Trump's Vision for "Gaza-Lago" | Israeli Experts Weigh In
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When President Trump says, "Okay, as a result of this war that your Hamas government started and you celebrated that brought ruin to your territory, it probably makes sense if you don't live in that territory anymore and live somewhere else at least temporarily and have a better life than you have." That caused people to express such outrage and then say, "Well, wait, Gaza is their home." And then I said, "Well, thank you. My work is done."

Breaking news out of Israel this morning. Shocking hostage-taking. Hundreds of Israelis are dead. I want to bring in Israeli government spokesman Elon. What happens when a four-day court... Have you resolved this? Where does this go now? Daniel Paul Rubenstein, DPR. Welcome to State of a Nation.

This is a confirmation for people that we're two different people. Exactly. We're rarely on camera at the same time. Despite wearing a blue tie and having the pin with the flag and the hostage pin as well, we are different people. Good friends, but different people. Although you are really my brain because I borrow so many ideas and good witty soundbites from you. We'll talk about that in just a bit. For our viewers, it is Thursday, the 6th of February.

12 o'clock. We are filming the day after everyone in Israel woke up in astonishment at that bombshell press conference at the White House in which President Trump came out with the rather extraordinary idea to relocate the entire population of Gaza, whether permanently or temporarily, and take control, American ownership of the Gaza Strip, what some people are mocking as Gaza Lago or from the Riviera to the sea.

as part of his proposal for how to fix the problem of Gaza. He is saying that the population of Gaza will have to move in order for Gaza to be rebuilt. It's not possible to do it with so much rubble. And I want to get your take in this conversation on

the news and recent developments and understand how you are interpreting recent events. But first of all, for those who aren't familiar, you have been one of the key partners in building the Israeli Citizen Spokesperson's Office. You've been doing international media interviews, reels through the Citizen Spokesperson's Office, and very active on social media. But many people will not be familiar with your story. So DPR, who are you?

Well, I was born in California. I grew up in Texas. I lived in Washington, D.C. for a while where I worked at AIPAC. And I kept moving east in my life, and I've ended up here in the land of Israel in 2011.

And I've done many different things since then. I wear many different hats. I've been very involved with the IDF Spokesperson's Unit since 2012. I was a social media advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I worked on the campaign of Naftali Bennett a few years ago. And I'm also a licensed Israeli tour guide. So I'm involved in education, I'm involved in politics, and I'm involved in social media. And now I'm involved in the State of the Nation podcast, which I think is the peak of

And, well, I don't know. It sounds like you've had quite an incredible journey so far, including the beginning of this war. October 7th catches you, a tour guide, not much tourism in Israel now with flights having dried up. You're immediately conscripted into reserves. Find yourself in the IDF spokesperson's office. Tell me what you were dealing to deal with the nation's strategic communications in those early chaotic days of the war.

The main challenge was to find the words to describe what had just happened and to prepare people for what was going to come. The words that had just, for the words that had just happened, we settled on October 7th Massacre, October 7th War, and it was the job of the unit as a whole to show the world the images from a war zone.

All of the images that people saw from Kfar Aza, from Be'eri, from Kibbutzim on the border was because the IDF spokesperson's unit arranged in the middle of an act of war with rockets flying every day to bring journalists to come see the truth about what happened and broadcast this around the world.

So I spent my time crafting messages, trying to understand the situation, gathering statistics, and helping all of our different spokespeople who were going on camera 24-7. We had an operation. I know some of them have been your podcast guests. Jonathan Conricos was here. Peter Lerner was also one of these people. We had a number of people going on camera all the time in multiple languages.

And they need to be updated on what are we saying about this? What are the latest numbers about that? What's going on here? So I was prepping them for their interviews and doing a bit of social media work and also writing some English content for the head of the unit, Daniel Higari, the...

Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, who's the head of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, he was delivering nightly statements in Hebrew to the Israeli public, and quite often he was also doing English. So I was part of the team that was working on his English statements. And of course, when you make statements to the international press, you're not just shooting from the hip. You have to choose your words very carefully. You spoke just now about what we actually call this war, and I remember it was October 15th. I'd just been sucked into the Prime Minister's office, and I remember sending you a message because you were at the IDF Spokesperson's Unit saying...

No one is giving a name to the events that happened last week. People are saying the Hamas terror attack, the Hamas-led attacks. This is an event of global magnitude. It needs a name. Let's call it the October 7th massacre. And that messaging stuck. When you were writing messages for the IDF spokespeople going on TV, I mean, how did you come up with the right message? What were you consulting? How did you know what worked, what didn't work, what sounds good for a domestic audience but plays bad internationally? Yeah.

Well, one of the advantages of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit is it is a...

meeting point for many of the sharpest communications minds in Israel, who also got called up for reserve duty after October 7th. And we would gather and sit and brainstorm and think about what is simple and what is clear and what should be repeated again and again and again. We would study all of the statements that were coming out in Hebrew from the IDF Spokesperson's Unit in putting out Hebrew messages.

pulling from there, deciding what is best, what is our audience who does not know the situation as well as the Hebrew speaking audience, what are the messages we should emphasize. We study polling, we pay attention to focus groups, we all use our backgrounds in political communication to push the messages that we think should be pushed.

And now here we are dealing with a president of the United States who is pushing messages that no one in their wildest imaginations could have thought would be coming out of the White House. Certainly not after the last administration. But hey, when you have a president who's talking about annexing Canada as the 51st state and taking over Greenland, the Overton window of acceptable ideas has shifted.

