Re-conquering Gaza–What is at Stake 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: Good afternoon and welcome to yet another extremely stimulating and thought-provoking EMET webinar. We are deeply honored today to be here with Dr. David Wormser. David is one of my oldest and dearest friends, together with his wonderful wife, Mayraav. He is perhaps one of the most distinguished and brilliant analysts of the Jewish strategic situation. David is a senior analyst for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy, as well as a fellow at the Miscav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. He also is the executive and founding member of the Delft Global Analysis Group, LLC, a firm specializing in geopolitical risk analysis and mitigation for infrastructure, high-tech defense industries, and financial firms from the U.S., from Japan and India, and other nations that are dealing with the State of Israel. David has had an amazing career. He has been a senior advisor for Vice President Dick Cheney and for Secretary of State John Bolton at the State Department. Before joining the government, David founded the Middle East Studies Program at the American Enterprise Institute. While at AEI, he published the book, Turn, he is, Ali America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein. David also is in the reserves in the military. He has done 11 years of intelligence experience in the U.S. Navy reserves, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. David holds a BA, an MA, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and has been published in many periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Commentary Magazine. As we convene today, David, the Israeli cabinet has just approved the idea of reoccupying all of Gaza after 22 months of a rather heartbreaking war. So at this point, you know, we all know that there are 50 hostages, roughly 20 of them are alive. What now are the risks and the benefits of the plan to reoccupy Gaza?

Dr. David Wormser: I think that’s an excellent way to phrase it, to put it as a ledger sheet, because we really have to- we hear always debates where one side is argued, but you never hear the other side. One really has to now consider all parts of this and all possible consequences. On the side of going in all the way, taking the entire territory, which I believe is what will eventually happen and what eventually needs to happen. The arguments for it are that essentially there is no way to visibly- or there’s no way to get Hamas to concede its weapons and leave the territory through persuasion. They will never leave. Moreover, they are holding all the hostages permanently to get a guarantee internationally that they will never leave, A, and B, that Israel will no longer be able to strike preemptively against Hamas so that they can rebuild themselves to the power of October 7th. Essentially, the path toward taking all of Gaza acknowledges the reality that if one gets the hostages back, the price to be paid is another October 7th on steroids, with hundreds of dead Israeli soldiers, civilians, perhaps hundreds more hostages, etc. That is not even considering the cost of all the killers who would be released in the deal. That is strictly in terms of allowing Hamas to take back all of Gaza, have an open border to resupply and freedom to rebuild without Israeli interference. You cannot but lead back to October 7th.

However, on the downside, if Israel takes all of Gaza, Hamas has said they will kill all the hostages. They have put them in places, I am sure, that it would be very difficult for Israel to conduct rescue operations. That is a very real cost Israel has to think about. That cost is not negligible just in terms of the horror to the families and to those of us who have become attached to these hostages through their stories and through their pictures. We all feel- we see these pictures and they are like our kids almost. That would leave a rip in Israeli society that is very difficult to overcome. The feeling that they were abandoned once on October 7th, they would be abandoned again to die, would leave a scar in Israeli society that would be very difficult to overcome. That is the pro and con of going in on that side. I think there are some negatives that have to be understood about not going in, which is Hamas will not release the hostages. They have made it clear they are not going to release all the hostages. The cost that they are inflicting on Israel to release even half the hostages is prohibitive. They are essentially already securing an end-of-war scenario, rebuilding an Israeli withdrawal, more or less from all of Gaza, just for half the hostages. So 10 of the 20 that are estimated to be alive, essentially it is their death warrant. The second thing is, as we are negotiating, the United States and Israel, they are starving the hostages to death. We saw the video two weeks ago of Eviatar David. That was essentially an execution video. When you have a person starving to the point of near death, forced to dig his own grave, that reminded me of the scenes we had in the 80s with more classical terrorism, when they would take an airplane hostage and they would shoot a body at the entrance to the airplane and dump the body on the tarmac. This is the modern equivalent of that event. As we negotiate, we do not really have time. These hostages may die very soon. So there may not be an ability to rescue them that way. If you take the balance of it, it seems to me that the best way to save any of the hostages- we have to come to terms with the fact that there is probably no negotiated way to get the hostages out. If we do, the only way to really get any of them out sooner rather than later, because they may not survive later, is to hope that when Israel goes in and the clarity of defeat of Hamas is impressed on all the rank and file of Hamas, including the hostage holders, that some of them may make a calculation for life rather than martyrdom. Some of them may give up the hostages and take the Israeli offers of aid and safe passage out. This is an impossibility right now, because right now every Hamas hostage holder asks himself one thing, at the end of the day, who will stand over my head? Will it be Hamas or will it be the IDF? If it is the IDF, I better give up the hostages, take the deal and go. If it is Hamas, if I give up the hostages, I do not care what the Israelis offer me, I am a dead man. All the hostage takers right now have their finger in their wind. They are asking themselves, is Israel going to go all the way? Does Israel have it within itself to risk the hostages and go all the way? Ironically, the more boldness Israel shows, in my view, the more likely they will get back some of the hostages. I say that with a heavy heart. I hope all the hostage keepers see the light of day and give them all up. We are dealing with awfully- we are dealing with Nazis, and Nazis kill people because they want to. Getting them to agree to be humane is not a reasonable expectation.

