Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is renewing calls, and this should be unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. Renewing calls to build illegal Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which seems to fly in the face of a peace deal that the Trump administration alleges [00:00:17] that they're making progress on pursuing. Now, he argues, Bezalel Smotrich does that. It should be the next phase after all the hostages are returned. Now, to just give you an update on where we are currently standing [00:00:32] on the hostage release situation. Hamas has released all hostages and they have released the remains of the of eight deceased hostages, although there is some reporting indicating that one of the hostages [00:00:49] who was deceased and whose remains were released, that individual's remains do not actually match up with the hostage that Hamas claims the remains belong to. So there are issues when it comes to the deceased hostages [00:01:05] for a number of different reasons, including the fact that just like the Palestinian victims in the Gaza Strip, some of the Israeli hostages, tragically, are believed to be trapped under the rubble. So Israel can help with that situation by allowing heavy machinery into the enclave. [00:01:21] It remains to be seen whether or not they are willing to do that. But let's move forward to what Bezalel Smotrich has to say, because he claims that after all the hostages were returned, well after they were all returned, this is what he said, he said, with the emotional return [00:01:37] of all our living hostages, I say again, just as I said here a year ago, there will be no Hamas in Gaza. There will be no threat from Gaza toward Israeli civilians for decades to come. So far, so good. By the way, so far, I've got no problem with that statement. [00:01:55] That seems like a totally normal statement, especially coming from an unhinged lunatic like Bezalel Smotrich. But he goes on and says, and yes, this too must be said. There will be Jewish settlement in Gaza. [00:02:12] Now, he took it a step further, if you can believe it, by making the unhinged argument that building illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land should be done in order to make Israelis safer. [00:02:29] Okay, let's just let's just hear him out. Maybe he's making a sound argument here. Without settlement, there can be no lasting security. First, because it is part of the land of Israel. Is it? And second, because only a Jewish presence guarantees that we won't return [00:02:48] to a situation where rockets are fired on Sderot and the South. When you steal stolen, when you steal land, and when you build settlements on stolen land. [00:03:04] Well, obviously that makes the individuals who are now living in said stolen land targets. So I fail to see how this would make Israelis safer. But I also have no doubt that this is what Bezalel Smotrich and this unhinged, far [00:03:23] right Israeli government intends to do. I haven't believed for a second that there was any sincere statement, any sincere movement or progress from the Israeli government toward an actual peace deal, because a peace deal would require the Israelis to end their expansionist [00:03:43] project, and they haven't ended their expansionist project, they have continued annexing the West Bank. They have been salivating over the notion that they could resettle the Gaza Strip once again, steal land from the Palestinians once again. [00:04:02] And even though the majority of genocide scholars have referred to what has gone down in Gaza as a genocide, they have called it a genocide. If you don't like that word, that's fine. Makes you a little uneasy. You think it's too harsh? That's fine. [00:04:17] But it is now widely accepted that the project the Israeli government has unleashed is all about the Greater Israel Project. It's all about ethnically cleansing Palestinians from land that belongs to them. [00:04:33] When the Likud's founding charter indicates the pursuit of the Greater Israel Project, why don't we believe them? Why is it that only Hamas's original charter matters here? [00:04:49] So this isn't the first time Smotrich signaled that the Israelis have no intention to end the bloodshed in Gaza. He is one of the most vocal genocidal maniacs in the Israeli government. And for anyone who tries to make you think, oh, he's just like [00:05:04] a marginal figure, like, who cares? No, no, no, he's not a marginal figure. Okay, not only is he Israel's finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that he needs support and Ben-Gvir support in [00:05:20] order to keep this government's coalition together so he can remain in power. So the Smotrich's and the Ben-Gvir of the Israeli government, the extremists in the Israeli government, actually have a lot more leverage and a lot more power than the Israel [00:05:38] supporters would like you to believe. So earlier he said that there is a tremendous responsibility to ensure that this is not, God forbid, a deal of hostages in exchange for stopping the war, [00:05:54] as Hamas thinks and boasts. Immediately after the hostages return home, the state of Israel will continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas and the genuine disarmament of Gaza, [00:06:10] of Gaza, not of Hamas. The disarmament of Gaza so that it no longer poses a threat to Israel. No, no. So the Palestinians won't have the ability, the capability or the capacity to defend themselves as they're living [00:06:28] alongside a regime that attempted to basically wipe them off the face of the earth and ethnically cleanse them. You don't have a military. You don't have a country. Let's just keep it 100. Especially when you're living next to a country that didn't believe [00:06:45] in your right to exist, doesn't believe in your right to self-determination. It's one thing to argue, hey, we want to disarm Hamas. Okay, I'm willing to hear out that argument for sure. But what does that mean? How do you determine what Hamas's arsenal is? [00:07:03] How do you determine whether Hamas has been fully disarmed? These granular details are super important in order to get people to sign on and to execute a real peace deal, a real peace agreement. I get that Trump wants to be viewed as the peacemaker. [00:07:23] But we live in the real world. You don't just, like, snap your fingers and say, I declare peace. It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. You don't just say it out loud and it happens. You actually have to work on the granular details of the deal, and that hasn't been dealt with at all. [00:07:40] At all. And it does not inspire much confidence when you hear from high ranking Israeli government officials saying, as soon as we get all of the hostages back, including the remains of the deceased hostages, we're going back in, baby, we're going back in. [00:07:56] More examples of that. Israel Katz, of course, had basically said, yeah, once we get the hostages, we're going to go back in. Let's go to graphic 11 here. This was reported by The Times of Israel. Israel to shift focus on raising Gaza tunnels, Katz says. [00:08:13] And that piece was a reference to the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, announcing that following the release of all hostages and the remains of the deceased hostages, The IDF will be ordered to go back into the Gaza Strip to destroy the terror tunnels. [00:08:29] The major challenge for Israel after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all Hamas's terror tunnels in Gaza. What were you doing in Gaza for two years? Oh, yeah, that's right. You were just leveling the entire place. 93% of residential buildings gone. [00:08:48] They wanted to make it uninhabitable. So Palestinians will want to leave the Gaza Strip. They'll want to abandon the land that is rightfully theirs. So Bezalel Smotrich and the other extremists like him can finally get their dying wish that they will be able to resettle the Gaza Strip, [00:09:06] steel that land, and then possibly and likely think about the next country they're going to invade and annex. That's what the expansionist project known as the Greater Israel Project really is. And so for all the people out there who were talking about how, [00:09:23] oh, where are the Palestinian supporters, why are they so quiet? Why aren't they celebrating the peace deal? It's because there isn't a peace deal for now. There's been a slowdown in the unbelievable brutality [00:09:40] and aerial bombardments that the IDF has carried out in the Gaza Strip. People are still getting killed, but not to the same extent as earlier. But is there really an end to what's been happening in Gaza? No, there is no peace deal yet. You have two parties that agree to the first phase of a ceasefire, but again, [00:09:59] all those other details remain murky. There have not been dealt with. They have not been negotiated. And so when there's an actual end to this bloodshed, when we could actually look to the future and not have to worry about the Israelis just incessantly attempting to steal land from the Palestinians, [00:10:19] then I'll celebrate. But we're not there. We're not even close. That's the reality. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. But it does keep you updated on our live shows.