Tell me, what were your initial reactions to that press conference, Donald Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu? Did you stay up late to watch it or did you wake up in the morning, check your phone and think, oh my goodness, am I still sleeping? I must be hallucinating. I was up until 3 a.m. in Israel watching the whole thing. I watched the first media availability when the prime minister arrived to the White House. He sat down with Trump in the Oval Office. We thought it was going to be a short interview.

and a couple questions. That ended up being a long Q&A session where President Trump shared a lot of thoughts. Then the private meeting happened, and I stayed up until the private meeting ended and the prime minister and the president appeared again, I think it was in the East Room of the White House, to deliver more statements, and Trump answered more questions and questions

It was hard to sleep after that. My first reaction was what you mentioned is, wow, the Overton window has just moved. For those who don't know what the Overton window is. Let's explain. It's a concept named for Joseph Overton, who was describing a spectrum of political commentary statements, beliefs that are acceptable in a society at any given time.

And Trump's statement certainly moved the center of what is acceptable to a totally different place because the comments that he made were not even mainstream comments in Israel. When people are talking about the war, they're usually not discussing the things that Trump discussed. No, I mean, journalists here in Israel were joking that short of calling for the dismissal of the attorney general in Israel, Trump had just outflanked even the most far-right Israeli party. I think what his comments did...

is make the messages that we have been promoting here at the Israeli Citizen Spokesperson's Office, our views about Gaza that we have been discussing even before this organization existed when we were in our different roles in the government and the military. We have some key principles that...

I think deserve a lot more attention that are very reasonable. And now because Trump introduced Gaza into the biggest story in the world by his comments, I think a lot more people are listening to us. And I've seen our social media numbers go up much higher because we're saying simple and clear truths that many of the people who had the, had the most antagonistic reaction to what Trump said, people who are,

perhaps more in the Hamas supporter camp or generally more pro-Palestinian or they're going to be the most upset at what Trump said. Well, they're not dealing with some very simple truths. And I think that explains a gap in the way different people react. What's an example? Okay, we're going to have to explain this because when you say Trump shifted the Overton window in a way that has made people more receptive to our arguments, what's an example of that?

We haven't been making the case that the people of Gaza need to be moved. So in what way do you think that Trump saying that, which is not something that we've been saying, has made people more receptive to what we've been saying? And what have we been saying? First, we have been saying that Hamas is the government of Gaza.

This is a key point that if people don't know this key point, they're going to have a different opinion about the war in Gaza entirely if they don't understand that Hamas is the government of Gaza and that it was the government of Gaza since 2007. And it was the government of Gaza on October 7th, 2023. It was not some armed group.

separate from the government that made the decision to invade Israel against the wishes of a central authority. Hamas was the government and the Hamas government decided to carry out the October 7th massacre. The Hamas government was the government that decided to turn all of Gaza into an urban warfare landscape.

We're talking an area that is walking distance from the places that Hamas terrorists struck on October the 7th. They turned all of these residential areas into military positions. They had guys there with rocket-propelled grenades. They had tunnels connecting their positions. They had snipers. The whole area was militarized, and that is what the Hamas government spent most of its resources on, and it unleashed this battery against Israel on October the 7th. And we also saw...

Thousands more civilians on October the 7th. In addition to the trained Hamas fighters who carried out the massacre and the invasion by air, land, and sea, thousands of civilians in Gaza saw an opening to join the party. And civilians in Gaza entered Israel and committed barbaric atrocities. And we also saw that when these Hamas terrorists and civilians came back into Gaza with hostages, dead or alive, bodies in their cars, they were

Thousands of people were gathered in the streets cheering for what happened. This is completely missed from any conversation about the war. We're partly responsible for it. I mean, I remember at the beginning of the war in the prime minister's office, we had very clear instructions to underplay war.

the civilian cooperation with Hamas because we were being accused wrongly of targeting civilians and it was important to pump out the message no this is a war against Hamas not the people of Gaza and if you talk about the civilians who are complicit you would be feeding ammo to the people who want to wrongly claim that we're targeting civilians but now that we look at the day after and the need to 3Ds destroy Hamas

Demilitarize Gaza, deradicalize Palestinian society. We have to talk about the deep grip that Hamas's ideology has in Gaza and why many of them thought that October 7th was the best day of their lives. We should be clear that there's no contradiction between adhering to the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law and the laws of war.

And also pointing out the level of support that Hamas has in Palestinian society, particularly in Gaza. Now, what we have been saying is, I think, a very simple message, which is that Gaza should make peace with Israel. Gaza's over here. Israel's over here. A war should end with peace. We have a clear border. Israel has no... Not a piece of paper. Israel, not a piece of paper. Israel has no claim on Gaza.

But Gaza has a big claim on Israel. That's why the October 7th massacre happened. Explain that, because I think I understand what you're saying. But to many people, that will not be clear. Israel has no claim over Gaza, but Gaza has a claim over Israel. What does that mean? There are around 2 million people in Gaza.

If you go to the UNRWA website right now, as you're listening to this, unrwa.org, click the Gaza section, you will see that UNRWA has registered 1.58 million people in Gaza as refugees.

This is the number of refugees not from this current war of the past 16 months. This is the number of refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants who are a total of 5 million. There's 2 million in Jordan. They're in the West Bank. And we have 1.58 million in Gaza. So it was a 1.6 million.