Sarah: Right. Certainly, the hostage holders are Islamofascists. They are jihadists. How do you negotiate with them? Have you heard what number of Palestinian prisoners would they want, of these murderers would they want in exchange for hostages?

David: Thousands. Many of them will have blood on their hands. But also there’s other things. The Saudis, others, are looking at Israel, and from their point of view, they do not understand this whole giving in to the hostages. It is one of the things that makes Israel so unique- we Jews and Americans value human life in a way that unfortunately most of the world does not. So for them, they look at Israel and they see this as weakness. Do you really want to make peace and hook your cart to a horse that you look as weak? So it also has an effect on the ability to win regionally and strategically. What concerns me most is we know the faces of the 20 hostages that are there. We do not know the faces, but we know there are 200-300 future hostages that will be taken because the way one is giving in to Hamas is validating the hostage-taking phenomenon as a major strategic tool to those who have no other tools. It will invite not only in Israel, but globally, whether it is a bus in Thailand suddenly disappears with Israelis, an American tourist group disappears somewhere. The hostage-taking phenomenon is suddenly seen as a major strategic victory.

Sarah: How would- I think defining victory for us would be at least to have a perimeter, a defensible boundary between at least the envelope in Gaza and Gaza, the Gaza envelope. The loss of territory, I think, to Hamas is a defeat. How do you think they would define victory and defeat?

David: They would define defeat through loss of territory if they are sure the loss of territory is permanent. They have reasonable confidence that whatever Israel does over the next decade or two, they can build such pressure on Israel that Israel will in the end anyway give in. So if there is a perimeter, it is good and necessary for tactical reasons as well. It is also good in terms of convincing some people. But they will simply proceed with confidence that some leadership will emerge and say, well, the [inaudible] you already have Europe with its recognition of Palestinian state, which they have already made clear. They do have borders in mind, and it’s the ’48 borders, the borders that Abba Eban called Auschwitz borders. They have those borders in mind. So Hamas knows right off the bat, most of the world is going to support a removal of Israeli forces from all territory anyway. So whatever Israel takes, it will be forced to give up. And the second thing is, they know that it gives them the propaganda tool to say Israel occupies territory. Now, when they say occupy territory, they mean Tel Aviv. They mean Ra’anana, they mean Haifa. But Europeans, they blur it. They let them believe what they want to believe. And Europeans think, it means Beth Hanun. It means Bethlehem. It means Ramallah. They deliberately don’t correct them. But because at the end of the day, the Europeans will say, you can’t expect Hamas to stop its terrorism if Israel is still occupying territory. So in many ways, taking the territory does matter. Annexing the territory might matter more. But in the end, the utter destruction of Hamas is necessary, although at this point, I don’t even believe sufficient goal to achieve full victory because Hamas has unfortunately- the Europeans, the Western audiences, the students on the campuses have given Hamas so much to hold on to as a victory that really serious and dramatic measures have to be taken to show that that was a disastrous development, October 7th. At this point, even if Hamas is exiled, October 7th is not clearly a negative event for them.

Sarah: We saw just today Toronto cancel the movie of Noam Tibon[?], of what happened and Kibbutz Nahal Oz and this heroic rescue. How do we change the zeitgeist? All of a sudden, everybody is in love with Hamas. They say from the river to the sea is merely rhetorical, globalized the intifada. We have Mamdani saying, I won’t say it, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe it. How did this happen overnight?

