Dan Senor: Israel has every right to be consumed by rage

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This is the Brian Kilmeade Show. When he said that Israelis should not be consumed by rage, who the hell does he think he is? I sat in on every single summit meeting with foreign leaders when they came to the United States after September 11th and met with President Bush. Not one of them. Not one said to President Bush, the Americans shouldn't be consumed with rage.

Instead, they just came to support us. So President Biden, who said some good things, never should admonish or lecture Israel about how to react like that. Dan Senor is with me in studio. I wanted him to hear that because he used to work with Ari Fleischer in the Bush administration. He's got a brand new book coming out in a couple of weeks called The Genius of Israel.

Dan, I want you to hear that because it really plays to, I don't know what your answer is, but it struck me that Ari Fleischer was really direct about that. It was kind of odd for President Biden to be sitting in the war council meeting with the Israeli military because I get it. We supply with great allies and all this stuff, but the war hasn't even started yet. Do we need the great war planner, Joe Biden, there? And what about the fact that he says in his speech, don't be consumed by rage?

Was that insulting advice? So first of all, I think it was important that President Biden was there. I think it's been important that President Biden has compared what Israel's up against to ISIS and to the Nazis, because we both know how each of those ended with a US commitment to completely wipe out and eradicate those threats and those menaces on the Western world. You can't, on the one hand, and by the way, and to console these people who are completely shocked and rattled, and it's important for them to know the president and the United States government is standing with them. I cannot tell you, Brian, I have a lot of friends over there. I have a lot of family over there. I have two sisters who live in Israel. My mother lives in Jerusalem. I have nephews who've been called up in the reserves. I have friends who have family members who have been taken hostage.

So it's a rah-rah time. Israel feels vulnerable. It's the most vulnerable Israel has felt since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. And so having the President of the United States be there on the ground, I think, sends an important message. That said, of course, Israel should be consumed with rage.

I mean, who wouldn't be? Think burning babies, decapitating children, torturing people. I mean, just think for a moment what Hamas did. First, they captured these people, these innocent civilians. Keep in mind, over a thousand of the Israelis were civilians.

They weren't in uniform. First, they captured them. Then they tortured them. Then they killed them or raped them.

And then they burned them, so their bodies were unrecognizable, unless they burned them alive, instead of burning them after they actually killed them. Israel is full of rage, as it should be. That is the natural human response. The question is, how do you channel that rage?

That's the question. Not, should you be filled with rage? It's, how do you channel that rage? And I believe Israel and Israeli society is coming together in the healthiest and most responsible and most resilient way. You mentioned my book, The Genius of Israel. The subtitle of the book, Brian, is The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, which is, we explain why this country is so resilient, how the country comes together, the sense of solidarity in the country. So that rage is being channeled into the most healthy and constructive way.

Let me tell you something. Israel did this call up of reserves, 300 to 350,000 reserves called up. The percentage of turnout is 150%, meaning they overshot in the number of reserves they called up because they weren't sure what the turnout would be.

It's 150%. People are showing up, more people than they know what to do with and they can deploy. People who are aged out of reserves are showing up saying, I know I'm aged out, but I want to be here and I want to be helped.

Retired military is showing up. Civilians, the civilian mobilization to help. The country is angry, but the country is not defeated.

So that rage is being channeled into a positive, constructive, as positive as one can imagine way, and as positive as one could hope for in this environment and as positive as one could expect given what it's been dealt. So I don't know what he meant. Right. Yeah, who knows?

He said that, well, I mean, put it this way. The big thing now is how effective has the bombing raid been knowing that there are hostages there? So there are hostages there.

You've got to be somewhat surgical in a very, the dentist's most populated area in a country 25 miles long and five miles deep. So how successful has it been so far? I think they have been doing the kind of bombing a military can do before the major war offensive begins. So to the extent that it's pre-clearing, a lot of, basically they're trying to take out, among other things, they're trying to take out weapons depots and launching areas that could be a problem for the IDF when it actually goes in, goes in. They're doing that well. You know, it's been a number of days.

I am a little concerned that they... Way too long. Yeah, I'm a little worried about that. Because they can get out and they could also plot and plan. They can plot and plan. The military personnel, the leaders of Hamas's military wing who they really want to get, it gives them time to scatter maybe.

And it just, there's a sense of momentum that you may lose. Now look, I think there's internal debates going on in the Israeli war cabinet right now to try to figure out how to prosecute this war. And, you know, there are disagreements within the war cabinet, according to reporting in the Israeli press and according to people I'm speaking to, there are disagreements on what to do next and what to do first.

And so that's also cause for delay. Because you want to know if you should actually push for the northern front, because this country is mobilized now. They understand the threat.

