David Wurmser: US treating Israel like it is not a sovereign country

Caroline Glick:

Welcome to another episode of The Caroline Glick Show. This is a special one, usually only do one interview a week, but for several weeks I’ve been thinking I have to have Dr. David Wurmser back on the show. Those of you who have been watching this for a long time know that he’s one of my favorite guests on The Caroline Glick Show because he just has one of the clearest strategic visions of what’s going on in the Middle East of anyone I know.

And there’s been a lot of events going on that are very, very strategic since October 7th, and particularly I’ve noticed in Hezbollah’s operations over the past several days, some moves that we talked about and In Focus that indicate that they’re playing a different game than we might’ve thought. It’s not a tit-for-tat game, it’s a preparation game for something big. And then we have developments vis-a-vis China and the Houthis and Iran that are playing into the situation. And obviously the big question in the middle of the room is where does Hamas and what’s happening in Gaza fit into Iran’s larger picture for its war against Israel? Because Iran is, as always, behind all of this.

So I asked David if he would join me, and I’m so glad that he was able to find the time to do so. So first of all, welcome back to The Caroline Glick Show. I’m so glad to have you back, David.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Well, thank you, Caroline. It’s so great to be on with you.

Caroline Glick:

So why don’t we just jump into the situation. Tony Blinken is here in Israel now, we’re recording this on Tuesday night, and he just gave, I think, I’m not sure, but it may be the most obnoxious press conference any visiting dignitary has given in Israel, and that’s saying a lot. He came in here, he just finished a press conference where he read Israel the Riot Act. He said we have to work with the UN, which is now pursuing genocide charges against us at the International Court of Justice through South Africa, that refuses to condemn what happened on October 7th, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And UNRWA, the UN Relief Agency in Gaza, is just a subsidiary of Hamas, and he wants a UN envoy to come in here, and he’s demanding that Israel let a UN envoy come in here so that they can set up when the Gazans who left Northern Gaza should be allowed to go back.

If they go back, that’s basically a strategic defeat for Israel. No fighting in the North. They’re pushing a diplomatic deal that would essentially be an Israeli surrender to Hezbollah, which would make it impossible for the residents of the north to go back home. And he was pushing very hard for Israel to pay the Palestinians for their day of genocide on October 7th by giving them a state and working with Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority in order to revitalize the Palestinian Authority and give them a state.

So he attacked Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria. He attacked the government. He said Israel has very difficult decisions to make as if this is October 6th, and pushing us to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority. It was really a tort of force, I thought, in terms of obnoxiousness. And he had virtually no demands at all to make of the Palestinians.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Absolutely.

Caroline Glick:

So that was something. And then with the Houthis, he said, “We sent them a very hard message. We told them that they better not provoke war,” when they are waging war against shipping in the Red Sea. So it was all very, very bizarre. And what is America trying to do here? I mean, why are they siding with the Palestinians? What’s going on?

Dr. David Wurmser:

Well, it’s a great question, Caroline. And I think at the end of the day, we’re dealing now with the United States a number of preconceptions or conceptions that the United States is dealing with, all of which were proven wrong on October 7th. But the United States actually sees October 7th as a validation. We’re also dealing with long-term trends in the United States that are very destructive. For example, the weakness that the Biden administration, which is really following in the footsteps of the Obama administration, is feeling that America’s the problem in the world and that we have to show the world that we’re not a problem, that we have to establish our credentials.

So there’s sort of a background to all of this, but most specifically, one thing I’ve noticed, and this goes right to the core of what you’re saying about the obnoxiousness of the statement, this administration has acted imperially against Israel. It is acted as if Israel is not a sovereign country. And by that I mean going back to the very beginning of the Biden administration, the language that the American Ambassador Nides used against Israel was often what a father would say to his son or a sovereign country would say to its province. It wasn’t what a respecting nation says to a peer country. Now, obviously the United States is a superpower, but they’re both sovereign countries. Israel is an old ancient culture. It does not deserve to be treated like a little baby who doesn’t understand things, and the United States does.

The second thing is the way this administration is acting right now, first of all, we all know for the last two years they’ve been trying to interfere internally in Israeli politics. And they have been destabilizing Israel. Instead of helping Israel calm itself down with the terrible rifts that were last year, they decided to try to take sides and use it to bring down the administration they didn’t like, though the Israeli people had showed-

Caroline Glick:

I just want to interject here something to just sharpen it is that yesterday Jake Tapper on CNN reported that an administration official told him that Israel was nearing the point where Netanyahu was going to have to choose between his coalition with Religious Zionism Party Chief Bezalel Smotrich and Jewish Party Chief Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are core members of his coalition, and American-Israel ties. And so they were laying it on the line, you either have good relations with the United States, with the Biden administration, or you maintain your coalition government. Anyway, just [inaudible 00:07:02].