David: One of the things that I find interesting, when we grew up, we studied antisemitism as a historical phenomenon. And we always believed that there was this basic din of antisemitism that had been around for thousands of years that wells up from time to time and leads to an explosion of antisemitism. But what we’ve seen in the last two years is the extent to which elites drive antisemitism. It’s a top-down phenomenon as much as it’s a bottom-up phenomenon. We saw it in Eurovision, where two years running, the Israelis won the popular vote. The Europeans had no problem voting for Israelis as the winners of the Eurovision song contest. But the judges who are part of the European establishment couldn’t have that, so they voted ridiculously negative in order to take Israel down. They still only got to take it down to place number five or six out of 20-some, 30-some nations, but nonetheless, they succeeded in keeping them from being number one. So we saw right there how European establishments were drivers of antisemitism and the protectors of antisemitism, not the people. Not that antisemitism doesn’t exist in popular, but it isn’t the primary motivating factor for most people. We see this in the United States too. The polls are very clear. Israel still remains a popular country. People do not identify with the Palestinians, do not identify with Hamas, and yet, we see elites, and unfortunately now on the right too, tapping into this phenomenon and instigating it, inciting it, cultivating it for political purposes. Now, they’re playing for the long haul because they know that the youth are an open book in America. They know the youth are becoming more religious and therefore more conservative. So that is why the phenomenon of antisemitism now is going back to the old school attempt to drive a wedge between Christianity and Judaism, which is why you see such a flurry suddenly of Israel attacks the church, Israel kills a Christian, etc., which is all lies. But as elite phenomenons, having been in Washington like you have, Sarah, for a long time, we know it’s very difficult to get things done without money. And this really gets to the core of the phenomenon. This is not organic. This is Qatar. This is the remnants of the KGB. This is the CCP in China. This is Iran. There are organizations and structures out there of vast amounts of money. It’s Turkey and Europe. Europe, you have two different structures of Turkish influence in Europe. One mimics the Muslim Brotherhood. One mimics the AKP party in Turkey. One appeals to Turkish expatriates. The other to non-Turkish Muslims. We see vast amounts of money being poured by nations like Qatar. And Qatar is pouring money into the West, not to help it, not to enrich it, but to burn it down. Qatar is Muslim Brotherhood. It is hostile. It has an inimical view of the West. It wants to bring us down. It knows that it cannot be done frontally. So it is using money to penetrate and tear us down. And you cannot deal with the phenomenon of antisemitism until you deal with the phenomenon of Qatar, of Turkey, of Iran, of the CCP, and of the remnants of the KGB.

Sarah: So right now I know Sisi and Erdogan are not the best of bosom buddies. What’s going on there? Could you enlighten us?

David: We in the West, and this idea, this paradigm lives even strongest in the IDF still. This concept, Concepcia, as is often mentioned, that Egypt is a rational actor, which it is, I think most leaders, even those we call irrational, are often rational actors. And that he’s looking at the reality out there. He gets billions of dollars of aid from the United States. Israel’s military is strong and likely would retake the Sinai where there is conflict. And so we assume that a lot of this is simply signaling to try to calm the flames down in Cairo, calm the flames down inside Egypt and that he needs to do that because he has Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood breathing down his neck and he overthrew Morsi the Muslim Brotherhood government and as a result he’s simply trying to feed the beast a little bit in order to buy time and space to maintain the peace. So it’s tolerated. His build-up is tolerated. His rhetoric is tolerated. His threats to go to war are being tolerated. His violations of the peace treaty, which are now material, are tolerated. But I think the concept needs to be revisited. Because first of all, there has been a shift in relations between Erdogan and Sisi. Two, we have to understand that Sisi is not really in control of his country anymore. The Muslim Brotherhood has already won in the lower rank and file of Egypt. It is a dysfunctional country. Qatar is out there and others willing to fit the bill for any money lost to survive for the Egyptian regime. America has not reopened the Bab el-Mandeb Straits with Yemenite hits. So the Suez Canal is still wheezing. And he is not able to replace that. And the amount of money that Egypt got from bribery and corruption with Hamas leadership in Gaza was an amount comparable to the amount of money he was getting from the United States, except without the strings attached. So, it wasn’t quite as much, but it was within the ballpark of maybe one to two billion versus three to four billion. That range. So, first of all, you have to look at the incentive structure there. The second part of it is that he is out to survive. And much can be done to survive through many different ways. But usually the money is not one of them. Holding on to the territory is not one of them. The territory matters having gotten it back under Sadat and so forth. But holding on to the territory at the expense of being seen by the Muslim Brotherhood as a sellout, there’s this welling sense of confidence in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood world because they’re in Damascus. There’s this welling sense of confidence. He sees it. And he may think that to protect his manhood and his honor is a far greater guarantee of his survival at the top of the Egyptian regime than any square footage in Gaza and in Sinai or the American aid. At that point, he’ll make a calculation to risk it to survive. In other words, there is a path, which I don’t say is necessarily 100% sure, maybe not even 50% sure, but there is a path where it is quite reasonable for Sisi to contemplate going back to war with Israel.

