Some media have been same because it isn’t an invasion.

They are going in to root out tariffs. And we’re gonna see some awful pictures. We’re gonna see palestinian children die. And all I can think about is the words of gold of my ear. Who said we can forgive the Arabs for killing our children.

We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us. And unfortunately, For the people who live in in Gaza and certainly for the rulers of Hamas, they seem to hate Jews, more than they love their own children. And it’s going to be horrendous, but it is absolutely justified. And I’m not Jewish, but I consider myself a zionist.

I listened to, president Biden, speaking this week, and I thought this is a man who understands who cares and who has moral clarity on this issue. There are not two sides. Peace is not possible as long as you have a culture. That is teaching children to hate the Jews and to want to destroy the Jewish state. There can’t be peace.

Damon, one of the things that some of us have written about for decades now is the the culture of incitement within the Palestinian world. And, you know, those images, if you just Google it, you will see images of four year old little children in Gaza dressed up with the headbands and the death to the Jews slogans and carrying guns. They are inculcated in this kind of eliminationist hatred from the cradle, and that never seems to get addressed.

Yeah. I mean, certainly, in Gaza, there is nothing anyone was gonna be able to do about that because they get to decide what they teach their own children.

Well, you’ve got a UN agency there that is supposed to be all the, you know, and they they do nothing about it.

Yeah. I mean, I do think it’s a it’s a pretty big problem. Yeah. But in the end, The Palestinians are never going to make Israel disappear as much as they may fantasize about it. And act out in homicidal violence to try to make it real.

It isn’t gonna happen, and the only way their lives are going to get better as I think all of us would really like their lives to get better is if they accept some modicum of pragmatism and allow for them to let go of the maximalist demands, which really I mean, what is maximalism in this contest? It is Israel go away so we can just live here without you being here. And the idea that after seventy five years, you have people willing to commit these kinds of atrocities for that goal is an abomination. It is a crime against humanism, I won’t say crime against humanity for obvious reasons. It is appalling that you have people who are willing to behave this way for the sake of, again, a goal that is that is never going to happen, and that simply it ensures that we’re going to see over the following days, and it is going to be appalling.

You know, when I hear about what is going to happen and know it is gonna be terrible, and I also know that it is called for. I don’t understand. How Israel is going to do this. Israeli intelligence was so poor in the Gaza strip when this had not just happened when supposedly things were at a very, very low simmer in relations. Israel had no idea this was going to happen.

That’s how bad the intelligence was. And now They have guidance about who in the Gaza strip is worth killing and who is not and where Gaza and its leadership are to be found versus all the other Palestinians who are living there amongst them, million, over a million of them. I have absolutely no idea, which is why the logic of it seems to point to you just flatten the place and kill them all, which I know is real will not do. I trust they will not do. But how one makes those distinctions in that context of block by block dense urban fighting.

I truly have no idea. I do as necessary and even in some way morally satisfying going to be. I I truly don’t know what Israel’s military commanders are telling the troops who are getting ready to enter, like, about who to kill, who not to kill where to go, where not to go, it really is beyond me and I shudder to think what we’re gonna be witnessing as a result.

And, Gil, before you react to that, let me just add to it. That, again, back to the theme of Hamas really sort of plotting this out carefully, you know, and trying to elicit a certain response from Israel presumably, they have laid so many booby traps in preparation for what is about to happen. And so I too am alarmed at the first of all, the failure of Israeli intelligence and the almost certainty that what awaits them in this street to street fighting is going to be horrific. Do you have any insight into that? And also, just say a word about Netanyahu’s fate here.

I mean, Mister security, you know, failed in the most basic task that he had, which was to keep Israelis safe. Is the sentiment in Israel to hold him responsible or not? Or is there a rally round the flag?