1.6 million out of 2 million people in Gaza are identifying as refugees from what's now the state of Israel. That means their claim, their identity is that they have the right to return to

That is why they're mad. The right to relocate. The right to relocate. They call it the right of return. If we go back a few years in 2018, there were massive demonstrations, protests, rallies. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza gathering near the Israeli border. Some kept a safe distance. Others were trying to break in.

What was the name of this event where hundreds of thousands of people were gathering to demonstrate? If you're gathering to demonstrate, you probably have some political message. It wasn't the march for a better life. It wasn't the march for more employment. Was it a march for a two-state solution? It wasn't the march for a two-state solution. It wasn't the march for coexistence. They called it the march of return because the demand of most of the people in Gaza is that they have a right to invade Israel and take it from them.

That is their vision, goal, identity, objective. And that is what Hamas claims to be the best organization to carry out that dream. October 7th was the realization of the vision of the liberation of Palestine. This is what they said themselves. We have videos of civilians who came in and were excited to do what they called return. This was it in practice. So we're talking about a population that is telling the world we're not from here.

We have a right to go over there. So suddenly now when President Trump says, okay, as a result of this war that your Hamas government started and you celebrated that brought ruin to your territory, it probably makes sense if you don't live in that territory anymore and live in somewhere else, at least temporarily and have a better life than you have. That caused people to express such outrage and then say, well, wait, Gaza is their home. And then I said, well,

Thank you. My work is done. This is the point we are trying to say. The people of Gaza are at home in Gaza and they should give up their claim to transfer themselves to Israel and demolish Israel and change Israel's name to Palestine. That is the mentality that we're dealing with. And that's why I say that Trump shifted the Overton window.

Because we can now have an honest conversation about whether or not Gaza is the home of the people who live there. My view is, yes, Gaza is the home of the people who live there. But what the people in Gaza are telling the whole world is, no, Gaza is not our home. And they are supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in this endeavor, which is why we are saying that this organization, it's one of many reasons we're saying that this organization should be dismantled.

Right. Either Gaza is the home of the people who live there, in which case they are not refugees and they should stop being subsidized with massive international welfare until such a day as they realize this fictitious right to relocate to Israel. Or Gaza is not their home. And then the question of whether they should be in Gaza or in a refugee camp somewhere else is unanswered.

immaterial because it's just temporary. I mean, I came back recently from the European Union. I had a week of meetings in Brussels. I haven't debriefed you fully on those conversations. They were off record, so I can't say what my interlocutors said, but I can say what I told them. I met with officials involved in plans for the reconstruction of Gaza the day after. And I said, you cannot have permanent reconstruction in Gaza if you continue to tell most of the people there that they are there temporarily.

If you continue to spend European Union money to tell people, you are refugees, this is temporary, you're not really from here, one day you're going to move to Israel, they are not going to build permanent homes. You're just building a Potemkin refugee camp and fueling their fantasies of moving to live in Israel. So actually, it's welcome that suddenly we're seeing, I mean, you know, what we see here,

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Alvarez rejecting President Trump's proposal saying, I want to be very clear on this, Gaza is the land of Gazan Palestinians and they must stay in Gaza, which is of course not what UNRWA wants or the Palestinians because they think that they have a right to relocate to Israel. Has he said that before Trump made his comments? Was he emphasizing that Gaza is the home of the Palestinians who live there or was he emphasizing a potential right of return as Palestinians call it into Israel? I

I'd be surprised if he was emphasizing this. No, he wasn't. And so now we're in a position where, as you say, Trump has moved the Overton window. People are speaking in terms of Gaza is being...

People are speaking in terms of Gaza being the home of the Gazans who live there. They belong to Gaza. Gaza belongs to them. And the logical corollary of that is that they are not refugees. And the solution is you, one of your more successful tweets recently, you wrote, my radical idea, Gazans should stay in Gaza and make peace with Israel. Literally nobody is suggesting this. You got over 300,000 views for that tweet, but also a lot of backlash, right?

Tell me about that. I think a lot of people misinterpreted this tweet because I got a lot of people who are trying to lecture me as if they've never seen any of my content or read any of my tweets. They're trying to lecture me that we tried peace with Gaza and it didn't work. Therefore, what we need now is what Trump is suggesting. Of course, they're right about the timeline that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, in

In 2005, the state of Israel forcibly withdrew the Israelis who were living in Gaza, about 8,000 of them. And Israel withdrew to the border that the so-called international community said, this is the legitimate border. So Israel ended its claims on the territory of Gaza, withdrew behind the line that the international community said was the border, and said, we hope that this will lead to a better future between Israel and Gaza and the Palestinian people as a whole.

This was in 2005. And one of the arguments that Israelis who were in favor of this made was if we withdraw and there is an attack from Gaza into Israel, well, then we will have the legitimacy to go back in. It's wild that people actually believe this. Yes, it comes from a misunderstanding of where legitimacy comes from. That is an argument that we are having with ourselves. But the way that other countries react is going to be based on their own internal politics and

and their foreign relations and not on what we think is a great argument. But this is key is that everyone said you'll have the legitimacy to go back and attack if you are attacked because you have withdrawn to the line that you're supposed to withdraw from. That was 2005. In 2006, Hamas, which wasn't even the government yet,

came through a cross-border tunnel. They had tunnels then. They ambushed Israeli soldiers and kidnapped Gilad Shalit, one Israeli soldier, and they held him in Gaza for five years until Israel released a thousand prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar, who became the head of Hamas and the mastermind of the October 7th massacre. And in 2007...

