This show proudly sponsored by Real American Freestyle Wrestling. Oh yeah, there's no doubt about disarming rockets and missiles, the factories that assemble them, the factories that do the manufacturing, particularly of the small-range rockets, the tunnel complexes themselves. All of this has to be done before anybody talks about Restoring Gaza. And if Hamas doesn't disarm, there's no restoring Gaza until that fact takes place. And that is what is on the table in phase two.
And it remains to be seen. Is Hamas lying to us when they say yes, we'll disarm? Likely. The opportunity for them to surrender and get their own personal freedom is on the line here. We'll see if they're going to take Israel up and the United States on that.
So that's a huge question, Mark.
So there you go. General Jack Keene on with me earlier today talking about what has to happen in phase two of this operation, but extremely pleased that there's a phase one.
So we understood too, Steve Witkoff put out on social media that the clock is beginning to tick on the 72 hours. What am I talking about?
Well, it was 24 hours to return to back up to a yellow line inside Gaza for the IDF, and they did that. And we watched this morning as thousands are pouring back into what I think is Gaza City. I don't know Gaza too well, but it looks like they're pouring into a major city back.
So they believe it's going to be peace. And then the clock starts ticking as soon as the IDF was in place on 72 hours to return the 48 hostages. 20 plus, we hope, are still alive. Michael Oren joins us now, very much involved in all this, former ambassador, Israeli ambassador to the United States. Ambassador, welcome.
Good to be with you, Brian. Hi. Good morning. Yeah, so when did you realize this was indeed possible? Do you remember a day or when you thought, okay, this could happen?
If you would have asked me two weeks ago whether it was possible, I would have been very doubtful. This, you know, before I was ambassador, I was a professor of history, of military and diplomatic history. That document, those 20 points. was one of the most impressive, elegant pieces of diplomacy that I've seen from any country. Maybe even in decades.
But it consisted of things that other countries and you guys wanted, correct? I mean, it wasn't coming out of thin air. This was almost like a best of, wouldn't you think? I think everyone's talking, most of the American media is talking about all the pressure that was put on Netanyahu, put on Netanyahu, Netanyahu.
Well, I saw you straighten out MSNBC. It was pretty much pushing on an open door. What did Israel want out of this war? It wanted an end to Hamas. It wanted to get the hostages back.
It wanted Gaza demilitarized. Who's not getting the memo there? It's right there in the 20 points, every single one of them. Yeah, Israel had to make some painful sacrifices, particularly the release of 250 murderers from our prisons. 1,900 overall, right?
But the people had actually killed Israelis. And think about the families. Think about the family. If you had lost a loved one to one of these murderers, and this guy is going to go free, he's going to get a hero's welcome at home. It's very painful.
Um my own family lost a close family member to a suicide bombing. Fortunately, that terrorist was killed later. But I can imagine if he got out tomorrow what we'd have to tell our kids and grandkids. Very difficult. And then, you know, other than that, it's very abstract.
It says that someday maybe the Palestinian Authority will be involved in the post-government, post-war government of Gaza and has to reform. Who knows what that means? These guys, you know. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is in the 21st year of his four-year term. And that maybe Israel would have to discuss a pathway to a Palestinian state.
whatever that means. Pathway, you know, could be a thing with gravel. But the actual concrete Terms of these 20 points, there was only one time in this whole thing. It was 72 hours. And that played in Israel's favor.
Ambassador, there's a story in the Wall Street Journal today and said how Trump's upside-down diplomacy delivered a major victory. He did do things very differently, right? He didn't look at the history. He didn't say, what happened in the 70s? What happened in the year?
Why did Oslo fall apart? What did Yazer Arafat say? How did that election go? And what were the numbers? And he didn't look at pie charts.
He went the other way. He used relationships he had with the Gulf states and the Arab world and the relationship he's already, and the loyalty he's already shown to the prime minister. I mean, my goodness, we couldn't work closer together. There was nowhere between them.
So Hamas thought, longer we hold out, look at the division between the U.S. and Israel even. Wasn't gonna be the case.
So the president the president was able to do this deal, it seems, and you correct me at any point, I don't take it personal, without getting every detail done. And these Arab nations didn't want to be the ones to say, I'm out.
So Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar help put this across the finish line without every detail done. I'm using historic m sort of metaphor. It's like being on Normandy Beach. You're under fire. You got to get off the beach.