First, let me say that I very, you know, intimately have skin in the game young man who was in Sri Lanka on Saturday by Sunday night was home, and is now on his military base. I have another son who, by noon, on Saturday, had scrambled up and due to the north, and I have a daughter, in an intelligence space in the in the center of the country. So we are well aware of the fact that we’re gonna have to pay a high price. And going back to what Bill said, I thought you summarized it very elegantly about the fact that indeed there is a very, very strong consensus that you know, we don’t live in Europe and we don’t live in, suburban Maryland. We live in the Middle East.

And until we restore some sense of deterrence, And the only way you do that is through a kind of, I’m sorry to say, Damon brutality. You just won’t be able to let your keyboard seem thrive, let your old people feel safe, let your young people play in in in the streets as they deserve to play. So I think that there is that that sense of wow. We’ve gotta do it and it and and it is gonna cost us. And we’ve tried to kind of manage the conflict, the expression mowing the lawn.

You know, you go in every now and then mowing the lawn actually reflects exactly that kind of suburbanite desire. To look at Israel as if it’s in Western Europe and not in the Middle East. So this has been a game changer. And I think from a military spec perspective, I’m not a military expert, but I think there are two things that are that I think we should be thinking about on the table. One is I would actually just make a much larger buffer zone.

And I wouldn’t kill people, but I would destroy houses. And I would reconfigure the geography of Gaza that we can control it better militarily. And even In twenty fourteen, there’s a big debate about whether to go in and create three strips rather than one long strip. So you would have zones in between. And then you could manage it more carefully.

And you could moderate it more carefully so that, unlike happen on Saturday morning, bulldozers wouldn’t be able to start rolling through and ultimately overwhelm the fence with twenty five hundred whatever numbers, people swarming. So that’s one thing of just changing the geography. And the second is indeed, it is very difficult to hunt down people. And sounds very, very horrific. But as I said, first of all, many, many, many of them are implicated in in the crimes of Saturday, and the crimes that have also been building for many, many years.

Israeli intelligence, I think, they obviously made some major mistakes, disastrous and it will be in accounting, but I think everybody is very much trying to put the politics on mute until that day comes for investigatory commissions and, and resignations and taking of responsibility. But I think, nevertheless, the they do have intelligence capability showing. They know who they are. They’ve taken pictures There’s facial recognition software. And so I think they will be trying to hunt certain people down, but I also thinking this is very painful to say because I’m thinking not just about my son’s bodies, but their souls.

And it’s very painful for me to say that they’re gonna have to start shooting and air on the side of defending themselves and their buddies and their people rather than defending our morals. And if that means there’s some mistakes made, that’ll that’s on that’s on Hamas. That’s on the people who started it. This is you said at the very beginning Mona. So eloquently, this is not some cycle of violence.

They started and they’re responsible for every palestinian baby who was killed. They’re responsible for every mistake. A an idea of soldier makes. They are responsible for all the destruction that is gonna come. And I’m I’ll go even further and say that even if some of hostages get caught in the crossfire.

Hamas overplayed its hand that the hostages really are in a certain level, and I and and I know some of them personally, and I and and everyone is special soul. Right? But when you’re talking about the latest number is thirteen hundred ninety one dead to add another hundred or or so to the toll is irrelevant. I’m sorry to say. It’s heartbreaking to say because the bigger issue was the nine million Israelis, including the Israeli Arab who I mentioned before.

And when it comes to netanyahu, I was actually quite nervous about the first polling and somewhat gratified to see that yes indeed no matter how tribal Israeli politics has become. No matter how blind Israeli politics has become. The first polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Israelis hold mister security responsible for this insecurity in this disaster. Most of them want him to resign, and most of them understand that the time for that to happen is after the war, not before. And it’s stunning.

Wow.

And he hasn’t even that he hasn’t even stood up and taken any kind of responsibility for this debacle.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Let’s turn now to something that is also a painful subject. Namely, the reaction of the left in the United States and around the world to this attack.

