Benjamin Netanyahu

Obviously, we saw that big Haaretz article, you know, Israel's elections coming up.

There's an October surprise, like I guess in every s- election, about how the UAE called up, the UAE, uh, king or leadership called up Bibi Netanyahu prior to October 7th and warned them about Yahya Sinwar, you know, cooking up something like a big attack, uh, and nothing was done on Bibi's side.

And, you know, according... especially according to Andy's research in his book coming out, it seems like on the lower end of the intel pole, like the Unit 8200 people and the Shin Bet people obviously saw that there was chatter about a big attack happening, and it didn't go to the, you know, necessary people for making decisions, uh, and October 7th happened.

So that's a huge, huge story out of Israel.

Um, all right, let's move on.

I mean, it's not like the stories get better.

Uh, Haaretz had a bombshell, uh, that 10 days before October 7th, the, uh, you know, King, King B of, uh, UAE, uh, called BB Netanyahu to warn him about an attack from Hamas, and Netanyahu didn't, uh, inform his senior intelligence officials.

Um, deny-- uh, BB's side is denying it.

Um, and it's, it's come to a head, as I said, and as you mentioned, both with E1, which would, you know, in many ways, um, uh, make it very difficult for a two-state solution to come to fruition, and because of the violence.

Now, there is an argument that by imposing these sanctions now, six and a half weeks before an Israeli election, um, these governments, ours and the others, may be playing into Bibi Netanyahu and these other ministers' hands.

There's a possibility, for example, that there could be a rally round the flag effect in Israel, and, uh, Netanyahu could be seen as, you know, by, by responding to these sanctions, as defending Israel.

So far, the polls have not shown that.

Uh, his numbers have not gone up, uh, uh, despite the fact that he has responded, he and his government have, have responded s- strongly, uh, to these sanctions.

But since then, has, has there been anything?

Well, there was a call between, uh, the Prime Minister and, uh, President Herzog.

Um, uh, and, um, there has been no conversation between Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Netanyahu, uh, since, um, our Prime Minister took office.

All came out and said...

Reports are that Benjamin Netanyahu was

warned

and knew about that October 7th attack.

He breaks it down.

He's a Jewish man himself, so straight from the horse's mouth.

which outlined in exhaustive detail that Netanyahu was warned of an imminent massive attack by Hamas, directly warned by the president of UAE, but also the security chief from uh, Egypt.

And that warning came from sin war, who was the Hamas leader who had been in negotiations with Israel for five years.

As Israel enters another tense election season, we are witnessing this exact brand of political insanity play out on full display.

Once again, left-wing media outlets, led by Haaretz newspaper, this week launched a sensational smear campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

They were pushing a sensational headline adapted from a new book by journalists Shlomi Aldar and Ruth Yuval.

The headline, picked up and repeated by outlets in Israel and the world over, alleges that roughly 10 days before the October 7th war, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed held a secret 45-minute phone call with Prime Minister Netanyahu in which he explicitly warned him that Yehia Sinwar was planning a massive, bloody attack on Israel.

The narrative claims that Netanyahu brushed off the alert and concealed it from his defense chiefs.

Unsurprisingly, opposition figures here in Israel like Yair Lapid and Gadi Eizenkot immediately pounced on the story to launch fresh new political attacks on Netanyahu.

This is what they wanted, the echoing of the shallow headlines and the misleading content.

But as soon as you look past the headlines, the entire narrative crumbles under the weight of the basic facts.

So there's all these services I just listed, but I think the main issue, remember that work, that W in UNRWA, kind of transformed into the educational division, right? So most of the employees, if I'm not mistaken, that UNRWA employs are teachers, right? Because these people do not have...

state to take care of them and even in Israel's interest they would be in schools and not in the streets, right? So that paradigm was sustained roughly around until 2017 in Israel, but in 2017 Netanyahu starts attacking unrun public and knowing that Trump wants to nix the funds of ALMA, basically, which in the beginning of 2018 he did, following the demands of Jared Kushner.

And in the August of 2018, it doesn't freeze them.

It halts them completely.

Trump decides to halt funding.

And then Germany steps in and increases funding.

Now, Israel in that case is governed by Netanyahu back then.

Interestingly, unbeknownst to most of the public, sends messengers to Trump to try and dissuade him from defunding UNRWA because Netanyahu wants stability, not because he cares about Palestinians, because for him stability is staying in power.

Is it

not that Huckabee is actually more of an outlier? And actually, if you look at the relationship between Netanyahu and Trump personally over the course of the last year, certainly had his ups and downs.

Obviously, the high point was, you know, with Netanyahu convincing Trump to, in an election year, go into this extended conflict in Iran.

But it seems to me that relations are pretty tense between Netanyahu and Trump right now.

Yeah, they certainly obviously, we don't know what happens behind closed doors.

But I think, you know, Israel is obviously still a very important ally.

How the Israelis really control our foreign policy.

How Netanyahu bitches Trump around.

Of course, we saw those blow-ups, those blow-up dolls in Ireland with Netanyahu kind of giving it to Trump from the back, which is just what we see play out in general.

Hegseth himself.

is a Zionist.

I'll run for president so they can't pin this war on me and I don't get fired.

But the war is his fault.

As much as it is Trump's, as much as it is Netanyahu's, it's their fault.

Ilan, to you, switching over to Israel, the U.S. is rejecting the long-term military presence in southern Lebanon.

This is, of course, against what Qatis is saying, the defense minister, and against what the prime minister says, Netanyahu.

And it's coming to conflict with the U.S.

The U.S. wants him out of there, a.k.a. Vance and others.

But Jacob, I'm going to go to you because Kirshner is about to visit Israel.

And the two things that they're going to discuss is Lebanon and...

Hamas the Board of Peace will take precedence but also don't want them in Lebanon anymore so against this backdrop against this backdrop that Kirchner was was supposed to well he was the engineer of the Abraham Accord to a large degree and Netanyahu doesn't want this Lebanon deal or the Hamas peace deal that they're offering these 15 points this is putting Israel again in a tough spot because they are going to go head-to-head with the United States, I guess, Kirchner and Witkoff and other people that are coming in there as negotiators, and they are vehemently against it.

What's the outcome going to be?

Well, I understand why that question is being asked, but I would say no.

When the government introduced the excise cut at the onset of the conflict in the Middle East that was started by Trump and Netanyahu, it was a reasonable expectation on their part that it would be a short-term thing.

After all, Trump was telling us that the US would obliterate Iran and oil would again flow freely and You know, everything would be fabulous.

And like most of what Trump says, it turned out to be completely wrong.