Is Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge Eroding Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah Stern: Good afternoon, and welcome to yet another topical and timely EMET webinar. I’d like to personally thank Arnold Ziedemann from Sutter Creek, California, for sponsoring this webinar today. There are a tremendous amount of fast-moving news this morning. Yesterday, on November 24th, President Donald Trump designated certain chapters and other subdivisions of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The president specifically focused on Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt in his executive order. In the president’s executive order, he spelled out, “In the aftermath of the October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel, the military wing of the Lebanese chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood joined Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Palestinian factions to launch multiple rocket attacks against both civilian and military targets within Israel.” A senior leader of the Egyptian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, on October 7th, 2023, called for violent attacks against the United States, its partners, and interests, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood leaders have long provided material support to the militant wing of Hamas. Such activities threaten the security of American civilians in the Levant and other parts of the Middle East, as well as the safety and stability of our regional partners. Also on Sunday, the military secretary general of Hezbollah, Haytham Ali Tabatabai, considered to be only secondary to Hezbollah chief secretary general Naim Qasim, was eliminated in a suburb of Beirut by the IDF. Israel and Jewish communities around the world are bracing for Hezbollah’s next move.

Then, in Syria, since November 2024, has been led by Hussein al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Joulan. Does al-Sharaa know anything about real leadership? Can he produce stability and the basic capacity for administration for all of the people of Syria? And, of course, the recent visit of Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to the White House, when the sale was announced of 48 F-35s, a joint civil nuclear engineering programme, and the sale of approximately 300 tanks. There are a great deal of moving pieces on the Middle East chessboard, and here to discuss them all with us is the wonderful Hazem Alghabra. Hazem Alghabra was born in Damascus, Syria, and is the founder and president of Frontiers Consultant, a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy firm that provides public relations and crisis management solutions with a focus of East and the United States. Prior to starting his firm, Al-Gabra held multiple positions within the U.S. Department of State, including senior advisor for public affairs at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Hazem provides daily insights and analysis and is a commentary on a vast array of television stations, including I-24, Keshet, Al Arabiya, Sky News, BBC, and Ashraf Bloomberg. Thank you so much for joining us, Khazam [crosstalk].

Hazem Alghabra: I’m so sorry, I’m a mess today.

Sarah: You are not a mess.

Hazem: I have a construction crew doing my floors as we speak. It’s [crosstalk].

Sarah: Don’t worry about it.

Hazem: I was inspired by President Trump when he is doing the ballroom. So I’m actually putting marble on my main floor here. It’s going to look nice.

Sarah: Yeah. And I’m sure in light of what President Trump is doing, you have a lot of gold gilding also, right?

Hazem: Paint only. Where do I start?

Sarah: Let’s start with some assurances from you, because I am a little concerned with the squadrons of F-35s to Saudi Arabia. I’m a little concerned that Israel might be in danger of losing its qualitative military edge. The F-35s, as you know, is not just a stealth jet. It’s also an intelligence platform, a strike and electronic platform, and is a source of regional stability. We have enshrined in American law that Israel should always have a qualitative military edge. So do you feel that this sale to Saudi Arabia is in danger of harming that?

Hazem: Great question, and I’ve been working on answering this for the past couple of weeks since the announcement. Actually, the initial announcement came out on November 4th, when the sale cleared the Pentagon hurdle. What the U.S. Air Force and U.S. military call an airplane, usually it’s a platform, so that platform will get certain weapons, equipment, upgrades, technology, if you may, especially nowadays, we’re in the fifth generation at this point. That technology varies from country to country. I’ll give you an existing example of a platform that Saudi Arabia and Israel share, which is the F-15. So Israel has a very unique version of the F-15, tailored to their mission, tailored to the needs of the IAF, but also to maintain that qualitative advantage that is, as you very correctly mentioned, enshrined in U.S. law. Now, the F-15 in Israel is called the F-15I, and the Saudi version of the F-15 is called the F-15SA, Saudi Advanced. Advanced is a good word, but it doesn’t mean it’s more advanced than other F-15s. Qatar has their own version as well, by the way, called the QA, the Qatar Advanced. So when it comes to the platform itself, the platform doesn’t change the actual fuselage of the aircraft. What changes is the technology packages that go on that platform, especially the EW package, which is the crown jewel of the crown jewel of the U.S. Air Force, which is the electronic warfare package that disables communications and interrupts communications. The pilot used to just point and shoot at things. Now the pilot is a technician, really, going and disconnecting networks and connecting networks. It’s a very different world we live in right now.

