The Cosmopolicast

Dan and I spoke about the big stories of the week. I was so shocked by the news from the US that almost I forgot we’re now closer to war in Europe than we’ve been since 1945—and Israel’s strike on Doha already seems as if it was years ago. But we covered it all.

Here’s the speech that I found moving, perhaps simply because it was appropriate.

This is not, actually, an episode of Critical Conditions. It’s a regular Cosmopolicast. But I haven’t yet figured out how to separate the two.

In this episode, former Canadian diplomat Chris Alexander and I discuss Russia’s post-Soviet trajectory, the rise of Vladimir Putin, and the West’s repeated misjudgments in dealing with Moscow. We discuss the endu…

In the inaugural episode of our podcast Critical Conditions, we discuss India’s uneasy place between the US and China, Trump’s tariff war, the fragility of democracy, the Supreme Court’s indulgence of executive power, the Houthis and the Red Sea, rumors about Venezuela and Greenland, and the surreal spectacle of Trumpism.

Future episodes will be paywalled, so consider upgrading your subscription!

Dan Perry led the AP’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East—from Pakistan through north Africa—for most of the 2010s. Before that, he led Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean for AP. He also served as the Foreign Press Association chairman in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. He now writes at Ask Questions Later. I thought he’d be a good person to talk to about a question one of our ME201 students asked: Why does the media keep getting things wrong?

I’ve written about this before—in fact, I’ve written about it in the “About” section of this newsletter, because the Cosmopolitan Globalist was founded in response to this problem. I’ve also written about it here:

* The Media Revolution and the New Man: Manufactured outrage and the breakdown of liberal democracy.

I have five free gift subscriptions to give away for Ask Questions Later. First come, first served.

Show notes

Matti Friedman’s article about the media’s coverage of Israel.

Here’s where Dan gets his news:

Basically, the baseline is phone alerts from the usual suspects—AP, Reuters, the NYT, the WaPo and so on. Nothing original there. I also get alerts from many Israeli media outlets, since these days I follow that story very closely. On occasion this will come at me from X as well, but I do not want to give that platform too much further credence. Then I get a variety of newsletters from a wide range of publications: These include The Hill, Newsweek’s “The Gist of It,” Semafor which does a decent roundup, and others. I also get Bloomberg newsletters for Tech and Business. And I also receive and read newsletters from The Forward, where I am a columnist.

Hardly a day goes by when I do not consult the website of The Economist, which is probably my favorite publication. Every now and then I will read the NYT and WaPo opinion sections, as well as that of Haaretz, which is Israel’s liberal standard bearer and absolutely a world-class newspaper.

And, of course, I get curated pushes from both Substack and Medium (I far prefer Substack, but Medium is oddly more proactive by email). And I am by now an avid consumer of quite a few Substack publications, in addition to The Cosmopolitan Globalist. Ron Fournier does a great job on US politics—more personal than Heather Cox Richardson, though I love her work (I like The Liberal Patriot’s take on things also). Chris Riback does a fantastic job of curating the news in all verticals with some style—highly recommended. David Andelman brings decades of foreign correspondent experience to a weekly analysis of global events and elections around the world. I love Cliff Schecter (Blue Amp) and Matt Robison for their passion for liberal causes. Marc Schulman’s Tel Aviv Diary is a crucial (yet these days dispiriting daily slog through the misery of the Israel-Palestine situation. Ted Anthony’s Significant But Unsorted and Nick Thorpe’s A Kind of Solution are eclectic and compelling on the cultural and societal side. And Larry Derfner (Now That’s Impressive (Not!) writes with curmudgeonly humor that I love.

And here’s a sample of what you’d read if you subscribed to Ask Questions Later:

* Israel is self-destructing: A harrowing read for anyone who wants Israel to continue to exist. There are very big problems:

* Perhaps humanity is artificial? An unsentimental look at the challenges of AI (part of a series):

* Dear Palestinians: Statehood is not a right: In which Dan, a supporter of the two-state solution, nonetheless tries to put things in some perspective.

* Putin is making Trump look like a chump: On Ukraine. It's odd.

* Know what? Most advances came from the “elites.” Enough with the populism:

* The War on Truth: A five-part series on the Authoritarian’s Game Plan:

The UN Security Council will hold an emergency session today (it’s now Sunday in Paris) to discuss the Israeli security cabinet’s approval of a plan to seize Gaza City. The hostages’ families have called for a general strike over the decision.

I spoke to Vivian Bercovici and Judith Deborah Levy to ask how they feel about this.

In short: not good.

It’s a long podcast—we had a lot to talk about—so I’ve posted a transcript below if you’re in a hurry.

* Bucking IDF warnings, security cabinet approves Netanyahu plan to conquer Gaza City. Residents will have until October 7 to evacuate; proposal more limited than PM’s previously-stated intention to take over entire Strip, but official indicates IDF will later move on to other areas.

* Masses rally against Gaza City takeover plan, urge soldiers to refuse, seek general strike. Tel Aviv’s Ayalon highway shut down as protesters light bonfires in the road; relatives of hostages bewail “eternal war-mongers” for choosing to “sacrifice” their loved ones.

Claire: This is the Cosmopolitan Globalist. And I’m Claire Berlinski. I’m here with two North American Israeli women, and we’re going to talk about everything that’s been happening in Israel and Gaza. Vivian Bercovici is the author of the State of Tel Aviv, which I’ve cross-posted frequently. One of the best newsletters on Substack, if you’d like to keep up with events in Israel, Tel Aviv and Judith Lee-vee is a guest on our podcast—

Judith: Leh-vy, Leh-vy.

Claire: Leh-vy. I’m never gonna say that, Judith. I’m sorry. It’s too late. I’ve known her for, what, 35 years and I still can’t get her name right. I didn’t introduce Vivian as Ber-co-vee-chee at least.

Vivian: No, but I do have to mention that I no longer live in Tel Aviv. So it’s now called State of Tel Aviv and Beyond. I moved a year ago to a kibbutz in Southern Israel near Sderot, and not too far from the Gaza border. So, that’s where I live now, Claire.

Claire: So, Judith and Vivian are both long-term Israelis. How long have you both been there? Actually, Vivian, you’re pretty recent compared to Judith.

Judith: I’ve been here about 24 years-ish.

Claire: Vivian was the former Canadian ambassador to Israel. So she has a lot of insight into what’s going on on the Canada side of this.

I just wanted to ask how you’re both doing?

Judith: Oy. Um, you know. I feel like I say the same thing each time. That we are living this bizarre kind of duality where we are living our normal lives to the best of our ability. And so we go to the movies, and we make dinner, and we have friends over, and we cook, and we go to the cafe, and we—you know, like normal—but there is this underlying insanity, and despair, and terror that's right underneath.

And so for me personally, it’s this wave, where sometimes what I’m constantly pushing down just comes roaring up. There are moments when it just comes roaring up and, then I really kind of … fall apart. Now, this I also think is an American thing, because all the Israeli-Israelis around me, they also are very aware of everything under the surface, everything that’s above the surface, but they don’t freak out the way I do and the way other Americans I know do. I’ve been here such a long time, and that will never change—that not having grown up with this kind of stuff. I will never, ever get used to it. So, the last time this occurred for me was when the snuff video of Evyatar David came out, the video of him being forced to dig his own grave.

And I—the combination of the event itself and the reaction to it, or non-reaction to it, sent me into a complete tailspin for a couple of days, you know, and then I just have to shove it back in my mental closet and get on with life. And that’s what it’s been like for almost two years—for all of us.

Claire: Vivian?

Vivian: It’s so hard to articulate the agony that I think we’re all living with. I’m not sure that, Judith, your reaction has to do with being American or not, or it’s just maybe who you are. Most of my social and day-to-day interactions here are with Israelis, what I call real Israelis, unlike me, the people who, you know, the seventh-generation types, the kibbutznik types, the people who have lived here all their lives, the real salt of the earth.

And privately, I find they feel every bit the same way as you do. I think that the level of, uncertainty, worry, concern, panic, fear about where this country finds itself today is unbearable. And one of the things that I try to do—I’m not just gonna deflect, Claire, and speak about Judith's reaction. I mean, my own is: I feel that I am living on truly on a knife edge every moment.

I feel like a bunch of raw exposed nerves. And one of the things that is so important that I try to convey, in my writing and in my podcasts to people outside of Israel, is: Whenever there’s a crisis in the world, politicians and media and NGOs go out of their way to say, “It’s not the people of, let’s say, Iran, we have a problem with. It’s the government and the leadership with which we have a problem.” But no one seems to cut us that slack.

And I would say that based on polls, over 80 percent—this isn’t me making things up; there are successive polls that have been coming out for months, really since the last hostage-release agreement in February—over 80 percent today of Israelis want the war to end now, all the hostages to be released, even if Hamas is left standing.

And we’re never given that room to breathe. We’re all demonized as being these horrible, evil people. And our evil, of course extends to Jews around the world, right? So I feel like Judith. I mean, we go through our days, and sometimes, often, I find myself sitting there thinking, “How can you do this?”

It happened last week. I went—actually, I moved to a new house, and I’ve been here for a year now, and I really need a dining set. And I entertain a lot and I like to cook. And I went and I chose a set. Then, in the store, I thought, “How can you do this? How can you even think of doing this?” And this was, Judith, days after, of course, we saw those horrific videos of Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski.

And I just—I came home. I couldn’t buy it. I mean, it sounds so stupid, but it’s very hard to live and breathe when so much is at stake.

Judith: I find something that helps me with that—because I have that all the time—this kind of dissonance between the small cheerful minutiae of my day, which feel like—feel like I don’t deserve to be experiencing that because I can’t solve this greater problem.

Vivian: Yeah.

Judith: So something that really helps me with that is actually getting out and being with Israelis. You know, hardcore, old-school, seven-generation, real-deal Israelis, because—I’ll give you an example. A couple of months ago I got invited to—do you know what urban sketching is? It’s when a bunch of artists go to a city together and just plop themselves on benches with their watercolors and their ink, and they just draw stuff, you know, draw buildings, draw people. It’s really, really fun. It’s really fun. And so I got invited to do some urban sketching in Tel Aviv. And so we went to the city and we went to the Yemenite quarter. And this was on—

Vivian: Paradise, paradise for a sketch. Okay.

Judith: —Friday morning. Friday morning. And I’m telling you, the place was absolutely jam-packed. And it was like every single cafe is just spilling over with cool young people with their tattoos. It was just this vision of healthy, healthy young people everywhere, singing, like suddenly, like spontaneously getting up and dancing to the music coming from the next restaurant down.

It was the most wonderful thing. And this is, of course, in the middle of what’s going on. Everyone has somehow decided, “We are going to not just find a way to push it aside, but we’re going to celebrate the life that we actually are still fortunate enough to have.”

And so I look at these kids—we stopped off somewhere to get something to eat. And the staff was changing over. And the new guy coming in behind the counter was a drag queen who hadn’t gone home to change, right? And he was magnificent with his gold and his leopard skin. He was magnificent. Magnificent. And he comes in and the music is playing and everybody’s dancing and we’re all stuffing our faces with this wonderful food. And it was just so unbelievably healthy. And I thought, “You know, the world doesn’t want to believe that this is us.”

The world doesn’t want to believe that—this is the kind of culture that we—we’re something entirely different from this. And I, at this point, have given up on trying to convince anybody of anything because it’s too big now. It’s just too big. And so all that I can do is just jump right into the middle of that and celebrate it along with them. It’s the best I can do.

Vivian: You know, it’s so interesting for so many reasons. I want to share an experience that was very intense that I had yesterday, but before that, I had been living—after my service as ambassador—in the center of the universe, the beating heart of Tel Aviv at Gordon and Rabin Square, and was deeply involved in the protests regarding judicial reform.

And then disaster struck. And it changed after October 7th. So in spite of all this kind of vitality that you’re describing, which is there, it’s, it is a shadow of what it was, Tel Aviv. People have, actually, a lot of them have left the hardcore Tel Aviv who were my friends, many journalists, artists, they've left

Claire: Really?

Vivian: Mm-hmm. Since October 2nd. Yeah. Because we—those of us who were really living in it—it felt very gloomy. It wasn’t the real Tel Aviv. It became almost like a bridge and tunnel thing, you know?

Judith: Mm-hmm. Right.

Vivian: I know, for Canadian, I laid quite a metaphor on you, huh? But what I wanted to share with you guys is yesterday, at five o’clock, there was a gathering on a moshav in central Israel called Kfar Ahim—and it’s where the Minister of Defense, Israel Katz lives.

And it was convened by the Hostage Family Forum, which of course is the main support NGO for the hostage families. And I’ve been working with them a lot since October 7th. And I sat here in my house and I was kind of tired. I didn’t sleep very well on Thursday night, ‘cause I haven't slept well since those videos came out.

And I thought, “Oh, I want to stay home and cook.” And again, I’m like, “How dare you? How dare you.” There were going to be released hostages there, and family members, how do you not go? And so I called one of my neighbors and I said, “How would you like to join me?” Real Israeli, never goes to these things, works on detaching because she feels this sense of powerlessness—“What can I do?”

And she said, “Sure, Viv, I’ll come with you.” And we went. It was—and I’ve been to so many events that are pulled together for so many different reasons. But there I was, standing feet away. They set up this long table and it was set with chairs, with the photograph of each hostage who remains in captivity.

So 50 chairs, and a plate with a quarter piece of pita at each place. And I was literally on one side of this long table, and just across it, three feet away, four feet away, was Iair Horn who was released and torn from his brother’s arms in February. His mother Ruti who spoke with me for a brief interview, the parents of Matan Angrest, an IDF soldier, there were many others that—I’m sorry if I don't recall all the names at the moment—but there were Ohad Ben Ami, who was also released in February. And his wife.

And they spoke so movingly, Ohad Ben Ami is from Be’eri. He was taken hostage in his underwear, literally. And he said, “I’m not religious. I don’t pray. I don’t do any of these things. But when I was in captivity, I did. And we all turned to faith in some way.” And this was before he did the blessing over the wine and this pita, and it was just so moving.

He said, “Friday nights were the hardest for us, and also the most uplifting. And they were the hardest because of course we would all think of where we should be, and wanted to be—with our families. And yet we were in this hell. And it was the most uplifting because we all shared our favorite memories, our favorite food, how we liked the fish to be cooked, the really simple, beautiful parts of life.” And he said that that communal caring that they were able to maintain, shackled and starving underground in these tunnels, is what sustained them.

But some of them are alone now, and they’ve been alone now for over 170 days. And we’ve seen Evyatar David, unfortunately. Who was digging his own grave in a video that was released last week. It’s thought that he’s not alone. He’s still with his best friend from childhood, but others are. So it was—

Judith: —we didn’t see Guy [Gilboa Dalal] though. We didn’t see Guy.

Vivian: No. He was behind a curtain. We think he was behind a curtain. That’s what the intelligence commentary has been saying. Okay. But the thing is, like, I’m standing there in this beautiful kibbutz, surrounded by so much pain, and I don’t want to use the word “resilience,” because I really, really cringe at that word now. I really do. We’re not superhuman here. We’re not superheroes. We’re getting ground down. And I think people need to also understand that. But my friend said, “Thank you so much for opening my eyes. Thank you for taking me.” Because we can’t run away from this. And we can’t. We all have to take it to the streets. I think millions of us have to take to the streets to end this insanity.

Judith: Will it it accomplish anything though? I mean, we go to the streets and what happens? You know the nature of the system. Sorry—

Vivian: Not millions.

Judith: Yeah.

Vivian: I think we need to—

Judith: —well, the other thing that could actually force a change? If the Chief of Staff says, “You know what? I’m not doing this.” That would force a change. Because then, because all the parents of all these reservists, and all these young soldiers would say, “The Chief of Staff is saying, ‘Don’t go. Stay home.’ And that changes everything.

Vivian: The Chief of Staff has said that.

Judith: He didn’t say, “I’m not doing this.”He said, “I think this is a bad idea.”

Vivian: Yeah. He’s come pretty close. And we know that the Chief of Staff and most of the top brass in the IDF, and this, of course—it’s important for your listeners to understand, Claire—this is a Chief of Staff appointed by Netanyahu five months ago. So it’s not like he can say, “Oh, this is one of those lefties from the other government.” No, this is his guy.

And he’s not alone. And I think that it is the IDF top brass saying, “We can’t do this. They’ve said publicly, “We’re going into a black hole. We’re going into a trap. This is gonna be our Vietnam.” So we’ll see what happens. But I think that he’s been very bold, the Chief of Staff, in challenging Prime Minister Netanyahu openly.

Vivian: Sorry, Claire, you were about to say something.

Claire: What I was going to say was I was very struck listening to you, because obviously, when you talk about the agony you’re experiencing, one of the things that is most agonizing, clearly, is the fate of the hostages and your awareness of the hostages, at all time. I saw, the other day—do you know who Azealia Banks is? She’s a rapper.

Vivian: The name is familiar, yeah.

Claire: I came across a tweet in which she said, “I didn’t realize there were American hostages.”

And that’s not surprising, actually, given the way the media has covered it. I just find that significant. Both as a sign of the strange way that the media has covered this, and the degree to which Americans have lost a sense of solidarity with one another. I am certain that had this happened 30 years ago, people would’ve known there were American hostages.

Vivian: They were Jewish Americans.

Claire: Even then.

Vivian: But today, yeah—that’s because we have become the personification of all things evil. I’m sorry I can’t remember his name, no matter how much of a celebrity he is, there’s an African American podcaster, Myron Gaines, something like that, who recently had on a number of his peers, and they were just saying, you know, “Hitler was right.” And it went viral.