Dr. David Wurmser:

Well, and I think that in that spirit, in context of what you just said, if my information is correct, Blinken has insisted on having a separate meeting with Gantz and Eisenkot from the Blue White Party, the ones who joined after the war to create a national unity government. The purpose of a national unity government is to express the unity of the Israeli people to their own soldiers, to their own people when they’re facing a difficult and grizzly circumstance. To use the national unity government as a political leverage tool to split the Israeli government quite simply is not what a friend does. It’s what an enemy does. And that is what the United States is doing now to try to use the national unity government to undermine the Prime Minister of Israel. And that’s not the point of a national unity. It’s called a national unity government for a reason.

So I think we’ve turned the corner on the United States’ relationship with Israel and the framework of this war where the delusional policies of the United States that somehow there are moderates and hardliners in Iran, and that the moderates need to be encouraged and they can be encouraged by America showing goodwill and goodwill gestures and tolerance of the Iranian strategic interests. And you need to discourage the hardliners and invalidate them. And that is done by ignoring their belligerent and destabilizing behavior because apparently the hardliners, that’s the strategic purpose of that behavior is to undermine the moderates through that. So the whole concept of America is Iranian regime will survive. We need Iran, it’s the superpower of the region. We have to come to terms with Iran and come up with a new deal with them that brings regional stability and drags in their proxies and keeps them unleashed by Iran. We need to encourage the moderates to encourage the moderates. We shouldn’t give in to the hard line provocations that we see via Hezbollah, via the Houthis, via all these other organizations.

So what you see is this administration isn’t stepping back, and I heard many Israelis in the last four months say, “Oh God, the Americans get it now.” Couldn’t be further from the truth, couldn’t be further from the truth. What the Americans see, this administration, I may add, never confuse an administration with the American people, and especially not the State Department with the American people. But this administration genuinely believes that this red redoubles the necessity of reaching a JCPOA, an Iran-America nuclear deal, but this time it’s JCPOA 2.0, and that means there has to be a regional dimension to it, that there are regional interests that Iran is pursuing, that it can help us bring stability. So they’re trying to now go for something much more dangerous and much more pro-Iran, so to speak, in terms of a deal with Iran right now.

And we hear now, the New York Times wrote an article or ran an article yesterday where that is exactly what they’ve been trying to do is they’ve been trying to get Iran to reign in its proxies thinking that that’s the key to everything, is to bring stability to the region, is to give Iran strategic goodies so that it behaves and believes that it’s not at war with us and reigns in its proxies.

And then we go for the other delusion, which is Oslo 2.0, which is the big problem with Oslo’s failure was that Arafat, and then Abu Mazen was too weak. And you had these radical forces that partly worked for the Iranians. So now if we deal with the Iranians, those forces won’t work to undermine. But second of all, most importantly, that Abu Mazen’s too weak because of the threat of Hamas. So if Israel’s eliminating Hamas, it makes Palestine safe for Abu Mazen. So Oslo 2.2 is the almost obsessive effort to make Palestine safe for Abu Mazen. And that’s the purpose of the Israeli military, the purpose of the sacrifice Israel’s making and blood and lives and coin is to make Palestine safe for Abu Mazen.

So in a nutshell, that’s the American policy, which is delusional. It’s not pro-Israeli. It had the appearance of converging with Israeli interests for a short while because there was the simultaneous interest of Israel and the United States to shove Hamas off the stage. And in as much as that was concerned, it looked like there was a convergence, a meeting of the minds. We’re seeing now that those two intersecting lines are beginning to diverge quite substantially.

Caroline Glick:

What’s so odd about the American policy, I mean, there’s so much that’s odd about it, but one is that there’s no objective proof or indication whatsoever that there’s any truth to anything that they believe. I mean, you empower moderates by giving into radicals? It makes absolutely no sense. Even if you assume that they’re right in proclaiming a competition for power between moderates and radicals, which I reject, but even if it were true, even by their own reasoning or lack thereof, it still doesn’t make any sense because you would want to actually fight back against the radicals if you wanted to empower the moderates, not appease them, because what you’re doing when you appease them is you’re empowering them more, right? I mean by their own internal logic. And aside from them, it’s just so-

Dr. David Wurmser:

Absolutely.

Caroline Glick:

No, and the other-

Dr. David Wurmser:

Absolutely. There’s three levels in which it’s flawed.

Caroline Glick:

Let me just say, I want you to respond to both of them at once. And the other thing that’s so odd about it or so horrible about it is this idea that the problem here is Israel and that all of… We were just at another funeral today for a soldier from a neighboring community, and we’re going to go to another one tomorrow for a soldier who was killed from our community. And I mean, none of the parents who are burying their children are doing it to empower Mahmoud Abbas or to form a Palestinian state. To the contrary, they’re doing it to save the Jewish state, and they understand that it’s a zero-sum game.