Israel not only will maintain the edge of American technology, but the existing and continuously developing Israeli technology that is very unique to the F-35I and will continue to improve over time. So the edge that Israel has is not only provided by the U.S. government, it’s actually more so than ever today, provided by the ingenuity and investments of the Israeli government and Israeli engineers at IWI and other companies that are making really cool new next-generation stuff that we’d love to get into a different conversation. But I do recommend the conversation with IWI. They have a great office in Washington, wonderful people, and they will tell you about all the great things coming out of Israel when it comes to defense technology.

Sarah: When do you think they will actually be delivered? What’s the timeline usually?

Hazem: No, there is no timeline on the horizon at this point. It takes, obviously, time, and the Saudi F-35 will not take priority over an American F-35 delivery or a NATO F-35 delivery. So there’s that aspect. Again, it’s not a simple aircraft to use. And not only on our side, we have a lot of [inaudible] to the [inaudible] and [inaudible], but also on their side. It’s kind of funny, it’s kind of not. I’m sorry about the noise; this comes with the territory today, but the F-35 uses a very advanced coating paint, if you may, that we found is very susceptible to sandy air. So literally, when the F-35s in Qatar and other bases, when we operated the F-35 in the Gulf region, we discovered that every time it goes out, comes back, it gets sanded a little bit to a point where, at the tip of the wings, which is a very important area in the aircraft for radar avoidance, the whole wing gets sanded down to bare metal. So they need to figure out how to run maintenance and how to protect it. They can’t just park it outside. It’s like a Lamborghini; you can’t just leave it outside with the other cheap aircraft. So a lot to be done. I’m thinking, compared to past deliveries that have been more simple, 2 years, this is a more complex one. So 2 years plus. And a lot can change in two years in that region, as we know.

Sarah: Right. What assurances do you have that Saudi Arabia would not be employing other nationals, North Korean or Chinese people, to work with them to update and man the F-35s?

Hazem: As you know, manning the F-35, that’s out of the question. If we see a Chinese PLA operative in the cockpit, we will shoot that thing down, no question about it, but the problem is really not physical access as much as sensors and data. So once the airplane lands, the airplane is like an iPad right now. So it downloads the data and uploads new data, and there’s software. There’s more software than hardware going on in that thing. So the concern is access to the software, access to the sensors, access to the technology, potentially sensors on the ground like radars. This is what we did with the, I remember the S-400s, I think, for the Turks.

Sarah: Russian [inaudible].

Hazem: Again, if I have a Russian radar sitting under an F-35, it’s just like that defeats the purpose. So usually, if an F-35 is going to fly over a Russian radar, we would bomb that radar before we get close enough. Having one that’s active and operated by Russians with Russian technicians right under it, no bueno. So that is part of a bigger conversation, obviously, not only with Saudi Arabia, with other countries. UAE is on that list of countries where PLA is trying to make space for themselves, and on the port, we’ve had an issue in the past couple of years. It’s a long conversation, but you ask for assurances. It’s hard to give final assurances, but I would tell the audience we’re not stupid. There are very smart people at DoD looking at things, looking at the technology packages, looking at counterintelligence to make sure this deal doesn’t become the downfall of our crown jewel, really. That’s the best thing we have in the military. There is nothing better than the F-35 today.

Sarah: Wonderful. Let’s go over to Lebanon now. President Joseph Aoun has repeatedly promised that he’d rein in Hezbollah, yet we’ve only heard rhetoric, and we haven’t seen any actions. What do you believe is holding back President Aoun of Lebanon from restraining Hezbollah? How do you feel Hezbollah might respond to what happened this weekend with the taking out of Tabatabai?