Claire: I saw that, yes. I thought the only thing that was comforting was that they were so obviously stupid that I figure they could never pull off a genocide.

Vivian: Well, they’re obviously stupid on many levels because they clearly don't understand how Hitler felt about black people. They might have actually been a lower form of life in his eyes than Jews. You know, I was—a week or two ago, I went in with the IDF spokespersons unit. They took a group of journalists. There were about 15 or 20 into just inside Gaza where they stage the aid distribution.

Right. So all this aid is inspected in Israel to make sure there’s no weapons or other contraband sort of stuffed in the sacks of flour. And then it’s allowed to pass through the border to the other side. And it waits on the Gaza side for the UN—not UNRWA, other UN organizations and other NGOs. They have trucks.

They’re supposed to come pick it up and take it to distribute to the population. And the big guys were there, you know, the big American media. And I use “guys” loosely because some of them, of course, were women. And one of them was obsessed. Obsessed. And she was on a major American network. With the fact that Israel allowed trucks to enter and come out.

And then often they would be directed to enter again on a similar route. And this just outraged her because how could Israel do that when they knew that, you know, gangs and others were waiting to ambush and steal the food. And the real issue is, exactly how many routes do you think there are? 30 years, super- experienced journalist who’s covered every famine in the world.

How many routes do you think there are from here into Gaza on which a truck can drive safely? There are three, I asked. She assumed there apparently were 300, and this became the obsessive focus of her coverage that day, which so missed the point. The point was that the food is here. It is not a food shortage. The issue is Hamas, criminal activity.

Claire: So hold on a second. She allowed, however, in her report that the food was being stolen? Because recently, the media line has been, “There is no evidence that Hamas is stealing the food.”

Vivian: She allowed, she didn’t specify it was Hamas. She said, you know, criminal gangs, whoever, civilians also are in desperation, ambushing these trucks, right?

I mean, pick your poison. But not that I’m equating civilians with Hamas, ‘cause I’m not, or with criminal gangs. But her concern was that the trucks are being ambushed and the food aid isn’t making it to those who need it. And on that point, she’s right. But with respect to the number of passable routes available in the midst of a very kinetic war ongoing, and the fact, you know, she says, “Well, you IDF—you’re responsible. This is your war.” And it’s like, “No, actually, we’re trying to prevent the trucks from being ambushed. We are not responsible. That is the UN’s job.” And they’re the ones who liaise with Hamas—like, this effort that the media seems to make, to avoid imputing any responsibility to Hamas is just breathtaking. It’s—

Claire: —it’s really spooky. It’s as if there’s some central—I’m not saying there really is, I’m saying it is as if there is some central coordinating committee sending out the new line every day. As I said just a moment ago, including, “There is no evidence that Hamas is stealing the food.”

And when you read that, I’m sure it sounds perfectly plausible, if you haven’t been reading about this carefully for a while. “Well, there’s no evidence—of course, the Israelis are lying about this. They just want to starve Palestinians.” But if you’ve been paying close attention, you know that there is tons of evidence—and videos of Hamas themselves, sitting there, stuffing their faces and laughing about it and filming themselves. What more evidence do you need? So why all of a sudden does every media outlet say this? Are they repeating each other? Is that all it is?

Judith: Well, it’s not exactly all of a sudden. I mean, right at the beginning of the war, at the very, very beginning of the war, one of the big machers, I can’t remember which one, said—from underground—“The welfare of the Palestinians above us is the responsibility of Israel and the UN.

Claire: Yep. I remember.

Judith: And everybody said, “Oh, okay.”

Claire: The context in which he said that is particularly important because he was being asked, “You know, you have 500 kilometers of tunnels under there, which, you know, that’s a really good bomb shelter. Why don’t you let people take shelter under there?” “No, no. That’s for fighters. Taking care of the people up there? That’s for someone else. The fact that he said that says everything—

Judith: —and the fact that it was swallowed, it was swallowed as perfectly reasonable—

Claire: And the circumstances he describes, 500 kilometers worth of bomb shelters that they won’t let the civilians into—yet everyone pours scorn on the idea that Hamas is using the civilians there as human shields. I don’t know what more you could ask for as evidence of this fact—

Vivian: —I don’t think—sorry, Claire—I don’t think anyone’s—there’s this collective hysteria that has just kind of taken over and seeped into so many institutional mindsets. Media. Many governments. They don’t want evidence. They don’t—in my view, it’s a different iteration, but it’s very similar to what happened in the ‘30s in Europe. There are people who know it’s wrong, but they’re scared to speak out, for all kinds of reasons. But there are many, many people who want to believe the worst of us, of Jews and Israelis.

They want to demonize us, and they will believe anything that is served up that does that. I mean, that’s very fatalistic, but it’s the only conclusion I can come to, because I’m watching otherwise, you know, rational, intelligent people, like the journalists who were there.

The other thing that’s lost in this, it’s really, really important, that the 30-year-veteran of famines and wars working for a major network in the US was promoting—the thing that she was not addressing is that this is the first—and I’m relying on experts, many of whom do not support Israel, who have said this—this is the first conflict where humanitarian aid is needed and the humanitarian workers are forced to operate in an active war zone. Why? Because Hamas has refused to allow the civilians to separate and to be segregated in a safe zone.

They have stopped and blocked that, actively, since October 7th, and they were aided and abetted in that by UNRWA leadership: “No, no, we will not move them. They will stay in their homes.” Israel was desperate to move them to an area in southern Gaza, into Egypt. This is what happens in wars like this, even in Sudan, in the most horrible wars.

There is a land area made for humanitarian safe zones, but not here. And that’s a really important point that Hamas and Pidge have blocked that. And these humanitarian workers, many, they’e heroes—

Claire: Hamas and who?

Vivian: Palestinian Islamic Jihad—PIJ, we call it for short.

Judith: Yeah, I read that. I’m not a lawyer by any means, but according to international, humanitarian law in times of war, the two sides in a conflict agree to a safe zone called a safe zone, S-A-F-E. And the problem is that throughout the war, Hamas, exactly as you say, has refused to agree to any safe zones whatsoever for any Palestinians, anywhere in the strip. And so Israel has taken the next best thing, which is called a safer zone, which is a zone that’s declared, basically, unilaterally by only one of the parties.

Now notice here, this is us declaring the safer zone for them. So it’s not to protect our people, it’s to protect their people. And then bad things happen—and it’s all our fault. I mean, we’re—

Vivian: —we can’t win. We can’t. And this is a really huge issue that has been absolutely ignored by the media, by the best of the media. The other issue that’s been totally ignored is Qatar.

Judith: Yeah.

Vivian: Qatar hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East. Qatar finances Hamas. Qatar hosts Hamas leaders in Doha. Just this last week, Qatar spoke out and said that it did not support the goal of demilitarizing Hamas and Gaza. And yet nobody is talking about that. Nobody talks about Qatar.

Qatar has donated so generously to top American universities, invested in media. I was reading something yesterday about how the Qataris own more prime real estate in London than the Royal Family. Their holdings are massive, and astonishing. And that’s just one city. But nobody talks about this. Why? Why?

Claire: The formulation “Nobody talks about this” is—it’s a little bit … conspiracy theory. I think the simple answer is that foreign news coverage has almost disappeared. The only subject that ever gets covered is Israel, and—Anne Applebaum published a really well-reported piece on Sudan in The Atlantic the other day, which I want to draw everyone’s attention to.

And I would be surprised if it received a tenth the attention of any of the dozen-odd articles they’ve published about Israel recently. Because once you’ve started focusing obsessively on a certain thing, people become interested in it, and they want to read more about it . People feel like they know something about this conflict.

Most people, I don’t think, are—I don’t think that most people are desperately eager to view Jews as villains. I think that they’ve been reading media coverage written by people who are desperately eager to portray Jews as villains. And I think if you are an unsophisticated consumer of news, a very decent person who has other things going on in his or her life, a family, a job that has nothing to do with international news, then you see these headlines over and over and you come to the conclusion, “This is monstrous. These Israelis are starving these Palestinian children.”

Judith: Well, it’s this combination of confirmation bias plus the ease of groupthink. So if you don’t know anything about something, and then somebody who is in a position of authority says X is true, then every time you see anything that seems to confirm that X is true, you say, “Well, it must be true. I mean, they said it’s true.” And then, of course, when you notice that everyone around you who is on the side of the Good, on the side of the underdog, and on the side of opposition to oppression and all, they’re all saying the same exact thing—it’s easier, it’s just easier to go along.

Why do any due diligence? Why check anything? Why read anything? Why second guess? It feels good.

Claire: Most people—sorry—most people don’t even know how to do that. They would have no idea where to start in thinking about, “Does this newspaper article—does it employ a framing that’s biased? Are all the facts in it correct? What facts have been omitted?” That’s not something most people can do.

Judith: I read that Bibi wants to sue The New York Times for blood libel for that photograph that they put above the fold.

Claire: Good luck with that.

Judith: No, but I mean the louder we are about this, the better.

Claire: That was a disgrace. That was a disgrace. Perhaps you should tell listeners what you’re referring to, because I’m not sure everyone knows.

Judith: Okay. Um, some journalists went into Gaza and were running around looking for ways to spin the Israel-starves-Palestinian-children story. So they found a mom with a child—

Claire: It was the Turkish state news agency that went in.

Judith: Oh, so the New York Times used the Turkish—oh, I didn’t even know that, that’s a nice little detail. I didn’t even know that. Okay. So this poor young Palestinian mother is cradling an infant who is in very, very bad shape. You can see the bones of his spine sticking out. He is very, very, very unhealthy.

Clearly, definitely, looks like a starving child. They take the photographs. The New York Times publishes this above the fold in a big picture. It’s like a quarter of the page. Huge picture. With this story about, you know, illustrating the fact that we’re starving Palestinian children. What they did not include in the article was the fact that the child had either cystic fibrosis or cerebral palsy—

Claire: Cystic fibrosis.

Judith: Yeah. Cystic fibrosis. Who had been in treatment. And so it was a complete fabrication, essentially. And the other other thing that they left out of the story is that the mother, when she was being interviewed, she said, “My child has cystic fibrosis. We really need help. Can you please help us? We really need help. My child has cystic fibrosis.” She’s not complicit in this scam at all. When the story was published, all of that was edited out. And it was just “Poor, tragic mom with her starving child, being starved to death by the Jews.”

Claire: They also edited out the part of the photo that showed his perfectly healthy brother—

Judith: —perfectly healthy brother. You know, and then there was another child, they did a similar thing with another child that looked, very, very gaunt. And this kid has another ailment, and he’s in Italy getting treated.I mean, it’s all fabrication!

Claire: It was the Israelis who enabled him to get to Italy for treatment.

Judith: Yes, yes. I mean, the number of times, the number of times—backing up a little, there have been reports, when the Israelis go into homes inside Gaza during this war, into terrorist homes, and they find papers from Israeli hospitals from where that family had taken their kid to be treated in the Israeli hospital. It just, it makes your head spin.

Vivian: There’s one of the guards who was with the group guarding Ohad Ben Ami, and the other five, his child was treated for cancer and cured in Israel. And the former hostages said that he was the cruelest, the cruelest and most sadistic with them. I just—I have to just push back very briefly on the suggestion that I was a conspiracy theorist. I’m saying that with a smile, for people who can’t see me. With respect to my comments about Qatar, you know, why is no one covering this? And I’m going to stick to that, because Qatar is not being covered. Qatar is not being held to account by this extremely diligent media that jumps on and creates false narratives about Israel.

And I think that this continued kind of refusal to cover Qatar and ask the tough questions is very revealing, with respect to that particular photograph and the disgusting story around it. Whereas Netanyahu may be correct, I actually think he should stick to his day job, and perhaps this is not widely known, develop a really capable, resourced media arm of the Prime Minister’s office in order to handle communications. Because right now there is nothing.

Claire: Who in the world has not said this already! I mean, for goodness sake, everyone is telling them this. Everyone. Even people who don’t like Israel are telling them, “You can’t do this. You’re a modern nation-state. You need to have an English speaker, in a press office, who can answer journalist’s queries. What is the thinking there? What is the thinking?

Vivian: Can I jump in? ‘Cause I'm pretty familiar with—

Claire: —Yeah, please.

Vivian: This is something that we have seen kind of develop. There’s a continuum over the period of Netanyahu’s service and tenure, and it’s become very pronounced over the last 10 years or so. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it’s very widely known, is pretty defanged. Much of the communication would come from them, in a properly, I’m going to say functioning, government. They simply have neither the resources nor the room. Okay. Also, the really important foreign relationships are all managed under the Prime Minister’s office. And so all roads really lead to two people in this government. And that’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Strategic Affairs, and Bibi’s right-hand, closest advisor, and most trusted advisor, Ron Dermer.

You know, we see the outlets that they choose to meet with and the independent podcasters, and almost, I think 100 percent, they’re foreign. They are American. They do not challenge the Prime Minister when they meet with him. And he likes that. He’s very good, in his mind, at messaging. I think he’s a brilliant orator. He’s an absolute genius. And his facility with language is peerless, probably among Western leaders.

Claire: It’s not a high bar.

Vivian: He’s a beautiful speaker. He speaks and communicates very, very effectively. But what’s kind of veered off course, in my view, is the message. And understanding the importance of having interlocutors for the media who are independent, truly independent, obviously working with, but independent of the Prime Minister’s office, who understands media, whose first language is English, who understand the nuance of Western culture and journalism, cause it’s very different from the way it’s practiced here. And who can provide the right information. But regrettably, I think that we’ve come to a point where these two top officials in the government trust no one but themselves to do that job. And this is the outcome, unfortunately.

Claire: Do they have, in your view, an understanding of what is going on in the media universe, in the social universe beyond Israel?

Vivian: Do they realize what—no, no.

Claire: So, they are unaware of the gravity of the problem, which means that they’re living in a total fantasy land about something—

Judith: How can that be? How can it be? Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t know what’s being said about us? How can that be?

Vivian: Oh, he knows. He knows what’s being said and I’m sure Dermer does as well. That’s not what I meant. Do they understand how critical it is that we develop some kind of plan to manage and respond in an organized, purposeful, strategic way? No, I think they think they can handle it. And Exhibit A, in support of my contention, is that they don’t have a media team. They do clearly seem to think that they are the answer.

Judith: Well, now I’m gonna say something that really is conspiracy-theorish, which is that we also have the X factor of Sara. Because we have had Noa Tishby, we have had Eylon Levy. These people have all been—poof—vanished because she can’t stand them. So I’m just gonna throw that out there. We can move on now.

Claire: We’re talking about Bibi’s wife, the execrable Sara. Do Israelis understand how serious a problem this is? Both the problem of the media coverage of Israel in the world at large, and the lack of a strategic response to it?

Judith: I would say yes. Both problems. I would say the people that I’ve talked to, yeah.

Vivian: I agree.

Judith: I mean, we can’t—we can’t not see an entire bridge in Australia packed, heaving with people screaming jihad. I mean, we can’t not see that. And, also the fact that, like, there was an article that I read just this morning that we’re being warned about Greece, because there is now a movement, an organized movement in Greece to harass all Israeli tourists everywhere in Greece because we are all from the IDF and therefore we are all child killers.

This is what I read. And so, Greece will not welcome the Jewish child killers and say—we can’t miss this. I mean, we know there’s a big problem here, a big problem.

Vivian: There’s all, yeah, there have been a number of cruise ships with Israeli passengers that have been refused, not allowed to dock in at Greek ports.

There have been Israeli tourists who have been beaten up. This is in Greece, but this is actually all over Europe too. This is happening, and in fact, I’m going to be traveling with my daughter, in a few weeks, to Europe. And of course, you know, we speak flawless English and have Canadian passports, but we’re also talking about how to hide the fact that we are who we are.

And, you know, my children who have been raised—my father was a survivor, and my children have been raised by me to try to kind of, you know, diminish the burden that we live with, that my dad lived with, that I lived with, and to be proud. And so they look at me and they say, “You? You’re telling us to do this?”

Judith: Wow.

Vivian: And I’m like, listen, it’s not shameful. This is how they survived in the war. This is how people survived, as they had to be clever about where, when, if, and how they disclose their true identity. I think that it’s important to mention at this point as well, you know, regarding your question about “Do Israelis see and feel and understand this,” Claire, over 80 percent—I said this at the beginning of our discussion—over 80 percent of Israelis oppose the government’s decision- making and conduct.

Even Likud supporters, the majority of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political supporters, oppose what this government is doing. And what is widely understood here, that may not be widely understood outside of Israel, is that the decision-making that has been taken since March with respect to how to handle the hostage issue, how to handle the war, they are absolutely, transparently political decisions meant to appease the right-wing nationalist extremists in his government who hold a very small number of seats in the Knesset, but wield enormous power because if they leave the coalition, they bring down the government, and Bibi cannot abide that.

And so he is, you know, literally, they’ve got a knife to his throat. And he caves. And if you look at this last decision—“We’re going into Gaza, we’re gonna occupy”—and initially, you know, on Monday or Tuesday when they first said it, they were saying, “We’re going to fully occupy. We’re going to not bring in the PA or Hamas. We’re going to bring in a multilateral force led by Arabs.” It’s changed—every day it changes five different times. We’re now at the point where we’re maybe gonna, sort of, kind of, totally, somewhat occupy Gaza City and then move on here.

But what’s important is, who supported that? And who supported that openly, from the outset, were Benjamin Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, and the two extreme right-wing nationalists, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Who opposed it? The IDF Chief of Staff, the head of Mossad, the Minister of— darn, it’s slipping my mind for a moment. I’m sorry. Everyone else in the security cabinet, …. the head of Mossad is not in the security cabinet. Everyone else in the security cabinet opposed it.