Hamas seized power in Gaza and became the government and used Gaza, militarized Gaza as a base of operations for carrying out attacks against Israel. And Israel had a number of operations in Gaza from...

Cast-led in the end of 2008-2009. There was Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012. There was Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Many smaller skirmishes. I don't remember Israel having any kind of legitimacy from certain crowds to defend itself against the Hamas government, which was calling for Israel's destruction. No, and the tragedy is that we ended up with October 7th because Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, thought we would have full legitimacy to crush the Hamas regime if they fired rockets.

They fired rockets, there's a war in 2008, massive international pressure to leave Hamas on its feet and not go all the way, take it down when it was a much smaller threat than the monster it became. But because Israel didn't have the quote-unquote international legitimacy to bring down the Hamas regime and thought the cost would be prohibitively large, we ended up with Hamas, the government of Gaza, not a minor armed group, the de facto authority, the regime in Gaza.

militarizing the entire strip network of 350 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza. And instead of building a metropolis, they turn it into a necropolis. So this is what my audience had in mind when they read my tweet, which you read out loud, which I'll read it again. I wrote, my radical idea, Gazans should stay in Gaza and make peace with Israel. Literally nobody is suggesting this. So I think it's a fairly simple solution to...

a problem, which is you end the state of war and you make peace and you end your claims and that's okay. It turns out

that people have other priorities besides the safety and well-being of normal Palestinians who live in Gaza, and their priority is to continue the war against Israel until Israel is no more. That becomes the priority, and the actual well-being of the people is less important. But I think my suggestion should be a test. If any of our audience is in a conversation with people about this subject,

Simply ask the person you're talking to, do you think Gaza should have a government that makes peace with Israel? Or should Gaza have a government that continues its war against Israel? Until this question is answered, I'm not willing to have any other conversation about the future of Gaza because that would be nonsensical. Well, let me put it to you. Let me play devil's advocate. I think people, well-meaning people might say,

Okay, there should be peace between Gaza and Israel, but Gaza isn't a separate entity. There is also the West Bank. These are together the Palestinian territories, capital letters.

And there are other issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that go beyond the border between Gaza and Israel. There's the question of refugees, the question of the status of Jerusalem, the question of Israel's control over the West Bank. So yes, there should be peace between Gaza and Israel, but as part of a package of the two-state solution. There shouldn't be a separate peace between Gaza and Israel, and then there's still Israel's control in the West Bank and the settlements and Jerusalem and whatever. There should be peace,

But peace should wait until there's a two-state solution. What do you make about that? Well, there's a lot of truth to what people who say this are saying. Israel is still a signatory to the Oslo Accords, and the text of the Oslo Accords is clear that Gaza and the West Bank are one territorial unit. So,

So when I'm speaking here about... Even though they're not geographically together. Even though they're not geographically together, it is in the agreement that the state of Israel will see Gaza and the West Bank as one territorial unit. That was the idea, that there would be a new government called the Palestinian Authority that would establish its jurisdiction and administration over Palestinian cities, and Israel and the Palestinians would keep negotiating and come up with some type of final status arrangement that would

resolve the issues of borders and refugees and settlements and water and Jerusalem and all of the things that need to be discussed. So there is some truth to that, but we need to also rely on a little bit of common sense in order to break this apart. The Palestinian Authority became the government of the Palestinian people in Gaza in 1994. They remained the government until 2007. How many years is that? 13 years?

I think my math is okay. That's 13 years, okay? 13 years the Palestinian Authority was the government of Gaza, and it made sense that Gaza and the West Bank would be one territorial unit because it was one government, this government that had been established as part of the Oslo Accords. Now, in 2007, Hamas has a war, a civil war, against the Palestinian Authority, against the Fatah faction, and Hamas now becomes the government of Gaza in 2007. It is now 2025, right?

That's 18 years that Hamas has been the government of Gaza. So Hamas has been the government of Gaza for longer than the Palestinian Authority was the government of Gaza. It's a new reality. The Palestinian Authority does not seem eager or willing to take control of Gaza and return to the situation that existed in 2006, 5, 4, 3, 2...

Because they were in a weak position then already. And if you look at what's going on in the West Bank, which is a separate conversation entirely, the Palestinian Authority can barely govern its own cities. So we're in a reality where Gaza and the West Bank are separated. And that is because Hamas has been the government since 2007. And if we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that by waving a magic wand that they can be connected again, that's a problem. Second,

Why should anyone in Gaza use violence against Israel if Israel has no claim against Gaza? Well, the answer from the perspective of the people in Gaza is very simple. It's that they are fighting for Jerusalem.

They called the October 7th massacre the Al-Aqsa deluge, Al-Aqsa flood. So the people in Gaza believe that they're fighting for Jerusalem and don't want to see themselves as anything separate. And I'm saying at this point in the war, given the reality in Gaza, it makes sense to see Gaza as something separate. That's just dealing with reality. I think everyone else is stuck in the delusions of the past. Hang on. I want to push back against that statement you made that Israel has no claims over Gaza. Yeah.

Because Israel's position has been consistently that Israel must remain consistent.

in overarching security control of the entire area west of the Jordan River. Now, I understand why that is, and I agree with it, because if Israel doesn't have control over the entire land, who will? It will be jihadi groups that will fill the vacuum. But that certainly does sound like Israel saying it has some claims over Gaza, and there are certainly elements in the Israeli government that want to resettle Gaza.