And here, I mean, he just totally disregards the Israeli people. And I guess the last thing that I’ll put in here, and you can relate to if you want to, is this idea that Iran, is this all powerful hegemony? I mean, there are so many indications that that’s not true, and to the extent that they’re powerful, it’s because the United States has empowered them so much. It hasn’t tried to destabilize the regime, to the contrary, it’s enormously stabilized the regime, it’s been acting to do so since Obama came into office. And you look at all of these just assumptions that they’d base their entire policy on, and they’re either totally wrong, irrational, or hateful.

Dr. David Wurmser:

There’s so much what you just said, that’s really, everybody should go back and when they watch this program, they should go back and watch again what you just said because I think there’s so much right there.

First of all, let’s go to the moderate hardliner part of it. People don’t understand where this comes from. It comes from the thirties and at The New York Times, there was a Nazi propagandist, I forgot his name, a very dramatic name, which is beyond my comprehension how to remember. But at any rate, he was the one who spoke very good English, he had gone to Princeton. And he came up with this idea of there are moderates and hardliners, Heydrich, Goebbels and Himmler are the hardliners and Hitler and Göring are the moderates. And that you can’t cross if you resist Germany’s attempt to remilitarize the Rhineland, or, well, even before that, to break through the limits of the post-World War I officer versus enlisted level and break through the limits that were on the German Army. That if you actually challenge Germany on those things, you are validating the hardliners and undermining the moderates. And Hitler and Göring will lose ground to Heydrich, Goebbels and Himmler and oh no good can come from that.

Well, two things right off right there that we see. One is they were not moderates and they were not hardliners. This is a Western delusional… or a Western projection of ourselves.

Caroline Glick:

And you’re saying that it was invented by a Nazi propagandist?

Dr. David Wurmser:

It was a Nazi propagandist who openly… His English was perfect. By the way he defected to Britain during the war. So he turned out at the end, he turned sides, but before it was obvious that Germany was going to lose. But nevertheless, it was a deliberate Nazi attempt to paralyze Western responses using this sort of a framework. There were no moderates. There were no hardliners.

Second of all, the dynamic of challenging hardliner… And by the way, the Soviets picked this up and they played this game. It’s kind of a good cop, bad cop thing. They played this game all along and over and over again, the historical record proves that this framework is flawed, both in terms of defining moderates and hardliners, and B, the dynamic you mentioned. You don’t validate moderates by allowing hardliners to get away with their aggression. You actually validate moderates, if there are such things in the country you’re dealing with, you validate them by making the cost of aggression so high that the moderates can say, “Are you nuts? Why are you doing this? You’re hurting us.”

Take for example, the Palestinians, the worst thing you can do is let them off the hook as a people for what has been done to the Israelis, because you want every Palestinian in a decade to say, “My friend wants to go back to war with Israel. Nobody in his right mind wants to do that. Look what they did to us last time. We don’t want to go there.” You validate moderation by crossing hardline behavior.

Then you mentioned several other things that are beginning to slip my mind because there’s so many good points you made.

Caroline Glick:

I talked about the meanness, the hatefulness towards Israel, the way that they just sort of dismiss the Israeli, the way that they’re acting.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Oh, yeah. The whole thing of this administration all the way through, whether it’s the Palestinians a year or two ago, whether it’s now the Palestinians, whether it’s Iran, is, “Oh, those guys, we need to bring them around. Israel, you pay with a pound of flesh.” Everything always is Israel, you do. Israel, you must do. Israel, you must do. And things that even a year ago should never have been asked and we now, after October 7th, know how deadly it would’ve been had Israel given in. Imagine for a second if there were a Palestinian state on October 7th with Tulkarm and Qalqilya being under Hamas control right next to the northern approaches to Tel Aviv in Israel’s narrow waist, it’s really a question whether Israel could have survived the Palestinian state.

Instead of returning and treating Israel as an ally and saying, look, you took a lot of hits and your hits were just taken because you have spent the last 30 years conceding to Western expectations. And now we always said, take risks. We’re going to have your back if you take risks. Well, the risks have turned south. Israel’s now facing a lot of death, a lot of destruction, a lot of fear, because again, the knowledge that if they had created a Palestinian state in the West Bank for real, fully independent like everybody who wants them to do with these borders, and then Hamas would’ve attacked and Hezbollah would’ve attacked, Israel simply wouldn’t have survived the first 24 hours. It would’ve been over and that’s it. The third temple would’ve fallen.

So there really is an arrogance. But it’s worse, it’s an arrogance based on being terribly diluted. I keep returning to that word, but there’s really no other word to describe American policy right now. And by the way, it’s not only in the Middle East, American weakness is felt globally at this point.