This podcast has been nothing if not conscientious about going after the moral rot that we see on the right in the United States. We have not held back But this week, we saw the moral rot on the left in vivid vivid display. The first inkling was a statement by thirty student organizations or thirty five student organizations at Harvard, put out a statement saying that the and I’m quoting them the apartheid regime in Israel was, quote, entirely responsible for the violence in that was perpetrated against against it. There was a rally of the Democratic socialist of America in Times Square. Where some of the participants waved swastikas.

There were cheers and jeers about the murdered young people who were dancing at a concert and were murdered And there were really, dismaying statements from members of Congress, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. There were many more. So, Damon, not a great moment, but perhaps another moment of clarity here.

Well, yeah. I mean, I look at this and I sort of wonder, you know, one way to look at it would be to say, well, it’s a kind of wake up moment. And you saw this. I mean, Michelle Goldberg had had a very good column in the New York Times this week in which she kind of wrestled with the left and, like, pleading for there to be a decent left. Please, and and Eric Levitz at, New York Magazine had a similar very passioned essay about the kind of making a similar kind of claim.

These are people who are or think of themselves as on the left and are kind of dismayed and appalled by this and and saying as Eric Levitts argued in his piece that, a left that can’t look this kind of evil in the face and and call it what it is is a left that is going to be politically irrelevant and rightly so. And that’s exactly true. So, like, part of me wonders, but Okay. Well, maybe this is, like, you know, a great moment of clarity for the left, and and you’ll end up with just this tiny rump of people on the streams and and more decent people will will break from it. But I think that might be a problem of of describing things a little bit wrong.

My view of it is that people like Michelle Goldberg and Eric Levitz have always been just liberals. And for some reason, some liberals really, really love to identify with, quote, the left. There’s this weird fetish of thinking of oneself on the left as kind of like the source of moral righteousness and goodness in the world, and I personally have never in all of my own ideological vibrations throughout my life have never found that persuasive. The left defined as the hard left has been morally moronic from the beginning. It always has been.

These are people who loved the Soviet Union. Some of whom even hung on Stalin, once his acts were revealed, they, they end up baptizing Polpott as a great leader defending, you know, the downtrodden masses. Michel Fu cheered on the Iranian Revolution in nineteen seventy nine. And now their descendants were doing exactly the same thing in this new context over this past week. And it is appalling, but it is exactly the same kind of appalling that has been going on now for around a hundred years or more, which is this sense that the world is just black and white, and there are the children of light and the children of darkness.

And there are these victims out there and the victims are excused in anything they do to smite their oppressors. And it is it is not helpful. It is an kind away, a kind of moral idiocy. And it’s very disheartening at this late date to see it all being re capitulated again as if people have learned nothing, but, you know, young people are always born anew into the world. And if they don’t get the right education, they make the same mistakes over and over again.

And that is I’m afraid what we’ve been looking at over these past few days. And, of course, with the the Israeli response that we’re going to see, their voices aren’t going to get quieter. I just hope that the The decent people who lean left who are at core true Liberals like Michelle Golberg and Eric Levets and others remain steadfast and remember, where they really should be planting their flag, which is not with the, quote, left.

Linda, there’s too many examples of the horrible things that were said to even go through and and itemize, but I’ll just give you one more example. A Yale professor named Zarena Growwall, settlers are not civilians. This is not hard. So that’s the sort of thing. But I want to challenge Eric Levitz’s point that Damon referred to that a left that cannot bring itself to condemn mass murder and rape and, the beheading of babies will be politically irrelevant.

First of all, as Damon also illustrates by his answer, the left has not been killed yet, and they have made apologies for every kind of horrific violation of human dignity and human rights over, you know, a hundred years. And and that hasn’t been enough but also if you wanna make an analogy, look, we on the right said, you know, these these crazy racists and bigots and and America firsters, they’re just a fringe, you know, that they’re not they’re not ever gonna be anything that has to be taken seriously. We can just we can just ignore them. But that sure didn’t turn out to be true. Did it?