And there was a 10-hour meeting yesterday, 10-hour meeting at which apparently there was very significant tension. And the IDF Chief of Staff said things to the effect that, “I cannot do this. I can’t lead these people. I will do what the government orders, but you must understand what you’re asking me to do here. You’re asking me to lead our soldiers into a battle that will be ruin us for us. And my oath is to protect the security of this country and the people.” And basically what he’s saying is, “You, Prime Minister, are putting me in a position where I have to choose between my oath and your political directives. Please, please, engage in some sober reflection.”

Now, we know that the outcome of that meeting was inconclusive last night, so, and we know that Netanyahu has kind of pulled back. It’s really important for people in Greece and everywhere to understand that we have this government with which we profoundly disagree.

Claire: What percentage of Israelis, according to polls, say that they profoundly disagree with this?

Vivian: Over 80 in polls, because polls—it started at around 70 in February, March, when that big chunk of hostages was released. And I personally think there were two things that shook this country and also many Americans and foreigners to their core.

One was what I call the Auschwitz weekend. I was actually on live television covering that for six hours, and that was the day that Ohad Ben Ami, Or Levy, and Eli Sharabi were released. And they looked like survivors of Auschwitz. And that was a very, very difficult moment. And in that same period, of course, the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two beautiful, orange-haired babies who had been murdered by Hamas or PIJ, we’re not sure exactly whom, with their bare hands. They had been murdered with the terrorist’s bare hands. And the return of those bodies was another just unbearable moment for this country. And those two events, coming so close to together, shook this country.

And we know that they, they kind of fortified the resolve of President Trump and Steve Witkoff to do everything possible. They have been the champions of the hostages and the civilians in this country, not Benjamin Netanyahu. That is the widespread perception, understanding, feeling. The polls, immediately after the release of those three hostages—emaciated, skeletal—went to 70 percent immediately, and 60 percent, at that time, of Likud supporters said, enough. Khalas, in Arabic. Enough, we have to stop this now. That has not changed. It’s only gotten worse for the government. It’s now well over 80 percent. And Judith’s nodding as I speak—

Judith: Everything you’re saying. Everything you’re saying. And also, another really important factor here is that in addition to the desperation to get the hostages back, we have a population where everyone we know has a reservist who has gone in and in, over and over and over and over—the number of soldiers I know personally who need mental health treatment now, because first of all, what they have seen is so horrible, that they have had to do this over and over and over again, that their lives that they had, they were forced to leave behind by reserve duty, have collapsed.

And this is—it’s a national crisis. And this is part of Zamir’s—the Chief of Staff— this is part of his consideration and should be part of his consideration. It is not just a matter of sending more 18-year-olds in as cannon fodder, which is disgusting, and sickening enough as it is, but to say to all these reservists, “Okay, pack up again.”

This is a little country, and we, the proportion of young, young men and women who have been pushed beyond their limits by this war, is much, much greater than you can imagine.

Vivian: There have been men—I mean, if you’re over the age of, depending on your unit, but usually 40 for combat, 45 for some other units, you’re exempted from military service. So many men in their late 40s, in their early 50s, have shown up and are doing combat duty. And some have fallen. And so I just want to add to what you were saying, Judith, because it’s such an important point. We need 250,000 combat soldiers to support this renewed … adventure, I’m going to call it.

That is most of the Reserve Army compliment in this country. And the reservists are the backbone of the army and the reservists have—they typically serve 30 to 60 days, depending on their unit a year. That’s understood. That’s part of what we call the social contract in this country. The majority of reservists have served over 500 days since October 7th.

That means their businesses have gone under. They’ve lost their jobs. Their wives are left to take care of children who are beyond traumatized. It’s really incredible how profoundly October 7th and the aftermath has impacted us. And what we’re starting to talk about now is a surge in the suicide rate among reservists and newly discharged soldiers that is just starting to be spoken about. The IDF, it seems, has suppressed that data. I’m hosting on my kibbutz, very soon, 150 soldiers reservists who have served over 500 days. They’re due to be released in a few weeks. We are hosting them for a pool party here on the kibbutz that I’m working to arrange with someone else.

They’re getting call up notices again. I have a friend who was just up north for a ceremony for her son, who’s in the army, who was supposed to be discharged now. And instead of discharging these kids, they handed them—they said, four months, you’re being called up for reserve duty now. You’re going back to Gaza.

And what the IDF Chief of Staff is trying to make the Prime Minister understand, which he does not seem to be processing fully, is we don’t have the soldiers. We simply don’t have the soldiers. And in the meantime, we have this crisis with the ultra-Orthodox in this country. There are 70 to 80 thousand men of service age who are ultra-Orthodox, who are not being called up.

And so you have the kind of combustion of this moment. Those videos, right, Judith, coming out last week. The ultra Orthodox rioting, one of the leading rabbis saying, “We will wage global war, go to war all around the world. We’ll wage war on Israel.” And the Prime Minister, in that same week, saying, “We’re going back in.”

All we want is to get those hostages who are clinging to life out.

Claire: I have a question. Is there any chance that this is a bluff? Because Israel’s negotiating leverage was so significantly harmed by the trio of Western leaders who announced that they would recognize a state of Palestine unless there was a ceasefire. Well, that was Keir Starmer, in particular. Which created an incentive, a positive incentive, absolutely to refuse to negotiate and release hostage. Given that, did Bibi feel, “We just need to do something to show that this isn’t going to work for them?”

Vivian: First of all, it was Macron who came out first, and it was on the day that Macron made his statement, “Hey, I’m gonna recognize Palestinian state,” that Hamas said, “Yeah, we’re walking away from the table.”

And then Starmer, and then Carney. And Carney, as he’s always doing, every time he tries to one up his buddies. He just takes it to the next level. Here’s the quandary with that. Is this a bluff? I don’t buy the bluff theory. And here’s another problem. Prime Minister Netanyahu talks about—and he’s right—Hamas is a suicidal death cult.

They don’t give a toss about the wellbeing of their civilians. They say so themselves. They openly say that they will martyr the civilian population in order to defeat the Zionist enemy. And they celebrate the martyrs. They are the Taliban, they are ISIS, they are horrible. And they don’t care. They are completely hardened.

They don’t let their own people into the tunnels to take shelter when the Israeli Air Force is bombing Gaza. Well, okay, well then you can’t turn around and say, “We’re gonna really put the squeeze on them and hammer them into submission,” because they don’t care. It won’t work.

Claire: But they do have objectives, among which is they’d like to stay alive to fight another day

Vivian: To remain standing. Yeah. The UN is helping them in that objective, as is Qatar.

Claire: They may think that if Israel takes full control, they're not going to survive that.

Vivian: They know Israel can’t.

Judith: Israel will never be allowed to.

Vivian: We don’t have the soldiers anymore. We, also, our logistics chains are deeply, deeply challenged.

Judith: Yeah. I don’t think it’s a bluff, Claire, because Bibi himself wants the war to continue.

Claire: Does he want it to continue only for political reasons, or is he—

Judith: Yes.

Claire. Okay. Well, the other theory which I was about to voice, but you’ve already said no, is that this is him saying, “We have achieved neither of the objectives that we set out to achieve. We have neither rid the area of Hamas nor have we rescued the hostages, which means this war is a complete strategic and moral failure. I can’t just say I give up now, because that makes the situation unredeemable and unforgivable. I have to think of something that allows me to at least realize one of those objectives, which won’t be retrieving the hostages.” Is it possible he’s thinking—

Vivian: A lot of lively discussion here over the degree to which Netanyahu was ever genuinely engaged by the hostage issue, the degree to which that was a priority for this government. And I don’t just make that up out of thin air. We have senior government ministers, again, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who have stated openly, and even this week: “It’s not a priority to bring out the hostages. The priority is to fully occupy Gaza and establish Israeli settlements in the territory.” So, to your question, is this, on the part of the Prime Minister, are his actions of this week coming from a purely political place? Again, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I think that the response of 80 percent of Israelis to that is, “Yes, we need to end this war.”

And it’s not—I mean, the hostages are so much more than hostages. The hostages have become symbols of the social contract, of the ethos of this country, which is that this country exists on the promise that it will be safe for Jewish people. And that promise was shattered, destroyed on October 7th. Every single person who survived, and every single hostage who has returned, says the same thing: Where was the IDF?

And we need to rebuild trust in the most basic, fundamental institutions that allow Israelis to cohere and to have faith. And I speak to people all the time who have young sons who are being recruited into combat units, and they do not have confidence in the IDF at this time. I stood feet away from Matan’s parents yesterday at this Kabbalah Shabbat, and they spoke, and that’s exactly what they said: Our son is an IDF soldier. He fought like a lion, and he remains there. Even after the War of Independence, when so many fighters were taken prisoner by the Arab armies, it was eight or nine months later, they were all repatriated. Every single one. This is a stain on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s tenure.

And I have to—I’m sorry I have to say this because it’s really, really important—because I speak to people who are very plugged into the system, the central nervous system of this government. And a conversation over a year ago with one, and I said—this was at the time when we thought we were on the verge of getting the hostages out in June, July, 2024. And we ran into one another at an event and I said, “You guys have to stop this. It has to end. You have to bring them all home.”

And this person voiced to me that, “Well, you know, the Prime Minister and his team are very concerned with his legacy that if the war ends right now, his legacy will be October 7th.”

And I said, “You could conquer Mars and Saturn and his legacy will be October 7th, because he was Prime Minister on October 7th. End of discussion.” Now let me just bring that forward because right after the attack on Iran, I think it was still ongoing maybe, but near the end, and I think it’s fair to say that the Prime Minister was feeling euphoric, and perhaps justifiably so.

He sat down with an Israeli journalist, finally, Ayala Hassan, and it’s an interview in Hebrew, but very, very telling. Because in that interview he spoke of himself in the arc of history, to the point that he invoked Cyrus the Great, King Cyrus of Persia from 2,500 years ago. And he said, King Cyrus, he liberated the Jews. He emancipated them, he gave them freedom. David Ben-Gurion, 2,500 years later, came along and established the State of Israel, a formidable task. I, Benjamin Netanyahu, I, by what I have just done, am liberating the Persians 2,500 years later. But not just that, I am ensuring the longevity, the survival of the Jewish state. So, I’m no psychotherapist, but—the words of the man himself.

Claire: There’s a touch of grandiosity there.

What do Israelis—beyond wanting the hostages back, and wanting the war to end, how do Israelis envision what would happen after that, with Hamas still in control of Gaza?

Vivian: There’s a great post this morning on X, Twitter, by Peter Lerner, former IDF spokesperson, Lt. Col. in the reserves, where he elaborates, very articulately and knowledgeably, on what that might look like. But what we do know is that this sloganeering of total victory is meaningless. No one knows what it means, and we simply are not very interested in continuing down this path that has not been terribly productive.

And what Peter says, and I think he’s right, is that we are in a war of attrition now, and we have been for well over a year, and that requires a sea change in the thinking, strategic thinking, and planning of both the IDF and our political leaders. This is not going to be a quick war, and the truth is it’s decades of decisions that got us to the point of October 7th. These are not going to be undone in five minutes. And that is a sea change for Israelis to come to terms with, but more importantly, the leadership. I think that the people here understand that much better than the leadership does right now.

Judith: Vivian, what do you think are the odds that there’s going to be a change in leadership? And if so, what do you think are Bennett’s chances?

Vivian: Yeah. I don’t do … that’s a high risk sport, political forecasting. I do like high risk sports, but … nobody knows. I don’t know if it’s Bennett. I don’t—maybe it’s—there are others. There’s a lot of backroom talking, and wheeling and dealing.

I think that Bennett is seen to be the most likely consensus candidate who can bring together elements of even the religious right. Even some of the ultra- Orthodox, in particular Shas, Aryeh Deri. And an interesting kind of thing about the Shas voters, typically Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent—who feel, quite rightly, that they were mistreated in the early years of the state and they were marginalized and alienated, even though many of the things that went on in the early years have been alleviated, almost totally—but Aryeh Deri is an ultra-Orthodox man from Morocco who studied in a Lithuanian Yeshiva, which is about as different from Moroccan as you can get.

And his base, they’re traditional people. They observe Shabbat, they keep kosher, but they’re not extremists. They serve in the army, they work. And so he’s a very, very kind of paradoxical leader to have this base. And he’s very mindful of the fact that his base is serving and is feeling the full impact of this war.

So he’s the most likely to cross over to support someone like a Bennett. And I think that the main factor is how long Benjamin Netanyahu can keep Ben Gvir and Smotrich placated, and in the coalition, and supporting the coalition. And as long as he leaves them with the belief and feeling that they will survive until tomorrow—and which he does so artfully—then we won’t have elections for some time. The best estimates that I’ve read—with kind of knowledge and backing, like intellectual backing, and knowledge of the system—is March 2026, is when we’re most likely to,

Judith: Okay. Okay. Okay. And Vivian, maybe you can explain something to me that I’ve never understood, which is Smotrich, also, his constituency has paid a very, very high price in this war. So I don’t understand his lockstep alliance with Bibi and Ben-Gvir. Because his people are out there dying in Gaza. I don’t understand it.

Vivian: And—so exactly, his base has taken a huge hit. And for that reason, in the polling—this has been consistent for a very long time now—Smotrich does not cross the threshold. Okay? So if there was an election held tomorrow, he’s out. Ben-Gvir, on the other hand, has increased his base significantly. And that should be concerning to all of us. So it seems that many of Smotrich’s supporters, Religious Zionist supporters, are probably moving into the Ben-Gvir camp, which is deeply concerning.

So why does Smotrich stay? Because he wants to survive. You know, there have been so many red lines that have been crossed in the last while, but Judith, as you of course will recall, and Claire, I expect you were aware of this as well, about a month ago, maybe a month and a half now, it was on Shabbat, a large group of so-called Hilltop Youth, which are generally young, ultra orthodox men who are often engaged in criminal activity, who establish illegal outposts, who tend to go to Palestinian villages and burn and loot and terrorize—and there seem to be little, if any, legal consequences. And this has just, this kind of conduct has really proliferated since October 7th, because the whole country’s been distracted by Gaza. It’s horrifying. About a month and a half ago, a large group of them in, I hate to say it, white pickup trucks and motorcycles, which evokes a very different image that is horrifying, on Shabbat—so they’re breaking Shabbat—they approached an IDF base that was being staffed by reservists in the West Bank, and there were physical altercations and quite a number of youth were arrested. , And the pushback from the Smotrich camp was intense and insane.

And I happen to be in a chat group where I don’t participate, but I do observe. And there are many Smotrich supporters in this chat group, and the discussion that was ongoing in those early days was horrifying. I won’t even say what it was here. But they were deeply critical—scornful—of the IDF in any way laying a finger on these men and boys, who had come to attack an IDF base.

That is just crossing so many red lines. A base that was being staffed by reservists who had been doing over five hundred days of duty. And within days, the IDF was exonerated because they had video evidence of what really happened. And the Smotrich camp went quiet. But … I mean—we have allowed this really open wound to fester. And we haven’t even begun to reckon with it, because they’re the ones wielding the balance of power.

Claire: It seems the only conceivable way for sane people to take power again is if … to ostracize what we could call the nationalist right, the religious right and the liberals need to be in an alliance.

Vivian: I think that there is a large segment of Likud, historically, a kind of right- wing secular but very heterogeneous party, in which there were also religiously observant people. It was a big, big tent. And so I think a lot of Likud voters could support a Bennett-led government. The thing with Likud though that’s really tricky is, I hate to put it this way, but it’s kind of like mafia-level like loyalty. Loyalty in that party is insane. And it goes back to the days of the founding of the state. When Ben-Gurion went after the Irgun, and Menachem Begin, and I won’t get into all that, but it’s a real—I mean, we just saw one of the jewels of the Likud party, in my view, Yuli Edelstein, who was working terribly hard to forge some kind of agreement with the ultra-Orthodox to begin to serve in the IDF. And Yuli Edelstein, he was number two on the Likud list, just a few years ago. A former prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union, an extraordinary man. And he was dumped. He was just dumped by Netanyahu because the ultra-Orthodox say “Can’t work with the guy. He’s against us.” And Yuli Edelstein is also religiously observant.

So, you know, it’s really hard. I don’t know, Judith, what you think, but like it’s really hard to gauge where the rank-and-file of Likud are. In terms of religious Zionists, I think it would be tough. I think most of them would go to Ben-Gvir over more mainstream. The religious Zionists too. They, I think, are something like 70 percent of the officers in combat units now, aren’t they?

Claire: Are they?

Judith: Wow.

Vivian: Something—I’m gonna hedge just, but this was a stat I was told a couple years ago.

Claire: That’s a really interesting figure.

Vivian: It is. There aren’t quite, they’re not quite as represented, or they weren’t, a couple years ago, in the Air Force and intelligence units. These Religious Zionists, they are literalists.

Judith: But if that’s the case, Vivian, if 70 percent feel this way, can you imagine, —approximately—can you imagine that they’re defying Zamir? That Zamir could end up all by his lonesome? If the officer corps—this is …

Vivian: I’m gonna, I’m gonna let that question just hang in the air. Because I think there are a lot of questions that are being asked now that are hanging in the air.