You know, get off the beach first, deal with the the German defenses on the beach and then you deal with the hedge crow cam campaign later.
Okay.
So you want to get off the beach. And he did. And yeah, there's a great battle after that. The great battle, as your previous interviews have talked about, is okay, how do we get Hamas to demilitarize now? How do we get them to give up their guns?
And that's that that's it's a steep it's a very steep challenge. But listen, he's got off the beach. And was getting off the beach just he stopped the war. He got the hostages back. We hope we think that's going to happen.
And he got everybody on board. I mean, the truly, truly miraculous part of the 20 points was getting countries that don't agree with one another, not just Israel. This is Turkey and Qatar, along with the Saudis and the Emiratis. They don't like each other. Getting them all on board with the Indonesians and the Pakistanis.
I mean, really, think about just how complex this was. But here it's not just the personal relations, Brian. There's another point which I think everyone seems to miss here. Right. And that's the use of power.
Yes, and showing the willingness to use it, right? Yes. Ambassador, stay right there. A few more minutes. I know at the top of the hour, you got to get to Harris.
So you're doing all the rounds today, and we appreciate it. Brian Killmey with Ambassador Michael Warren. Don't move. That Hamas is not going to disarm. They're never going to fully disarm, and you couldn't monitor it or verify it that if they did, that's the lesson we had with Northern Ireland, getting the paramilitaries to give up arms.
Ceasefire may break down. You can imagine a situation where the word won't go out, or some people in Hamas are going to disagree with the guys who negotiated. Then Israel might see that as an opportunity to use military force against the British.
So what do you do that? But the focus on maintaining the ceasefire. That's something you can monitor. You can watch a ceasefire. You know if that's working.
Giving up arms, show they're going to stash away arms. You'll never get 100% of their arms, but you can get 100% compliance with the ceasefire.
So I would focus on that. Sure. That's one way. That's Richard Haas, Council of Foreign Relations. Ambassador Michael Oren is here, and very much to do with the peace deal that we have right now.
With the the President's going to be going over to Egypt and then over to Israel, the significance of him going, is there going to be paperwork for him to sign? Is even symbolically? Are we going to have that moment that was Jimmy Carter with the With that, we had in Camp David. I put my money on it. Certainly, it's a great, it's a photo op opportunity.
By the way, it's a photo opportunity that he actually deserved and earned.
So yes, there'd be a signing ceremony. I don't know what the actual paper is going to say because it's not the sign. Hamas is going to sign the other side. Right. But it could be some type of symbolic.
And then the way I understand it, it's over to Israel. to possibly greet the hostages? I I think that would be an extraordinary moment. And then to address the Knesset. The President is overwhelmingly popular in the State of Israel.
It's uniting right and left, up and down, religious and secular, and I think even Arab and Jew. He's overwhelmingly popular. Among the Haases families, they were the ones who nominated him for the Nobel Prize.
So they love him, and I think that he deserves it. I don't want to say cynically it's a victory lap, but okay, he deserves it. And he's going to address the Knesset, which has never happened, right? It has happened in the past. It's a bit of a roll of the dice, I must say.
In the day, if you remember, President Obama visited Israel back in 2013 and there was a question whether he would speak to the Knesset, and it was nixed. It's nixed because we have a different political culture where people scream in the Knesset. And I don't know who would scream at Donald Trump. It could be we have radical leftists in the Knesset. We have Communists in the Knesset, believe it.
There's a Communist Party. They may get up and scream at him because he's not sufficiently pro-Hamas. And there are rules of order. You can only scream for so much and they'll take you out. But that wouldn't make for good optics to have Israeli parliamentarians, whatever party they belong to, sort of berating publicly the president.
That would be interesting because the invitation's already been put out, I think. They're going to do it. I think they're going to sit down and talk to the communists and say, guys, be quiet. True or false, the Prime Minister was feeling pressure from the right not to do any deal. And let's just go for complete and victory.
Extreme right. You have to say, there's a moderate right, too, in his government. And okay, the so the extreme right was pressuring maybe not happy the Prime Minister signed this? They were not happy. They're saying that they oppose the deal, but they won't leave the government.
But the government itself voted overwhelmingly in favor of the deal. This is the nature of our government. It's a coalition government. Imagine if every member of the President's cabinet was actually the head of another party that was seeking to unseat the President. That's our system.