Sarah: Usually during times of war, there is an escape valve. There’s a place for refugees to run to. Of course, everybody has been putting the agency on the government of Israel. Israel has to feed the starving Gazans. Israel has to have some kind of escape valve. What about Egypt and Jordan? I think you’ve explained Egypt and Explain Jordan.

David: This goes back to the origins of the Palestinian crisis to begin with in the 50s and 60s and 70s before there even was a Palestinian nation, which is that the refugees were political tools used by these governments to maintain their state of war against Israel. The refugees fled to where they fled in 1948, a lot of them because their families had come from those countries. They had, in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, they had immigrated to the mandatory area, the Mandate of Palestine, because there was work. There was work because the Jews had come and the dead land had come back to life. This is not Zionist propaganda. This is Mark Twain. This is any traveler in that area at that time. All said the exact same thing. It was a barren land, devoid of people. The numbers are clear. Jerusalem was already majority Jewish for at least 150, 170 years. We are talking about minuscule amounts of people. The Arabs that were there were often nomadic, going back and forth to what’s Jordan or the Hejaz or the Sinai. A lot of the Palestinians descend from families that only 30, 40, 50 years before the creation of Israel had arrived from Iraq, from Syria, from Egypt, and so forth. And their names suggest that, Al-Masri, etc. Al-Masri means Egyptian and so forth. So the Egyptians had no real ethnic reason not to accept these refugees. It was a political tool, a shameless political tool. And now they are trapped in it, and they can’t overcome it because they have also cultivated that into an incredibly radical and radicalized population that is now the cauldron. It’s not really the cauldron. It’s the wellspring of regional fanaticism. It’s no accident that Al-Azam, who was the founder of Al-Qaeda, was the Palestinians. Arkawi came from essentially Palestinian roots. Again and again, we’re seeing the Palestinians at the core of further radicalization of all era politics. They’d become the lingua franca of radicalization of Arab politics, deliberately used by various Arab regimes, whether it was Nasser or Assad or so forth, and then Khomeini and Khomeini before him, deliberately used in order to attack the rest of the Muslim world and Arab world. So now you’re dealing with this horrible thing, and I think Egypt and Jordan are telling us something unwittingly, but they’re telling us something very important, that if you move the Palestinians as a community, they will continue to have agency over their youth. And if they continue to have agency over their youth, they will continue to radicalize them within Egypt, within Jordan. So what the Egyptians unwittingly are telling Israel is, either leave that problem in Israel for Israel to deal with, or move it somewhere else, but not to us, because we would need to break down the Palestinian population, rip from them all agency, and force their children into Egyptian schools, Jordanian schools, so that they don’t destroy us the way they try to destroy everybody else. So I think it’s really an indictment of anybody who continues to believe there should be agency given to the Palestinians for the next generation or two to run their own schools.

Sarah: I’ve gotten a lot of questions here. And one is we know that, and you and I go back to the beginning days of Oslo where we’re talking about the textbooks and the jihadist ideology that was indoctrinated into the minds of young children. One person asked, what is the point? Hamas and other jihad groups will never be eliminated. It’s their credo. Can we eliminate- and what can Hamas take on another name? It could call itself the National New Liberation Movement and be recognized by the international community. How do we eliminate this?

David: Well, I think there’s really two parts to it. One is agency, as we mentioned, the Palestinians need to lose control over their own education structures, incitement structures, and press structures, indoctrination structures. And that can’t be done. Not only with him still, Hamas remaining in Gaza, but frankly with the Palestinian Authority remaining in the Palestinian Authority. They are the real epicenter origin or structure of incitement of Palestinian youth and their indoctrination into war. As Israel pulled back, eliminated its information ministry, did away and started teaching in the spirit of Oslo, its kids about peace, the Palestinians accelerated their effort to teach about murder, to teach about genociding the Jews, to teach about the Jews being a colonial presence and radicalizing their youth. And that’s the Palestinian Authority, the moderates. So I think that you have to remove all agency from them. And that means that for the next generation or two, the idea of a Palestinian state, which implies agency over a most basic function of government, which is the educational structure and the press structures and so forth, information structures, has to be removed.