You know, the son of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Yair Netanyahu, who has been living in Miami throughout the war, also this week, he put out on social media and a tweet, a comment basically accusing Eyal Zamir, the Chief of Staff, of plotting a military coup. And he said it. And Zamir, in a cabinet meeting, I think on Wednesday, Bibi challenged Zamir, he said, you know, “If you wanna resign, resign, right? But don’t do it in the media.” You know, kind of being critical of him for speaking, from time to time, in the media. And Zamir reportedly—because, as you know, all cabinet meetings in Israel are leaked, and if they’re not, then we get really worried—and Zamir replied to the effect, he said something like, “Why don’t you tell your son?” Like, to tone it down and to stop critiquing me openly in social media. To which Netanyahu responded, “My son’s 33 years old, I can’t control him.” I think that if I had tweeted out something like that, I might have been arrested by now. Just sayin.’

So. There’s so much going on, so much going on. And we do know that the Likud Party is not thrilled with the way in which the son holds forth. And there were stories about him, a couple years ago, being told to just, like, dial it down. Go off social media, go into exile in Miami for a while, cool your heels.

But it seems he hasn’t returned—so, who knows what’s going on there. But we do know what he’s saying publicly. And I think that there is open—I don’t think, I know there is open speculation, I was listening to it on the news last night—I don’t know if you saw it on Channel 12, but wow—about what Eyal Zamir may do.

I don’t think he’s going to initiate a coup. But there are many things he could do. And the Commander in Chief, the IDF Chief of Staff, if he’s going to lead these young men and reservists, he has to do it with integrity, with this guy. We know he feels that way. He said it, and he takes his oath very, very seriously.

So, I don’t know. I think that we’re all at the real, real, really pointy edge of a spear right now. What do you think?

Judith: Yeah.

Vivian: What do you think, Judith?

Judith: This whole thing with the Chief of Staff, I mean—when he took over from the other Chief of Staff, I remember thinking at the time that honestly, my heart went out a little bit to the previous Chief of Staff, because he had the misfortune of being the Chief of Staff on October 7th, after 18 years of Bibi’s decision-making that had led to this catastrophe. And I felt that he was doing his best. It was unfortunate he had to go though this.

New guy came in, didn’t know anything about him, and when—and now, it would be such a monumental thing for—even if he were to resign at a moment like this, as you say, this is the tip, the pointiest point of the spear that we’re at. I think that could have historic repercussions in terms of the response of the people.

There are many things with reference to—like, we were talking about the social contract that has changed completely in this country since October 7th. One of them is not serving, which used to have a certain stigma attached to it. And now, I mean, I know parents who advocate for their kids not to, try to talk their kids out. This is unheard of. This was not … such a thing was very rare. And if it ever happened, it was not public. And now it’s a very common thing. I think, if he were to resign on principle, there could be a tremendous ripple effect in who shows up. It could be huge. And he seems to have integrity, this guy. We’ll see. We’ll see. This could be a big moment.

Vivian: Yeah. I feel the same way.

Claire: Okay. So we’ve been talking about what’s going on in Israel so far, but I think the people who are listening probably have a lot of questions about what’s going on in Gaza, which I certainly can’t answer because I’m not there. And you’ll have trouble answering because you’re not there. But you might have more insight.

The reports from Gaza make it sound like hell on Earth, which I have no doubt it is. But I’m hearing really conflicting things about how it came to be that there’s not enough food. A lot of things I’m hearing are not getting reported in the mainstream English-language press at all, even though they should be.

The prevailing attitude in the mainstream media is that, of course Israel is just starving people deliberately—which seems insane to me, but that is what people believe. And I wonder if you could both tell me what you think, what your best understanding of what happened with the food situation is.

Vivian: You want me to go?

Claire: Go.

Vivian: So we know that there has been more than adequate food that has entered the Gaza Strip since October 7th. We know that during the ceasefire period, last winter, when hostages were released, even more food and humanitarian supplies were allowed in, with respect to food alone. The allocation was 3,000 calories per day, per person, in the Gaza Strip, which is excessive. The IDF and the government have relied on that statistic when justifying the cessation or the closure of the border in April and May. So there was a period when the ceasefire talks broke down and Netanyahu said, “Forget it. We’re going to shut the border. We’re not going to allow food in, and we’re going to try to break Hamas in that way.”

We’ve already dealt with that kind of paradox, so even still—with no food going in—given what had entered the Gaza Strip, there was a surplus. People have done these calculations in and outside of Israel. Even the UN admitted this, there was a surplus of food. So where did all the food go? We know that the food is stolen by criminal gangs and by Hamas and PIJ, and we know that it’s hoarded in warehouses and there’s been video released of these warehouses.

Claire: Yeah.

Vivian: We also know that there is a not-insignificant population that is not receiving food, there are civilians for whom food insecurity is extreme, and that many of them are going for periods of time—1, 2, 3 days—without adequate food and water. And we have that from multiple sources. We have that from IDF sources on the ground. They’ve said it.

Now, what they don’t concede is famine. There is a very specific legal, international legal definition of what constitutes a famine. There also is not a policy of starvation at the national level. There may be grotesquely insensitive comments made by political leaders like Ben-Gvir, but that does not constitute a policy of intentional starvation.

And this is the thin edge of the wedge in which Israelis find themselves. understanding that notwithstanding the fact that more than adequate calorie counts and food stocks are in the Gaza Strip, there is a not insignificant number of civilians that are not receiving adequate food. And I can only speak for myself—that is absolutely intolerable.

I cannot live with that in any way. I cannot live with it ethically, morally—and I am no, like, “woke leftist.” And I know that many Israelis, most Israelis feel the same way. We simply cannot bear it.

So is there food? Yes. What is the problem? Distribution. Hoarding by Hamas, PIJ, and criminal gangs and, UNRWA facilitating and allowing, or looking the other way, when they were doing that, which is why Israel said, “All right, we're not working with UNRWA anymore. We’re going to set up this new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. We’re going to take all control of food away from UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Works Agency. We’re going to allow—we will work with other UN agencies that we trust, like UNICEF and World Food Program. And they can distribute”—that gets into the other problems we were discussing earlier.

So the issue is distribution of food. UNRWA had over 4,000 distribution points, GHF has four. The journey to get to these aid sites is treacherous, it’s difficult. But the focus, again, has always been on, for the last two months, “Israel’s starving, Israel’s not allowing in food, Israel’s preventing distribution”—no. That is not true. And I would urge your listeners to look at the feed of my very good friend, on X, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. He is fantastic. He’s been on my podcast a number of times. And we speak about this all the time.

Claire: I have—I was in touch with him because I wanted him to come and speak to my class and, we’ve meant to organize that. He’s very impressive. I wonder how many more are like him.

Vivian: Well, more than we think, I think.

Claire: Yeah? I hope so. I hope so.

Vivian: He’s extraordinary. He’s extraordinary. But there are people like Ahmed out there—and for your listeners, just so you know, he’s born in Gaza City. He was raised there. He totally by accident left when he was 15 years old on an exchange trip to study at high school in the US. It was supposed to be for one year. And for reasons he explains in one of my podcasts, it turned out to be for life. He has family there. It was just What’sApping with him this morning, I said, “Where’s your brother?” Cause his brother had been based in Gaza City. He said, “He got out, he’s in the south now. But we have family stuck there and we’re trying to figure out what to do.” I mean, he’s someone you can talk to, but he openly—and it takes tremendous courage, ‘cause he has family there—openly accuses Hamas of hoarding food and depriving civilians. He doesn’t exonerate Israel, but he’s very clear-eyed on what’s going on on the ground.

Claire: What’s most remarkable—he has lost 19 family members in this war.

Vivian: More.

Claire: More?

Vivian: More in terms of his extended family. Yeah. Big family, and they’re close, and he grew up with them. They grew up in these family compounds. They all live in each other’s houses. I think it’s over 50. It was very early on.

Claire: Terrible.

Vivian: Terrible.

Claire: But he is a remarkable voice of clarity about what’s going on in Gaza and what Hamas has been doing, and how little Hamas cares about civilians in Gaza. And I’d really like to speak to him. Really like to have him on the podcast. He’d probably be a much better person for me to speak to about what’s going on in Gaza than—well, he hasn’t been there himself, as far as I understand. He’s getting all of this from his family, right?

Vivian: Family and friends. I had him on a few weeks ago, and he spoke about seeing a friend of his, also from Gaza, in the States, saying, “My family’s desperate. They have no food. They have no money. Can you please help?” He sent $500. And he explains this whole corrupt chain of kickbacks. And by the time the money gets in their hands, it’s $330, and they buy provisions that would’ve cost $10 before the war for—like something crazy. The corruption, the exploitation of desperate civilians by people in Gaza and outside …

But yes, he is in touch with all kinds of people on the ground. He has friends, he has family, and he speaks to them directly on a daily basis. So he is the best person to speak to this.

Claire: The thing is, you completely dismissed the idea that Bibi could have any kind of motive beyond the utterly base and self-serving. But when you think of just declaring the war of failure, strategically … all of this suffering in Gaza has been for nothing. As is the entire world’s reaction to it. It’s leaving Hamas in place, it’s …

Vivian: IDo you know what could have stopped it all? On October 8th? If the United States and all the Western governments had frozen Qatari assets.

Claire: You think that would’ve stopped it?

Vivian: The question is, why did they not do it?

Claire: Well, I don’t rightly know, but I expect it’s because Qatar has bought off everything that’s buyable in Europe and the United States. I mean, if I say “Qatargate,” you could think of four separate scandals that would be called that. No, but literally—there are four separate scandals now being called Qatargate—the one at the seat of the European Union, the—goodness, I mean, with someone like Trump, especially, who has his hand open for bribes and kickbacks, you think he’s going to turn on Qatar?

Vivian: I am just asking the question. I’m not the conspiracy theorist, I’m just asking the question.

Claire: How many members of Congress do you think they own?

Vivian: I’d love to know. I’d also love to know, and this apparently is not required to be disclosed, and I don’t understand why—even in private educational institutions in America—I’d love to know how much Qatar has donated.

Claire: Oh, it’s a fortune. It’s an absolute fortune. They own Georgetown.

Vivian: But they’re not required to disclose that. And why not? I mean, these are educational institutions. I understand they’re private, but there are a lot of blurred lines here.

Claire: Mm-hmm.

Vivian: You know, a friend of mine made a very, very astute comment to me a while ago. He said, “When Jewish people donate to these institutions,” which they do, very generously, and hospitals, “They love to see their names on buildings, right?” Park benches, you name it. Well, you don’t have the Sheik this and that, or this and that building—”

Judith: —wing.

Vivian: Exactly. What they do, the Qataris, is they endow chairs and departments, and then they dictate the kind of scholar that may sit in those chairs and the kinds of things that they may teach. And interestingly, all of those people in the West, and in America, who are so overheated about intrusions on academic freedom by the Trump administration—and I’m not carrying water for them, I’m just saying, pointing out a contradiction—they seem completely nonplused by the fact that a foreign government may be bankrolling universities and chairs and dictating what may or may not be said and taught in that capacity. And if that's not an intrusion on academic freedom, I don’t know what is.

Claire: It is, although it doesn’t have the force of the state dictating what may and may not be said. I mean, it’s a voluntary—it’s just scuzzy, that’s all. It’s scuzzy and it’s deceptive, in so far as students and their parents aren’t being told, “By the way, the curriculum is going to be Qatari-approved.”

Vivian: Yeah. It’s scuzzy. I think it’s also threatening the foundations of our democracy as we’ve known it

Claire: The integrity of the university, certainly. And it is threatening, at the very least—it’s a threat to Jews. I mean, because kids at these schools are being taught. a version of events that is—that allows for eruptions of antisemitism like the kind we’ve seen.

Judith: Almost more heartbreaking than that is I have talked to parents of college-age Jewish kids in the US whose children are turning against us. Their Jewish children are turning against us because of what they’re learning in class and what their classmates are allowed to say about us. And they’re good, good children. And they come home and they say, “Why didn’t I know? Why did you never tell me how we—the terrible things that we have done to the Palestinians,” you know, that’s where their head is—post-October 7th, post-October 7th. It’s very deep. It’s very deep. This poisoning of the academy, in the States is very, very profound.

Claire: And that, I think is the source of what’s gone—a lot of the source of what’s gone wrong with the journalism. And you’ve got people coming right out of that educational environment.

Judith: Yeah.

Claire: And there are a lot of other things that have gone wrong with the journalism, including some that are just—that have nothing to do with antisemitism or hostility to Israel, but are just artifacts of the news business. Israel is a place where journalists are very comfy.

Vivian: Mm-hmm.

Claire: There aren’t a lot of conflicts as intense as what’s going on in Gaza where journalists can report on it from the comfort of a four-star hotel where they’re perfectly safe. And there’s a ton of interest in Israel, and that becomes a flywheel. So lots of—was in that really good series of articles by Matt, Matty, what is his name, Matty, he used to work for—

Vivian: Friedman

Claire: Matti Friedman, where he pointed out that at the time he was working for AP, there were more AP correspondents in Israel than there were in all of China, than in the entire African continent?

Vivian: Yeah. Not only, it’s not only the journalists, it’s also many of the humanitarian workers and NGO employees.

Claire: Yeah.

Vivian: They much prefer to be based in Tel Aviv or in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, than in the areas where they actually do their jobs. When I began my tenure here as Canadian ambassador, in 2014, and my younger daughter was in grade 12 and she went to the American school. And the irony was just so incredible, because until grade seven, she’d been in Jewish day school in Toronto, a very liberal one. And then she was in art schools in Toronto, in the public system. And then she comes to Israel, and she’s going to the American school, and it is full of the children of diplomats, and NGO workers, and some corporate people. It’s a very, very privileged group of young people. And the environment was not terribly understanding or sympathetic towards Israel among the students. You know? So the irony of course being, you don’t go to public school in Canada, you go to Jewish day school, because there’s hostility, and there are challenges. And then you come here, where you expect to kind of just feel at home, and you’re in the environment I try to protect you from there.

Claire: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot that I wish people understood, which the media could be explaining and doesn’t, about the many aid and humanitarian organizations and their relationship—their necessary relationship—with Hamas, the one they’ve had to have in order to be able to do their jobs.

Vivian: Yep.

Claire: Because people will tell me, “But look at this report by Amnesty! Don’t you trust Amnesty?”

Judith: But there’s also this—there’s also this echo chamber of wrong information. And if you trace it back, right at the beginning of the war, [UN Secretary-General António] Gutierrez, our old friend, made a statement that 500 trucks of food are needed a day to adequately feed the population of Gaza—which has nothing to do with reality. Not remotely. The actual number is between 130 and 150, which is what they had been getting.

But he put it out there, this complete falsehood—500 trucks. That number, 500 trucks, has been quoted and quoted and quoted and quoted and quoted and used as the baseline for all these studies and calculations that are done by these NGOs and that are done by—it’s unbelievable. And you could just trace it right back to a lie told right at the beginning of the war. And so it’s all self-referential. “Well, this refers to Amnesty, and that refers to Human Rights Watch, and that refers to”—and it all traces back to the same falsehood.

Claire: Like a game of telephone.

Judith: Yeah.

Vivian: Yeah. I just wanna make a point that also, on this, that I think is really important. It was when I was serving as ambassador, and one of the hot issues at the time was a village in the West Bank, one village, and I’m sorry the name escapes me at the moment, that the Israeli government had decided to demolish, raze, for a long period of time. And it had been built illegally. And it became the cause of the moment for Western activists. This was in, like, 2014, 2015.

And the State Department also put out a report on this village, and said, “This is terrible. This can’t be done. These—of course, the Obama era—this can’t be done.” And I was presented with this report by one of my staffers in the Canadian embassy, urging me to sign a letter that had been signed by all the others. And I said, “Well, I can’t do that without verifying what I’m signing. It’s making some pretty strong statements.”

And this particular staff person was not overly sympathetic to Israel. And so I said, “Why don't you go and I’ll arrange for you to meet with, you know, senior people.” And they did. And, “I want you to come back and report to me what you see.” To this person’s credit, they came back and reported the truth. And the truth was that nothing that was verified in the State Department report could be verified by her. None of these assertions. I said, “Well, on that basis, I can’t sign this letter then, can I, demanding X, Y, and Z.”

And I did speak to my American peers, at the time, and what shocked me was that they had been presented with the evidence by an NGO. They had not done any due diligence on it. I was shocked. Maybe I’m naive. So talking about, to Judith’s point, about the echo chamber, this information is taken as gospel, and that I had the temerity to question the State Department horrified my staff person.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Vivian: But I’m a lawyer by training. That’s what we do.

Judith: Well, I have read, I have actually read of cases where researchers trying to get to the bottom of famine and Gaza are criticized for simply asking the question, because to do so is contemptuous and dismissive of the suffering of the children of Gaza. And this is done with an absolutely straight face. And it has real consequences, where people can’t get their questions answered and they’re treated like pariahs within the little world of researchers. You simply can’t ask certain questions.

Claire: How many times has The Washington Post or The New York Times had to issue an embarrassing retraction because they took a Hamas press release and ran with it as gospel truth? And then within days it was completely debunked. And then they do it again.

Vivian: I’m not counting, but I will say this: I’m a New York Times subscriber, through it all, because I do find value in a lot of what they produce. I am about to cancel my subscription. And the reason for that is the disgraceful interview that Ezra Klein did with Mahmoud Khalil this week.

Claire: Oh, I didn’t listen to that. That bad, huh?

Vivian: Hen Mazzig did a very good analysis. I frankly could not listen to more than half. It was absolutely revolting. I think that interview lays bare everything you need to know about the ignorance or malevolence of that publication and people who seem determined to whitewash Hamas. … I don’t know Ezra Klein. He could be the nicest, most well-meaning person in the world.

Claire: He certainly seems like it.