Hazem: Excellent question. I love how my guys, like, whenever you’re asking the most important questions, they decide to go harder on the cutting, but almost done. So we’re putting as much pressure as possible right now. I don’t think the U.S., short of actual military intervention, political pressure is being put on President Aoun and his government. They have a head of the army whose name is Rudolf Haikal, really problematic guy. So here’s what it will have to boil down to. The Lebanese government is claiming, “Hey, listen, the army is very fragile. If we move the army against Hezbollah, the 30-plus percent of the army that is Hezbollah-affiliated or Ampero will split. I think the easy answer is like, “Okay, cool. What’s wrong with that? Because if your army has a problem, it needs to be reformed.” Sometimes the reform will need to be a bit more violent, especially when you wait like 30 years complaining about the same thing year after year. The other thing that we failed at miserably, and this is where I blame everybody, including one of my heroes, Ted Cruz, every time the Lebanese Armed Forces, the LAF, sub-8 package is up for signing, we get into this whole conversation: should we do it? Should we not? Should we do it? Should we not? Then in the final minutes, it gets signed. And that is a problem because it’s like raising kids. If the kid knows, like, no matter how much you yell at them, they’re going to get their iPad back by the end of the evening, they’re going to keep doing the wrong thing. The right thing to do right now is stop all aid, and there is the bigger stick. The conversation around an Israeli incursion into Lebanon is a live conversation right now, and the conversation boils down to a simple point.

If the Lebanese government is not going to fulfil their side of the agreement, and by the way, this is not a random request that just came up; this is an agreement signed by the Lebanese government over a year ago, I think a year and a few days at this point, so if they’re not going to fulfil their end of the agreement, well, somebody’s got to. The IDF has more bandwidth right now than they did a few weeks ago. So the Lebanese forces, the Lebanese government, need to get hip to the fact that if they don’t want to deal with another 82, and mind you, a much more successful 82, because no more Palestinian fighters, Hezbollah is broken, Syria is not going to get involved. It’s going to be an open road from Jerusalem to Beirut. So if they don’t like that, sure. Nobody likes that. I don’t wish it on anybody, nobody likes war, but that seems to be one of the last options on the table if they do not want to fulfil their part of the agreement. And it’s being talked about.

Sarah: Right. So is Hezbollah like Waccamaw? Will there be other people waiting to take Tabatabai’s place?

Hazem: I’m going to steal that from you, Wacca Nasrallah. That would make a great arcade game. But listen, Hezbollah will do what Hezbollah does: try to survive. The Iranians actually have this term they use, this idiom they use, called “slaughtering with a piece of cotton.” I think I’ve mentioned that to you. They play the long, long, long game. Their game transcends the U.S. 2 years, 4 years, strategy, quadrennial strategies, these things like how we plan in the U.S. No, they’re looking at the next hundred years. They are in no particular rush, and that is the concern: that if you do not maintain pressure, the Iranians right now, they’re sitting pretty over in Tehran. They’re not doing much, compared to what we were worried they were going to do, but now they are waiting. They’re waiting for a better opportunity. A different president in the White House, a different prime minister in Israel. They wait for opportunities, and it’s like a disease. If the immune system is busy doing something else, they will come out in mass numbers, and you’ll get an outflare. So, how do we prevent the outflare of Hezbollah or Iran is really the question on the table, and this is not a two-year question, not a four-year question. This is a hundred-year question because the ideology is not going to change. It’s going to take a lot to change the ideology. What we need right now is to keep them suppressed so the ideology is not going to throw symptoms till a cure is found.

Sarah: So, as you know, yesterday President Trump designated certain branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, but no mention was made of Qatar or Turkey. How do you think they’re reacting in Qatar after all they’ve housed the leadership of Hamas in Qatar, and Erdoğan of Turkey is always praising the Muslim Brotherhood? Why do you think they were omitted?

Hazem: It’s an interesting question. I think President Trump, as we know, has been working very hard to balance two things: to balance the national security and international security priorities, but also relationships that President Trump believes are required to make a difference. He does this thing that’s really interesting. He thinks if there is a way to avoid including certain countries in an executive order package or a congressional law package, if he can work with them directly and kind of say, “Listen, you guys have to help us on this,” he will avoid the embarrassment of these countries being named. If he feels that he cannot, then he will go out and name these countries. Obviously, he’s trying to bring Turkey into the fold. Turkey’s been out of the fold for a while. So it’s a hard task. I don’t envy President Trump’s position on this, but he’s trying. Great. We can always go back and adjust. This is not a one-time opportunity, but if the Turkish government is willing to take a second, harder look into the Muslim Brotherhood, a legacy organization at this point that all remain thereof is some finance of terrorism networks, that’s not a good look. The Muslim Brotherhood had an opportunity, that whole thing: “Oh, no, no, no, it’s a civilian organization that wants to govern.” Sure. They had Egypt in 2011. It didn’t work out too well for them, or for anybody else. So it’s time for them to go. What’s more interesting about this, again, what the executive order does is the important aspect. It provides resources, funding, capacity, and bandwidth to the U.S. government to look into the network in a way that we’ve never looked into the network before. Treasury, bureau, agency, commerce, even State Department.