The second thing is I do believe there’s really not much alternative to Trump’s plan, which is if there are Palestinians who want to leave, they should be allowed to. The West has weirdly put itself in the position of the Berlin Wall, where they’re incarcerating people against their will. Many Palestinians want to leave. They wanted to leave in the 60s, in the 50s, and weren’t allowed to and just put in these camps by Egypt and Jordan. They’ve all along wanted to leave because their attachment actually is not that deep. Their history is even more shallow. At the end of the day, if you open up the gates to allow them to leave, like you would let any other free people, any other people in the world allow to leave, except those incarcerated by Soviet communism in Eastern Europe, if we don’t play the role of Soviet communism and incarcerate them, then estimates are at least half would leave. And at that point, you have a population that under proper management, which means the removal of agency over education for the next generation or two, is just rested from Palestinian hands. You perhaps could create a different Palestinian polity that Israel can work with. But for the moment, we have to find solutions of management and not permanent solutions of statehood or any other delusion. Any attempt to move to that now will result in a bigger disaster than October 7th in its following events.

Sarah: There have been many plans. Plans that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, maybe the United States would control parts of Gaza, maybe the Mediterranean to the Sinai. Have any of these nations bought into these plans?

David: First of all, it’s vague. Many of them have indicated they’re open to ideas, but they haven’t yet embraced them or advocated them. Number one. Number two, it’s not clear they really want to do it. The Palestinian issue for many of these nations didn’t want to touch it. They don’t like the Palestinians, to be honest. They see it for what it is. It was the mechanism to overthrow them. The PLO was created in 1964. Palestinian nationhood was created in 1964 by Nasser to create an octopus of tentacles in the world into Jordan, into Lebanon, into Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt- well, Egypt was under Nasser’s control- Libya, etc. To use the Palestinian issue to radicalize, undermine, and bring down the regimes. People forget the history of Jordan and what happened between ’64 and 1970, Black September, which is how the Palestinian issue was used by Nasser to try to topple King Hussein of Jordan. This history is not lost on many Arab countries, and they’re not willing to really engage with the Palestinians genuinely because they see it as a dangerous phenomenon that they don’t want to have a part of. Now, any solution, including any Arab solution by the way, has a precondition. And that precondition is that Israel won and is seen to have won by the region. By won, their victory was sufficient to such an extent that any hope for the next decades of once again pulling an October 7th, once again pulling an Iranian threat through a ring of fire around Israel, once again developing weapons of mass destruction that could threaten Israel, that those threats are so soundly destroyed, that no nation will think to do it again for a while. That is one precondition. The second part of it is that Israel emerges strategically from this war powerful. And strategy is part culture, but it’s part geography. And the Israelis have to start answering the propaganda at them of river to the sea with, you’re right on some level that the area from the river to the sea is one strategic zone. Gaza is a dagger pointed in the heart of Israel in its most populated areas, only about 20 miles from Tel Aviv city center. Judea and Samaria is a blob pointed at the heart of Israel, cutting Israel in half only by with the sparing of seven miles at one point. Basically Tel Aviv can’t grow westward because you’re in Samaria already if you are- eastward because you’re in Samaria already because it’s the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Jerusalem is a corridor, a cul-de-sac corridor. A city dies if it is closed in on itself. So, at the end of the day, there is no way to separate safely, culturally, geographically, militarily, strategically, Judea and Samaria or Gaza from the land of Israel. And forget about ideology and history. I’m talking about simply from the point of view of current culture, current economics, current demography, current structures. It cannot be separated. If the Arab world understands that Israel now has a strategic doctrine where positive control over everything from the river to the sea is an absolute, that there are buffer zones that Israel projects beyond that, say, for example, in Southern Syria, where air power, Turkish air power or significant ground forces can’t penetrate, or that there are an alliance of minorities that may emerge with minorities the Druze or the Christians in Lebanon and so forth. When people begin to see the fundamental reality of Israel’s strategic power grounded and changed, then reality starts shifting. Then new solutions appear. But as is right now, the hope remains that Israel is on borrowed time. And as long as Israel is on borrowed time in their mind, there won’t be a solution.

Sarah: We have, look, no matter what anybody believes about President Trump, he has been a very good friend of the State of Israel. And certainly he showed that during Operation Midnight Hammer. However, we only have three and a half more years, and we see what’s going on within the Democratic base. How do we penetrate through that veil of hatred?