Vivian: I’m sure he is. But he either did not have proper research done to prepare him for that interview, or he chose not to challenge outrageous statements that his interview subject was making.

Claire: Perhaps for the benefit of listeners who might not know which statements were outrageous and how they should have been challenged, just give us a quick rundown, if it’s not too disgusting.

Vivian: There are so many, but … perhaps the most chilling is his repeated comment that October 7th simply couldn’t be avoided. And Ezra Klein did not press him on that, and why he said that. He refused to respond in any meaningful way to the violence that was perpetrated on the 7th. And let’s not forget, it went on for a few days. It could not be avoided, and it was justified and justifiable. I could drill down into some of the things that I heard—like his continued insistence that the so-called March of Return that was this weekly exercise that was—

Claire: —totally peaceful, right?

Vivian: Yep.

Judith: Yeah.

Vivian: Totally peaceful. Yeah.

Judith: All those incendiary balloons were really peaceful. Yeah.

Vivian: Yeah. It was just kind of fabrication, outright fabrication after fabrication. And Ezra Klein, as I heard it, was much more concerned with demonstrating deep empathy with the Palestinian cause and with what Khalil went through when he was in ICE detention.

He also—Ezra Klein—chose to allow Khalil to present all of his activity, both before arriving in America and after arriving in America, as being peaceful in nature, focused on the dignity of the Palestinian people, and not in any way intending to promote the annihilation and destruction of the state of Israel. And I think that—Hen Mazzig does a very good job of picking it apart, so no need for me to reinvent the wheel. But I think that Ezra Klein should do some reading and very, very deep soul searching.

Claire: Yeah. Sounds like it. I didn’t read it, but I saw his byline over an article about how divided American Jews are and how awkward conversation was at the family table. And I’m suspecting that might be based on a personal experience there. I should read the article before discussing it. …

Okay. That was a good conversation—

Judith: It sure was.

Vivian: I think we had a wonderful conversation.

Claire: Yeah.

Vivian: Very candid and very honest.

Claire: I hope it gives people who are listening a sense of the real human beings about whom these headlines are written. Clearly, these are not two génocidaires.

Vivian: No.

Judith: Thank you.

Vivian: Thank you for bringing us together, Claire. What a lovely, really cathartic and—thank you for this free therapy session.

Claire: I want people to hear what people who really are going through this sound like, not the caricature.

Vivian: Alright. Bye girls!

Judith: Bye!

Claire: Bye!

I recorded this podcast with Vladislav Davidzon on Zoom on Wednesday. I thought we’d covered some interesting ground. But when I listened to it, I was horrified to discover that something was seriously wrong with the audio. Vlad’s voice was mostly fine, but mine was often inaudible. I don’t know why. I record conversations on Zoom several times a week, and this has never happened before.

I spent yesterday trying to salvage the recording, but I could only improve it so much. Finally, tired and frustrated, I gave up and decided to deal with it today. Having slept on it, I decided that it didn’t merit my wasting another full day trying to fix it. Too much is happening in the world that I want to write about, and I didn’t want to see another day go down the tubes.

So I’m putting it up as is, with the transcript, below—read the transcript, listen to as much as you feel like, or don’t. I also gave the transcript to Google’s NotebookLM, which created a completely new podcast, with perfect audio. in which two slightly dopey AI speakers discuss the transcript in a chirpy tone. It’s just as good as the original, really. Voilà:

Claire: Welcome to the Cosmopolitan Globalist Podcast. I’m here with my friend Vladislav Davidson, who is in Amsterdam. Is that right?

Vlad: I am in Amsterdam indeed, Claire. Hi.

Claire: Hi! Are you coming back to Paris?

Vlad: I should be back in about a week or so. I’m waiting for a meeting with a politician. As soon as he tells me what his schedule is, I should pop back in.

Claire: Right.

Vlad: I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. I know you missed me.

Claire: You going to be back for the 14th?

Vlad: Um, possibly. What do you think, you mean the parade?

Claire: Firemen’s ball. I thought it might be fun to go this year.

Vlad: You're going? Do you have extra tickets?

Claire: You don’t need tickets.

Vlad: I only have a white jacket with me while I’m on the road. What do you think?

Claire: Oh, you don’t need to dress up. It’s for the whole neighborhood.

Vlad: Is it on the street? Where is it?

Claire: It’s at the firehouse. It’s just across on the rue de Sévigné.

Vlad: I think it’ll be nice.

Claire: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.

Vlad: Let me know. Actually, I’ve never done that.

Claire: You absolutely should.

Vlad: Right?

Claire: Yeah, speaking of the 14th, they’re practicing now for Bastille Day with the planes overhead, the fighter jets, and you know, when they pass overhead, the sound terrifies the cats—they run under the bed and they can’t be coaxed out for hours. And it actually terrifies me, too. I find these sounds terrifying. Just—

Vlad: I have flashbacks to the war. I can’t, even now in Amsterdam, sometimes the car back stops, sometimes it takes me a few seconds to realize I’m not in Ukraine. I’m not at the frontlines that—when some alarm goes off, I’m continuously thinking, are the Shaheds firing? So, uh—

Claire: It scares me and I know that they’re not coming for me. They’re just practicing for a parade. What is it like to deal with that for real, knowing that they are coming for you night after night? It’s just—

Vlad: It’s terrifying. And I have an extremely high appetite for risk, more than most people. But it’s really, really scary when you are in a situation where you’re getting bombed and you know you’re getting bombed. It’s not pleasant

Claire: Night after night. It must just leave people—it must just leave people beyond exhausted, beyond, beyond empty.

Vlad: Yeah. Well, that’s the point. That’s why they do it. They know that this is a way to grind down the population. They purposely do it in the middle of a night in order to wake people up and not allow them to sleep and to grind out the population’s capacity to resist.

Claire: I feel so bad for everyone who's living with this. I feel bad for the people in Gaza living with this. Obviously, I’m not a great enthusiast of Gaza’s political leadership, but—

Vlad: One has to have empathy for ordinary people who are caught in between the bad decisions of the leaders or the decisions of other leaders, right. I support Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas, and I also feel bad for every collateral casualty, for the suffering, by innocent people. Obviously it’s terrible. War is terrible.

Claire: Yeah, I know. I—that’s not a very original observation, but I—

Vlad: It’s not, it’s not.

Claire: But still, I just really feel bad for everyone who’s going through this, and I don’t understand why my fellow Americans don’t seem to feel for what Ukrainians are going through.

Vlad: Well, they did. They did and they still do. The polling is very obvious on this. But some people on the NatCon MAGA right have been, I wouldn’t say manipulated, but it’s become a partisan issue, and it’s easy for people not to care when they feel they're not being taken care of by the state.

Claire: Well, you have to be pretty stupid to allow that to be a partisan issue. For most of American history, there was an edict that politics stopped the water’s edge. And to make this partisan issue—

Vlad: It became a partisan issue because of the stupidity of some people, on both the Democratic Party and on the Ukrainian leadership side. The Ukrainians obviously have made a lot of mistakes in their dealings with Donald Trump over the last nine years.

Claire: I really think you’re blaming the victim on this one.

Vlad: I was a US law enforcement witness on this. I was there and I saw this, the Ukrainians got off on the wrong foot with Donald Trump from the very beginning. And obviously there was no playbook for how to deal with an insurgent Trump campaign in 2016, and the Ukrainian Embassy made some unfortunate calls in a difficult situation—I discussed this very recently with the Ukrainian ambassador at the time, and he’s very grateful to me for what I did back then.

Claire: You mean by handing over the information from the Party of Regions?

Vlad: That was one of the things they did. Yeah. Hmm.

Claire: What else?

Vlad: Uh, how discreet do I wanna be? The Ukrainians made a bad decision about, thinking that the Clinton campaign was gonna win and they made they made less effort to talk to the Trump people in the beginning, Ambassador Chaly—and I’ve told him this to his face—made a bad call with the way he published an article on The Hill in the spring of 2016, when Donald Trump was talking about Crimea as Russia—I mean, it should have been done at the level of the Foreign Ministry. It shouldn't have been the Ukrainian ambassador to Washington that made that call and wrote that op-ed.

Claire: Mm-hmm. I still think you’re blaming the victim. No normal administration would pay attention to that. They would act in the American interest.

Vlad: I mean, obviously he got embroiled in the Ukraine impeachment stuff. Obviously, that’s his own fault. But he did get embroiled in Russiagate, which was a lot of psychosis from the legacy media. And he saw the Ukraine stuff as an extension of Russiagate psychosis. So, he should get over it, but there’s multiple instances of things that he continuously got involved in. As a MAGA guy says to me, the Ukrainians somehow keep getting involved in Trump’s business. It’s a very vulgar but not incorrect way of explaining why Ukraine kept getting involved. And for whatever bizarre reason, as I put in one of my articles, Ukraine was fodder for presidential elections, three cycles in a row, 2016, 20 and 24, and that’s weird.

Claire: I don’t want to spend all of our time on this, but I still think that you're blaming the victim. The abnormality here is—

Vlad: I’m not blaming the victim because these are my people. I’m on the Ukrainian side. I think the Ukrainian leadership, before Zelensky, has a lot to answer for. Zelensky inherited a bad hand and a bad relationship. I don’t like the way they were treated. I don’t like what happened with him in the White House, that’s all terrible. But certain things happened between 2016 and 2019 that when Zelensky came into office, he already inherited a not-great relationship with the Trump administration. There’s a bad relationship, why there’s bad blood, why there’s lack of trust, you know?

Claire: What are you hearing about the latest insane episode in which it was reported that Pete Hegseth and perhaps Elbridge Colby unilaterally decided to hold up arm shipments to Ukraine? Is that true?

Vlad: Look, I don’t want to discuss Mr. Colby because I don’t want him to stop replying to my DMs on Twitter.

Claire: At some point you’ve gotta stop DMing and report what he says, right?

Vlad: Yeah. I mean, I don’t wanna—

Claire: He doesn’t listen to this podcast.

Vlad: I put a lot of effort into having conversations with those people and a lot of people told me it was a wasted effort, and it turns out—

Claire: So your sources are so carefully cultivated that you can’t ever use them?

Vlad: Yeah. Right, right. I don’t know, I tried, and a lot of other people tried to have conversations with the other side on this stuff, and some of them have come around, some of them have not, and I think it’s—

Claire: Well, you don’t have to say anything. But if he’s responsible for it, chuckle. And if not, I—

Vlad: I’ve read the same reporting that you have. Ha ha ha, ha ha.

Claire: I see.

Vlad: So, I really wish that wasn’t the case. They are really committed to their pivot away from Ukraine to Taiwan. They are committed to having the Europeans deal with this, and they are committed to offsetting this situation onto, NATO and European.

Claire: But Colby isn’t committed to Taiwan. He’s said so, explicitly. He said that he doesn’t think Taiwan is a vital American interest, and he thinks we should reach some kind of accommodation with China. It’s all just stuff he say. He’s a total opportunist. I know you don’t want to ruin your relationship with him, So I—

Vlad: Honestly, I don’t want to attack this gentleman. He has power, and there are a lot of vindictive people in the world, and people in power typically have egos and or sometimes thin egos. And I really hope that this is just a more of a kabuki game, which it very well could be. A lot of what happens with the Trump administration is kabuki games, allowing Trump to have his daily change of mood on whatever it—

Claire: Trump just said something about the Russians b**********g him, to which the entire world said, “Um, yeah.”

Vlad: But he knew this for months. I mean, he’s frustrated enough to actually call them out publicly on it because he knows he’s not getting anything from them. The Russians are just really stubborn, and they don’t want deal, and they don’t want anything and they’re just pushing Trump around. So at a certain point, even Donald Trump, whose policy was not to publicly criticize them and try to get them to make some sort of small concessions privately, said, “Okay, f**k these people.”

Claire: So why is he trying to rescue them economically?

Vlad: I mean, he has, again, a complicated relationship with Russia. He has a difficult relationship with the Russians and he obviously, like several other administrations, wants to park the Russian relationship and see if we can just get back to business as usual. Of course, there’s no going back to business as usual, and I think even he gets that, but he’s trying. Did you read my piece from December with Mark Galeotti?

Claire: The one about Trump scheming to get a Nobel Prize? I read about a third of it before you called.

Vlad: What’d you think of a first third?

Claire: You know what, just let me tell you something interesting that I heard, which I haven't written about yet.

Vlad: Yes?

Claire: Actually Trump has done something important in Congo. Something that

Vlad: Is that right?

Claire: He could legit get the Nobel Peace Prize for if anyone paid any attention to it. You know, that is the worst armed conflict since the Second World War. And it was heating up again. I found this out—it wasn’t reported anywhere—from my cab driver. I know it’s a cliche to cite the cab driver, but what can I do, it was a cab driver who told me this. My cab driver was from Congo, and we ended up talking about it. He was kind of surprised that I knew anything about the conflict. But he said “The Americans have really helped us”— and did you know there are American troops there in quite large numbers?

Vlad: When?

Claire: Now.

Vlad: I had no idea.

Claire: No, me neither. I mean, I’ve taken this from my Congolese cab driver, I haven’t tried to find out if it’s true. But why would he make that up? That’s kind of a hard thing to be mistaken about, right?

Vlad: I’m going to Google this. Immediately. US troops in Congo. I’m gonna Google this. It should be—I mean, unless it’s a secret and we’re secretly—

Claire: We pushed back M23, which is a significant achievement. Negotiated a ceasefire. And apparently, Donald Trump is popular there because he’s credited with stopping the war.

Vlad: Al Jazeera reported three years ago that President Tshisekedi authorized the deployment of US counterterrorism forces in the Eastern DRC. And the US Embassy says US Congo Military Cooperation continues. “A new chapter opens military cooperation.” This is on the US Embassy Congo website and “The need for US action for Democratic Republic.” Amnesty, USA. It seems that there are troops.

Claire: There are indeed. I was surprised to hear that, and surprised to hear the first non-American person I have encountered, probably, who was genuinely enthusiastic about Trump.

Vlad: African News has a piece on us deploying Army to secure the DRC election last summer. So it’s obviously true

Claire: —and this is a significant accomplishment. Now, obviously, the only reason, I’m sure, that we’re there is because it’s such a significant source of absolutely essential minerals. But—

Vlad: —but so what? You stop a war. You stop a war.

Claire: —you stop a war, you stop a war. So why isn’t Trump talking this up? Is it because he thinks his base will disapprove of sending troops to Africa?

Vlad: This may not be even in his top priority list. He may not even understand how successful his own policy may be. It’s entirely possible.

Claire: Well, he is a much more realistic candidate for a Nobel Prize for that achievement than for anything else.

Vlad: Well, I’m not against him getting the Nobel Prize if he actually does something worthy of it. Yeah. At this point he probably deserves it more than Barack Obama did.

Claire: Well, Barack Obama didn’t deserve it at all. He hadn’t done anything when he got it.

Vlad: Right. And in fact, he caused wars, and caused a lot of people to die.

Claire: Yeah, no. But Trump does seem to be quite obsessed with getting a Nobel prize. He’s having everyone who visits him submit his application to the Nobel Committee. He’s not going to get it, of course. And I don’t know—

Vlad: I had lunch with a very prominent Anglo-American journalist the other day, and he told me that he’s talking to his Norwegian friends and Swedish friends about getting their governments to back the committee to get it. And that’s the one way that we’re going to get influence on them, is the thinking. So, some serious people have had this thought.

Claire: Yeah. Pakistan came over and offered to nominate him for having negotiated a ceasefire with India, which India completely denies, and then the Israelis are nominating him for … having bombed Iran, I guess. Can you make any sense of this proposal in Gaza? I mean, what is he talking about when he talks about taking control of it and turning it into the Gaza Riviera? Does he—

Vlad: Is there an actual proposal, or that was just him—

Claire: —there was a press conference, a couple days ago. And I actually happen to have the transcript. Someone asked me about it. Let me just pull it up. His speech is so incoherent that it’s really hard to figure out what he’s getting at, in even the most literal sense.

Vlad: Do we just annex Gaza, make it into the 51st state? Is that what you're asking?

Claire: Well, he seems to be talking about “taking ownership,” which has to mean annexation, right? Or maybe it means taking ownership in the sense of “taking responsibility.” And—

Vlad: Anything?

Claire: Okay, here’s the transcript. Here we go. “We brought peace and stability to the Middle East like we haven't seen in decades. Together, we defeated ISIS, we ended the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, one of the worst. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Vlad: Blah, blah, blah.

Claire: “We starved Hamas,” which is a really unfortunate turn of phrase, “and other terrorist proxies. And, we starved them like they had never seen before.”

Vlad: Cool.

Claire: Blah, blah, blah. Says we’re going to have a lot of people signing up for the Abraham Accords very quickly.

Vlad: Good.

Claire: And then he says, “The horrors of October 7th would never have happened if I were president. The Ukraine and Russia disaster would never have happened if I were president”—

Vlad: By the way, I agree with that. It’s actually the case. It happened because we had a very weak and brain dead cadaver in the White House, and Putin made the decision to go all in because he saw weakness. I do believe that actually if Trump had been president of the war, and that sort of—

Claire: I am sure the debacle in Afghanistan was a significant part of his decision making, but I also think he felt internal pressures that had nothing to do with us. I think it was an act of regime consolidation.

Vlad: Yeah, I know, but he made a decision to go thinking that, it was not gonna have any kind of—

Claire: The ones he really thought were weak, compared to reality, were the Ukrainians. And that was obviously a major miscalculation.

Vlad: Yeah. Obviously there were miscalculations all around. But, that doesn't mean the Biden administration doesn’t have a lot to answer for.