No. I wanna take issue a little bit with what Damon said. He’s so always wants to look for the good in people and and, you know, calling these people who are involved in some of these rallies, etcetera, naive, It is much more than that. I mean, there is a real totalitarian strain that runs through. Parts of the left.

And I don’t even know, you know, why we talk about it as the left. These people are they’re the inheritors of the weather underground and PSDS and some of the radical, folks, in our own history. They are totalitarian they are not they are not looking, you know, to get, Israel and the Palestinians to the bargaining table to sit down and settle disputes. They are siding with the people who simply want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. And, you know, they are Unfortunately, they are proliferating on American campuses.

Why that’s happening? I think, you know, deserves some real examination. I’m not the person to engage in that, but I do think that there has been a lot of money that has gone into universities that have come from Arab Nations. There are a lot of Arab students on campuses. Some of whom are going to side with Hamas And they are recruiting, young Americans.

I mean, the whole, you know, involvement of the Democratic socialist of America I’m old enough to remember when Michael Harrington helped found the democratic socialist of America. It has come a long way since the time. Yeah.

He was a gentle soul, so I called.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I was a member of the Ypsil, the socialist league, which is part of the socialist party and Michael Harrington split off from that. When you and you talk about the left, that’s a very different left than the totalitarian left we’re talking about here.

And you know what worries me? Is that so many people are getting sucked into this. I talked to my granddaughter who is not a very political person. She came over to visit, and I said, you know, have you been watching what’s going on with the war. And she said, yeah, I’ve seen it on Facebook, and she said about half of my feed has been pro Israel and the other half has been pro Hamas.

That’s terrifying to me. Yeah. You know? I’m hearing

that from all the young people that I know. Yeah.

That is really scary. So I think we have to be very clear eyed about, the totalitarian left on campuses. And this is a manifestation of that, not the only manifestation.

Gil, I thought Joe Biden’s speech this week was moving, inspiring. I thought it was one of the best speeches I’d ever heard an American president give about Israel. Was it received that way in Israel?

It was an incredibly moving and well timed gift to Israel to liberal democracy. I actually don’t think I’ve heard Joe Biden speak that crisply and that powerfully and that passionately in many, many years. And you could feel that this was an emotional issue. You could sense that this hadn’t been about polling and it wasn’t about politics, but certainly he has a very strong anti Israel voice, in the Democratic party. This was an American president doing what American presidents used to do.

And Mona, you know what Ronald Reagan used to do. And, getting up and saying, this shall not stand. This is wrong, and we have your back. And everyone is talking about it in Israel. It was during a a week of horrors.

It was one of the few points of of light and, and he made it very, very clear that this shall not stand in that that he has Israel’s back. We also know, as we said at the very beginning of the program that, this love of Israel last certainly as long as Jews are bleeding, when Jews start fighting, it gets, a little bit harder to manage. And one of the things we keep on saying to all of our friends in the United States of America, Jewish and especially non Jewish is don’t just sympathize with us now. Don’t just support us now when it’s easy. But next week, two weeks now, three weeks from now, when we’re stuck in the muck, we need your support.

And let’s contrast Joe Biden’s words. With the people who really disappointed me this week, I have to say, this week, I had all kinds of emotions, very, very deep and dark, emotions. But I wasn’t embarrassed at all by my people in Israel. The two moments of embarrassment I had were when I read the speeches at the statements of the Harvard president as a Harvard alum and of the McGill principal, which is president in in Canadian speak, about the conflict And they were so mealy mouthed that even before I looked up the way the same institutions denounced the Ukrainian invasion, you could feel the difference. You could feel the what about ism, the two sidedness, the oh my goodness.

And I’m not surprised by the left. I’m not disappointed by a totalitarian left. I’ll echo Linda’s word, a phrase which refuses to has been refusing to deal with the facts since nine eleven. But to see the failure of university administrators and then what I call the silence of tenured lambs to hear the utter silence. Where are there were a hundred twenty gender studies programs that for some reason felt in May twenty twenty one that they had to denounce Israel’s response in self defense to to Hamas’s attacks then.