How many more attacks do you need? Do you need something of that magnitude to go off on Hezbollah? Do you need something of that magnitude to go off on Hezbollah now? And does, if you want to hurt Iran, you'd wipe out Hamas and Hezbollah or diminish them to set them back decades.

The biggest misconception of what Israel deals with is when they refer to it as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That is incorrect. It is. It used to be.

Yeah, it used to be. But the Hamas cause, the Hamas movement is a proxy for Tehran. And Tehran has a number of proxies. It has Hamas. It has, to some degree, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It has Hezbollah up in the north. As you mentioned, it's got Syria in Israel's east of Israel. Iran's got a huge presence. And Iran has a huge presence.

So all these entities are proxies of Iran. And Israel's got to think holistically about the threat. It's not just about taking out the Hamas threat, because Hezbollah in the north, which is just as vile and barbaric as Hamas is in the south, has 10 times the capabilities of Hamas, 10 times the rocket capability, 10 times the personnel. In fact, the Hezbollah militias, their terrorists are better trained than Hamas because they spent the last number of years they were deployed in Syria to fight in Israel's civil war on behalf of Assad.

So they're actually better equipped. So Israel's got to think about this holistically in terms of what it's dealing with. And Iran is at the center of this. So as is written, if they take on Hezbollah, buildings will fall in Tel Aviv. I mean, there'll be problems. But are you taking on a war that would be more damaging in five years, in 10 years? And then there's going to be, right now you do have the public sentiment. And if the world is ever going to be on your side, even though some of them staggeringly are not, there would be now because we see this.

So that's what you guys, that's what they're debating over there. I would talk to Musab Hassan Youssef, whose dad was one of the founders of Hamas. Yeah, son of Hamas. Yeah, he went in, went to prison, came back. He ends up working for the Israelis. He wrote a book about it.

He's now somewhere, I think he's in the Virginia area. Here's one of the things he said about the PR war and the need to go in and how lethal these guys are cutting. I cannot convince the entire world of truth. Right now, people are emotional. They hate to see children dying, even though, you know, Hamas is killing the people at the hospital and we have evidence of that, but they still blame Israel. People can blame whoever they want, you know, but now we have to concentrate. We have to focus. Public opinion is very important, but unfortunately it's not the time to win the public opinion. It's the time to win the war against the most brutal terrorist organization living today, you know, and later on when people look back at the situation, they will understand what we were doing. We should not be afraid of the public opinion.

We have to explain as much as we can, you know, but now we have to concentrate on our goals. Is he right? Yeah, I mean, it's it's heartening to hear what he says. I must say, I mean, I know his story quite well and his book is quite good and he is, I have a lot of Israeli friends who are, have relationships with him. Yeah, I mean, by the way, what's interesting is, so he has all these direct ties to Hamas and he's saying these things. I'm struck by the number of Arab voices in and around Israel that are basically saying versions of what he said. So Israel has a large large Arab population inside Israel that are citizens of Israel. OK, they're they're minority. I wouldn't know that because I don't really see, you know, I'm not seeing that.

I know exactly because you're not getting covered here. So there's an Arab population in Israel. They have political parties in the Knesset.

They have representation in the top academic institutions in the Supreme Court. They have historically been very critical of Israel, even though they're citizens of Israel. Think of them as on the far left of the Israeli political spectrum. And they have mostly been historically sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative and the Palestinian cause, even though they're citizens of Israel. For the first time, I've never seen this, they are speaking out as proud citizens of Israel. There's an anchor on one of the major Israeli television broadcasters, a news anchor, Lucy Arash, who's, I've been posted on social media after this interview, I'll post on Twitter and Instagram again, just for people want to see it.

What she did on television, where she she does her broadcast every night and she's known as a fierce critic of Israeli government policy. And she said, I'm going to say something now. She said it in Hebrew. She said, I don't say that English.

I'll put the English clip up on my social media. And she said, I stand with Israel. I'm an Israeli citizen. These people who wage this barbaric attack are not me.

And I abhor them. And this is like a prominent Arab voice. And it's not getting attention over here. Is it a Muslim voice?

Yeah. And it's not getting attention over here. And so I just think this, yes, you play Son of Hamas, but there's more and more of these voices speaking out. And how could they not? Because many Arabs live in Israel as Israeli Arab citizens.

They're regular. Dan, I was struck by the fact that eighteen thousand work permits people come out of Gaza to work in Israel. I didn't know that. Eighteen thousand come through those gates every day. You know, it breaks my heart is if you look at the communities that were were targeted in the south of Israel in the October 7th invasion. Many of those communities are secular, white, liberal communities, these kibbutzes, the kibbutzim. They're peace oriented people. They actually want to coexist in many cases with Gaza.