So you’re going to get an all-hands approach to the problem, and figure out the network, figure out how far it goes, obviously dry out the possible sources. That’s the other problem. It’s a lot of cash economy. I’ll tell you, Hezbollah still continues to be financed out of the United States through car dealers out in Michigan, in Detroit. We all know that. The whole used car global network has been a major source for financing for Hezbollah, and most of these cars come from the U.S. It’s a whack-a-mole game. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, but now we have additional resources. Also, now there are people who are not only affiliated, but sympathetic with the Muslim Brotherhood, who will also get a chance to take a look and say, “There is a problem here, so maybe we should not be affiliated with these guys.” I’ll end here. This is where I think President Trump and the U.S. government has not been very successful: explaining to the American public, educating the American public, why this is a problem. Because now the first reaction from the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR, obviously, and I’ll talk about that for a second, it’s like, “No, we didn’t do anything wrong, we’re being prosecuted by a racist government, local and federal.” Well, a lot of groups, even non-Islamic groups, are identifying with this: black groups, Hispanic groups, et cetera, because they’re trying to create these alliances. Well, President Trump, U.S. government, come out, explain it to me. Sell it to the American people. It’s not a hard thing to sell. You just go and make the average citizen feel involved, feel listened to, and respected. It’s very important right now as the policy shifts more domestically in the next year than foreign policy. We focused the first year on foreign policy.

Now the White House, according to what last I heard from friends, they’re trying to shift inwards, which is very important and key to the 2028 elections. [crosstalk] elections [inaudible].

Sarah: Speaking of shifting inwards, could you discuss a little bit the debate you had with the head of CARE? And Governor Abbott of Texas designated CAIR as a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate [inaudible]?

Hazem: Yeah, I’m still getting death threats on the YouTube comments feed. It’s is normal. It’s nice. It makes you feel heard, but unseen. I was on the news this year with Nihad Awad, the head of CAIR. The first thing he says, and this is what’s so concerning about CAIR and these MB-affiliated organizations, first of all, it’s very important to remember that CAIR was created not in the wake of an Islamic event or Islamic need. It was created in the wake of Oslo Accords by Palestinians. So let’s start there. The organization has been almost entirely focused on anti-Israel agendas, not the well-being of Muslim people. They go out and say, “Oh, we want to make sure Muslims are not discriminated against.” They really don’t represent workplace concerns as much as they represent activists who are burning flags and being involved in anti-Israel protests in many ways, some of which are violent. If you’re not sure about that, look into our friend Kimara Simral’s story when they pulled the flag off her neck and almost really hurt her in a Senate building. So CAIR is more interested in defending these guys, and the Texas story is particularly interesting. This is something I’ve discussed in that interview. It’s an ongoing case, so we’re getting updates on that case, and it’s still in the media, but a year ago, some Muslim activists, younger, not underage but definitely in their 20s, defaced a church in Texas. The idea was that the church had the Israeli flag up, which is still a very lawful thing to do in this country. They painted swastikas and slurs on the walls and whatnot. CAIR came in and said, “Oh, yeah, you cannot prosecute these kids. This is freedom of speech,” and this is where the core of my problem with CAIR lies.

Instead of educating the Muslim community, a Muslim community that really lacks a diversity of organizations claiming to represent them, they’re saying, “Oh, yeah, it’s okay to spray paint and damage private property. It’s freedom of speech.” And they came up with this term. It’s so dumb. It’s like, “graffiti is the voice of the unheard.” I’m like, “Okay,” and you see that on damaging property, but you see the same mentality all the way to October 7th. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, because we feel wronged, we can go and kill, maim, kidnap people.” That is really the core ideology that Greg Abbott is fighting, President Trump is fighting, and you and I are fighting, sir. It’s a threat. It’s a threat. I usually try not to give Nihad Awad any free advice, but I told him, “You know what, maybe this is analogous here, mind you: maybe you should learn a bit from Chabad. See what they do. See how they create a nurturing environment for the Jewish people and even guests of the Jewish people at their activities and events. Do what they do.” I told him, “After this interview is over, take a minute. Think why the Jewish community in this country is respected, and the Muslim community is under pressure, why Jewish organizations are successful,” because he kept complaining about AIPAC, that’s all he does, “And why Jewish organizations and Israeli organizations are successful, and why your organization is an utter failure.” He did not love that, but I hope he sat down for a second and like, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Not everybody else has a big thing.” If there’s 300 million saying you have a problem, then maybe you do. This is a wake-up call right there.