David: Yeah, I think it’s the youth, and it’s part of the overall progressive takeover of American youth on the left. Unfortunately, well, you see a lot of American youth becoming more conservative, but below the age of 25, it’s actually a conservative demographic. But in terms of those that remain on the left, the old liberal core of the Democratic Party is all but disappeared. It is a progressive core now. And that progressive core is ideologically against Israel. It does not- it is beyond convincing, basically, because they have accepted a narrative. And unless you penetrate the schools, the universities, and so forth, you are not going to be able to take that youth back. The conservative youth are still up for grabs. But there in lies a really big problem, which is the propaganda of Qatar and the rest, is now really burrowing in on dividing Christians from Jews, trying to divide conservatives from Jews, whether it’s the isolationist crowd, whether it’s more traditional Catholics, etc. They’re really trying to encourage this hatred of Israel, this Israel’s a burden, Israel’s killing Christians, Israel’s the biggest threat we have in the region, the Jews are trying to finagle Americans to spill their blood to defend the Jews, etc., etc. We see all the antisemitic tropes. And these are being encouraged. So I think there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done by American Christians, American supporters of Israel, American Jews who are not always supporters of Israel, and Israelis to really work on the long-term future of American conservative youth, number one, and number two, to go back and see what can be done to resurrect the old liberal core of the Democratic Party. I’m going to say something rather out on a limb and kind of controversial. But I wouldn’t look too much to Democrat versus Republican at this point. Because my sense is, we’re on the eve of- and this is not Middle East, but we’re on the eve of a big political upheaval in America, where something we haven’t seen since the 1820s and 30s and 40s and 50s, when you had a go-round of several parties that come into being collapse, new parties form. And we always were a two-party system. It always went to a two-party system. But what the two parties were were different. So you had, in the 1824, you had the first big collapse of parties and then again, all the way up until the creation of the Republicans and Democrats that we know today on the eve of the Civil War. I think we’re at the eve of something like that. So you’re going to see coalitions. And weirdly, the Palestine issue has become the driving factor of the breakdown of parties. Suddenly you’re seeing really conservative, if we’re even far right Republicans, attacking MAGA, attacking Trump on the Palestine issue. They’re willing to split the Republican Party over the Jewish issue. In their case, it’s really the Jewish issue, not just the Palestine issue. And you had the same thing in the Democratic Party. They were willing to split the Democratic Party and tear it down in order to get their way on the Palestine and Jewish issues. So it really, unfortunately for us Jews, we’re at the epicenter of the political collapse of the partisan structure that we know it. But when it resurrects, I think that fundamental reconfiguration of coalitions will mean that a large majority of Americans will be pro-Israeli and they will be coterminous with parties that are electable.

Sarah: Right, I hope so. We had seen two weeks ago a vote where many more Democrats switched their vote to deny armaments. And this was really for the Israeli National Security Service, the police force. Although Moore did vote for armaments for Israel. But in this first vote, it was really scary. Do you think that the House might turn Democrat and will they block funds for weapons for Israel?

David: You could see a momentary period where they might. We are heading toward an election in a year and a half. You never know what will happen in that election. This big reconfiguration I’m talking about is something that will happen over the next 20, 30 years, not the next 20, 30 days or even weeks. So yes, you could see the Democrats take the House. I think that the Palestinian issue will be one that they’ll obviously focus on. But of course, they’ll also focus on trying to bring down President Trump. So there’ll be a divided attention there. But yes, definitely be there. But that, I think, emphasizes yet again the core point we were talking about earlier. Israel has to win and it has to win strategically in such a way that within a few months, it has secured itself strategically, so powerfully that it can weather just about any storm that comes at it over the next decade. And by that-

Sarah: David, for this- Right. But for the sake of argument, for the war within the war with Iran, during Midnight Hammer, Israel absolutely won. Israel, with the help of the United States and the B-2 bombers. We absolutely won. Yet you see what’s happening with Keir Starmer, Macron, and so many others in the international community. Does this world accept winning or is this a victimization contest? Is it just the biggest victim that gets our sympathy?

David: Well, there is definitely the victimization narrative that is so prevalent in Western thought, although that ultimately will also rub against American spirit as well. But this goes back to your very first question of Gaza and the cabinet decision to go in. To be brutally honest, Israel is winning everywhere, but it hasn’t won. It hasn’t won in Gaza. It hasn’t won in Lebanon. It hasn’t won in Syria. It hasn’t won in Iran. It is winning. It can win. But none of these wars are finished. And as long as these wars are not finished, it is a festering wound that gives the Keir Starmers, the Macrons, the ability to yap. And that’s what they’re doing. The moment that these fronts face decisive victory and shutdown, then you start- If Israel occupies Gaza, the calm returns. The starvation that has been a fake news story for now, how long, goes away. The vision of 50 Palestinian children killed by an Israeli sniper just goes away because it’s done. It’s a state of seizing of all fire. And the Israelis’ reconstruction, a normalcy returns, even if they’re living in tents. A normalcy returns. The emotional ability to blackmail Israel over Gaza ends. So that, as long as this war goes on, and this is again an argument for the need to do the decisive act and occupy all of Gaza, the antisemitism isn’t caused by Gaza, but it sure uses it. And it really helps if Gaza is shut down as an issue. Same with Iran. Once, and there’s really only one solution for Iran, is when the Iranian people take back their country. This is not an issue that can be managed in the long run. It is all those old Westerns where the guy walks into the saloon and he says, this town ain’t big enough. This is a twilight struggle to the death between the West, not just Israel, the West in Iran. And Iran will have to lose and it’ll have to lose very soon. In Lebanon, we’re seeing movement. But in the end, there’s only one solution for Lebanon, which is that it’s resurrected for what its original intent was, which is a nation anchored to the results of the 1711 Battle of Endara, which is a coalition of Druze Christian forces to establish an entity. Syria is a fiction. It always was a fiction. There’s only 40% that are Sunni Arabs. The idea that that is the homogenous government of Syria naturally is the best answer to these countries is to give authority to these minorities to run themselves. So I think all these areas, we see the contours of what total victory would be. We see the contours of peace coming to at least parts of those areas. When that happens, I think a lot of the overheated rhetoric and intensity and rage begins to dissipate.