Ambassador, how do you view the head in Doha? Was it worth the risk? Where the risk? I know the roundifications were positive, it seems, but just from your perspective. The risk is that Hamas will use.
The say 200 American forces that are being placed there to monitor the implementation of the withdrawal and the ceasefire, some type of international force to use them as a human shield.
Now this happened in Lebanon. And basically Hamas wants what Hezbollah has. It wants to say, we have no sovereign responsibility over this place. We're not going to clean up all the rubble. We're not going to rebuild Gaza.
But we want to keep our guns. We want to be a jihadist. That's what Hezbollah had. And Hezbollah for years and years used the UN. Unophil as a shield.
And International Peacekeeping Forces infamously. Only work when there's no peace to keep. The men have to actually keep the peace. They run away or they're used as human fuels. That's what happened with UniFil.
So that's the big danger here. But that's a UN sponsored uh thing, right? Would Egypt and would an all-star team of Arab nations in Indonesia would they be different from UNIFIL?
Well, I'm going to be very cynical here. In the past, we've had European forces in Gaza. The minute the shooting started, they ran away. There was Dutch, there was French. They ran away.
Same thing happened in Beirut. Italians and French, they ran away. The Arab world is tougher. And uh you're gonna have countries like if you had troops from UAE and Saudi Arabia. They don't like Hamas.
Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood threatens the Saudi invasion. Sure. And they're going to be much tougher. Yeah.
Well, believe me, they do. And it's tough for the West to know what. And if I were a Hamas, I'd say, God, bring me a Frenchman, bring me an Italian, bring me an Englishman, but don't bring me a Saudi, don't bring me an Emirati.
So do you think in 72 hours, was it going to go as smooth as the first 24 hours, which you guys pulled out? Not you guys, but the idea pulled out right to the old. Yeah, we accorded very quickly. There's a fear there that Hamas will come back and say, listen, you know, they said there's 20, but there's really 17 and we can't find the other three. And always keep that for a rainy day and that keep us psychological terror.
These are terrorists who deal not just with physical terror, but also emotional and psychological terror. They'll say this can't find certain bodies, and that will be. Always a source of great. of of Dave concerns sorrow and psychological distress uh for Israeli society. And holding their feet to this fire will be very, very crucial.
I want you to hear, you know the politics in America, and you know how few and far between compliments to Trump are for people that don't like him. Here's a little of the media reaction to what they've seen so far. Dave Ignatius, Martha Raditz, Jake Tapper, John Meacham, cut nine. Joe Biden could never do that. And Donald Trump was able to do it.
Do you worry that Trump wants to get the Nobel Prize on Friday? I mean, I really don't mean that as a joke. If we see those remaining hostages freed and Israel begin its withdrawal, it is a remarkable achievement. I don't want to diminish the importance of this, and obviously, blessed are the peacemakers indeed. It is worth Pointing out, this is a ceasefire deal, right?
This is not a A larger peace deal. All credit to President Trump.
So do you your thoughts? Number one, it is a larger piece deal. It is the beginning of a largest PCL, and it can be, it can be, and um But that's going to require very intense diplomacy, a hands-on approach. And um And we see how far it can be taken. There's great opportunities here.
Just when the when uh the Prime Minister decided to take that shot in Doha and tried to take out the terrorists' brass, he d I think he only hit one of the guys he wanted. These other guys got away and the security official died. Was that shot worth it? Do you think that to go into Qatar where they were negotiating In retrospect, in in Was it worth it?
Well, history's going to have to judge us differently. from the perspective of several weeks after I'd say what that operation did was to shake everybody up. And realize that this conflict could not be contained in Gaza, that was going to spill out. And that got a lot of countries on board that hadn't been on board previously. And yeah, the conventional wisdom of the American press was that the president was furious with Netanyahu, and that was it.
He was going to put his foot down. But I think the story is a little bit more complicated than that, Brian. I think that um the The Qataris realized that they couldn't continue to play this game. and that they were going to have to come on board with the President and get Hamas. How much to cooperate.
All the emphasis, particularly under the Biden administration, was putting pressure on Israel. Let's cut off arms sales. Let's delay arms sales. We can't go into Rafah. We were talking earlier about Kamala Harris's memoir where she said, I was disappointed that Biden wouldn't put more pressure on Israel.