Caroline Glick:

To me, it’s hard not to feel like it’s also discriminatory. I mean that there’s something here that’s bigoted. The idea that you can stick it to Israel after what we’ve been suffering, after what happened to us and talk about the cycle of violence after October 7th. And that was a term that I think that Blinken just this evening returned to two or three times, kept talking about the cycle of violence as if there’s a moral equivalence between our fight now against Hamas in Gaza and their invasion and slaughter on October 7th. And it was so astounding, and it’s not that I was surprised, I was appalled and I was insulted.

And beyond the emotional, I mean, it just feels like there’s something there that’s so hateful, that’s so bigoted against Israel that I saw a clip from Megyn Kelly today where she was talking to somebody, I think Maureen Callahan, and they were talking about the fact that there was some Hollywood award, maybe the Golden Globe or something, and that last year everybody was wearing these blue ribbons for World Refugee Day, and two years ago they were wearing ribbons for Ukraine or something, and that there had been talk about whether they might make a gesture for Israel. And nobody did. Nothing. Nobody wore a Star of David. Nobody put on a blue and white ribbon, nothing. Nobody said anything, nobody mentioned it at all. And these are very political events and nothing. And that was probably.

Dr. David Wurmser:

They couldn’t even put on a yellow ribbon, not even supporting Israel, but just supporting the hostages that are being destroyed and raped and killed sitting in jails in cages, now we know-

Caroline Glick:

Cages.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Hamasistan

Caroline Glick:

And being starved to death.

Dr. David Wurmser:

And couldn’t even bring themselves. Yeah.

Caroline Glick:

No, I mean, and so there’s like this… It’s not like. I should never use the word like. My father, may rest in peace, would be cringing. And I said, but it’s as if they… I mean, you can’t… the anti-Semitism, just the anti-Jewish bigotry here, that there’s something somehow acceptable about genocide against Jews. And the reverberations are being heard very clearly in remarks like Tony Blinken’s this evening. And Joe Biden said yesterday at some church that he was heckled by these pro-Palestinian activists in the audience, and he said that he’s working quietly with Prime Minister Netanyahu to get us to leave Gaza. Oh, and, Tony Blinken said, nobody’s allowed to leave Gaza. No, nobody. They have to stay there. You have to be in charge of 2 million Nazi Jihadists who support the genocide and participated in the genocide of your people on October seventh. No, no nothing. And Biden says, we’re trying to get these Israelis out of Gaza to a bunch of rabble-rousing Hamas supporters who are interrupting a speech by the President of the United States. And there’s this sense, it’s either fear or it’s actually bigotry that’s behind this.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Yeah, look, I mean, there is a bigotry, but it’s embedded in the way these people look at it. I mean, not only the progressives and who are really rabidly anti-Israeli, and I think, again, we have to come to terms with the fact that whatever we think of President Biden and his sentiments toward Israel, the staffing of his administration is largely rabidly anti-Israeli.

But as far as the double standard goes, just take a look. We talk about the humanitarian crisis. The true humanitarian crisis of innocence are the hostages being held and Gaza, and we are negotiating the terms of the release of the hostages in a prisoner exchange as if the hostages are equivalent to the terrorists sitting in Israeli jails, number one. And number two, we demand of Israel humanitarian relief for Gaza. So we demand of Israel, but we negotiate over hostages. I mean, this is the double standard right there.

But it goes right back. I mean, let’s just go no further than the Temple Mount. I don’t think there’s a single human in the world with a straight face that can maintain that the Temple Mount isn’t one of the most holy places to Jews in the world. I don’t think you’re going to find a single Muslim in the world who wants to survive saying that Mecca and Medina are not the holiest places in the world for Islam, and yet their tertiary claim to Jerusalem absolutely takes off the table, no talk about Jewish rights to the Temple now. Now, that’s one thing if you’re Muslim and you’re in Saudi Arabia, I get it, you believe and so forth, but why do Westerners accept this? Why do they not see Jewish rights at the holiest point of Judaism not to be at least equal to the rights of Muslims the third holiest? And it’s not even third, there is no third. At a minor holy place for the Muslims. Right there is a double standard.

Caroline Glick:

I want to shift a second away from the mistreatment of Israel and I want to go to actually the nature of the war that we’re fighting now for the duration of our conversation, because I talked about this and In Focus earlier this week. Hezbollah carried out a strike with precision Kornet rockets and apparently attack drones on one of the most critical strategic sites in Israel, the aerial control base on Mount Meron, which is nicknamed the Eyes of Israel along with the Pheromone station. And Israel responded by assassinating, apparently some significant albeit, but people, Hezbollah commanders who obviously have replacements. And I’m trying to figure out, in the media discourse, which isn’t very smart, they’re saying, “Well, it’s a tit-for-tat. We assassinated a Hamas strategist and commander of terror operations in the West Bank, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut. And so Hezbollah had the attack on the aerial control base.