Yes, the government of Israel has no territorial claim on Gaza in the sense that we do not want Gaza to be part of Israel. That's why the state of Israel left Gaza in 2005. Now, when Israel left Gaza in 2005, it turned it over to the Palestinian Authority, which was not yet a state.

So it was something in the middle. There was still some Israeli control of Gaza, airspace, the sea, and so on. But this was in accordance with the Oslo Accords, which Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to. So now, of course, we're in a very different situation nearly 16 months after October the 7th. Of course, the Israeli military has some security claims over certain areas in Gaza as a result of this war. But I'm generally speaking about what was the reality that existed on October 6th, which

which is that Israel had no claim on the territory of Gaza, did not want a war with the people of Gaza, the government of Gaza. Israel wanted to stay back and hope for a better future. And much of Israel's policy toward Gaza at this time, from 2007 until 2023, could be simply described as buying quiet.

Literally buying with suitcases full of Qatar cash.

We've been many times, you and me, to the border crossing between Israel and Gaza, the Erez crossing. When I take groups as a guide to this border crossing, I ask them to imagine, what do you think the Gaza border looks like? I mean, this is before October 7th I was doing this. What do you imagine the Gaza border looks like? And because they know that Hamas is the government of Gaza, they are imagining ditches, barbed wire,

guns and no man's land, just like you'd see in the movies, maybe between two trenches and in a world war one movie, when you arrive to this border crossing between Israel and Gaza, it looks like an airport. It's a massive building. Why is it so massive? Because Israel thought that after withdrawing in 2005, uh,

we would have better relations with the people of Gaza and there would be movement of peoples between the two sides, just as there is movement between any two territories in the world. So the plan was that we would have more coexistence and ultimately that that could lead to some type of peace, but

where we stand now to go back to... You see that in the infrastructure that when Israel pulled out in 2005, it wasn't expecting a Korean-style DMZ. It was expecting, we're going to pull out of Gaza, and this is an opportunity to create, well, back then they said the Singapore of the Middle East, as President Trump would say now, the Riviera of the Middle East. But that was the dream. That was the experiment that failed with the Gaza disengagement. Yes, and I would not wait...

in order for the PLO and the Palestinian people as a whole to agree that it's okay that there's going to be one place in the world where the Jewish people are responsible for their own fate, that there's going to be a Jewish majority state and it's going to be called Israel.

We cannot wait for them to make peace with that idea before we look at Gaza with a set of eyes that see things for what they are and not as we dream them to be. I don't think we're in a position to sit and wait, and we simply should see Gaza as a place where two million people live. They need a better future than the one that they have now.

And the best idea for them to have a better future is to make a separate peace with Israel and just say, we're done from Gaza. We're done. We want to have something different. And if the answer to that is no, which it still is right now.

There's no voice in Gaza or in Palestinian society saying that what happened on October 7th can never happen again. In fact, we're hearing the opposite. And it's because of this, it's because there are so many voices calling on the war to continue that President Trump has an opening to say something like, well, OK, if this is going to be the situation, we're never going to rebuild Gaza forever.

with a government that's going to keep declaring war against Israel. So it makes sense if people in Gaza have another place to live, and that's why they should be allowed to leave. And other countries, for example, Spain, all of these countries that have accused Israel of genocide in what I would see as the most obvious self-defense operation in the history of military operations in humanity,

Let's see Spain offer some entry visas to Palestinians in Gaza who it says need to escape a genocide. That's how we'll know if someone is serious or not. Okay, so President Trump with his statement of the White House has shifted the Overton window, that window of acceptability of arguments in a way that has made people more receptive to the things that we have been trying to say in support of peace and security since the beginning of the war.

The first is that Gaza is the home of the people in Gaza. Before, when we said that, it was a radical idea because the UN was telling us, no, it's not their home. They're there temporarily. Now, thanks to President Trump, the Palestinians themselves and their supporters are saying Gaza is their home. So that has shifted. The second way that he's shifted the Overton window is the point perhaps about

the need for a separate peace. As we say, wars should end with peace, not a piece of paper, that there's no such thing as a permanent ceasefire. That's an oxymoron. The war should end with the permanent cessation of hostilities and normalization of relations. And President Trump is coming along here and saying, well,

If the Palestinians don't want to make peace with Israel, then it makes sense that this conflict is going to continue. If the conflict continues, it's impossible to rebuild peacefully. So he's shifted the Overton window in that, forcing people to think seriously about, hang on,

Does the end of this war mean the end of the conflict in a way that we can rebuild peacefully? Or are we accepting there will still be a state of conflict between Hamas-run Gaza and Israel? In which case, why are we going to spend our taxpayer dollars on reconstruction? And then there is that question of reconstruction. President Trump talking about how Gaza, people are making jokes, the Gaza strip club, Gaza lago.

could be the Riviera of the Middle East. People almost mocking Trump's obsession with real estate as if he sees it as a plot of lucrative real estate. But he's right.

Gaza has so much potential, so much potential, and that only heightens the tragedy of the fact that after 2005, they could have chosen to make it the Riviera of the Middle East. Instead, they chose to make it a launchpad for permanent jihad against Israel. And under the right government, under the right administration, whether it's the 51st state or the 52nd after the U.S. annexes Canada or the 53rd after Greenland,

or 54th after Panama, right? There is huge potential for the Gaza Strip because of its proximity to the Israeli tech powerhouse, to the Nile Delta, to provide a life of prosperity for the people who live there. There's only one price. Peace. Either this territory is still in a state of war with Israel, in which case they're doomed. And frankly, it's on them if their choice is war.

