President Biden has said that it would be a mistake for Israel to occupy Gaza. Who should govern Gaza when this is over? That's really the big question. What is the plan? What is the Israeli government, with the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu planning to do once the war is over? [00:00:15] And what is the real goal here? That was the context of this interview that Netanyahu had with ABC news. And here is what Netanyahu had to say about it. Let's watch. I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security [00:00:34] responsibility, because we've seen what happens when we don't have it, when we don't have that security responsibility. What we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn't imagine. Now, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu did have a security responsibility on October 7th. [00:00:49] The security responsibility was to keep his own civilians safe. And it's laughable that he is sitting there on ABC news pretending to be the arbiter of adequate security when, again, he failed himself. And luckily David Muir asked him about it. Let's watch. [00:01:06] We now know the Hamas attack had been planned for months. We saw the training videos. Of course, we saw the thousands of Hamas terrorists swarming into Israel. How did your government miss this? It's a very good question, because the first task of government [00:01:21] is to protect the people. And clearly we didn't live up to that. We had a big, big setback. As prime minister, do you personally bear any responsibility here? I've said that there are going to be very tough questions that are going to be asked, and I'm going to be among the first to answer them. [00:01:38] We're not going to evade. The responsibility of a government is to protect the people. And clearly that responsibility wasn't met. But you know what I'm asking here because so many Israeli officials, including the defense minister, the military intelligence chief, the military chief of staff, they've all taken some responsibility [00:01:54] for Israel being caught off guard. They didn't say, we have to wait for an investigation here. Do you believe that you should take any responsibility? Of course. That's not a question. It's going to be resolved after the war. It's going to be resolved after the war. Now, you look at Netanyahu's current popularity among Israeli civilians, [00:02:13] voters, and he is not popular. He has failed to keep them safe. They know it and they want him out. But there seems to be an agreement that he will remain in place until the war is over. At the same time, in other interviews, I've heard Netanyahu say, you know, [00:02:28] this isn't going to be a quick war. This war is going to take some time, which I think is fascinating. Now I'll get to some details about the aerial bombardments and the incessant bombing that continues to kill innocent Palestinian civilians in just a moment. But I'm curious what you think about Israel basically taking over Gaza. [00:02:49] - I mean, he that's what he's saying here. - Yeah. So look, some people say, oh, well, Gaza wasn't occupied because technically Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza and took out the settlers. It's definitely true that they took out the settlers, and in a sense, [00:03:07] they withdrew, but they never allowed the Palestinians to control their own borders. They never. And as you can see here, they can cut off water, power, electricity to them any time they want. And the way that they control the Palestinians in Gaza was already enormous. But now Netanyahu is saying, no, we're going to go all the way back to old school [00:03:25] and and run the security there, which means not only is it an open air prison, but we're putting our guards back in. And any missteps within Gaza will probably lead to either imprisonment or execution immediately. And that's usually how an occupation works. [00:03:41] And so I don't know if he's going to bring settlers back in. Yesterday we began to talk about some of the cabinet ministers and others in this insanely right wing government talking about just taking Gaza, just stealing the land and creating another Nakba or catastrophe where they're [00:03:57] locate the Palestinians, which is one of the hallmarks of a genocide. And then they just take their land and, and decide that it's theirs. And they're trying to move some of the Palestinians into Egypt so they could displace them. So this is just reprehensible in every way. [00:04:14] In reality, of course, they should be going in the opposite direction and going in the opposite direction is not just the morally sound position and the legally sound position from an international war crimes perspective, but also something that would make Israel safer. I mean, there's an IDF soldier or an IDF soldier who we have a video of [00:04:32] who is going to tell you in a little bit about how you need a political solution, because all of these military solutions haven't worked. It's super obvious that they haven't worked. And the Hamas attack was exhibit A of how they haven't worked. And in fact, that leads to the Netanyahu's point about avoiding responsibility. [00:04:52] He says I'll be among the first to take responsibility. No, you're actually literally the last. Even David Muir, who did generally. A softball interview, but ask some good questions. Pointed out the defense minister and all those other ministers have already taken responsibility. You're the only one who hasn't taken responsibility. [00:05:08] And you say, well, I'll take one after the war. Well, is the war ever going to be over? Especially if you go back to occupying Gaza 100%. Then you can say, well, the hostilities still haven't ended. And by the way, he's set up an impossible standard when Hamas is eradicated. Well, how do we know when they're eradicated? [00:05:26] How do we know when they've lost? It's an impossible standard. So that he can continue the war forever and ever and avoid responsibility forever and ever. So I wanted to fill in some of what you said, Jane, because it's really important for the audience to know the details about what we're talking about here, because [00:05:42] there are members of the Likud government who are very transparent about what their objectives are, and it is horrific to read these things, hear these things. But I want to tell you exactly what we're talking about. So let's go to graphic five here. Some Israeli hardliners advocate keeping control of Gaza and permanently expelling [00:06:01] its Palestinian residents. A Likud lawmaker, Ariel Kallner, has called for another Nakba that would overshadow the original mass displacement in 1948, just openly calling for ethnic cleansing right now. One goal Nakba, Kallner said on October 8th, Nakba in Gaza and Nakba [00:06:20] to anyone who dares to join, he added. And then we've got some more, including this government minister, a far right government minister, Amish Eliyahu, who said on Wednesday that Gazan land should be given to former Israeli soldiers who fought in Gaza, or to former [00:06:38] Israeli settlers who lived in the enclave before Israel withdrew from it in 2005. Then on Sunday, he