But those aren’t proportionate targets at all. One is a person and one is Israel’s ability to defend itself, both through airstrikes and also through air defense. And then Hezbollah also has attacked Israeli, I don’t know, strategic systems on Mount Dov and it attacked the Northern Command today. So I have my thoughts about what they’re doing, and I’d like to hear your thoughts about what they’re doing and how Israel should be looking at the Lebanese theater right now?

Dr. David Wurmser:

Well, I think you’re pointing to a very important thing here. Unfortunately, I think on a global scale, the way we’re hearing the Israeli imagery on how to deal with Lebanon still reflects the October 6th mentality. Specifically, Israel has a defense problem. Israel wants to build some sort of defensive structure that allows it to exist. We saw how that happened in Gaza. Well, we have Iron… You withdraw from Gaza. They come after you. Well, you build a wall so they can’t come after you. They go over the wall with missiles. So you build Iron Dome. They go under the wall. So you build Iron Dome under the ground, whatever, always the defensive measure. You let your enemy build up and you believe you’re so powerful that you can hit him back in a second strike, but you need a little bit of a defensive mechanism so that he can’t hurt you too much on the first strike.

Well, if you’re looking at what Israel’s asking right now in Lebanon, it’s that it is essentially asking for a technical or tactical revision of the situation on the ground so that it can not deal with the larger question of Hezbollah and the role Hezbollah plays for Iranian regional power. So if they withdraw the Litani, you’d imagine it like it’s a big wall, except now it’s kind of a buffer zone. I am deeply skeptical that it can be an effective buffer zone if there isn’t a force put in there, which would be the IDF or what IDF had there, which was the South Lebanese Army, something that the Israelis work with closely, tightly in unison, not something like UNIFIL or peacekeeping force, which is utterly incapable of really providing a genuine buffer. But even if that works, even if Israel establishes a South Lebanese Army and it establishes basically one big wall behind the Litani River, it still hasn’t dealt with what Hezbollah means regionally, which is Israel is under attack by Iran and its proxies.

Israel is in a twilight struggle regionally with Iran. One will survive, one will not. Israel must be the one to survive. It is a Western interest. It’s obviously a Jewish and an Israeli interest that Israel survive. And to do that, everything with Hezbollah has to be filtered through the strategic objective. Are you damaging Iranian regional strategic strength? Are you turning the strategic tables against it? Are you throwing the Iranians back on their hind heels? Are you delivering them a humiliating defeat that will impugn them with their own population and make them look weak? Which is when regimes like that fall. Are you throwing Iran on the defensive?

Or are you essentially allowing them to continue to build up, continue to threaten you? You just change a little bit the chess pieces, but you haven’t addressed the strategic underlying problem and you haven’t at all shown the Iranians, let alone everybody else in the region, that you get it, that you get the strategic problem and that you’re determined to win, which is what will make peace with other Arabs and it’s what eventually the Iranian people will see, and it will encourage them to throw away their regime, and the Iranian regime so that it begins to act desperate and make mistakes. All those things are off the table if Israel’s dealing with Lebanon from a strictly technical tactical point of view of shoving them back a few kilometers to the Litani, if even they do that, and then allowing Hezbollah to continue to exist as is beyond that line. That’s the problem right now.

And the second thing is the idea that Israel might even be open to paying for Shebaa Farms, Raja, those areas of dispute, those were demarked by the UN. These are not disputed areas. What it means is the very fact that they’re back on the table… And this is another thing that should be told to Amos Hochstein and Anthony Blinken, don’t talk about these things because it validates Hezbollah’s strategy. One is nobody talked about giving them Shebaa Farms 10 years ago. Now all of a sudden America’s giving them Shebaa farms, or wants Israel to give them Shebaa Farms.

Caroline Glick:

Well, I mean Condoleezza Rice was hoping to do that, but she-

Dr. David Wurmser:

It was actually [inaudible 00:33:37], but I mean, I hate to-

Caroline Glick:

Oh, no, that’s fine.

Dr. David Wurmser:

But you’re right.

Caroline Glick:

Just add onto the pile of things that she-

Dr. David Wurmser:

But the other thing is if it’s occupied territory-

Caroline Glick:

But let me just add to that. I mean, I guess there are two things that I’d like you… I mean, one of them is that the Americans have used this dispute to informally, but very clearly rescind US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. I mean, they were saying that the border corrections were only going to be dealing with the Blue Line, and that Hezbollah has a dispute with Syria over the Shebaa Farms. No, I mean, the Shebaa Farms is Mount Dov. I hate that terminology. It sounds like it’s just this little ranch or something.

Dr. David Wurmser:

It’s Har Dov.

Caroline Glick:

And it’s this huge mountain range that is one of the most strategic heights in the Golan Heights, and it’s a crazy talk even to talk about it. But everybody seems to think that you can dilute everybody by using this fake terminology of calling it a farm. It’s crazy. But that means that the United States doesn’t recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And they did this in the UN Security Council deliberations about reinstating the UNIFIL mandate, I think in South Lebanon.