Claire: Hey, we dispatched Bill Burns, the CIA Director, to Moscow before the war. Do you have any idea what he said to them?

Vlad: No, that’s top secret. But he threatened them. Obviously. They didn’t care. They didn’t believe him or care. Yeah. So—

Claire: I’m just wondering what he threatened them with. Alright, so here's what he says:

“Gaza strip has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly, who’ve been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It's been an unlucky place for a long time. Being in its presence just, uh, has not been good. And it should not go through a process of rebuilding or occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it, lived there and died there, and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains, which will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly, bad luck.

“This can be paid for by neighboring countries of great wealth. It could be the numerous sites, or it could be one large site, but the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll get, I’m sure, we’ll get something really spectacular done. They’re going to have peace. They’re not going to be shot at and killed and destroyed like this civilization of wonderful people has had to endure.

“The only reason Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down. They’re living under fallen concrete, and that’s very dangerous, precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety, and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again. The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.

“Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for a hundred years. I’m hopeful that the ceasefire could be in the beginning of a larger and more enduring peace that will end the bloodshed and killing once and overall, but the same—”

Vlad: Claire, okay. I’ve had enough. Claire, what are you parsing there? What are you getting out of it?

Claire: I’m just trying to figure out what on earth he’s getting at. What is his idea here? Who is he talking about, even?

Vlad: I think he is sending signals to whichever Sunni Arab allies of ours we're trying to blackmail into paying for it and policing it. That’s what I would guess. But who knows?

Claire: Americans are not going to be happy with the idea of sending troops into Gaza.

Vlad: No, no. And we shouldn’t. And I personally want nothing to do with that. And that’s a bad idea. Obviously no one needs to do that. And—

Claire: On one thing, he’s right. Doing the same thing will get the same results.

Vlad: It’s totally right. Yeah.

Claire: It’s just—I just don’t know what he’s proposing as an alternative,

Vlad: Both the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes will collapse if they take on more responsibility for it. And the other Sunni Arabs don’t want to do it and the Palestinian authority doesn’t want to do it. I don’t have an answer anymore than anybody else does to, sorry to say.

Claire: I saw something—was it coming from the administration or was it just something I saw online?—about turning the Sinai into Palestine?

Vlad: People have been wanting to do that for a long time, but that would lead to the collapse of Egyptian regime, one way or another. And we’ve promised our Egyptian friends that we wouldn’t make them do that. So no one serious is actually demanding that they do that because it would bring the war to Egypt.

Claire: Trump doesn’t care what we promised.

Vlad: He understands power dynamics extremely well. He has an extraordinarily predatory and clear-eyed understanding of power. He is the president who is most comfortable, and most understanding of, power dynamics that we’ve had in a very long time.

Claire: That's why he can’t figure out how to handle Russia?

Vlad: He sees Russia as having nuclear weapons and very difficult to deal with and rightly so. I mean, what are you gonna do if the Russians don’t want to make peace? What are you going to do? You could.

Claire: Arm Ukraine! Give weapons to Ukraine!

Vlad: Yeah, I know, I know. And that, yes—I’m calling for that, obviously, but, still. It is a difficult situation. I don’t know why I’m defending him. I mean, I just like being on the contrarian side of things. Anyways, what did you make of my piece with Galleoti, as much as you read of it?

Claire: So far it was interesting. I just didn’t finish it. I mean—

Vlad: Basically we predicted that he would put a lot of pressure for some of the Ukrainians and that when that wouldn’t work, he would put the pressure on the Russians, and that's exactly what happened. Sadly, it didn't happen quickly enough.

Claire: He’s not putting a lot of pressure on the Russians.

Vlad: No, he is not. He’s not, and he doesn’t think he has a lot of sticks.

Claire: When we spoke to about this when you were here the other day, you said that Ukrainians are holding on for Russia’s economic collapse, which I think really could come quite quickly.

Vlad: The system is very shaky. It’s shakier than anticipated. And the Ukrainians are extremely smart and they know what they're doing and they are really putting a lot of effort into blowing up stuff like oil refineries, right? And so they are very good at blowing up oil refineries and oil tankers and arms munition sites. So they’ve—according to Ukrainian intelligence—created US$10 billion worth of economic damage inside Russia already just with drones, right? Just a couple of days ago, the Ukrainian drones shut down all of the flights, the entire night, in one of Moscow’s four major international airports. So nobody was flying in and out of Moscow that night, and the cell phone jammers were turned on in order to jam the drones. But basically, all those people in the airport didn’t have cell phone service, so they sat there for hours waiting for their flight, which didn’t happen until maybe the next day. They couldn’t call anyone and couldn’t go home. So that’s a knock-on effect. No one likes that. You get on a plane and then you have to sit at the airport and then you have to go home, right? So the idea is to make life very difficult for the Russian population and also to blow up a bunch of stuff that the regime needs to consolidate its economic control. So do Ukrainians think they’re gonna kill every last Russian soldier? No, they don’t. But they think they can, they can wait this out. And, um, maybe they—

Claire: Then what?

Vlad: Then? I don’t know, honestly. We’re waiting for the regime to collapse. He’s only human. You don’t make a deal with with him, because he doesn’t want to make a deal. You just wait it out.

Claire: There’s been an impressive number of Russians falling out of windows recently.

Vlad: Yeah. Like three of them just over the last three days. Yeah. Regime consolidation is real.

Claire: So these are people who were suspected of disloyalty in some way?

Vlad: Even a former defense minister, Timor what’s-his-name, went to jail for 13 years for corruption. There is a lot of internal politics in Russia and some of the regime elites are unhappy. Some of them are looking for quiet ways of making a deal. And some of them are falling out of windows because the regime both needs to scare some of them and also to take away their assets in order to pay off others, right? The system cannibalizes its own, once in a while, and even very high-level guys, a former transport ministry guy, a former defense minister, going to jail. This is just the way they run the regime, you know?

Claire: Yeah. Of the elites who aren’t happy, are there more of them who are unhappy in the direction of wanting to make a deal, or more of them who are unhappy in the direction of wanting to become more aggressive and take more risks?

Vlad: Well, there are those of them who just want to keep going and keep fighting. And then there are also those who are like, “This is stupid. This isn't going anywhere,” right? I think the ones who were okay with the war have consolidated their support for a really long time, and they’ve just priced in the fact that this war’s going to go on for a long time.

Claire: Who are the notable figures? Who would like to cut a deal, do you know?

Vlad: No, because if we had their names, they wouldn’t be in the game anymore. So I know that people do talk to them, and I have two names that have been bandied about, but I’m told I can’t make that public. There are regime insiders who do talk to Western intelligence agencies, but if they get caught, they do get killed.

Claire: So, do we have any insight to Putin’s state of mind right now?

Vlad: I personally don't know. There are people who look at that all day long, but it’s very difficult. And he does sit in a bunker, and Kremlinology is real, of course, but that’s a very difficult one. So I can’t say for sure. He thinks he’s winning.

Claire: Does he?

Vlad: Yeah, he absolutely does. Yeah. Why wouldn’t he? He is winning on the merits of his own position. He’s kind of winning. Yeah. So why wouldn’t he think that?

Claire: Certainly in the larger sense of demoralizing the West, leaving it too confused to understand the difference between its allies and its adversaries, bringing allies to power in Europe, and—

Vlad: The Russian Army’s grinding—at tremendous, unspeakable, inhumane costs, 1,300 Russian men dead and wounded every single day—they are making gains, they’re making substantive gains. And the Ukrainian army will run out of men at this point. It’s just the way it is.

Claire: Are Russians noticing all these wounded men coming back, do they—

Vlad: Well, it’s a good question actually. The Russians have made a point of not cycling people out of the war zone. Unless you’re really terribly maimed, you’re not going to be allowed out of a war zone by the Russian authorities. They try to keep the mobilized men in the war zone or in the regions around Russia in order to keep them from going back to their hometowns in Siberia and telling everybody how terrible things are.

Claire: Well, they remember 1917.

Vlad: Yeah, it’s a real policy at the presidential administration level. The number of demobilized guys is tiny. Actually, most people who were mobilized since September 22 have not been demobilized. There’s no demobilization structure. All the contracts that have been signed, with exception of the six-month ones that were given to the Prighozin guys, the Wagner guys, those have been honored, but everyone else, their stop-loss stuff has prevented them from going home. So the Russian regions are sort of getting information and if 200,000 Russian men are dead, those are substantive losses and—

Claire: People must have noticed that their loved ones are not in contact anymore.

Vlad: There’s a lot of that, but again, people will find out how bad it is when the demobilization starts, and there are gonna be huge, huge knock-on effects to the Russian economy and Russian society for decades to come as veterans come back, and crime, PTSD-related incidents skyrocket and roil the society. But that’s in the future. In the meantime, they’re not being let out of the staging grounds. And the population of Russia doesn't really know quite how bad the war’s going for them in terms of losses.

Claire: The POWs that were released recently, they didn’t even let them go home. They just sent them right back to combat.

Vlad: That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That’s Russia. Ukraine is worse. You know, there’s a new term in Ukraine. It’s called a double widow. Do you know what a double widow is? A double widow is a Ukrainian woman who lost her husband to the army, remarried after 23, and lost her second husband. Can you imagine that’s a social term?

Claire: “Ukraine is worse”—not in the sense, however, of keeping people at the front so to conceal the extent of losses, I presume?

Vlad: No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, in terms of per capita dead, per capita wounded. Probably a lot worse for the Ukrainians, but the population is a quarter or a fifth of the Russian population, so it’s not the same.,

Claire: It’s an utter catastrophe. An utter catastrophe for Ukraine, for Europe, for Russia too. I mean, it’s just, just—

Vlad: It’s their own fault, but yes.

Claire: It’s their own fault in one sense, but there’s—really, I cannot think of anything that would make a country deserve this.

Vlad: The Russians put up with this regime for years and years, and actually in some ways they do deserve it, to be honest. There was a reckoning coming and they absolutely got what they deserved. Any Russian man who wound up in the war zone and was not forcibly thrown into it, with no agency of his own, deserves this in one way or another. I’m sorry to say that. I have very little sympathy.

Claire: I think I’d agree with that, but I wouldn’t agree that the whole society deserves what’s coming to them.

Vlad: I’ve asked soldiers, Ukrainian officers, on the front line, “Do you feel bad for anybody?” And they're like, “No. Look, you go to jail. Just say no to mobilization orders. Go to jail. Don’t kill anybody. Don't wind up dead in a ditch.”

Claire: I think I would agree with that—but—

Vlad: The Ukrainian officers do not have even the least bit of empathy for any Russian man who wound up there, and it’s completely normal. You have to dehumanize totally. You have to dehumanize your opponent in order to win. Obviously. That's a normal thing to do.

Claire: Sure. But I cannot condemn Russian civilians for being easily propagandized and incurious about the wider world, and willing to accept things that a free society shouldn’t accept, because if I use that standard, I’d have to condemn my own country, and I’m not willing to do that.

Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, no, I have more empathy for MAGA guys who see this as one more lie from an elite that has been lying to them and sending them to Iraq and Afghanistan than I do for any Russian on the frontline. I’m sorry to say.

Claire: Guys who think that are not the ones who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Those guys are actually much more aware of what’s going on and they tend to be extremely supportive of Ukraine.

Vlad: No, actually I do talk to people who were in Iraq and Afghanistan who are like, “What was I there for?” Like. “This is the one more lie. This is just—”

Claire: Well, I understand that bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan for the veterans of those wars, but I don’t think that, by and large, that people who served are completely ignorant of why there’s a war in Ukraine, and who’s the bad guy.

Vlad: The Americans aren’t stupid. They know what’s going on anyways. Um, anything else we can talk about in terms of—

Claire: I contest that statement. I have to contest that statement.

Vlad: Really?

Claire: Yeah. I don’t think Americans know what’s going on. No. I think by and large Americans exhibit very little understanding of foreign relations and would be very hard pressed to answer simple factual questions about this conflict..

Vlad: Well, why is that?

Claire: Most people, not just Americans, but most people are not interested in international relations, or even politics. They become interested when it touches them personally. And Americans have a long history of feeling insulated from the rest of the world, different from the rest of the world, and they’re also unbelievably badly served by the media. It’s not really even the media’s fault either. We all know that the media’s been destroyed by the internet.

Vlad: Well, and their own stupid decisions.

Claire: A lot of them too. A lot of them too.

Vlad: Yeah. Anyway, Claire, thank you so much for this. It’s been a lovely, lovely time talking to you. I’m a bit miffed by all this also, so I, I can’t really—

Claire: Come back on the 14th and we’ll go to the firemen’s ball.

Vlad: Yeah, lemme try it. Lemme try. Okay. Okay.

Claire: A little plug for your new Substack?

Vlad: Are people gonna listen to all the way to the end?

Claire: You don’t want the ones who don’t as readers.

Vlad: Okay, I’m Substacking about art and politics, so I really hope everyone will tune in to my Substack about art and politics. And I think I'm good at what I do. I know a lot of interesting things,

Claire: Lots of lively writing and very informed commentary about both art and politics.

Vlad: Yes I just had my first piece. Claire was nice enough to cross post it. Claire, what was it about?

Claire: It was about the Rijksmuseum.

Vlad: Oh. And, hanging out, looking at arts. Yep. Right. You, you feel like you’re on a little walk through the Rijksmuseum, in art—

Claire: I left you a comment saying, “I got hung up on the word ‘garrulous’ to describe Otto Dix.” He had a fine pictorial feel for what things looked like after an exchange of artillery. You could say that.

Vlad: Right? That’s right. Alright, so do I. So do I. Thank you. Thank you Claire. Okay.

Claire: Alright.

Vlad: Bye bye.

Claire: Bye

Vlad: Bye.

While I’m at it, here’s the conversation you missed with Sergei Cristo. He’s the hero of the podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, in which he offered evidence of a spy ring operating at the heart of the British establishment.

I apologize for how long it took me to put this up. My computer wasn’t able to handle a file this big, so I couldn’t get it down from the cloud. Every time I tried, it crashed my computer. I finally broke down and bought a new computer. (It was time. My old computer had serious problems, including a broken keyboard—I could no longer type the letter “a,” which was a handicap in my line of work.) Then it took me a little while to reestablish all my files from the old computer. But I’m now good to go—and this will be followed by more video files that I haven’t been able to upload.

I’m a bit puzzled, though, because while I have the whole audio transcript, I can only find the highlights of the video, below. Did I move the video file somewhere else in the hope of opening it? Sergei, I’ll keep looking for the complete video file—it’s very likely that I moved it somewhere clever, and it will come back to me what I did with it. For now, this is actually quite a good summary:

UPDATE: I found the full video. I’d uploaded it to Dropbox in the hope it might open there.

Here’s an AI summary:

Russian Intelligence Operations in the West

Sergei discussed the Russian intelligence operations in the UK and the West's readiness to accept these operations. He highlighted the growing realization of autocracies working together, regardless of their ideologies, and the need for a unified approach to confront this growing threat. Sergei also touched on his research into Western investments in oppressive regimes and how these investments damage the national security of democratic countries. He mentioned parallels between the recent history of Turkey and Russia and the importance of understanding the Gerasimov doctrine, which outlines the role of non-military means in achieving political and strategic goals.

Russian Warfare and Western Intelligence

Sergei discussed the Russian approach to warfare, emphasizing that they view their intelligence operations as part of a war plan. He suggested that the West's successful use of soft power in the Cold War was weaponized by Russia in an inhumane way. Claire expressed concern about persuading Western publics that Russia is at war with them, particularly regarding the 2016 US election. Robert and Arun discussed the difficulty of convincing people of the truth, even when faced with evidence. Kay asked why there hasn't been a factual reveal from their own intelligence agencies. Sergei suggested that the UK could conduct a proper review of the evidence they have.

Trump’s Russian Organized Crime Ties

Sergei discussed the potential connections between Trump and Russian organized crime, highlighting Trump's business relationships with Russian criminals and the potential influence of the KGB. He also touched on the topic of cryptocurrency and its potential use for money laundering. Claire asked about the significance of Elon Musk's connections to the Kremlin, to which Sergei responded that while he doesn't have a definitive answer, there are potential links through new industries and the legalization of cryptocurrency. Andre Bauer asked about the connection between Alexander Lebedev and Boris Johnson, to which Sergei explained that Lebedev's father was a former KGB officer and that Lebedev himself was elevated into the House of Lords by Boris Johnson.

Aaron Banks’ Russian Financial Ties

The discussion focused on Aaron Banks, a major donor to the Brexit campaign, and his financial connections to Russia. Sergei and other participants share information about Banks’s business practices, including his use of offshore companies and potential involvement in money laundering. They also discuss Banks’s Russian wife and his meetings with Russian diplomats. Xavier adds that Banks was known for laundering money for Russian oligarchs through Gibraltar. The conversation touches on the broader implications of Russian financial influence in British politics and the need for further investigation into Banks’s activities.

Russian Influence on Trump’s Behavior

Claire discussed the influence of Russian operations on Donald Trump's behavior. The group agreed that Russia's influence is significant, but some participants, including Robert McTague and Robert Zubrin, expressed concerns about the public’s willingness to accept this fact. They suggested that a major incident, similar to the 9/11 attacks, might be needed to convince the public. The group also discussed the media’s role in educating the public about these issues, with some participants expressing frustration at the media’s failure to do so.