Sarah: Right. Do you have any idea how much money CAIR is funneling to Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, Hamas, or Hezbollah?

Hazem: Again, it’s not as simple as CAIR. It’s a network. It’s subsidiary. Remember the alphabet soup we had to deal with the past 2 years, with the JP line of alphabet soup and the MP line, the Muslims for Palestine, Students for Palestine. This is not clear-cut. They have a C3. They have a C4. They are claiming credit for Mamdani, part of the credit at least. Everybody’s taking credit for Mamdani. I don’t think the New Yorkers, the gullible New Yorkers, elected Mamdani because of CAIR or anything else, because 2025. Anyways, here’s the thing, we should not look at one big fire, we should look at the million small flames that they have going, and that is really the concern, and it’s not always as direct as a cash transfer. That used to be the case before 9-11, mind you, but our systems have evolved greatly since 9-11. Now they still try; everybody’s trying to squeeze one by the goalie, but it’s not as simple as that. I will pose a question: how can you quantify CAIR’s role in misinforming and miseducating the community with American kids joining ISIS during 2017, ’18, ’16, when that was happening? It’s a very valid question: the relationship not only with external actors but also internal actors and mosques. For a while in the Washington, D.C. area, we’re like, “Oh, we have a nice, non-extremist mosque called Dar Al- Hijrah in Falls Church, Virginia,” only to find out that the imam that was in charge of it is none other than Awlaki, who is an expert, a veteran bomb maker for al-Qaeda, and then he went to Yemen and went into bomb making full-time. I’m sure many people have heard the story. It took us years to get him, and we ran into a load of problems targeting a U.S. citizen, but he’s not a normal U.S. citizen; he’s a really good bomb maker. So there you have it. There is a problem, Sarah.

People say I’m anti-Islam when I say these things. Nobody can be anti-religion. Hitler maybe, but Hitler’s a really bad person; you got to be really bad to be against a whole religion. But when a religion has failed to produce positive results for their own community, then it’s reasonable to say, “Hey guys, you have a problem. You have a big problem that affects you and affects me as well, and affects the people around you. Your freedom stops at my freedom. You can operate within your community, but when you start spray painting churches or attacking Jewish people in the streets of New York, then this is where we draw the line and come down on your head like a big hammer.” And this is what’s happening right now; this is what caused the whole mess, but it had to happen, and I’m glad it’s happening right now.

Sarah: Okay, speaking of al-Qaeda, on November 10th, Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Joulan, a former member of al-Qaeda and part of the al-Nusra Front, was welcomed into the White House just several months ago, maybe about a year ago. There was a $10 million bounty on his head. Despite the fact that Alawites, Druze, Christians, and many other minorities faced discrimination in Syria, why do you think President Trump welcomed him with open arms, and why do you think he removed the Caesar sanctions on Syria?

Hazem: So, I was listening to your question; I was putting something I wanted to share, but let me answer your question first. The Syrian government, represented by Sharaa and somewhat by Shibani, his foreign minister, made a list of promises, and these promises were brokered by what we’d call grand tours, loosely, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, that were fantastic. Sharaa came and said, “We will become your partner in fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS, more importantly. Listen, I used to be ISIS and al-Qaeda. I know these guys; if you need somebody that will fight them, I know them better than anybody else. You don’t need to even deploy your intelligence. I know all of these guys; I know their faces; I slept with them; I ate with them; I ran with them for a while,” which is an interesting proposal. He said, “Listen, that past is behind me; now I’m a new person.” You know what? His history kind of puts that in the realm of possibility. I can’t think of many people that successfully left al-Qaeda, went to ISIS, then left ISIS and went in a new direction, had their own organization. The guy is not stupid; the guy is smart; the guy knows his limits; and the guy is actively fighting ISIS on the ground right now. It’s a reality. This is not something we’re making up or the White House is using to defend him; there are active missions happening daily. Great. Now, all of that, he’s given the opportunity. He needs to do two things at this point. Continue serving what we agreed is a common agenda. This is not serving the purposes of the United States. This is serving the Syrian people and the American people and the people of Israel and the people of the whole region and the whole world, mind you. This is not some kind of private agenda. This is a global good.