Or it can be the Riviera of the Middle East that they can enjoy from and there's just one cost, peace. You think that President Trump's statements have made people more receptive to that message?

Well, first of all, I think it's not for us to tell another people what their priorities should be. The Palestinian people are a capable, educated, literate people who have made the decision about what their priorities are. And their number one priority until this point has not been to turn the Gaza Strip into the French Riviera or Dubai. Their number one priority is to preserve Gaza as a weapon against the state of Israel. Hang on. The Palestinians or Hamas?

The Palestinians. Explain. Well, it's very simple. We do not have Palestinian voices who are saying that we should give up this demand that we're calling the right of return. These voices do not exist in Palestinian society. It's very easy to disprove me.

Find a tweet, find a public statement, find a blog post, an op-ed. It can be in Arabic. Send it to me of Palestinians in Palestinian society who are living under a Palestinian government or even in Jerusalem where they're under the Israeli government. Find examples of Palestinians who are saying that this fantasy that 5 million of us have the right to immigrate to Israel is

and change its name to Palestine, find people who are saying that this is nonsense. Okay, we're going to make this a challenge for our listeners because I know that many people think that the Palestinian rhetoric around the right of return, the right to relocate, is just rhetoric and they don't really mean it. You are on Twitter at Paul Rubens, on Instagram as RubyGuidesIsrael. Anyone who can find a statement from a Palestinian living under Palestinian government or even in East Jerusalem publicly saying in whatever language...

The Palestinians should stay put where they are, and there is no right to relocate to Israel. Please get in touch with us, and we will give you a big shout out and send you some sort of prize as well. Maybe we'll send them a signed State of the Nation mug as well to say thank you. We have many points of reference in this conversation, and that's the whole conversation about UNRWA. UNRWA...

is in many people's minds, an organization that is providing aid to people who have no access to safety or security, and they're on the run because they're refugees. But again, look at the UNRWA website, click on the country called Jordan, and see the situation there. And it says on the UNRWA website that there are

2 million registered Palestine refugees in Jordan. Most of them are citizens of Jordan. It says this on the UNRWA website that most of the people receiving UNRWA benefits in Jordan are citizens of Jordan. When you say the Palestinians are very capable people, they are the only people in the world who are capable of being both refugees and citizens of the country they live in. In Jordan, they are at home. They have jobs.

They are citizens of the place where they live and they are defining themselves as refugees. So when I say it's more than just Hamas with this identity, it's the entire Palestinian people. This is what I'm referring to. We can look at the West Bank also, something closer to where we're sitting right now in our building. If you go up high enough and look to the east, you'll see the hills of the West Bank. Since 1993, 94, the Oslo Accords, there's a new government in much of the West Bank called the Palestinian Authority. And its job is to provide services to

to the Palestinian public in the cities, Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus. There are also places in the West Bank that they call refugee camps. These are areas where there were refugees from 1948, and now they have permanent homes.

homes, apartments in these places called refugee camps. And the Palestinian Authority does not provide services to their own people who are next door to their major cities because they're trying to preserve them in these refugee camps. The people living there are saying, we are Palestinian, we're in Palestine, and we're refugees. This is the mentality that gives rise to Hamas.

We have the core Palestinian identity, which says that 5 million people are refugees with the right to immigrate, relocate to what's now Israel. So if that is the core identity, you're going to have a political movement and come along and say, we are the way to achieve the results that you are looking for. Our way of doing it is Islam. Islam is the solution. They have turned Islam into a political movement, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But Hamas is coming from core Palestinian identity and...

people should know. Yeah, in my meetings with European Union officials, again, off record, I can't say what they said.

I can say what they didn't say when I asked them why the European Union is funding welfare services for two million citizens of Jordan and why the Palestinian Authority isn't being forced to take responsibility for hospitals and schools in its own jurisdiction. I didn't receive any answers, at least not satisfactory answers. Right. So President Trump has shifted the Overton window through these statements that are just

completely left of field or right of field or however we want to put it. He's forced people to confront some very real questions about the root causes of this conflict, about whether the Palestinians in Gaza really think they belong in Gaza or they think that they belong in Israel and Israel belongs to them. He's forced us to confront the question about

whether this war should end with peace and an end of claims, or it's just freezing a conflict until next time, forcing people to question whether reconstruction can really be sustainable inside the Gaza Strip, if people still think it's temporary, or if the government is still committed to Israel's destruction. And that's before the logistical question of how you clear so much rubble. And Gaza is rubble.

It's rubble because it's government, Hamas, decided to declare war on Israel and fight that war from a network of tunnels underneath people's houses. I wonder the way you place within this. You said that that vision of the destruction of Israel from the river to the sea is not just Hamas vision.

This is something that is shared widely across Palestinian society. Unless we come to terms with why Hamas is popular, why people thought October 7th was the best day of their lives, we're not going to be able to rebuild peacefully or de-radicalize. But the major difference between Hamas and ISIS, we've been saying, is that Hamas has state sponsors. ISIS was a global pariah. It was the enemy of humanity. Hamas is seen as a legitimate actor, not only by...

crazy radicals on the streets of London and Paris and New York, but also by its state sponsors: Iran, Qatar, Turkey and South Africa that have been giving Hamas material, financial, military, moral, legal support. I want to get your take on Qatar because you've been tweeting a lot about Qatar. At the beginning of the war, I remember Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

any country that has relations with Hamas should be treated like a country that has relations with ISIS. They should be sanctioned. They should be a global pariah. That message very quickly changed when Israel realized, thought that Hamas was going, that Qatar was the key to getting to Hamas, to negotiating a hostage deal. And while we've been saying some very harsh things about Qatar, even the president, Isaac Herzog, met the prime minister of Qatar at Davos and thanked them for their role in mediation.