And then the other aspect to it that if you have a chance, if you want to discuss is that the only thing that may force Israel to think, or is forcing, compelling Israel to think strategically about what’s happening is that the residents refuse to go back home. And they’re saying, “Look, no, we’re not going to accept some fake concept that’s going to supposedly move the Radwan Forces away from our doorsteps. It’s not real, and we’re not going home so long as these forces exist and they’re poised against us, whether it’s from a distance of five meters or 15 kilometers, we don’t really care. No. And so that places tremendous pressure on the government as well to take this seriously.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Yeah, I mean the government’s under a lot of pressure to deal with this seriously, from exactly the dynamics you mentioned. Look, we’re not tolerating, the United States is not tolerating depopulation of the northern half of Gaza, which is going to be a problem because you’re going to have all sorts of people coming back into northern Gaza who are dressed as civilians. They have probably buried-

Caroline Glick:

We’re having it now already. It’s already started.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Yeah, exactly. Buried and hidden slicks of weapons. They get back in and they shoot Israeli soldiers and they reconstitute very rapidly. I doubt if we don’t tolerate the depopulation of the northern half of Gaza, that we’re going to tolerate the depopulation of Lebanon south of the Litani River. And if civilians are allowed back in south of the Litani River, there are lots of tunnels, there’s lots of weapons. It will last a week and Hezbollah will be back. It’s a delusional idea. And if you think UNIFIL will do anything, UNIFIL was responsible for stopping… Israel was up to the Litani River in 2006. It isn’t that as part of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hezbollah withdrew to the Litani River. Israel was on the Litani River. Israel withdrew. Hezbollah was to be barred from reentering those territories, and UNIFIL was supposed to enforce that. So it’s really, again, the word delusion keeps coming up, it’s delusional to think that anything like that is possible right now.

But I am glad you raised this issue of the Blue Line and the American position, Amos Hochstein is going there next week. And according to Arab Press reports, this is what he said, which is that he will not deal with the Shebaa Farms, Har Dov issue because it is an issue between Lebanon and Syria. It is part of the Golan Heights. The United States recognized the Golan Heights, even if-

Caroline Glick:

It’s part of Israel.

Dr. David Wurmser:

… it’s a good idea… It’s not a good idea. But even if you think it’s a good idea to negotiate that border, that is a border now according to what we have recognized, that Israel is the party and Lebanon is the party, and that Israel and Lebanon are the only two ones who should be in the room on this. To now say it is a Lebanese-Syrian issue and not an Israeli-Lebanese issue de-recognizes the Golan Heights. And I’m mystified as to why the Israeli government isn’t going through the roof on this. This is one where they have everybody on America on their side.

Caroline Glick:

The Israeli government is not going through the roof on anything. And that also speaks to what we were talking about before the left in Israel, Benny Gantz very prominently featured among them and Yair Lapid and down to the last talk backer on Twitter, they all say that we owe our survival to the United States, that we only are able to fight because of America. On the one hand, they’ve spent the past decades deepening Israel’s dependence on the United States for its military. But on the other hand then, using the United States, which is so anti the Israeli people that it has a nerve to say, “You, Prime Minister Netanyahu, have to choose between your coalition partners and Israel’s alliance with the United States.” And so now they’re saying, we cannot stand up to the United States, which is demanding that we stand down in Gaza, that’s demanding that we stand down in Lebanon, both in and of themselves, and certainly both of them together place our very existence in question and in fact, in doubt, because we’re dependent on America.

And so the question is, can Israel defy America? I mean, what would be the price?

Dr. David Wurmser:

Of course.

Caroline Glick:

Give me the response.

Dr. David Wurmser:

First of all, these staffers-

Caroline Glick:

Yes.

Dr. David Wurmser:

… Israel is currently mentally putting itself in the position, not of being dependent on America, but being dependent on a crew of staffers in the White House and in the State Department who are anti-Israeli. They are not America. They are staffers in a current administration. There’s a whole world of America beyond them. There’s Congress, there’s the American people, there’s political pressures. Israel is paralyzing itself in fear of a group of people it could circumvent, it could put political pressure on, it could work around. That’s number one.

Number two, as an American, as somebody who grew up here my whole life, one thing I do understand about Americans is they respect people of conviction. If you go to the Americans and say, “Listen, I’m going to disagree with you. I’m going to have to cross you even. I’m sorry. I like you, but I got to have to disagree with you because this is a matter of survival, or this is a matter of conviction, and I cannot compromise on that. I can’t even begin to compromise on that because if I compromise on my convictions, then I have no convictions. If it’s something that’s not important, I’m willing to compromise on. But if it’s a matter of conviction or survival, I cannot.”