So as long as he’s still committing to these promises, I think he’ll be in a good place. Add to that the need to go back and focus on domestic issues. Domestically, the country is a mess. It’s an absolute mess, and that needs to be addressed. I did something earlier; I’m like, “Okay, what’s the conversation around Syria?” And I pulled a screenshot; I looked up the headlines in the past 24 hours on Syria. New York Times: “The grisly killing of a married couple sparked new sectarian unrest in Syria.” I’m sure you’ve heard of it in Homs, which has a large Alawite minority. A couple were killed; the walls were painted with blood and messages. Very grisly. So now there is, I wouldn’t say an not an all-out, but there are skirmishes in the street. There’s unrest, and there are new calls for decentralization and local governance. So it’s still a powder-keg situation. Till the country stabilizes, if Sharaa continues to build his foreign influence campaign on a weak domestic foundation, that foundation is going to collapse and bring down everything he’s doing globally. We saw that happening with the Druze a few months ago. He came back and said, “Well, Israel really fixed it for him in a way or another by bombing his forces,” and now he cannot commit genocide against the Alawites. There is that, but that was, I think, enough of a slap on the wrist to change course. Not everything is Gaza, sir. Sometimes people respond well to slaps on the wrist, especially if it’s a big bump on the wrist.

Let me give you a couple more headlines from the past 24 hours to give you a bigger picture. That was the New York Times. Wall Street Journal: “ISIS prisons and camps are festering in a fragile Syria.” And that leads us to the American concern and the American interest in al-Sharaa continuing to do what he does and succeeding in what he’s doing, because there is a tangible problem in Syria, not only with ISIS in prisons but ISIS outside of prisons. The country is one bad decision away from becoming a new Afghanistan. I’ll explain it the way the White House explained it to me directly. They’re like, “Listen, we have similar concerns, but we had a lot of conversations.” People think this policy came out of thin air or came out of President Trump exclusively. It’s not. Many conversations were had on counterterrorism, and it boiled down for policymakers to two options: try to work with Sharaa, who comes with some support from the region, who is domestically accepted, who is promising to do the right thing; or go to potentially Afghanistan, early 90s, where you have a bunch of warlords controlling a swath of land no bigger than 20 kilometers and warring with each other and getting involved in drug trade, human trafficking. Obviously, if you’re a warlord in the region, what do you do? You go and attack Israel, because that’s how you dip into the Muslim Brotherhood’s cash flow. So, so far the White House feels that Sharaa is the best option. Is he the best option that Syria can muster? Probably not. Is he the best option that has presented itself to the international community? So far, unfortunately, yes.

Let me move to the third headline here, which is where it gets interesting. So: “Syria’s displaced by war returning to find homes occupied by foreign fighters.” So now these conversations are being had. They are front and center. Now they cannot ignore these conversations. Sorry, I’m not going to sit and read you headlines, but this gets interesting because it gets into Israeli. Haaretz, a few hours ago, said it. I can’t say it any better than they can say it: “al-Sharaa won major diplomatic victories for Syria, but his real test begins at home.” So this is not something I discovered yesterday. This has been the conversation for the past few months. Let him do his thing. Let him control the foreign aspects, but now let’s see how well he does with the Druze, with the Kurds, with the Alawites, with most of the Sunnis in Syria who don’t know what hijab forced on them. Most of the country in history were not really that religious. They’re devout, but not that kind of religious. I’ll give you the last headline that concerned me the most, and it shows you that sometimes the threat and the problem is not that obvious. This is from the Times of Israel two days ago: “Four IDF soldiers charged with trafficking weapons from Syria into Israel.” The threat is not always so clear, but when you have instability and that kind of mess on your border, no matter what happens, somehow that mess seeps into your country. This is why people say, “Oh my God, what’s Israel doing with the buffer zone?” Well, there you have it, even with the buffer zone. Now you’re getting smuggling. So, we need a land on this. I know I’ve taken a lot of time with this question, which is an important question.

Sarah: Very important.

Hazem: There needs to be traction on the agreement between Sharaa and Israel, between Syria and Israel. These are my two recommendations for anybody from the government of Israel is listening. For one, Sharaa is an interim president. So it’s actually the correct thing to do to go into an interim agreement, something that can be tested over a period of time, and we see what that gives us. More importantly, it doesn’t have to be an all-encompassing agreement. Let’s start small, build confidence, expand it. It’s not like we have one opportunity to have an agreement. I’ve said that since January, when I was in Israel. I’m like, “You know what? Let’s look into a hotline between the two countries.” So if somebody shows up in the wrong neighborhood, we can have a conversation before everybody has to go kinetic on each other. Yeah, not hard.