Tell me how you see the role of Qatar. What is it doing? What does it want to achieve? Let me put it this way. Imagine you are at home and the fire department comes to your house and sets a fire in your front yard. And then the fire department goes back to the station. You look out your window, you see your front lawn is burning. Your trees are on fire. Your house is in danger from this fire. So what do you do? You call the fire department. Fire department comes, puts out the fire.

and sends you a very large bill for putting out the fire. Would you then go on television and say how helpful the fire department has been if you knew that the fire department itself was a key player in starting the fire? Probably not, but in a way, the state of Qatar, its government, the royal family, is holding all of us hostage because Qatar is Hamas's agent.

And Hamas is holding hostages that we would like to see home. Qatar has us in a very complicated position. And I understand when Israeli government officials or the president of Israel or representatives of the hostage families say polite things about the government of Qatar. Fortunately, I am in a position where I can say whatever I want about the government of Qatar. Let's go through the points.

On October 7th, 2023 at 3 15 PM, the foreign ministry of Qatar published a statement condemning Israel. This is while the massacre was ongoing. Qatar published a statement with a long list of complaints about Israel. It said Israel was solely responsible for,

for the ongoing massacre. This is in the afternoon of October 7th, Qatar condemned Israel. Where were Hamas leaders on the afternoon of October 7th? They were in Qatar. They were in Doha.

Down the street or in the same building from the same group of foreign ministry officials that published the statement condemning Israel. We saw the video of Hamas leaders in Qatar on October 7th on Al Jazeera. They're watching Al Jazeera and they are celebrating and they are thanking God for the success of their operation, their invasion of Israel. They should have thanked Qatar. I did not see any statement from any Qatari official saying anything.

What Hamas did was bad. It was immoral. Hamas should not have done that. There was nothing of the sort. In fact, we saw recently on Israeli television, the prime minister of Qatar did an interview with Channel 12. With the rotten, yeah. Okay, so I've gone over October 7th. What happened? Let's talk about what happened on October 8th. This is from the Qatari prime minister. He's the one saying it. He says, we've wanted a deal from October 8th.

Now, someone just listening may think that sounds nice, reasonable, like, oh, they wanted a deal. We like deals. They wanted a diplomatic solution. They could have spared us the war. A deal on October 8th would mean that Hamas gets away with the October 7th massacre 100%, that all of its leaders are alive and in power 100%, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Daif, that Hamas

Hamas goes back to exactly where it was with its military infrastructure completely intact in exchange for the hostages. So of course Qatar wanted a deal because a deal at that time means Hamas wins completely. Hamas wins. Hamas holds a victory parade.

Hamas still promising to do October 7th again and again until we're all dead. And Hamas's popularity would surge even more than it already did because everyone would see that Hamas had succeeded with its methods. Hamas would become more popular. Hamas would take over the West Bank. Hamas would take over the PLO. And Hamas would be the sole representative of the Palestinian people on the world stage, which is their ultimate goal.

goal. And Qatar was helping them through this process one step at a time. So I have been saying very clearly as often as I can, my interpretation of Qatari actions and statements, which I think is a quite obvious interpretation based on everything that they've said and done. And it's this Qatar told Hamas to keep the hostages.

I'll say it again. Qatar told Hamas to keep the hostages. That's what it means when you say, oh, you wanted a deal. A deal means it's okay that, you know, you've got one side holding the hostages. Israel has this. It means you're okay with it.

So they wanted Israel to pay a price in exchange for the hostages. And the price that they wanted Israel to pay was that Hamas remains in power and in control of Gaza and in position to do an October 7th massacre again and or take over the Gaza Strip. And Hamas would not have to pay a price. All Hamas would have to do is release the hostages it illegally and barbarically seized from their beds on October 7th. And this is a conversation that I'm sure Hamas officials are having and in Palestinian society they're having as well. Did Hamas pay a price?

for what it did on October 7th? From our perspective, we would say yes. We look at how many Hamas terrorists have been killed. We look at the state of the military infrastructure in Gaza, and we would say, of course, Hamas has paid a price. Sinwa's dead. Def is dead. Al-Aruri's dead. All the leaders are dead except for Sinwa's brother. Hamas has been very clear about their strategy, which is that they're going to use their own civilians as shields. They compare what they're doing to what the Viet Cong did in Vietnam or the...

the war in Algeria to remove the French, they see the cost as worth paying. And I'm not hearing loud voices from Palestinian society saying, no, it's not worth paying this cost. We see here and there on social media. And you know what? I will say credit to them. Yes. If you raise your head above the parapet and denounce Hamas inside Gaza, you'll get a bullet in that head.

Yes. Well, let's talk about, let's say, Jerusalem, where the city of Jerusalem is one third or more Palestinian. They're living under an Israeli government. They're free to speak.

Palestinians in the West Bank who are living under the rivals to Hamas, the ones that Hamas wants to overthrow, they should be free to speak about Hamas. But every time I see even a Palestinian official whose job it is to speak about the situation, whether it's their UN ambassador, whether it's their ambassador in the UK, whether it is Mustafa Barghouti, who I just saw was on Piers Morgan.