Russian Influence in Politics

Robert Zubrin discussed the dilemma faced by generals and politicians like McCarthy in acknowledging Trump’s potential ties to Russia, as it conflicts with their institutional loyalties. Sergei then shifted the conversation to Russian influence in politics, particularly focusing on the Brexit campaign and the harassment of journalist Carol Cadwalladr. He highlighted the role of Russian intelligence in orchestrating online abuse campaigns and the importance of exposing political figures with Russian connections, especially in Britain.

Financial Deals and Political Manipulation

Sergei discussed the potential consequences of exposing the financial dealings of politicians and bloggers, emphasizing the damaging impact of populist figures. He also shared his concerns about the British government’s reluctance to investigate Brexit. Sergei suggested that the revelation of Trump's financial deals and alleged misconduct could lead to widespread disillusionment among his supporters. He also expressed his belief that the rule of law should be used while it still exists, and he criticized the lack of action from the British authorities. Claire agreed with Sergei’s points, highlighting the need for democracies to harden against manipulation while remaining open societies.

Statesmanship and Sovereignty in Democracies

Robert Zubrin discussed the importance of statesmanship in democracies, citing historical examples such as Pericles in Athens and Churchill in Britain. He emphasized the need for a patriotic political movement to reverse current trends. Sergei brought up the issue of sovereignty and foreign interference, while Arun highlighted the division in American society and the perception of Russia among Trump’s voters. Robert Zubrin clarified that the majority of Americans support Ukraine, not Russia. The discussion also touched on the role of media and the importance of understanding the difference between criminal and counterintelligence investigations.

Russian Influence on US Political System

Larissa expressed concern about the Russian influence on the US political system, emphasizing the need for new ways to maneuver in the face of changing political dynamics. Sergei discussed the potential for Russian interference in the US electoral system, particularly with the suspension of cyber defense operations against Russia.

Western Investments in Oppressive Regimes

Sergei discussed his research on Western investments in oppressive regimes and its impact on national security. He is working on a case study of asset managers and sustainable funds, which often invest in regimes like Putin’s. Sergei is collaborating with investigative journalists and publications like The Economist and Berlin Times to publish his findings. The discussion also touched on the influence of Trump and other American politicians on European far-right parties like the AFD in Germany.

Social Media’s Impact on American Politics

The group discussed the impact of social media and Russian influence on American politics, particularly in relation to Trump’s presidency. Robert Zubrin suggested that social media has created a “post-truth environment” that made Trump’s rise possible, rather than an increase in racism. Claire recommended Adam Garfinkle’s work on the effects of social media. The conversation concluded with Sergei emphasizing the importance of exposing crimes and the group agreeing on the need to find solutions to combat misinformation.

Help Sergei expose Western investments in dictators here.

And just for fun, here’s a briefing and a podcast created by Google’s new one-click AI podcast creator, which turns everything you feed it into banal but completely realistic podcast slop. It’s amazing.

Listen to Google Slop’s podcast version of our conversation

Briefing: Russian Intelligence Operations and Western Influence

This briefing summarizes the key themes and important points discussed in the provided transcript, focusing on Russian intelligence operations and their alleged influence in Western democracies, particularly the UK and the US.

Main Themes:

* Russian “Active Measures” as Warfare: The core theme is that Russia views its intelligence operations, including propaganda, covert influence, and disruption, as a form of warfare against the West, not merely espionage. This is linked to the Gerasimov Doctrine and a perceived lesson from the Soviet Union’s collapse and Western "soft power" success.

* Historical Context of Russian Influence: The discussion places current Russian activities within a historical context, noting parallels with Soviet ideology and methods, as well as drawing lessons from the Cold War.

* Targeting Western Democracies: Russia is seen as actively targeting Western democracies through various means, including exploiting political divisions, supporting populist movements, and using financial and commercial links.

* Difficulty in Western Recognition and Response: A significant challenge is the difficulty in persuading Western publics and institutions of the reality and severity of Russian influence operations. There is a perceived reluctance to acknowledge being “at war” with Russia in this unconventional sense.

* Specific Cases of Alleged Russian Influence: The discussion delves into specific cases, including the US elections, Brexit, and individuals like Donald Trump, Aaron Banks, Alexander Lebedev, and potentially Elon Musk, examining their alleged connections and the mechanisms of influence.

* The Role of Finance and Organized Crime: The transcript emphasizes the intertwined nature of Russian intelligence operations, organized crime, and financial dealings, particularly through offshore structures and potentially cryptocurrency.

* Challenges in Investigating and Prosecuting: The offshore nature of some financial activities and the political sensitivity surrounding these allegations are presented as significant obstacles to effective investigation and prosecution.

* Impact on Political Discourse and Public Opinion: Russian influence operations are seen as contributing to the amplification of divisive narratives and potentially impacting electoral outcomes and public understanding of events.

Most Important Ideas and Facts:

* Russian “Active Measures” as Grand Strategy: According to Sergei, referencing the Gerasimov Doctrine, Russia considers intelligence operations and covert actions as the “cheapest in terms of grand strategy” and a “more effective way of achieving those goals,” making them a “part of the war plan.”

* Western Democracies are “at War” from Russia’s Perspective: Sergei states, “if we're asking ourselves... in Russian's eyes, are we at war with Russia in the West, NATO with Russia? The answer is absolutely, categorically, we are because they're already conducting that war as per Gerasimov doctrine.”

* GRU Involvement in US Elections: Sergey mentions that “according to CIA, what they’ve disclosed was that the part of the intelligence machinery of Russia that was engaged with the first Trump election was GRU group, which is part of which is military intelligence.”

* Trump’s Relationship with Russians: Sergey suggests Trump’s trust in Putin likely stems from his “long established relationship with Russians” through his business dealings, describing it as a “fusion of the KGB, organized crime under Putin, and weaponizing Trump’s commercial links.”

* Aaron Banks and Brexit Funding: Aaron Banks is highlighted as a significant figure in the Brexit campaign who received scrutiny for the source of his large donation. It’s noted that his business is structured through offshore companies and that his companies had similar names with small differences, a potential sign of illicit activity according to due diligence practices. The largest political donation in British history was Aaron Banks’s £6 million to UKIP (now Reform UK).

* Alleged Russian Influence on Aaron Banks: Connections between Aaron Banks and Russian intelligence are suggested through his meetings with Russian diplomats and alleged discussions about gold and diamond investments. The use of diamonds as a historical KGB funding method is mentioned in this context.

* Aaron Banks and Money Laundering in Gibraltar: A personal account from someone with connections in Gibraltar alleges that Aaron Banks and his companies were “laundering money like it was going out of fashion for the Russian mob” through Gibraltar.

* Lebedev’s Elevation to the House of Lords: The elevation of Alexander Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer and owner of UK newspapers, to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson is presented as a controversial event that occurred just before the publication of the Russia report, despite leaked objections from the Security Service.

* The “Bad Novel” Problem: Claire Berlinski suggests that one reason people struggle to accept the reality of Russian influence operations is that “it sounds so much like a bad novel or a bad movie makes people think it cannot be true.”

* Brexit Referendum’s Legal Status: Sergei points out that the Brexit referendum was “advisory,” meaning “the same strict rules is applied to elections to see what was actually legal result of election. What could have been an illegal result in the election. Those rules do not apply to advisory referendums.”

* Western Investments in Oppressive Regimes: Sergei mentions his research on how Western investments in oppressive regimes can damage national security, focusing on asset managers investing in the “Putin regime” despite it being labeled a “sustainable fund.”

* Undermining NATO as a Russian Objective: The boosting of the AfD in Germany by figures like Vance and Musk is seen as making “perfect sense in terms of our operating assumption,” as undermining NATO and splitting Western alliances is a “big Russian grand, strategic, objective.”

This briefing provides a snapshot of the concerns raised regarding Russian influence operations and highlights the complexity and perceived lack of preparedness in Western democracies to address this challenge.

NotebookLM can be inaccurate; please double check its responses.

For those of you who missed it, here’s the conversation we had on Sunday with Vivek and Raja Muneeb.

Here’s an AI summary of the conversation—it’s remarkably accurate:

Pakistan’s Nuclear Threat and Implications

The meeting involved a discussion about the potential threat of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and the implications of their use. The participants discussed the possibility of Pakistan using nuclear weapons as a bluff and the potential consequences of such an action. They also touched on the issue of Pakistan's nuclear technology being sold to rogue states and the need to prevent this from happening. The conversation ended with a discussion about the stress and sleep deprivation experienced by the participants due to the ongoing tensions.

India-Pakistan Tensions and Terror Groups

Vivek and Raja discussed the recent developments between India and Pakistan, focusing on the events that took place in Pahalgam and the speech made by the Director General of Military Operations. They also touched on the history of Kashmir and the role of terror groups in the region. Raja explained the Pakistani military’s mindset and the political situation in Pakistan, while Vivek provided context on the formation of terror groups in the 1980s. The discussion also included the evidence of the terror attack and the reasons behind Pakistan's denial of involvement.

Kashmiri Pandits’ Experiences and Historical Context

Raja shared his personal experiences and memories of the 1989-1990 exodus of Hindus from Kashmir. He described the violence, harassment, and terror faced by the Kashmiri Pandits, including extortion, rape, and murder. Raja also discussed the impact of the conflict on the education system and the economy in Kashmir. He mentioned the role of Jamat-e-Islami and other terrorist organizations in subverting the society and the government institutions. The meeting also touched upon the historical context of the Kashmir issue, including the Instrument of Accession and the role of Sheikh Abdullah.

Pakistan’s Government and China’s Influence

Raja explained that Pakistan’s government, feeling isolated internationally, has rekindled the conflict to boost its legitimacy. He also mentioned the influence of China in the region, particularly in Balochistan, where the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is facing challenges due to the Balochistan Liberation Army’s activities. Vivek added that Pakistan's economy is in trouble, and the CPEC projects have been criticized for being poorly negotiated and expensive. The group also discussed China’s interest in keeping India destabilized, as they are competitors in the Asian space.

Indus Waters Treaty Conflict

The meeting focused on the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan, particularly regarding the Indus Waters Treaty. The participants discussed the treaty’s history, its implications, and the challenges it poses. They also touched on the role of the United States in mediating the conflict and the potential for de-escalation. The discussion also included the effect on the treaty on the region’s demography and the potential for a plebiscite. The participants also discussed the potential for international intervention. The conversation ended with a discussion on the economic interests of the United States in the region and the potential for a hyphenated approach to the conflict.

Pakistan’s Identity and Military Power

The group discussed the fundamental insecurities within Pakistan about its identity, stemming from its formation and the reasons behind it. They highlighted its psychological insecurity and the talk given by General Assi Muni on April 16th, which stated that only two nations were formed on the basis of the Kalma, one being Pakistan. The team also discussed the challenges faced by Pakistan in building a truly Islamic identity, the problems within the country, and the question of whether Pakistan needs to emerge from its religious mindset.

They also touched upon the role of the Pakistan military and the myth of the threat from the Hindi, which has been a core reason for the army’s power. The speakers concluded that without othering India, Pakistan’s right to exist is questioned, as a large part of Pakistan shares the same gene pool, food, and practices as India.

India-Pakistan Relations: Challenges and Reconciliation

Vivek and Raja discussed the complex relationship between India and Pakistan, highlighting the challenges in fostering peace due to Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorism. They noted that India’s attempts at reconciliation have consistently been met with aggression from Pakistan. Raja emphasized that the Pakistani military’s rejection of cultural ties and its support for radical groups have hindered efforts towards peace. The discussion also touched on the role of political parties and the impact of democratic regimes in Pakistan on its relations with India.

Terrorist Group Connections and Funding

In the meeting, Vivek, Raja, Robert, and Jim discussed the connections between various terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. They highlighted the complex networks and funding sources of these groups, with a particular focus on the role of ISI.

The discussion also touched on the challenges of tracking and countering these groups, with Robert mentioning the division between India’s Indo-Pac Command and Pakistan’s Central Command.

The conversation ended with Claire expressing interest in having Raja write about these topics.

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You’ve heard, I’m sure, of my famous but highly elusive brother, Mischa Berlinski. He’s the author of FIELDWORK—a finalist for the National Book Award— and PEACEKEEPING. His writing has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. He got a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award. He’s the big family literary success. But he’s very shy, and until now, he has categorically refused to come on this podcast.

However, he’s written a new book. He would very much like you to pre-order it, and so would I, because pre-ordering is hugely important: If it looks as if people are excited and eager to read a book, the algorithms will start flogging it.

So, capitalizing on his desire to sell his book, I’ve managed to persuade him to introduce himself to you and tell you a bit about MONA ACTS OUT—a novel that just happens to take place over the course of a single Thanksgiving Day.

We’d be ever so grateful if you were to pre-order it now. I promise you won’t regret it. It really is so good.

I’ll add some extra motivation too: If you pre-order a copy today, I’ll comp you an extra month here at CG.

Here’s the cover blurb:

Both beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, MONA ACTS OUT is a novel about acting and telling the truth; about how we play roles to get through our days; and how the great roles teach us how to live.

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of a household of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband, who has not forgotten what happened last night; and in just a few weeks she is supposed to step into the rehearsal room as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It’s the hardest role in theatre—and the first role Mona has ever attempted without her sister, who died just over a year ago, by her side. When her father-in-law starts fighting with her niece about Donald Trump, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!”) to find the only person she doesn’t have to act for: her estranged longtime mentor, Milton Katz, who may or may not be dying and who was recently forced out of the legendary theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s trek turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face to face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has loved and still loves.

A brilliant, highly-anticipated return of a writer of almost magical descriptive and imaginative powers.

The reviews so far have been fabulous:

Kirkus (Starred review):

Berlinski follows acclaimed novels set in Thailand (Fieldwork, 2007) and Haiti (Peacekeeping, 2016) with a New York–based comedy of of manners and morals featuring a brilliantly imagined female protagonist, Mona Zahid, one of the stars of a Shakespearean theater troupe based in the East Village. Until recently, the company was led by legendary director Milton Katz, but an article in The New York Times, filled with accusations of misconduct from a slew of actresses, led to his disgrace. Mon herself “an out-and-out, unabashed Miltophile,” was not among the accusers. We meet her as she awakens in her Morningside Heights apartment on Thanksgiving Day to a full house—in addition to her surgeon husband, teenage son, and canine companion Barney, her in-laws and her college student niece, Rachel, are milling about. Absent is Rachel’s mother—Mona’s sister, Zahra—who died less than a year earlier, leaving Mona a stash of 150 pain pills of which there are now only six. Mona starts her day by taking two. Not long after, she hears the assembled family members begin to argue about Milton Katz and Donald Trump. She knows she should go out and save the day, but by then she has vaped some weed so strong she suspects it of being laced with “hallucinogenic toad drippings” and can only bring herself to put Barney on his leash and race out the front door, claiming she’s off to buy parsley. At this point the novel takes an amazing left turn; suffice to say, Mona will not be home for dinner. Readers who know their Shakespeare will thrill to Berlinski’s brilliant distillation of the power and relevance of the plays and characters, but those who don’t will find they can easily come along for the ride. And a great ride it is.

Wonderfully constructed, witty, warm, wise, and filled with an extraordinary sense of the relation between theater and life.

Publishers Weekly (Starred as well):

In the sharp-witted and weighty latest from Berlinski (Fieldwork), #MeToo allegations roil an off-off-Broadway Shakespeare company, prompting a 50-something actor to reevaluate her life. Mona Zahid is already grappling with the difficult new role of Cleopatra and what it says about her career; after playing everyone from Juliet to Lady Macbeth, being cast as the Egyptian queen means she’s just about aged out of Shakespeare’s heroines. Mona’s also dreading hosting Thanksgiving dinner, especially after the death of her younger sister, Zahra, whose daughter, Rachel, will be in attendance. Recently, Mona learned that Rachel, following an internship at the theater company, was one of the women who accused its octogenarian founder, Milton, of sexual misconduct. On Thanksgiving Day, Mona escapes her cramped Upper West Side apartment for a last-minute grocery run, during which she frets over a recent postcard message from Milton, in which he claimed to be dying. She decides to make a detour to Brooklyn to see him, and on the way, she burrows deep into memories of her younger years as a player in Milton’s company, when scoring an audition at his dingy Avenue C squat was akin to “winning one of Willie Wonka’s Golden Tickets.” Mona’s thoughts are laced with scathing humor and piercing insight into the actor’s craft, resulting in a surprisingly moving exploration of the courage required to play life’s many roles. Berlinski deserves a standing ovation for this bravura performance.