decided to say that Israel should consider dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, an idea that drew condemnation from Netanyahu and other members of the government. [00:06:55] And to be fair, Netanyahu did suspend this lawmaker as a result of his public comments. But I do wonder what kind of conversations take place behind the scenes for someone to feel so comfortable, to openly call for a nuclear bomb to be dropped, that would [00:07:12] obviously kill so many of those civilians who are already being terrorized and brutalized by these airstrikes by the IDF. And in regard to, you know, people who have a clear mind and can see how damaging this is, not only for the Palestinian people, not only for the innocent women [00:07:30] and children and elderly people who are being slaughtered in Gaza, but also for Israeli civilians seeking peace. Here you have it. He's a former IDF soldier. He says what's happening right now is just increasing radicalism and increasing [00:07:48] the likelihood of Israel being less safe. Let's watch many people, colleagues in the Israeli peace camp and the Israeli Anti-occupation camp have been warning for so many years, saying that there is no military solution. [00:08:03] We can't just manage the conflict and maintain a very, very brutal military regime of control over Palestinians that actually plays into the hands of Hamas and plays into the hands of these murderous terrorist groups. [00:08:19] And so all I've been doing since then is trying to share my message, try to share my experience, and try to avoid making the same mistakes that we made in 2014, when Hamas only got stronger after we bombed them and killed thousands [00:08:35] and we struck them a decisive blow. Or that's at least what I thought at the time. But I only saw afterwards that my own government strengthened Hamas. And he's absolutely right about that. He's worried that this the military action taking place in the Gaza Strip, [00:08:51] is leading to more extremism, and it's going to make Israeli civilians less safe. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows this is true. And then just to help you visualize or really understand what this aerial bombardment looks like on October 14th, just a week into the war, [00:09:11] the Israeli Air Force said it had dropped 6000 bombs on Hamas targets in Gaza. By contrast, a little more than 7300 bombs were dropped on Afghanistan by the US led coalition in all of 2019, and that was the heaviest year [00:09:27] of aerial bombardment there. IDF spokesman Daniel Hager appeared to foreshadow the possibility of targeting major hospitals, citing their alleged use by militants to fire on Israeli forces. [00:09:42] He described medical facilities as a key part of Hamas's war machine and urged that they be evacuated. I give you that part because of how clear it is to me that they don't care. They don't care if it's hospitals, they don't care if we're talking about refugee camps, clearly. [00:09:59] There have been multiple refugee camps that have been bombed multiple times. And yeah, innocent people are dying as a result of it. You have Hamas leaders not in the Gaza Strip, but in other countries like Lebanon and Qatar. It's just ridiculous to me that this is allegedly a war to root out Hamas, [00:10:16] when in reality the people suffering the consequences here are not Hamas militants or Hamas leadership. It is ordinary Palestinian civilians, women, children, elderly people. More than 10,000 civilian deaths, 4000 of which are children. [00:10:31] And we're supposed to sit here and pretend like this is a war that Israel is going to win? No. Yeah. So 6000 bombs in a tiny little area of land. So this is not Afghanistan, which is a giant country. We should have never dropped 7300 bombs on Afghanistan in a year anyway. [00:10:49] But in one month, in a tiny little area of Gaza that is densely populated, has 2.2 million people. Even David Muir again pointed out that, you know, when Netanyahu said, well, we told them to move to the South, he said, well, you did drop bombs in the South, to which they did. [00:11:05] And those are not the you know, the Hamas rockets are terrible to begin with, but they're tiny compared to the Israeli bombs. And Israel has Iron Dome, obviously, because Gaza doesn't. So they're dropping these giant bombs in the middle of very crowded cities. [00:11:21] And so as you're going to see a little bit later in the show, one of the nurses, American nurses that were there explaining, dealing with kids that have burns all over their bodies from the bombs that were dropped. And those are the ones that were lucky enough to survive. So this is absolutely brutal, what Netanyahu is doing [00:11:38] and doing it on purpose. And one of our members asked a good question yesterday, would Israelis say the same thing, this right wing government, if it was an Israeli citizens that Hamas was hiding between? [00:11:54] You know, that's what they claim. Oh, Hamas is hiding between the civilians. Well, I don't literally don't know where they would go. Are they supposed to go on an open field and be like, oh, we're here, bomb is here. Right? So it's a total nonsense excuse, but would you, would they do it if it was if the Hamas soldiers were hiding in the middle of Tel Aviv? [00:12:11] How about if it was an Israeli hospital? Would you have that same guy make that same statement? Yeah. There was 1 or 2 guys callously using an Israeli hospital to hide out. So we bombed the hospital and killed most of the people inside. - Mission accomplished. - Yeah, they would never say that. [00:12:28] They would never do that. And what does that tell you that tells you they just don't value Palestinian lives. To say anything other than that is absurd. It's absurd on its face. And then one last thing for me is that in that same interview with on ABC news, [00:12:44] even Netanyahu conceded at one point he didn't realize he was making a concession. But listen to to the words that he said. He said, well, now that we have the ground troops in there, we can see that we are putting pressure on Hamas. And and now we're beginning to talk about the hostages because of that pressure. [00:13:04] So you are accidentally admitting that when you dropped a 6000 bombs, it didn't even create any pressure on Hamas? Correct. They weren't talking about the hostages at all. What did we tell you here? We didn't just say, hey, peace. From day one. We said Israel has a right to defend itself, but it should use special forces [00:13:21] on the ground to actually create pressure and to find the hostages. Well, Netanyahu didn't choose to do that in the beginning. He chose to drop those 6000 bombs and kill 10,000 civilians. It was an act of collective punishment, and it was obvious that he was killing those civilians on purpose. [00:13:36] Anyone doing cover for him and pretending that, golly gee, the entire 10,000 was an accident is being patently absurd. This guy wanted to kill civilians. He did butcher those civilians on purpose. Thanks for watching. [00:13:52] If you become a member, you get to watch all this ad free. Except for of course, this ad still hits the join button below.