There are volunteers from some of these kibbutzes who go to Gaza every day to pick up Palestinian children to help bring them to medical centers to get them their dialysis, whatever. I mean, there's these amazing stories. These people like this woman I'm talking about, she's dead or they've been taken hostage. These are the people they attacked. I know, but they did do research and how to get them in infiltrate military bases. They were on for hours. I saw in the manual, they thought this attack would last three to five minutes. And instead it lasted forever.

And that's what is stunning. I don't think you guys can wait. Israel can wait to the end of the war to figure out what happened. They got to find out now. I really think, I know you only have so many resources, but there's got to be somebody on this.

We were studying 9-11 while we were still mobilizing for Afghanistan. You're right. The problem is Israel, as we've talked about earlier, and it's got multi fronts that potentially are opening up.

Right. Dan Sino is going to stick around. His book's coming out because he's, I just, ironically, no one knew this was going to happen, obviously.

The Genius of Israel. If anyone knows what's going on there, he does a few more minutes with Dan and we come back. Brian Kilmeade Show. Hey, welcome back.

Got a couple more minutes here with Dan Sino. The president's got to address tonight, at which time would be great if he just addressed Iran as the major problem and talk about how, what I would love to see, and I know we don't have to do it. I made a decision to try to bring Iran back into this nuclear deal and try to bring them back into the family of nations.

It's been an epic disaster. There's reasons to believe they're behind all of this at the very least, the funding and creation of Hezbollah and Hamas, therefore X, Y, and Z. That to me would be an effective address. I don't think he's going to do that. What about Dan Sino, former former policy advisor of the Bush administration, author of The Genius of Israel, coming out in a couple of weeks.

Dan, you know communications. What do you think they're going to be in that speech tonight of from the oval? I think the president is recognizing the public opinion right now is extremely high in the United States for support of Israel. Again, as I've said earlier, not surprised to protest, despite the protest, the reality is most Americans, the overwhelming majority of Americans, look at the forces of barbarism and the forces of civilization, and they say we're on the side of the forces of civilization. And that's why you're seeing high 70s, 80s percent of Americans across the ideological spectrum saying we stand with Israel. How about this, almost 80 percent of Republicans anyway, and now it's over almost 60 percent of Democrats, up 17 points since the attack October 7th.

I don't know what the Democratic Party has been doing, but. Right, and so I think it was a wake-up call. And look, you know we've seen this before, Brian, in about a decade ago when ISIS was on the move, America's role in the Middle East was in the decline. Yeah. And overwhelming, you looked at the polls, should America be involved in the Middle East?

Overwhelming majority of Americans, no, 60, 63, 64 percent said America should reduce its presence in the Middle East. And then you remember it was in 2013 or 2014, those two hostages were beheaded by ISIS. Remember they videoed it and they broadcast it.

Jumpsuits. Right, one was Australian, one was an American reporter. And public opinion flipped overnight. Majority of Americans said we need a presence in the Middle East. We shouldn't be bailing out of Iraq and these other places so quickly. I think when Americans see that kind of barbarism, they know we need to be engaged in the world and they know whose side we need to be on. And the president needs to channel that. The president needs to express that. America is engaged in the world, it's engaged in the Middle East.

We've got to stand by our allies and we've got to confront the nucleus and the architect of the barbarism. And as you said, that is Iran. And he has to say that tonight. He's been reluctant to say it. He's not said it at all. He's barely mentioned, I don't think he's mentioned the word Iran. And he's hinted at it, you know, he's discouraged other parties from getting involved or capitalizing on this moment. He's speaking about Iran, not just Iran, but he's been speaking about Iran. But yeah, I look, once he once he talks about Iran, it does commit the U.S. in a sense to to being much more involved than I think the president wants to be. Right.

And you have to think about yourself. Is there a scenario where the next day after a successful invasion without the Israelis occupying where this doesn't become a terror den again, if Iran's allowed to continue to fund these terror networks, if Israel does real damage to Hamas and even does real damage to Hezbollah, but the Iranian regime is still intact and untouched. These terror groups will rise to fight again. I mean, that's just the reality in the near term, not in the long term, in the near term, because Iran's presence there. And does it bother you, Dan, as somebody who really understands global politics? At the same time, China's got over 100 nations in a conference for the Belt and Road program, where they give, you know, they give out loans that people can't pay back and projects that probably won't be effective. But the Belt and Road program in China looks like they're in charge. Yeah, it is. Look, look what China's done in the Middle East. China's tried to raise its presence in the Middle East, too, for this reason, because they sniff American weakness. Right. And people are tired of it. They want to worry about home, but you can't. It's going to come home. Right.

What happens in the Middle East doesn't stay in the Middle East. All right, Dan, thanks so much. Go out and pick up his book. You can preorder it. Genius of Israel. Thank you. Podcasts.com.