I have not heard one feminist. On campus. Maybe I missed it. I haven’t heard one gender studies program, denounce the orgy of sexual violence, the violation of women in the most public and heinous way that we’ve seen in years. Where are they?

And I’m genuinely embarrassed by the universities that I’ve been affiliated with my entire life. I’m genuinely embarrassed by the people in the supposed center, the supposed ground grown ups. And frankly, I’m also embarrassed by reading that some Jewish students turn to the administrators and say, oh, I’m worried. I’m feeling unsafe. Please protect me.

From the Palestinian rally or the the Prokhamas rally. I don’t think we should need protection from grown ups. If you are feeling unsafe, then go and invite your non Jewish roommates to walk with you. Go to your professor and say professor. You seem to be someone who stands up for for values.

Look at what just happened. Will you join me? Go to your feminist studies professor and say, wait a minute, you stand for women. And when you make those challenges, You grow a spine then I’m so I’m sorry to say too many students Jewish and non Jewish don’t have today. And you also get a certain clarity and you get a win win because either they join you.

And sometimes I’ve asked people to to sign petitions pro Israel against BDS. I had one Irish Catholic, a friend who thanked me said I didn’t know the opportunity of how to reach out. You showed me how. So you can be pleasantly surprised that way or you get the clarity you discover your friends aren’t really your friends. And this has to be a moment where people stand up and say, you know what?

I’m willing to lose friends. I’m willing maybe not to get an a in the class. I’m willing not to get the promotion if the if if if my coworkers are not with me on this. If I am surrounded by people who cannot see the moral clarity here, then they’re not my friends. And I shouldn’t be in that world.

I should change my world. And that’s where we really need to have a paradigm shift, not just on the left, but in the center. The people who have just sort of allowed this totalitarianism. And of course, the idiot parents who have been spending seventy thousand dollars a year and the gazillionaires who’ve been, putting all kinds of money into all kinds of universities. I’m far less worried Linda about the, Arab money and far more worried about the unthinking money that just goes and gets used to turn our universities into propaganda, centers rather than centers of critical thought and learning.

Yeah. Bill Galston, there have been a few bright spots in the academic, firmament. One was, Princeton, president. Christopher Ice Grooper, who said, even in a world, wearied and torn by violence and hatred, Hamas’s murder and kidnapping, of hundreds of Israelis over the past weekend is among the most atrocious of terrorist acts. That’s not so hard.

One would think to just state the obvious. But, Bill, I also wanna get your reaction to this whole question about where the left fits in with the Democratic party because it’s not always, you know, it’s not a simple matter of drawing a line between where the left is and where you know, ordinary Democrats are. As we saw, they’re members of the Democratic caucus in the house who who made comments that were denounced by the White House spokesman, Karene Jean Pierre, who said they were repugnant and disgraceful. And you have data. I mean, Gallup had a survey that earlier this year that’s noticed a really, worrying pivot point that Democrats now have more sympathy according to this, more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

Four forty nine percent with the Palestinians versus thirty eight percent with the Israelis.

Well, a painful question. You’re right on the facts. Let’s redo that gallop poll in two or three months and see if those numbers remain where they were when Gallup was out and on, out in the field a few weeks ago. I would like to believe that they would shift. If they don’t, I will come back on this program and confess that what little residual optimism I have has now disappeared.

With regard to the congressional delegation, I think it is really fair to say that there are four or five outliers. In a delegation of a hundred and twelve Democratic house members. And that The smart ones like a o c smelled rat immediately, and she aggressively distanced herself from and denounced the DSA rally in New York City.

Let me interrupt right there, Bill. Yes. She did denounce the rally, but then she also stuck with her positioned that Israel should not retaliate, which, you know, if somebody had said to the US after nine eleven, do not retaliate, that would not have been well received by this.