Did anybody remotely think, hey, maybe someone should put more pressure on Hamas? Maybe. Never came up. And all of a sudden, along comes this guy, this guy Donald Trump, and says, wait a minute, let's put pressure on Hamas. And who can we do that?
What are the levers here? The levers are Qatar. The levers are certainly Turkey as well. And he pushed those levers. And you saw how quickly that worked.
So how do you view Cutter? Qatar is a mixed bag. It is a mixed bag. It plays both sides. Let's face it, this is a country that puts in tens and tens of billions of dollars into the United States, into universities, American universities, into lobbyists in Washington to influence American policy.
They have Al Jazeera, which was a media branch basically of Hamas. On the other hand. They talk to us. On the other hand, our Mossad deals with Qatar and they have been negotiators, they've been mediators, at times good mediators, at times less good mediators in the hostage issue. They are a mixed bat.
That's the way they. They they like playing both sides. And they're friendly with Iran. And they're friendly with Iran. They try to be friendly with Saudi Arabia.
There was a couple of years, but they didn't talk to each other. Um that's that's how a very small, very, very rich country uh survives in the Middle East. That's her survival mechanism.
So, they do have leverage over Hamas.
So, if Hamas wants to make this into an insurgency and start taking shots, they would have some. They would have some stake in that. But let's look what happened. Again, the conventional wisdom that Israel did this operation against the Hamas leadership in Doha didn't quite succeed. But look what happened afterward.
What happened was, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, Qatar was playing ball with Donald Trump to pressure Hamas.
Now, think about how did that happen? They got shaken. I mean, there's a theory that Trump did know. That the hit was going to be done in place. And that phone call wasn't really necessarily an apology in the Oval Office.
It was, hey, one of your security officials died. That was never the intent. That was the. That's what he apologized for. Look at the text of the apology.
Yeah.
I was involved in the apology that Dennis now gave to Erdogan in 2013, helped draft that apology. That was over the Mavi Mamara affair, if you remember, it was a flotilla that our Navy SEALs intercepted. And that apology is very, very carefully crafted. You can't. Apologize for our Navy trying to intercept an illegal flotilla that's trying to break a legal blockade, but you can apologize for things that went wrong.
We apologize for operational mistakes.
Okay, here he apologized for killing inadvertently. Tell me. A Qatari security official. Tell me if that's right.
So the Hamas interpreted that as well. Trump does have. say Prime Minister will listen to Trump. Definitely.
So and then Hamas goes, of course they don't like America, but they'll say, okay, maybe this could be backed up. And one of the statements from Hamas, if I could paraphrase, was it's up to Donald Trump to make sure that Netanyahu lives up to his side of the bargain.
So they needed to see that. It's all a piece. Again, I maybe said earlier that Trump was able to do this because he projected power. He projected power in the Middle East that previous American presidents had not really done since George Bush. And you even saw George Bush, even with Iraq, with all the problems of Iraq, he was able to convene an international peace conference in Annapolis in 2007 with forty-eight countries in it.
Because if you use power, people respect you. That's just, you know, it's a rule of the game. And we also know that the Middle East was fearing Saddam Hussein. He was a problem. It wasn't just an American problem.
He was a Middle Eastern problem. The other thing is, in the big picture, do you think that if barring anything unforeseen, which the Middle East is always unforeseen, do you think these Gulf states want economic relationships and relationships with Israel? Unquestionably.
So that was on track. You believed that that was going to continue. Saudi Arabia was probably going to be next. It's what precipitated the war. Remember, we know from Hamas' documents that the reason they launched, one of the major reasons they launched October 7th, 2023, was because they were afraid of Israel-Saudi peace.
So is Iran. Dairy's desperately afraid. And remember, peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia is not just with Saudi Arabia, it's with the entire Sunni world. It's peace with Indonesia. It's peace with Pakistan.
The biggest Muslim populations in the world are not in the Middle East, they're outside the Middle East. And they're sunny states. And so it was a game changer. Total game changer. And they sought to block it.
It was very, very smart.
So right now, that's still on the cards. And I think that you throw in the Saudi Israel piece, you saw it in Israel-Lebanese peace, Israel-Syria peace. What I said to you before is the Six Day War was a transformative event. This war could be even more transformative. It's Will Cain Country.
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