“Mischa Berlinski has written an instant-classic New York novel about theater, aging, sex and love, and the promise and price of life’s second acts.”—Joshua Cohen

“After a few pages, I canceled my dinner plans rather than put this one down. I absolutely loved this novel’s stunning, almost alarming, insight into one woman’s longing. An unflinchingly honest exploration of the complexities of the human condition and the ambiguities of contemporary morality, MONA ACTS OUT epitomizes great comedy; deftly woven throughout its fabulously hilarious prose is significant wisdom and sorrow.”—Binnie Kirshenbaum

“The delightful MONA ACTS OUT takes us where we all dream of going: away from the irritations of our present moment, into the open streets, to confront everything that still haunts us and reach, surely, hopefully, the Promised Land.”—Daniel Handler

A delightful, insightful, and critical view into the world of theater, New York City, and one woman’s reflection on her life as she enters her later years. Mona, one of the star performers in a Shakespearean troupe, struggles to reconcile her life as she lived it and the modern criticism of the mores of that time. The story asks, how will Mona reconcile her truth and experience while acknowledging that times have changed and she may be left behind if she does not change with them? Humorous, reflective, and insightful; I enjoyed taking the journey with Mona. A thank you to W.W. Morton for an advance readers copy. —Joanna on Goodreads

Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning. Her in-laws are there, along with her husband (with whom she is unhappy), her son, and more. Mona is a skilled and experienced Shakespearean actor, soon to begin rehearsals for Cleopatra. Given her age, it is likely the last leading role she will have. She needs to have some time, so she heads out with the dog to buy parsley. This leads to an overnight ramble that brings past and present together. As a long-ago English major, I read most (maybe all) of Shakespeare’s plays. My roommate and I found the plays to be much more approachable and enjoyable by doing two-person readings. We were on the right track, but this novel explains so much more about how Shakespeare should be presented. (Does that sound horrible? It really is much more casually informative and fascinating than didactic.) In any case, this is quite a great novel that shows how much we learn from the roles we play. —Lee Cornell on Goodreads

“I’m head over heels for this witty, tender, keenly intelligent exploration of art, artifice, and the human heart. Mischa Berlinski is a masterful and deeply empathetic storyteller, and MONA ACTS OUT is a pure delight.” —Antonia Angress

Only one bad review, so far—from a woman who also panned Shakespeare:

First, I didn’t like Mona at all. I found her unsympathetic, annoying, and selfish. That makes for some tough reading. Next, I found all the Shakespeare unbearable. Too much with all the quotes and references. I had to stop halfway through. Too many wonderful books out there and for me, this was not one of them. —Sylvia

I loved this book so much that I made this collage for Mischa, for his birthday, with all of the book’s characters in it. When your copy arrives, you can check back to see how, exactly, I imagined everyone in the book. (The original is really big, so you have to look at the close-ups for the details.)

Close up:

Even closer:

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Once. you’re hooked, you can also read my brother’s first two novels: FIELDWORK and PEACEKEEPING.

And you can read about how my brother tried to buy a Zombie in Haiti, too.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers! Among the many things for which I’m deeply grateful today are you. It’s a joy to have readers to whom I can introduce my brother (on the very rare occasions he emerges from his cave)—and vice-versa.

And should you be finding discussion around the Thanksgiving table slightly taxing this year, do not do what Mona did.

I invited Bob Holley on the podcast to discuss the article he recently published here, Fracturing the Security Map, warning that the return of Donald Trump, coupled with Ukraine’s defeat, could spark a stampede to redraw the world’s nuclear security arrangements.

Discussed in the podcast

This is the remarkably prescient article by John Measheimer I mentioned: The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent

America First

I’ve been thinking about this problem since the first Trump presidency. I’ve explicated my own arguments about this risk in these and other articles:

Five Alarm Fire: The 118th Congress is destroying the world our grandparents built.

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—American statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now ushering into being.

“[T]he US is basically making the case to all states that they should try as hard as they can to develop nuclear weapons,” writes the war historian Phillips O’Brien … There is nothing wrong with his logic. His observations are correct and so is his reasoning. But the same logic applies to every other power in the world that would prefer not to suffer Ukraine’s fate.

The United States is pursuing a feckless, shortsighted policy that will lead to moral disgrace, generational shame, global nuclear proliferation, and an uncontrolled, multipolar nuclear arms race. We’re not pursuing it deliberately. It isn’t what we mean to do. But we could not be pursuing this policy more industriously if we had dedicated all the resources of our federal bureaucracy to the goal.

America First means nuclear war. The inevitable end point of losing the world's trust is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation:

… Here’s where a devout cadre of Trump’s supporters jump in on Twitter and say to me, “Great! All these freeloaders can start paying for their own defense!”

No. That’s not what’s going to happen. No single country can conceivably match the power of the full NATO alliance. That’s why we had it.

It would be a catastrophe if every country with the ability to do it acquired the Bomb. Never mind whether they would use them in anger, it would multiply the risk of an accident, which we already know is insanely high.

But they’re going to to do it if we keep this up. Any American who owns a gun, even though rationally they grasp that fewer Americans would die if there were no guns in America, should understand the calculation other countries are now apt to make. Is it a rational thing for the world to do? No. Rationally, the world will be, objectively, less safe if everyone acts on that impulse.But the world isn’t a rational place. People want safety for themselves, even if it means putting the world at greater risk. The inevitable end point is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. What “America First” means, in the end, is “Nuclear war.”

If you missed it the other day, here is the case for believing that under these circumstances, the risk of an accidental nuclear war would be insanely high.

If you’re unconvinced by this case, you may be suffering from one of these common cognitive errors.

It’s Happening

This is no longer theoretical. We’re not discussing an abstruse theory in international relations, or something that might happen. It’s happening now. The news is scarcely being reported in the United States, crowded out by discussion of Trump’s Cabinet picks, but as soon as the election was called for Trump, the world began to change:

“NATO or Nukes.” Why Ukraine’s nuclear revival refuses to die:

Addressing a European Council meeting in Brussels on October 17, Zelensky invoked Ukraine’s decision to surrender nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security commitments from nuclear states—the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia—recorded in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. (China and France pledged similar security assurances in separate letters.) The Budapest Memorandum commitments failed spectacularly to prevent Russian aggression against Ukraine. So, how does Ukraine provide for its security? Zelensky outlined two options: “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then it will be a defense for us, or Ukraine will be in NATO. NATO countries are not at war today. All people are alive in NATO countries. And that is why we choose NATO over nuclear weapons.”

On the same day, Zelensky revealed that he had delivered a similar message to presidential candidate Donald Trump during his visit to the United States in late September and added that Trump responded that his reasoning made sense … the international community cannot blame [Zelensky] for stating the obvious: NATO members, under their nuclear umbrella, are at peace while Ukraine is at war. Russia and NATO exercise restraint vis-à-vis each other based on a shared understanding that a direct conventional confrontation between two nuclear-armed adversaries would carry the inherent risk of nuclear escalation and possibly a nuclear war. Russia does not exhibit a similar restraint toward a non-nuclear, non-allied Ukraine. To add insult to injury, Russia, with its nuclear saber-rattling, has succeeded in partly influencing the timing and conditions of Western arms supplies to Ukraine, hampering Ukraine’s defense effort. In short, peace is the prerogative of those who are fortunate to benefit from nuclear deterrence. The unfortunate ones must suffer war.

“I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God.”

Could Zelensky use nuclear bombs? Kyiv could rapidly develop a rudimentary weapon similar to that dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 to stop Russia if the US cuts military aid:

Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. …

With no time to build and run the large facilities required to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine’s nuclear reactors. Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite having given up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996.

… The paper, which is published by the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, has been shared with the country’s deputy defense minister and is to be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukraine’s ministers for defense and strategic industries. It is not endorsed by the Kyiv government but sets out the legal basis under which Ukraine could withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the ratification of which was contingent on security guarantees given by the US, UK and Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum. The agreement stated that Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for the promise of protection. “The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reconsideration of the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994,” the paper states.

…. Trump has pledged to cut US military aid unless Kyiv submits to peace talks with Putin. Bryan Lanza, a Trump adviser, has already said that Ukraine will have to surrender Crimea. This week Donald Trump Jr. taunted Zelensky, posting on X: “You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.”

… “You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation,” said Valentyn Badrak, director of the center that produced the paper. “There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags.” Badrak is from Irpin, where occupying Russians tortured and murdered civilians, and he was hunted by troops with orders to kill him.

Western experts believe it would take Ukraine at least five years to develop a nuclear weapon and a suitable carrier, but Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year from building its own ballistic missiles. “In six months Ukraine will be able to show that it has a long-range ballistic missile capability: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers,” Badrak said.

Signatures collected in favor of stationing nuclear weapons in Latvia.

The Future of the Zeitenwende: Scenario 5—Poland Becomes a Nuclear Power:

… Given that Poland would have to fear Russian preemptive action, especially in a world where Washington had withdrawn from NATO, Poland’s best bet would be to hide its nuclear ambitions for as long as possible. In this regard, Poland would likely aim to present the world with a fait accompli once its nuclear weapons program has started to bear fruit.

Interview with Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski:

“If America cannot come together with Europe and enable Ukraine to drive Putin back, I fear that our family of democratic nations will start to break up. Allies will look for other ways to guarantee their safety. They’ll start hedging. Some of them will aim for the ultimate weapon, starting off a new nuclear race.”

Center-right leader Weber supports Macron’s call for European nuclear deterrent.

Germany debates nuclear weapons, again. But now it’s different.

Germany and a European nuclear deterrence capability

Germany must go nuclear! 

With Russia inching forward in Ukraine, the US threatening to flake out as an ally and the rest of Europe in a state of paralyzed shock over Donald Trump, Germany should waste no time in pulling together a nuclear arsenal. In a nutshell, that’s the position of Germany’s atomic hawks, who have been screaming from the rooftops this week that the clock is ticking to take action before Germany finds its collective self once again staring down the barrel of der Russe (the Russian).

To be sure, Germany’s nuclear debate isn’t new. In recent years it’s come up again and again. But this time, the debate is much more urgent. “We’re running out of time,“ Maximilian Terhalle, a German security and military expert  who has spent years pushing his country to reconsider its stance on nukes, tells the Bulletin. … Putin could see an opening to test the US’s resolve to protect “every inch” of NATO territory as soon as Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025 by moving into Estonia or another Baltic nation (or as Trump has been known to call them, the “Balkans.”)

Iran reaffirms stance against nuclear weapons amid regional tensions:

In recent months, there have been calls from certain figures within Iran to reconsider Khamenei’s fatwa in response to Israel’s nuclear capabilities and escalating tensions. In May, Kamal Kharrazi, Chairman of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that Iran could reassess its position if Israel were to threaten Iran with its nuclear weapons. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also stated that such a threat could lead regional countries to reconsider their nuclear stance.

Saudi Arabia will build a nuclear bomb “as soon as possible” if Iran succeeds in developing its own.

Turkey needs to acquire nuclear arms to stop Israel, urges Erdoğan’s chief fatwa giver:

Hayrettin Karaman, the 90-year-old Islamic jurist and chief fatwa (religious edict) giver for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a prominent ideologue for the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood, has said Turkey must pursue nuclear capabilities to counter Israel and establish deterrence against its adversaries.

In an article published September 8 in the Islamist Yeni Şafak daily, Karaman argued that Turkey’s current efforts are insufficient to stop Israel. He urged that “either the Islamic world must unite and collaborate with China and Russia, or Turkey must move forward by acquiring nuclear warheads and weapons.”

Erdoğan’s nuclear itch. Why Turkey’s nuclear program is a threat to regional stability and the international nonproliferation regime:

The year 2023 is an important one for observers of Turkey’s nuclear program, as that year is when the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey’s first, is scheduled to come online, making Turkey’s ambitions more clear. The threat may very well come to pass as nothing but a threat. This rests upon the international community adopting several measures to reestablish confidence in the nonproliferation regime, something which looks unlikely at the moment but is necessary to prevent a new nuclear arms race. A nuclear Turkey would help realize Erdoğan’s dreams of a Pan-Turkic Empire. So long as Erdoğan continues on his revanchist path of returning Turkey to its Ottoman glory, the threat posed by Turkey gaining nuclear capabilities cannot be disregarded.

Taiwan must get serious about nuclear weapons:

Since its February 2022 invasion, Russia has repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation if NATO sends troops to Ukraine. Predictably, NATO has refrained from sending troops. Equally predictable is that the US would avoid sending troops to Taiwan if it believed the decision might lead to nuclear war. … Ukraine tried to deter Russia with conventional weapons, and it did not work. Instead of repeating Ukraine’s mistakes, Taiwan should learn from them. … Ukraine and Taiwan have no choice but to face their nuclear-armed adversaries alone. Their best chance of long-term survival is to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.

Trump’s comeback fuels nuclear debate in South Korea:

"In general, the more the Trump administration denigrates and neglects the alliance with the South and the more it shows signs of wanting to reach an arms control deal with North Korea that provides Pyongyang with nuclear weapons status, the more South Korea will entertain its intention of obtaining its own nuclear weapons.” …  That concern will be heightened if, as has been speculated, Trump pursues an agreement with the North that bans its development of the long-range missiles—the kind of missiles that could be used to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons—in return for the West effectively accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. Such a deal would provide no assurances to South Korea, whose capital city is only 50 kilometers from the North Korean border.

Trump win fuels campaign for nuclear arms in South Korea:

“Mistrust of the U.S. is growing,” said Cheong, who founded the ROK Forum for Nuclear Strategy, a group of 50 analysts, former military officials and academics who share his view that South Korea should acquire nuclear arms. …In 2020, Trump ordered the withdrawal of around 12,000 US troops stationed in Germany, calling the European nation “delinquent.” “Germany’s not paying for it,” he said at the time. “We don’t want to be the suckers anymore.” Trump has similarly dismissed the US-South Korea alliance as an unnecessary drag … As president, he canceled joint military exercises between the two countries for being “tremendously expensive” and told aides that he wanted a “complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea”…

“Rhetorically, nuclear weapons are on the table,” said Mason Richey, a professor of politics and international relations at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “And that will be significantly affected by how the Trump administration approaches the alliance with South Korea and how it approaches the relationship with North Korea. In general, the more the Trump administration denigrates and neglects the alliance with the South and the more it shows signs of wanting to reach an arms control deal with North Korea that provides Pyongyang with nuclear weapons status, the more South Korea will entertain its intention of obtaining its own nuclear weapons.”

“So much has changed since the Ukraine war, with the nonproliferation regime once managed between China, Russia, and the US having been considerably weakened. Who will tell South Korea that it can’t have nuclear weapons for its own survival?”

Push for Seoul getting own nuclear arms gains steam after Trump win.

… “There are a lot of concerns about former President Trump having been re-elected,” the first-time lawmaker said. “Gaining nuclear potential is going to be a long game for South Korea. But I think we can and should try to get there faster.”

Retired three-star Army general Rep. Han Ki-ho, reputed as a leading military expert in the ruling party, went a step further and said South Korea getting nuclear arms may no longer be a choice given North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons program. “For South Korea’s survival, nuclear armament may be the only path left to us,” he said. Within the People Power Party, a National Assembly resolution urging the government to pursue nuclear arms as a means of North Korean nuclear deterrent is underway.

How Trump could push Japan, South Korea to go nuclear:

“If South Korea has nuclear weapons, Japan will surely have them,” [said] the prime minister’s advisor, who had recently returned from a visit to Korea. …Technically, while South Korea can move faster politically, Japan has the fissile material already in storage—the plutonium stockpile from reprocessed spent fuel—as well as a potential long-range delivery system in its H-2 and H-3 rockets. “We have to face the sheer reality of who is leading the US,” the former senior Foreign Ministry official concluded. “We cannot change that.”

The Inexorable Logic

Imagine that you are the defense minister of an American ally. When you open the newspaper today, this is what you see:

* Russia and China: Two Countries, One Threat:

The combat deployment of 10,000 North Korean troops to the battlefield near Ukraine’s border has confirmed that Russia’s war of aggression is now a multi-theater global confrontation—China’s critical role in sustaining Putin’s war machine through the supply of dual-use goods, as well as drone and missile technology, and Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles and other armaments to Russia, make it hard to argue against the de facto existence of a four nation authoritarian axis. These developments should put paid to the notion that the theaters can be neatly separated.    

Pyongyang’s active engagement in the conflict, in particular, is a turning point. Not only does the transfer of North Korean military personnel to Russia represent a major escalation, it also marks yet another failure of US deterrence.  Whether in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, or the South China Sea, Moscow and Beijing seem increasingly keen to test US responses to their escalation. The deployment of troops to Eastern Europe by one of Moscow’s allies from Asia creates a precedent that defies residual assumptions from the Cold War era.

* Trump’s secretary of defense pick is a wildly unqualified Fox News host.

* The curious case of Tulsi Gabbard: Is she a Russian asset or a dupe?

What would you conclude?

The moments when an adversary is on the precipice of acquiring the Bomb, or a secure second-strike capability, are the most dangerous. That’s when the incentive to launch a first strike is the greatest. But rivals have incomplete information about each other’s capabilities, so the chances that one party will miscalculate, sparking a blood-soaked conventional war or a nuclear exchange, are enormous. Israel and Iran are the obvious example of this dynamic.

No one should console himself with the thought that the world will be safer when our allies, or former allies, acquire the Bomb. We don’t have the ability to say that friendly countries may have nuclear weapons but hostile ones may not. The demise of the NPT will even destabilize regions that are for now tolerably stable. A global proliferation cascade will ensue.

By electing Donald Trump, the United States initiated a de facto withdrawal from its treaty commitments and alliances around the globe. The effect of this will be much like that of the sudden collapse of the British or the Ottoman Empire. When empires suddenly collapse, they leave a security vacuum and chaos. There are no examples from history of such a thing proceeding peacefully.

There are now superpower-sized holes in the world’s security architecture. We will very likely see multiple regional nuclear arms races, under circumstances and in configurations the world has not seen before, as a consequence. This will be a world completely unlike the one every living American has known. Many Americans believe, wrongly, that the power configuration of the world and all that implies is simply the natural order, rather than a thing we built deliberately. For people like this, the ramifications of its destruction will no doubt come as a great shock.

We’re willingly embarking on a project to create precisely those circumstances most likely to give rise to terrible accidents and miscalculations. Even if the world’s luck holds, which is unlikely, we will live for the foreseeable future in a world where nuclear showdowns like the Cuban Missile Crisis regularly occur, but we will have no power to shape their outcome. No one will be looking for advice from their former security guarantor.

By the time we realize what we’ve thrown away, and what it meant to have it, it will be too late. We will be hostage to other nations’ fortunes. Our power to shape our own destiny, in the most fundamental of ways, will be gone.

Historians, if they survive, will be puzzled that we barely thought twice about it.