I’ll grant you that. But there’s a difference between, say, morally speaking, as well as empirically, between saying don’t retaliate and what Hud Moss did was just great, and Israel made them do it. And she didn’t make the second statement didn’t make the third statement. I think it’s incumbent upon us in the center, you know, to try to draw the distinctions, that perhaps people differently situated in the political spectrum are unwilling to draw. But let me make a broader point here.

I speak with some historical authority. I was a student at Cornell University in the years when we went from sort of late Eisenhower Kennedy Kennedy, Palmel, towards the political world, it’s much more recognizable to us. And what struck me at that point when students were being outrageous was not the idiocy of the hard left, but the weakness of the center left. The absence of moral clarity and to steal the term for Gil, the absence of a spine. I was a student representative to a university Council that included the then president Cornell University one James Perkins.

And I described him to myself privately as a tower of jelly because he had no discernible principles other than keep the piece on campus. And if that means opening your office, to people who in coming years would trash it. If it means making excuses for demonstrations that employed unacceptable tactics, in the name of keeping the peace. Little if anything was done. And when I read the president of Harvard statement, Claudine Gay, I said to myself, Nothing has changed.

These are people who have climbed academia’s greasy pole and who genuinely believe that keeping the peace is more important than calling evil and moral idiocy by their rightful names. I think it was George Orwell, who said, you know, that in times like these, it’s It’s the duty of intelligent people to tell the truth.

To state the obvious, I think.

To state the obvious, thank you. I that is the quote that I was reaching for and failing to find, and the inability to state the obvious. Perhaps the inability to recognize it but certainly the inability to say it for fear of giving offense to people who will declare you then part of you know, part of the horrible fascist enemy, that is the real problem. When people in authority do not have the clarity and the courage to use their authority, then anything goes. And I that is my analysis what’s going on in all too many college campuses these days.

Yeah. The campuses that have taught us the term microaggression seem paralyzed from responding to the real thing.

Machro aggression.

Yes.

Alright. Now I would like to turn to our highlight and low light of the week, and I will start with Linda Chavez.

I wanna point to my low light to a speech that Donald Trump gave. Apparently, I guess, to, people who fund him. About what went on in Israel this week. He took the occasion of the attack on Israel. To attack BB Netanyahu who we’ve criticized on the show, but he attacked him for all the wrong reasons and to call the head of the, defense in Israel

Yo of Gallant.

Yeah. Yes, mister Galant, a jerk. What Trump did is so characteristic of Donald Trump. Nothing can happen in the world that is not all about him. He attacked bibi netanyahu, for apparently letting us down when the United States under Trump’s leadership did kill, Iran’s revolutionary guard.

Leader Qassem Soleimani. I did not know this. I didn’t think a lot of people didn’t know it, but apparently Israel, had been consulted and was for a time. Going to consider being part of that operation. That kind of information by the way has got to be highly classified and the fact that it is not general knowledge suggests that once again Donald Trump has released important intelligence in a public setting to people who have no reason to know it.

It was a disgraceful display And, I I just can’t say how awful Donald Trump is and to use the occasion of the slaughter of innocent Jews to attack Joe Biden, to attack BB Netanyahu, and to attack the head of, Israel’s defense is just, awful. By the way, the article I’ll point to where I got all this information appeared in the times of Israel by Jake, Jacob Magid, after Hamas onslaught, Trump appears to mock Israel calls Gallant a jerk.

You know, he he’s such a distortion of a human being that it’s it’s just hard to imagine. By the way, the other thing he holds against Netanyahu.

Oh, he didn’t acknowledge that Joe Biden didn’t win the election because he called to congratulate him. Yes.

When he called to congratulate Biden for winning the auction, that was the great.

Thank you.

That was the great offense that he he committed in the eyes of that person. Alright. Gil Troy.

My low light was waking up at eight twenty in the morning on Saturday morning looking forward to a beautiful day of prayer and enjoyment and fellowship, but waking up to sirens and then discovering that, my country had already been overrun for an hour and a half. And watching just unspeakable horrors. And by the way, I have to say as both as an American historian, and as an an Israeli, it’s really important for me that Americans learn from this lesson. You cannot have government dysfunction for so long. You cannot forget the importance of being united.