Sarah: I hope so. So we also look at the theology of Islam, which is a motivating factor. We do see the UAE’s textbooks have gotten better. Saudi Arabia’s textbooks have gotten better. But still we understand that the Imams from the mosques are still inciting young people to want to join jihadist brigades- to want to rejoin. Even a Saudi Sahadi has said yes. The government in Lebanon has said that they will disband Hezbollah, but people are still joining Hezbollah. And Hamas- How do we put an end to this?

David: Well, half of the Lebanese spectrum is going after Hamas, Hezbollah, because they want Syria take over half of Lebanon. Because right now, we haven’t seen it visibly, but the Shiite Crescent died. The Shiite awakening that started before the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon with Musa al-Sadr, in the early 70s it began and was taken over by the Iranian Revolution after 1979 and subordinated to Iran’s regional project. And unfortunately for the Shiites, they’re going down with the demise of the Iranian Islamic Republic. When it goes down, the Shiites are in a very bad place, and many will seek protection from where they can. And unfortunately for them, most likely the only protector that will be out there for them is probably the Israelis. So we may see ironically, we’re beginning to see with the Alawites, who were Assad’s guys, begging the Israelis to help them the way the Druze now are helping them. But this points to a core question, which is the Sunni question. We’ve been so focused on Iran that we have essentially put the Sunni question on the back burner. But Sunni Islam and its relationship to the West and modernity is an open question, and it is an unresolved problem. They have not come to terms with the West. They are not moderating. They’re not reconciling with the West. They’re not entering a Westphalian state system where you live and let live between states. They are very much what we saw a thousand years ago. And they’ve been given a shot in the arm of confidence by their victory in Damascus, and specifically the type of Islam that emerged in Damascus originally, which was a highly totalitarian, highly ideological form of Islam that emerged under the first Umayyad Caliphs 1,200 years ago, 1,400 years ago in Damascus. And having taken back Damascus, they feel invigorated with that ideological fervor. What’s helping is that the Saudis, the UAE, which are still very tribal, they come from a very different Arab tradition than the Levant Arabs, are terrified by this. They’re terrified by Islam that way because they fought it 1,400 years ago. They still husbanded their tribal authority and autonomy. And you’re seeing that, those contours, which is why you’re seeing some peace emerge between Israel and those Sunni Arabs, largely because they see a similar threat also in radical Islamic theology that emerges from Damascus. And it is Islamic. It isn’t this modern manifestation. Yes, it’s a modern manifestation. But to argue that there’s no authenticity going back one and a half thousand years is wrong. It does. And that’s what scares the Saudis because with that authenticity also comes a threat to them. So you have that problem. And I think there’s something that Israel can work with some of those Arabs. But I think we have to come to terms, honestly, with what Islam, as it’s currently constituted, in the Levant represents. And that is Ash’ari. That is the Muslim Brotherhood. Those are the things that we have to deal with at this point.

Sarah: Right. And Ahud al-Ashara, when he first emerged back in December, the entire world embraced him. Can you just recap his history, his roots in Al-Qaeda? And why is it that people have- I’m very happy that there is no longer this corridor going from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut and the Mediterranean. But what is this about this man that everybody is embracing him?

