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With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into? Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. As the President said, if we'll be asked to go back into kinetic activity with the United States side by side, shoulder to shoulder, wing to wing, we're ready to do it. We consider ourselves your model ally and junior partner. What the President decides will fall in line.
And that is the ambassador to the United States from Israel, Leiter.
So, Ambassador Leiter weighed in, made it clear. But the story the Jerusalem Post has, and other people, according to Israeli sources, the prime minister and president, kind of battled about what the next step would be when it comes to fighting Iran. And they say they're right on the cusp, that we submitted a return proposal. And the prime minister didn't like it and let the president know it. And the president, I guess, snapped back at him.
But they're still friends. And that's what happens in a real relationship and a high-stakes battle like the one we're in with Iran. And there are obviously pluses and minuses to going back at him. Joining us now is somebody no stranger to this issue, wrote a book about it. He is Judge Roy K.
Altman. He's author of a book, Israel on Trial, and a sitting federal district court judge in the Southern District of Florida, the youngest ever appointed to the bench. Judge, welcome. Thanks for having me again, Brian. Hey, Judge, I know you got to stay away from politics, so I'll try to keep you away or punt if I ask you a question, it'll get you in trouble.
But how real do you think that friction is between the two? I think the only thing I know of it, and I'm not in that room, is that the media seems to want to drum up conflict between Israel and the United States and has been doing that for the entire time that we've been here since October 7th. And every time the media predicts that here finally is the rupture between the prime minister and the president, guess what? They have a meeting and they're holding hands and they're working shoulder to shoulder.
So I wouldn't believe it this time because we fell for it five or six times before, and each time it was fiction. Also, when you have a real relationship with stakes this high, of course you're going to disagree. You're going to tell me that allies never disagree?
So I think that if you ask me, the Prime Minister absolutely wants to go back and finish the job. And the person is weighing the risks of finishing the job because the Gulf states have been targeted, Judge. That's pretty much we have been studying during the ceasefire what they have, what they don't have. And the one thing that's intolerable, they're now charging tolls on international waters in the Strait of Hermuse. That's unacceptable in any plan.
One of the things you mentioned that I think is so critical for people to understand is the Wall Street Journal story that came out, and now I think has been publicly acknowledged: that Israel took. its own uh defense systems and ship them in secret to its Gulf uh state allies. And it's now clear that as a result of Israel taking its own protective system away from its own civilian areas to protect its Arab Muslim neighborhoods, Arab Muslim neighbors' cities, that thousands of Arab Muslims in the Middle East who were targeted by the regime in Tehran with ballistic missiles had their lives saved by Israel's generosity. And I don't think the UAE and maybe the Bahrainis and Kuwaitis will ever forget that. Right.
And I think that Saudi Arabia has gotten 8,000 troops from Pakistan because they have a mutual defense pact. And Bahrain is concerned because they have missile defense, but maybe not that much. We've had plenty of time to get them additional because we want additional defense because everybody in the region is concerned about their desalinization plants as well as their energy facility, right? I think what we're seeing, and what I talk about on college campuses, is the conversation we're having about Israel is, in some respects, five years old. The new Middle East is being shaped minute by minute by a growing alliance between partners in the Gulf states and in Israel, and a new partnership that may be arising between Israel and Lebanon.
We saw polling come out from Lebanon today, shocking numbers. I don't know if they've been reported on widely in the press here in the United States, but for the first time ever, a majority of Lebanese citizens responding to surveys say they want to finish their lifetime war with Israel and make a peace agreement with Israel. That includes majorities of Christians, majorities of Druze, and a slight majority of Sunni Muslims, even. Of course, it doesn't include Shiites who prefer to continue the forever war with Israel, but they're a minority of the population. The Middle East is changing.
And if the war with Tehran might shift the desire of the Gulf Arab states to start shipping their liquid, their natural gas, and their oil resources. Forces, not through the Strait of Hormuz, but to the ports of Ashdod and Haifa, we may see a partnership between Israel and its Gulf Arab neighbors that would have seemed inconceivable just a year ago. I know they're trying to reconfigure a pipeline and get it elsewhere. We know Saudi Arabia is now going through the Red Sea, I think, with a bulk of theirs. They're almost up to pre-war levels, and they're concerned about being targeted.
But I really think, Judge, that it's in our best interest to finish the job. With another week or two on Iran and really pressure this regime, who does not seem conciliatory or repentant. My view is: America has been the greatest force for good the world has ever known. Israel has been its closest and most important ally for 50 years now, votes with the United States more than any other country in the world on the international stage. I think over 93 or 94 percent of the time votes America's interests.
And time and again around this country, at churches and schools and colleges, I get people who work for the Navy, who work in the Department of War, who work in tech procurement for our government coming to me and saying, Judge, you have no idea how right you are. We sell Israel a piece of technology and we sell it to them, by the way, thus stimulating our economy and creating thousands of American jobs. And they do something we can't do. They battle test it in real time, give us minute-by-minute assessments of what it's doing well and what it's doing badly. And then two years later, they give it back to us for free, and it's totally unrecognizable to the product we sold them because it's 10 times.