You cannot forget the importance of compromise and of working together and of creating legitimacy in a democracy, and that only comes from both parties knowing that they have to have limits and that they have some issues on which they agree and, and agree to disagree, amicably. And also within each party, there have to be sometimes where factions put things aside. And, yes, it is completely relevant to what’s going on in the house representative. Well, so I don’t think that’s the only piece of the puzzle when we talk about the disaster that occurred on Saturday, but it’s certainly, any genuinely honest historian looking at this moment ten years from now, we’ll have to put in what was going on in the country for the first nine months. But the highlight has been the extraordinary generosity of people all over the world, the extraordinary love of people all over the world, the extraordinary support from people all over the world unexpected in in many ways because Israelis have gotten used to being pummeled more than embraced.

And, and that has also created a circle of love and of life within Israel. I continue to jog, by the way, in in in Jerusalem, I’m continuing to jog every day without, without fear. And at the in the middle of my jog two days ago, I saw a lone Israeli flag flapping in the wind. And it was so inspiring to me because It was the first time in a long time that I’d seen an Israeli flag not being used by the left or the right to make some kind of political statement. And this morning, I jawed just past there again, And that Israeli flag was still standing there flapping the wind, but it’d been joined by about fifteen other of those triangular Israeli flags.

And it just captured to me the sense of we’re here forever. We’re not going away. And we will bleed. We will suffer. We will mourn but we will survive.

And we’ll come out of this stronger. I know it’s cliche, but I really do believe it. And I’ve seen this week so many people recognize, you know what? We went too far. And we forgot the neighborhood we live in.

We forgot the enemies that we face. And we also forgot why we have to stay together and work together and live together and sometimes, yes, compromise and sometimes, yes, lose within a small political battle because there’s a much greater issue of making sure the nation is strong and wholly and united.

Alright. Excellent. Will Saletan.

Well, I’m gonna change subjects, and I’m not sure whether this is a highlight or a low light, but it kept me amused in very dark times. I’m talking about the continuing saga of Cornell West’s presidential campaign. He started out, if memory serves, l, as the proclaimed, perhaps self proclaimed candidate of the people’s party. Then after a couple of weeks, he decided that the people’s party was too small and too weak. It couldn’t give him the kind of platform.

That he wanted. So he decided then to throw in with the green party, the party of Jill Stein of unblessed memory, you know, whose candidacy in twenty sixteen helped to open the door to Donald Trump’s narrow victory. Well, it turned out that after a few Weeks. Cornell West made an unpleasant discovery, at least unpleasant to him, namely that he wasn’t going to a coronation. He was expected to go to the Green Party state chapters and Tell them why he wanted to be their nominee and what he would do with political power if

you

know, against all odds, he were actually to attain it. That was too much trouble, he said. It took too much time. What did it take time from? His favorite activity, which is moving his jaws before adoring crowds?

So he has now found the first perfect platform for his presidential candidacy, namely himself. He is running as and independent with no evident infrastructure. I think given where he is now, he would do well to get on the ballot in a handful of states. I think he may not even understand how difficult that is, but in the meantime, the logic of dissent has reached its logical conclusion, and that is an independent candidacy standing on the platform of a party of one.

The narcissist party Damon Lincoln.

Oh, that’s a little unfair that I have to follow that because I was extremely taney. Thank you, Bill.

I told you, and it could be entertained in very

Yeah. That was that was a good one. Yeah. I’m actually starting to feel like, wow, like, may be the only, like, lunatic, third party person who actually could cause trouble is RfK, and that’s pretty good. Because he’s he’s still in the mix.

But, yeah. So I what I wanna do is is slightly change the subject from what we have justly focused on for the today’s podcast just to make note of, a Twitter slash x account that I learn a lot from and also, sub stacked by the same anonymous author. This is called Populism Updates. It’s exactly what that name implies. It’s some kind of an academic.