David: It’s the wish being the father of the thought. And there’s also probably, I don’t mean to sound too crude, but there’s probably a lot of Qatari money behind all this, too, convincing people, whether it’s in Europe or whether it’s here. But more than that, we do have a proclivity to believe that there’s, Washington especially, that when we’re encountering dangerous people, whether it’s Hitler in the ’30s, if you remember this whole moderate hardliner thing, people don’t remember that paradigm was formed in the ’20s and ’30s in places like The New York Times about Hitler. The idea that Goebbels and Goring were moderates, and Hitler was between the moderates and the hardliners, which were Heydrich and Himmler. So the more that you push on Hitler, the more you validate the hardliners. So you’ve got to give in to Hitler and the Rhineland and so forth in order to build up the Goring and Goebbels, not realizing they were all just hardliners. They were all crazy. They were all dangerous. They were all murderous and homicidal, genocidal. And we learned that lesson. But then again, right afterwards, with the Soviet Union, we entered into the same paradigm, which is there’s moderate and hardliners. We have to give in to the moderates in order to validate them so they don’t lose to the hardliners. And that same paradigm now obtains to the Palestinians. It obtains to the Iranians. And now, lately, it’s obtaining to the Sunni Islamists. One thing you see when you see these ideologies, ideologies are totality. They’re totalitarian structures. They don’t moderate. They can’t moderate because at the essence, at the core of who they are, is the monopoly of power and the monopoly overall reality. So you see people leave communism. You see people leave even Nazism. You saw people leave these ideologies. But they go the other way. It’s an on-off switch. They don’t become Nazis with a human face. They don’t become communists with a human face. Every attempt to do that has failed because it’s an all-or-nothing structure. That is true of the Islamic Revolution. It is true of the Islamists we’re dealing with in Syria. Just because he put on a suit, which is the other thing to prove the moderate hardliner paradigm, that we fall over ourselves, oh, he studied optometry in London. Bashar al-Assad must be a moderate, and he wears a suit. We’re doing the same thing again. You know it when they leave this radical Islamist ideology, it would say the Green Prince, we know many people who have left, it’s clear that they did. That they don’t leave the 100 yard distance, 90 yards in. I mean, 10 yards in, leaving 90 yards to go. They make the leap. You can’t jump across the Grand Canyon in baby steps.

Sarah: Right. And my apologies, I should not have said that the embrace of Palestinian statehood and of a lot of the ideas of jihadist Islam happened overnight. It didn’t. We watched it happen. So I misspoke there. It was, we saw it being cultivated from the Communist Party.

David: Absolutely. And the Nazi structures before. There’s a direct pedigree from the Kaiser’s intelligence to the Nazis, to the Soviets, to the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood and so forth. This is one structure that has evolved with different masters.

Sarah: Exactly, exactly. So I want to also read Claire Lopez’s wonderful comments. We all know and adore Claire. It says, given that Hamas are the husband’s, father’s, sons, and brothers of the Gaza people, how can Israel really end their presence and influence in Gaza, even if the current fighters accept exile unless, like MacArthur and Japan after World War II, Israel and the U.S. take complete control of the mosques and schools curriculum? Will that Islamic influence ever be expunged? Can I-

David: It’s the question. I think it’s part of the larger question of Sunni Islam. In her latter years, I got to know Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick very well. I remember sitting with her at lunch at American Enterprise Institute. One day, this was the idea that we should work with voices of freedom in the Middle East, which you do for moral reasons, and you always have to do for moral reasons. But I was giving her the argument that maybe it can transform the region. And she looked at me and she sighed, and she said, David, I’ve given my life pursuing the universality of freedom and the human condition. My entire life’s work has been about pushing the idea of the universality of freedom, including in East Europe and so forth. And it’s been a great success. But the Arab world tries my ideas. I don’t have confidence in my ideas when it comes to the Arab world. She was really sad about it, but she was warning me, basically saying the Arab world has bigger problems than we know. And until they work those problems out, Israel can’t. And current leadership in the West can’t. These are huge problems that involve thousand years of evolution. Of the founding structures of Islam, to be honest, have to be readdressed. And I don’t think the Sunni world is there yet. And as a result, I don’t think you can really deal with it, which is why, again, I think for a couple generations, giving agency to the Palestinians is a bad idea.

Sarah: Okay, so I do have to remind everybody, first of all, to support David Wormser at the Center for Security Policy and the Miskav Institute. He is a wonderful thinker and scholar. And on November 19th, we have just recently heard back from Senator John Fetterman. We will be honoring him at our Raise of Light and the Darkness Dinner, among others. As soon as the invitations go out, please be sure to respond. It’s going to be a wonderful, wonderful event. And please, we’re depending on all of you to support us at EMET. Please go to ametonline.org. We really do need your support to continue what we do on Capitol Hill every day, as well as these amazing webinars with our brilliant thinkers such as David Wormser. Thank you so much, David.

David: Thank you.

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