Sarah: You mentioned that al-Sharaa’s government is an interim government. What do we know about the former Syrian Republican Guard member, Brigadier General Manaf Tlass? His name has come up as someone who might possibly replace Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Hazem: No. First of all, let’s remember this guy; his dad was a former defense minister. He’s the most decorated defense minister that has won no wars, lost a few, actually, but very decorated dad. He was Hafez Assad’s friend in the military academy, and that’s how he ended up being minister of defense. The guy was a mess. He was a womanizer. One day, I’ll tell you a whole story with Tamara Fine from Figaro and how my family got involved unwillingly and unknowingly with him, saying the dumbest things possible in an interview, but that’s a story for another time. So his dad was a joke. Nobody took his dad seriously. Manaf is kind of interesting because he’s Sunni, by the way. He’s not Alawite, but he’s friendly with everybody. That said, what does he represent is really the question. Sharaa comes with an interesting narrative that fits the psyche of the Syrian people because he kind of split the country into two categories. By the way, Sharaa is great at marketing. I don’t know who taught him marketing. I don’t know who’s helping him. He’s great at marketing, and he figured out his customers. He has customers that are religious, and then he says, “We’re going to revive the Sunni global…” in the times past, a very short-lived empire, the Umayyad dynasty. Quite short-lived, actually.
It was based in Damascus, and talking about “make Islam great again,” that one. Using the same story but for a different audience and adjusted pitch, saying, “We used to be a great nation.” This is more for the nationalist, non-religious people. Also, the Umayyads, forget the religion, were not really about religion. It was a merchant family that found its way to leadership of a growing empire. So “let’s be like them.” Get into commerce and becoming a great country. So, make nationalism great again.

With these two skews of products, he has captured the interest and the support of most of the Syrian people, and there are variations to these pitches, obviously. Some people like, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to rebuild the economy through Islam, or through nationalism. You know what? We’re going to rebuild the economy,” which is great. This is what people are interested in. Mind you, also on domestic policy, he’s making some less popular moves. He’s not doing a horrible job so far. So, under a lot of pressure by Qatar mostly, he liberated the price of electricity. So the electricity is no longer subsidized, which is allowing, right now, the building of new electrical plants. The prices for the Internet also went up a lot to match global economy prices. Now, this is what the IMF would have probably recommended before a loan, so it makes sense. However, what he needs to do right now is figure out how the lack of electricity or expensive electricity, and expensive Internet for a country with the average monthly income is $100 a month. The average income is $3 a day, how they’re going to afford global communication and energy prices while they need that communication and energy to improve their income. So they’re going to get a chicken-and-egg thing. It’s a very curious economic challenge. So far, the Syrian government has been funded by the charity of others. Every two weeks, they do “loyalty to a city.” So this week is loyalty to Homs, or loyalty to Hama, or loyalty to the Damascus suburb. They’re really making it into more like a region than a whole city. They raised a couple of hundred million dollars from people who are originally from there, who are well off, who have travelled. There is a $1000 here, a million dollars there. I don’t know how sustainable that is.

Now, a lot of the government expenses are running on the charity of others. That’s not sustainable. So now what we’re looking into is a stabilization plan, and this is where the question presents itself, like, can he stabilize?

Sarah: Right. So do you think ideally al-Sharaa would like to turn Syria into a theological state, a devoutly Muslim theocracy?

Hazem: I will rephrase the question. Remember, I’m a former bureaucrat. So at the end of the day, I really don’t care how he feels. My question is, can he? What do you do, and how do you position so he cannot? Because that’s not going to help anybody. It’s not going to help the Syrian people. It’s not going to help Syria’s neighbors. It’s not going to help the United States. So what do you do? And now I think what President Trump did, on one end, he frightened everybody by inviting him to the White House. But also he gave him a lot to lose. Where else is he going to get 45, 47 Victory perfume in Syria? He needs his White House connection for that, but like many other things, now he has a lot to lose. Every time he makes a decision, he’s going to weigh that decision against the ability or the action by the U.S. government and other governments. I’m going to say this. I said this on I-24 a few days ago. I was debating the same thing. I said, “Listen, one of the great things that happened in Israel is millions of people coming with their experiences from all over the world, with knowledge, opinions, ideas, coming together under one mission, one purpose, if you may.” That is why Israel became one of the most successful new countries in the world right now. So Syria needs that opportunity. Syria has been closed off to the rest of the world for decades, if you think about it, since the Ottomans, really. So right now, you look at the calendar, it’s November 2025. By the way, happy Thanksgiving, everybody. In Syria, I don’t know what year it is. It’s not 2025. I know that much. You can take it back 100 years, you can take it back 600, 700 years. You still will be in the right ballpark.