And Americans respect Israel because for 50, 60 years, that was the way the Israelis behaved, whether it was in the 1960s with the nuclear program under Ben-Gurion and the fights he had with the Kennedy administration over this, whether it’s Israel and the United States in the ’73 War and Golda Meir pushing back against Kissinger, or whether it’s now. If the Israelis make it clear, this is so important that they have to do something, they will have America behind it. They will have a swelling amount of support from Congress. They will have the American people polling heavily toward Israel. And at that point, especially heading into an election year, this administration won’t cross Israel.

So I think ironically, Israel makes the pressure effective by accepting it, and it actually undermines the pro-Israeli sentiments in America in the long run because Americans will stop respecting Israel. If everything they say is a matter of conviction, and then everything gets compromised and thrown out the window, then the Israelis don’t really have the will to survive. The Israelis don’t really believe in anything. They’re cynical. That’s not how you win American support in the long run.

So A, in order to secure American support in the long run, Israel has to act independently. It sounds ironic, but it’s very important. The second thing is I’m very surprised the very people who reduced the size of the Israeli military, Americanized its bureaucracy and reduced the stockpiling and rainy day power of the Israeli military are the ones who are saying, “Oh, we don’t have a choice. We depend on them for bullets and bombs.” Okay, first of all, I think it’s a question of how the Israelis used their military.

If Israel right now we’re cut off from the use of the resupply from the United States, Israel will survive. The question is the price and the way Israel does it. The price unfortunately may be more Israeli soldiers. And it’s sad because you and I, we all have lots of loved ones there, we all have people we know, friends, family, et cetera. That’s a bad thing. But the survival of the Jewish people and the state is transcendent, number one. Number two, Israel would change its tactics. It can fight this war with a lot less bullets and artillery. It could use bombs from airplanes. It could not use smart bombs. It could do all sorts of things. It would be more brutal.

Caroline Glick:

It could lays siege on Gaza, which [inaudible 00:44:33].

Dr. David Wurmser:

Yeah, it would lay a sea on Gaza. It would’ve cut off all humanitarian supplies because all the-

Caroline Glick:

Yesterday we lost six soldiers in, it was an operational accident where a tank was shooting at and terrorists trying to protect a force on the ground, and one of the shells hit an antenna that then detonated the explosives that the force on the ground was about to use in an operation and they were killed. And we were talking about it earlier, and we noted how crazy it is because why do they have electricity in Gaza? Why was this a live electricity line? It was a live electricity line because of the US pressure. I mean, it’s like, if it’s not one thing, it’s another, but it always leads back to American pressure. There shouldn’t be any electricity in Gaza. There’s no call for that.

Dr. David Wurmser:

And to remember, that electricity comes from Israel for free. Israel provides it for free. I can tell you, if I don’t pay my electric bill, the state isn’t going to make it free for me.

But I think this is very important. If you cut off the humanitarian supplies, and I’m not talking about food maybe or water, but if you cut off electricity and you cut off fuel-

Caroline Glick:

Fuel.

Dr. David Wurmser:

… the war fighting capability of Hamas degrades radically and rapidly. And by now, they wouldn’t have air in the tunnels. They wouldn’t have the ability to make any weapons. They wouldn’t even have cell phones without the electricity. And they wouldn’t have the fuel to run generators. So they could force a retreat. The second thing is Israel’s acting now, and we have to remind ourselves the morality with which the Israeli Army is acting is above and beyond that which any army in the world acts, including the United States. If Israel would pull back and just do as America does now, I’m not talking about in World War II, I’m talking about what America did a decade ago in Mosul. If Israel plays by the rules America and Britain set for themselves, it would be a far uglier and more brutal war, but it would be a lot easier for Israeli soldiers, and it’d be a lot quicker.

Caroline Glick:

I agree. And a lot less lethal at the end of the day for both sides probably. Although you never know. I mean, that’s a what if question.

But let me just ask you one last question. I want to just go to one last field, which is China and Iran. We’ve had one curious development in relation to China that I wanted to discuss with you, which is the Chinese just agreed to increase the price that they’re paying for Iranian gas and oil, which is surprising why they would do that. But the other thing is that the Chinese are also, they just announced their largest shipping company, COSCO is what it’s called, that they’re not going to ship any more goods to Israel. So they’re actually cutting off supplies of Chinese exports to Israel at the same time that they’re accepting an increase in oil prices that they’re paying to Iran. And I’m trying to… There’s something very large going on here that is very, very disturbing, and I’m trying to at least begin to think about it. I don’t know whether you have any real clear understanding of this, it just has been happening in recent days? Or if you could just give me a way to think about what is happening here so that we can understand the larger strategic chess board?

Dr. David Wurmser:

It is another very disturbing aspect of American policy. You mentioned in the upfront introduction about the Houthis and the Americans warning the Houthis about adult start a war, a blockade is a war.

Caroline Glick:

After they already have. They started it [inaudible 00:48:42].