Every time they have a chance to say something bad about Hamas, they don't. And one of the reasons they don't is because they're speaking on behalf of a population that thinks Hamas has a point. Let's talk about South Africa. Qatar condemned Israel on October 7th. What did South Africa do?

The government of South Africa took a similar stance to the government of Qatar. The statement is still live on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Africa. The government of South Africa condemned Israel on October 7th. There was no condemnation of Hamas. There was a long list of grievances about Israel. While the massacre is still ongoing... While the massacre is ongoing... The country that is about to play advocate to the devil...

and B, Hamas's legal defense by taking Israel to the ICJ and accuse it of genocide of all things, takes Hamas's side on October 7th. And if you look at the statement, the statement mentions what Palestinians call the right of return. So the government of South Africa on October 7th, 2023, while the massacre is ongoing, and one of the

motivations of the massacre was this Palestinian dream of return. The government of South Africa is sympathizing with that. And the government of South Africa has no problem with contacting Hamas, showing support for Hamas, having meetings with Hamas and publishing photos of the meetings. The government of South Africa has been among the

the, I don't, enemies of the state of Israel in terms of their position in the world stage and what they are trying to do to the state of Israel. As you mentioned, they are the ones who brought this fake genocide accusation to the highest international court, the International Court of Justice, while at the same time, the government of South Africa has no problem hosting the Russian Navy. I don't know how to explain it, but

And if we circle back to President Trump and the way that he is shifting the Overton window, he's also taken a very aggressive stance against South Africa. What do you make of that and how it fits in strategically in this region? Well, I think what the statements of President Trump against the government of South Africa is issues separate, totally separate from the issues that we're concerned with. Right.

Right. He's not picking a fight with South Africa because it is acting as the legal defense of the Hamas terror regime. Correct. I have not seen anything from President Trump or from Elon Musk, who has an interest in South Africa. I have not seen them make the connection between the actions of the government of South Africa and the state of Israel. They are focusing on different issues. One of the issues they're focusing on is land rights in South Africa.

But this seems to be a domestic issue in the United States vis-a-vis their foreign policy with South Africa. So it really has nothing to do with us now. But what happened as a result of President Trump saying what he said about South Africa that was totally unrelated to anything about us, well, I used the opportunity to tweet, the government of South Africa condemned Israel on October 7th, I won't forget.

It is my most viewed tweet of all time. The last time I checked, it's at 2.5 million reach. Amazing. I only have 21,000 followers on X. Wow.

Now that is not a celebrity on this. That is an injustice. But I have 2.5 million reach. So what happens when President Trump made something a trending topic? I pushed a message that I had been pushing before and it was more widely seen because you had many people in the United States who didn't know or didn't care anything about the relationship between South Africa and Israel. They're more interested in the domestic U.S. political angle. Trump, Elon Musk, South Africa. Well, now they're also seeing this point like, wait a second.

The government of South Africa condemned Israel during Hamas's massacre. What this means in effect is that there is no action that any Palestinian could do against an Israeli that they would say is immoral. Like this was the test and they are so far outside what should be acceptable that I am

Thankful for any spotlight on the government of South Africa, because the government of South Africa speaks with a certain sense of moral authority in many parts of the world, because the ruling party of South Africa is the African National Congress. The African National Congress is Nelson Mandela's party.

So these are people who are influential beyond the borders of South Africa, and they have the power to shape the political discourse in the United States. Because when the government of South Africa says something, when they attempt to use the word apartheid to describe our situation here, it has an audience. And they have been pushing this for the past 20 years. I know many people in South Africa who have...

vastly different views from their own government. And I only wish them the best in steering South Africa in a different direction where we can pursue peace and coexistence and cooperation based on mutual respect and not on support for an Islamic supremacist group like Hamas.

And that's going to require the South African government to make decisions about where it fits within the new emerging world order when we see the closer connections between the Russia, China, Iran, North Korea axis. Does South Africa see itself as part of that axis?

uh, fighting against the West or does it want to, uh, be a productive, um, actor? And that means not acting as the legal defense of the Hamas terror regime. DBR, this has been a fascinating discussion and I want to do this again, if only because we both have such hectic schedules that I think this is the longest conversation we actually had in a long time to sit down and brainstorm and think out loud together. Uh, until we do that, how can people follow you and your work, uh,

which is now part of our work. How can people follow you and your work on social media? Well, I'm on a few platforms. If people want to follow me on Instagram, which is where I often post short form videos, carousel posts, my Instagram handle is Ruby Guides Israel, R-U-B-Y Guides Israel.

On Twitter, on X, my username is Paul Rubens. That's P-A-U-L-R-U-B-E-N-S. Those are the two places that I'm publishing most of my content. So I look forward to connecting with anyone who's hearing me now for the first time, chooses to follow me, send me a message, let me know what you thought about this, and hopefully we'll keep doing it

in the future. And I will amplify the fact that you have only 20,000 something followers on Twitter is a travesty. It's an injustice. If this, after this podcast, it doesn't jump by a few thousand, at least we're going to have to take it to the ICJ, such as the level of the injustice. DPR, thanks for coming on the show. It's been fun.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of State of a Nation. As always, if you enjoy these episodes, please hit subscribe on whatever platforms you use. YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Give us a follow on social media platforms. We're on State of a Pod. And share the link with friends you think will be enlightened by the conversations we're having here on the podcast. I'm Elon Levy, and thanks for joining us.