So, how do you bring the Syrian people access to everybody else? How do you open up the economy? How do you open up the society so people can learn from other people, including the Syrians that are coming back from the U.S., Europe, and say, “What you guys are doing is not right. This is how Europe became successful.” And you’re going to get bad ideas too, mind you. It’s not all good ideas. But with that discourse, with that positive friction, we’ll be exactly where we are today 100 years from now. Another 100 years from now, they’re still talking about Ottoman ideology. Mind you, most of the laws governing commerce in Syria are Ottoman or French occupation laws. Now they have to have a conversation: how do we repair our legal framework when it comes to insolvency and incorporate it? These are the conversations they need to be thinking about. This idea never really worked, but the idea has existed since 9-11, maybe, that if these people are busy thinking about commerce, thinking about fixing their insolvency legal framework, they are not going to think about negative ideas and what flavor of jihad, of violent jihad, they want to get into that evening. It’s an interesting thought.

Sarah: Interesting [inaudible]. Meanwhile, of course, we had seen photographs of Russian troops entering Syria along with Turkish troops, which makes Israel a little edgy.

Hazem: No, not with the Russians. The Russians are still seen to be like a balancing kind of weight for Israel. The Turks, however, that’s a different story. It’s on al-Sharaa’s score to find a deal with Israel right now, an interim deal that doesn’t ask for the sun and the moon, and get to the next step, hopefully toward peace. Nobody should be talking about peace or Abraham Accords today. That’s years away from us. First of all, actually, on Syrian national television, I’ve encouraged Syria to recognize Israel. I’m like, “You guys cannot be thinking about getting into an agreement with a country that doesn’t exist because that’s kind of silly. So recognize Israel. That’s not going to change anything for you guys. You build trust that way.” Israel can also make some moves that will comfort the Syrians a bit more, but no withdrawal at this point. I do not recommend a withdrawal at this juncture. It’s way too early. Can I take one more minute? Because I think I spoke way too much. I want to give you some time, but I want to thank you and your team. Beyond fantastic. I don’t know how to describe last Wednesday. If anybody listening has not been to one of EMET’s galas, mark your calendar for November next year, because it was amazing. Fetterman was wonderful. I’ve never seen Leo Terrell on fire that way. I’ve seen him on fire; this was like he went all in. He was fantastic. And obviously, Sarah, your company, Buddy’s, Dr. Greens, and everybody else, it was such a great night. Thank you.

Sarah: I am particularly grateful to you for all of your wisdom, all of your knowledge, and for moving up and sitting at our table. It was wonderful. It was wonderful to share the evening with you.

Hazem: I want to talk to Sloane a little bit. So I saw her. I’m like, “It’s a bit inappropriate, but let me go.” Fetterman left, so I took his seat. It wasn’t big.

Sarah: Wonderful.

Hazem: By the way, if anybody listening has not donated to EMET yet, do what I do and donate to EMET. I think it’s very important to donate [inaudible].

Sarah: Thank you so much, and while we’re speaking, part of us are on Capitol Hill. Our members of Congress rely on us to keep them up to date and posted about all of the moving parts in this five-piece plexiglass chessboard, which is the Middle East. I cannot thank you enough Hazem, for all of your wisdom.

Hazem: Sarah, do you have an announcement to make?

Sarah: Oh, yes. My announcement is that my husband, Buddy, and I are going to be living part of the year in Israel. We’re in the process of making Aliyah and just got our passport stamped today. We actually will continue our work in Israel as we do in the United States. Thank you so much, Hazem.

Hazem: See you in Jerusalem.

Sarah: We’ll see you.

Hazem: Now we see you in Washington and Jerusalem. Wonderful.

Sarah: And Washington. Okay, thank you so very much.

Hazem: Thank you.

Sarah: Okay, bye.

[END]