Dr. David Wurmser:

It already is. I mean, a blockade is formally a casus belli, a blockade is a war. Israel went to war in ’67 over the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, and they’re blockaded again. Oh, well, not the Tiran Straits, but further south. But the Red Sea, the whole southern part of Israel is blockaded. COSCO now, people are beginning to say, “Well, I mean if ships headed for Israel are in danger, maybe even those to the Mediterranean are.” Which increases insurance rates to Israel, which makes things very expensive, but more importantly, cuts off shipping. Israel is facing a blockade. Israel is being cut off. And the United States, which since 1812 with the creation of the Marines has been its foundation of American military policy, the [foreign language 00:49:29] of American policies, freedom of the seas. We have abandoned a 200-year-old policy for the sake of the Houthis.

Caroline Glick:

For the sake of the Houthis. There are 2000 of them for crying out. There are 2000 of them. And this is what paralyzed the entire US Navy and ended the [foreign language 00:49:52].

Dr. David Wurmser:

As an American, I find this embarrassing, but also the implications are devastating. If the United States cannot keep open the Bab al-Mandab Straits against the Houthis, where the Saudis are already… By the way, the Houthis, that port that they operate from, the Saudis wanted to take, we’re the ones who told them not to because we wanted humanitarian aid for… we didn’t want humanitarian crisis among the Houthis. So we forced the Saudis not to take Hudaydah. And now look what happened.

Again, this is all a consequence of American policy in this administration or the Obama administration. Instead of stepping back, expressing humility and reevaluating what we’ve done to wreak havoc on American power, American reputation, and now even American purpose, by abandoning our role as the protector of the oceans, this is going to invite a global world war because such level of weakness, the entire security of the world rests on America’s power. Even our enemies depend on that. And if American power is so diminished that we can’t confront the Houthis to keep open 20% of the world’s trade, which is what passes through there, then we’re not a global power anymore. And everybody will understand that and they will act on that. And a lot of America will have it’s own October 7th,

Caroline Glick:

The Taiwanese, I mean, looking at this must just said, “Okay, nevermind. We’re just going to be part of China [inaudible 00:51:35].”

Dr. David Wurmser:

No, America’s headed for its own October 7th. This will not go without a tremendous breakdown in American power and a challenge to America.

Caroline Glick:

Well, I mean, and the Chinese looking at this, you think that they’re just saying, okay, then Israel’s done for? I mean, they’re sacrificing their own port here? They have a port in Haifa, I mean, what are they thinking?

Dr. David Wurmser:

I think the Israelis should send a signal to the United States it’s willing to do what America, I mean, Israel has the means to take out Hudaydah port. If it really wants to shut down the Houthis as part of this, it may want to sequence it, it may want to wait, it may want to do it now, I don’t know, there might be operational issues right now. But at the moment, this is one of those things that Israel must have dealt with at the end. And if it’s not dealt with one way, it’s going to be dealt with another.

And in this case, this is a military threat. It will not be diplomatically dealt with. I’m sure the Saudis would love to see the Yemenis taken down a notch. They’re a little afraid of joining in right now because they’re afraid of left holding the bag. Because if somebody picks a fight with them, it’s a fight with Iran, and then they face Iran and nobody wants to have a fight with Iran so they’re alone. So they’re playing kind of a double game a little bit.

But the bottom line is, Yemen… excuse me, the Houthis, because it’s not all of Yemen. The Houthis are a manageable military threat for Israel. It can take them on, it can reopen those straits. And it’s really, in my view, humiliation for the United States that the small country of 10 million fighting on several fronts is going to have to do for the world, because that’s a lifeline for the world, we’ll have to do for the world what is the purpose of the American Navy.

Caroline Glick:

Well, I think we’re going to leave it at that, David, but I think we’ve covered some important ground today. I think… it’s just I’m very frustrated by the Israeli military leadership’s refusal to think strategically about what’s happening here. I hope that people are watching us and maybe they’ll rethink it because it’s absolutely imperative that we do. So immediately. Any more thoughts before we turn off?

Dr. David Wurmser:

Yeah, it’s just for all those people who keep saying that America has to fight for Israel, we’re in the position now where Israel’s fighting for America. That Israel is carrying the water for the West as a whole. It’s the West that is freeloading here in some ways, number one. And number two, I have a lot of faith in the Israeli people. I share your frustration with Israeli elites, all Israeli elites, but I really am impressed how the Israeli people are sober and getting it.

Caroline Glick:

I agree.

Dr. David Wurmser:

So I’m optimistic about Israel, not so optimistic about any particular government or elite in Israel right now.

Caroline Glick:

I think you, well-spoken. I appreciate it. All right. Well, David, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show again. And guys, keep watching this space. There’s still going to be more this week, not to worry. Not to worry. So take care and thanks for watching. And thank you again, David, for joining me. I appreciate it so much.

Dr. David Wurmser:

Thank you.

Caroline Glick:

Take care.