I don’t know where who who really does follow, the progress of especially right wing populism. Around the world and has lots of good data regularly, posted. I I learn a lot from it. So it’s very good. And this week, the person who does this had or actually the, I guess, the, the sub stack post titled, a hardcore advocate for Greater Romania could be the country’s next president.

And I found this very interesting because, Romania is I will admit somewhat off, my main rate are. But the fact is that in Romania, a relatively new party called the Alliance for the unity of Romania, enter parliament for the first time in twenty twenty, and the party is currently polling in a close second place. And its leader, a guy named George Simien, I think it’s pronounced is actually kind of in the lead for the presidency, you know, elections aren’t gonna be held for another year. So we’ll see if that holds. But this matters because the party favors greater Romania and wants the unification unification of the country with its neighbor Moldova.

Now, it’s not clear that Moldovans would support this, although it it’s not like there’s a huge surge of opposition to the idea but if that’s unclear. But even if they do, I almost can’t believe I’m saying this because it’s so crazy. This would put the breakaway Russian so called Republic of Transnistria, which exists, on the eastern border of Moldova inside Romania territory. And Romania is, in case you’re you’ve forgotten for a moment, a NATO member. So so, like, It just isn’t it conceivable that in this crazy world we live in, that the final, confrontation between NATO, the United States on one side and this Russia could come from this kind of hapless event taking place.

The unification of greater Romania with moldova over, the narrow sliver of land called Transnistria. If it if it’s gonna happen in any reality, it would happen in hours. So keep that in mind. We have about another year till, an election. We’ll settle this matter.

But it is a sign of really how crazy the times we live in have become.

Well, didn’t Bismarck predict that the next huge war would start with some fool thing in the Balkans. I mean

It happens every time. Well, not every time, but, you know, two out of three. I don’t know. We’ll see.

As I indicated, Mona and Damon, this is particularly amusing because one Victor Orban believes two thirds of current Romania is actually hungary unjustly seized by the treaty of trianon.

So Yes. I know. It’s it’s it’s crazy. Like, you could have greater

You know, um, ania versus greater hungry.

Yeah. No kidding.

Oh, gosh. Alright. Because it’s been such a terrible, horrific week, I also wanted to switch gears for my highlight and choose a real highlight, something a little bit optimistic. And, it’s an article that appeared in the New York Times called who runs the best US schools? It may be the defense department.

And it turns out that the defense I didn’t even know The defense department runs this whole sort of network of schools for active duty people who serve their kids, obviously, And they get tremendous results. So, you know, for all students, but particularly for students, from traditionally underperforming communities. So, for example, their schools says had the highest outcomes in the country. For black and Hispanic students whose eighth grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students. And also eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school, suggesting lower family incomes on average, performed as well in reading as students nationally, whose parents were college graduates.

So The military schools are doing something right, well worth figuring out what their secret is. And emulating it. So, little piece of, encouraging news there. Also just want to let our listeners know that the Boer crew will be appearing live and in person this month, October twenty fifth, in New Orleans, and we would love to see you there. It will be Sarah Longwell, Tim Miller, Sunny Bunch, Charlie Sykes, and me, and special guest, author Walter Isaacson.

You can sign up at big easy bulwark dot rsvp if I dot com. So that’s big easy Bulwark dot r s v p I f y dot com. Tickets are fifty dollars And again, that’s October twenty fifth. We hope to see you there. And with that, I want to thank Gil Troy so much for joining us.

It was really first of all, everything you said was very moving, and also it was really great to get, someone who is in the midst to, report from the ground, in Jerusalem. So thank you so much. And also to my usual panel, my thanks, Our producer is Jim Swift. Our sound engineer is Jonathan Last. And, of course, we wanna thank our listeners.

Thank you for all your reviews and your word-of-mouth, which we rely upon, and, appreciate We will return next week as every week.