Better prepared to the geostrategic conflicts that are coming. I wouldn't read too much friction into what actually is the relationship between the United States and Israel, and I'm confident that they'll both do what's necessary to rid the world of this evil, tyrannical regime. Yeah, so let's go over some legal terms that we hear bantered about. Number one, there was genocide in Gaza. I think that was disproven.
Now, maybe no one's covering it. What do you say? Because you. There's no doubt that Israel's war in Gaza was not only not genocide, it was the least likely urban conflict in modern history ever to meet the standard legal definition of genocide. And you don't have to take my word for it.
The high-level military group, the HLMG, which is a collection of all the high-level officers and generals from almost all the Western democracies in the world, not just the United States. These people aren't Jews. They have no connection with Israel. They're just generals in militaries around the world. They wrote a report and a brief to the International Criminal Court, the ICC, which says.
That Israel's civilian warning system, which is a warning system where Israel tells the civilian population of Gaza exactly where it will be striking the next day, and then provides humanitarian corridors for them to leave those zones. And even in Al-Mawasi, in the southwestern part of the strip, created an entire new city for them where it provided food purveyors, medical clinics, polio vaccines for 1.2 million people. The HLMG says not only is that completely incompatible with genocide, not only is it completely incompatible with what any other country has ever been willing to do for the civilian population of the enemy in warfare before, but they say, It's also something our own democracies would never be able to do because our civilian populations would never stomach endangering the lives of our own soldiers, our own sons and daughters, by warning the enemy of where those sons and daughters will be. And by the way, it's taken a very heavy toll. Over 800 Israelis have been killed in Gaza precisely because they warned the civilian population to get out of harm's way.
And they sent those soldiers into homes, home to home, that Hamas had had the time to lay an ambush at and to booby trap and fill with. And John Spencer, the president of the War College at West Point, said the same thing. He went and visited five times, and he said they actually were more humanitarian-oriented than even we were at Fallujah and Mosul.
So I want to bring you to something else we hear about. Israel is an apartheid state. What do you say to that, Judge? Israel is the most free and diverse country in the entire region. And again, you don't have to take my word for it.
Talk to Israeli Arabs like I do when I visit Israel, and they would tell you that their socioeconomic mobility in the country, their health, Their life expectancy, their child mortality rates are all better than they would be in any of the 22 Arab countries in the Middle East, in any of the 57 Muslim countries in the world. Israel is a country of 10 million people, 21% of whom, 2.1 million people, are Arab Muslims who share equally in the free commercial, civil, and political rights of their Jewish neighbors. There is apartheid being practiced all over the Middle East today. Think, for example, of how inconceivable it would be to have a Jewish justice on the Supreme Court in Tehran, or a Jewish general in Damascus, or Jewish lawyers, doctors, or judges in Ramallah or Gaza City. These things are absurd even to consider, but there are Arab Muslim Supreme Court justices in Israel.
There are Arab, Muslim, and Druze and Christian judges, lawyers, and doctors all over the country. There are four major Arab political parties. In the Knesset in Israel, who, by the way, were part of the governing coalition of the country just four years ago in 2022. If Israel is practicing apartheid, It's doing a real bad job of it. All right.
So, Judge Roy Altman is our guest.
So, Judge. Is there a way from what you know to be able to track the arms deliveries to Hezbollah and Hamas? Because it seemed clear since you guys, since Israel did such damage to them, they were able to get more rockets in. And I'm just wondering, even if Iran comes out and part of this deal and says we won't. rearm our proxies.
Is it possible for us to enforce that? And you guys can't. The biggest and most important ally in this struggle will be Syria. And we'll learn a lot about whether Hezbollah can survive by whether the Lebanese government is willing to do what it has promised. And we should say, again, people criticize the Lebanese government for not doing enough.
I think that's fair. But we should say again how revolutionary it is that for the first time in 40 years, the Lebanese government has gathered the strength to be able to stand up for itself and say Hezbollah is illegal in the country. We want to have a monopoly on military weapons in the country, the government, and we want to expel the The man who used to run the country for 40 years, which is the ambassador from Tehran.
So the question will be: will the Lebanese government, in conjunction with the new Syrian government, have the willingness, have the strength, have the ability to stop arms transfers from continuing to pass through the land corridor, through Syria, and into Lebanon? If they can do it, Then that'll be a sea change for peace in the Middle East, for both Arab and Jew alike. All right.
Thanks so much. I appreciate you joining us, Judge. You're a great advocate, and also you go into the facts as opposed to a motion. Judge Roy K. Altman, his book is Israel on Trial.
Thanks so much, Judge. Thanks, Brian.
