Transcription
But it's clear that we're going to be stuck in this cycle of violence as long as Hamas remains in power. That's why Israel is saying, "Look, give us the tools that we need to finish the job against Hamas, and then it will be possible to move to a day after in which Gaza is no longer under this Jihadi ideology that is committed to a forever war against the existence of Israel."
Hello and welcome to the Americano show. Today, we are going to be talking about Donald Trump's plan to build a new Riviera in the Middle East. That's because, at an extraordinary press conference yesterday alongside Prime Minister B.B. Netanyahu, Trump outlined his plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza and possibly turn it into some kind of resort. We don't quite know. The idea would be that the Palestinian people would be resettled, possibly in Egypt, possibly in Jordan. Donald Trump was a bit vague about that. It's all pretty extraordinary stuff.
I am very pleased to be joined by Elon Levi, who was a spokesman for the Israeli government, to discuss what he thinks. Elon, first of all, I think I just need to start by asking you what you made of it all.
Extraordinary indeed. There is astonishment in Israel, with people trying to work out whether President Trump was being serious or whether this is a hot air balloon to prepare for a negotiation. But I think the president puts his finger on a very real problem. It is impossible to rebuild Gaza as long as its government, Hamas, says that Israel must be destroyed. It is impossible for Gaza to be rebuilt peacefully as long as its government says that it will continue to wage war against Israel again and again until Israel is destroyed.
And it's impossible for Gaza to be rebuilt permanently while the world continues to tell the people of Gaza that they are refugees and that they are only there temporarily. Gaza is rubble now, and Gaza is rubble because its government, Hamas, decided to declare war on October 7th. It decided to wage that war from inside and under civilian buildings.
There is a major question now of how we rebuild Gaza. I think what's most interesting is not the logistical question of how on Earth do you clear that much rubble and rebuild those buildings when you have civilians in such a small area, but how do you rebuild permanently and peacefully without setting the stage for the next war? As long as Gaza remains under the control of Hamas and remains under Hamas's Jihadi ideology, it's impossible for Gaza to be rebuilt peacefully, and that's what we need.
Well, it also might be impossible to resettle the Palestinian people. I mean, it does seem like pie-in-the-sky thinking to me.
Well, both Trump and President Trump think that the Palestinians should be relocated. Trump thinks they should be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, and others think that the Palestinians should be relocated to Israel. That is why, nearly 80 years after the war of 1948, there are 1.6 million people in Gaza who are officially classified as refugees, even though almost all of them were born inside Gaza. They believe that Gaza is not their home and that they have a right to relocate into Israel.
One of the most welcome things of the last 24 hours has been to hear people in Gaza saying, "Gaza is our home. We belong in Gaza. Gaza belongs to us." I agree with them; they are not refugees. The focus after this war should be on rebuilding permanently and peacefully so that they can build better lives inside Gaza instead of the world fueling those fantasies that one day they will relocate into Israel and live there.
American foreign policy under Donald Trump is meant to be about putting America first, America's interests first. I can see that America benefits from having an ally in the region, but the sheer cost and also perhaps the military investment of troops and possible lives lost to actually achieve this dream state in Gaza is extraordinary, is it not? I mean, it's not necessarily something that Trump's voters would have been thinking about when they cast their ballot.
I have no idea what President Trump is planning, whether he is envisioning some sort of American military intervention or facilitating somehow the voluntary departure of people while Israel finishes the job against Hamas. But he puts his finger on a very real problem, which is that as long as Hamas remains in power in Gaza, we are doomed to the same cycle of violence.
Hamas, the government of Gaza, decided on October 7th to launch war. It decided to launch war with barbaric atrocities that shocked the world: families burned alive, beheadings, torture, mutilations. Hamas is telling us that it is going to do that again and again. Hamas is threatening to do it on multiple borders from Israel, and that is why Israel is determined that Hamas has to go. It has to be defeated in order to give a chance of a better future for people inside the region.
What we need to hear coming from inside Palestinian society now is that what they want is to rebuild permanently and peacefully, and that they want to embrace the vision of rebuilding Gaza as an amazing place. Gaza has so much potential, and President Trump is right. You know, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. It pulled out its army, it pulled out 9,000 Israelis, 9,000 settlers, and there was genuine hope that the Palestinians were going to be given a chance to create their own mini-state there and show what peace would look like.
But it was taken over by Hamas, a Jihadi regime that used it to declare war on Israel. We need to see permanent, peaceful reconstruction inside Gaza with people committed to building real, permanent, peaceful lives inside instead of being committed to waging this forever war against Israel until it's destroyed.
That is what we are going to be doomed to: that eternal cycle of violence if this war ends with hostages still in Gaza or Hamas still in power.
But isn't the most likely solution that Israel, not the U.S., will take control and be in charge of Gaza in the future then?
Well, Israel isn't asking for America to intervene militarily. Israel has never asked for America to intervene militarily. Israel says, "What we want from America as our ally is to receive the weapons that we need and the diplomatic support that we need in order to do the job."
Israel has never wanted to get American troops involved, and throughout this war, Israel has been saying, "We are going to bring down Hamas so it can never do this again and to bring back the hostages." But the question is, what happens after you clear Hamas? How do you get to the day after?
Israel says it doesn't want to control Gaza; it doesn't want Hamas to control Gaza. Israel says it wants Gaza to be controlled by local Palestinians who are committed to rebuilding peacefully and living next to Israel, free from Hamas's Jihadi ideology.
So the question is, how do we get to that day after? There are negotiations now for stage two of the ceasefire. Israel says Hamas has to be removed from power. Hamas is saying we're going to remain in power. But it's clear that we're going to be stuck in this cycle of violence as long as Hamas remains in power.
That's why Israel is saying, "Look, give us the tools that we need to finish the job against Hamas, and then it will be possible to move to a day after in which Gaza is no longer under this Jihadi ideology that is committed to a forever war against the existence of Israel."
There's a fair bit of speculation, Elon, that Trump's real agenda here is not actually this sort of fantastical project in Gaza that he was talking about yesterday, and it's more about leverage over the Arab states, and in particular Saudi Arabia. Do you think that's what's going on here? Trump is putting it on the plate of Israel's neighbors to say they need to step up and help the Palestinians if they want to have some say in the future.
I think that's a very sensible interpretation. What President Trump is trying to do is push the Arab states to play a more active role in the day-after planning. The day after means the day after Hamas. Israel has been clear: this war cannot end with the Jihadi regime that started this war still in power.
Israel wants to see local Palestinian actors who aren't committed to Hamas's Jihadi ideology take power in Gaza and be supported by the local Arab states. What's the problem? Israel has been left alone in thinking about what to do the day after because no one wants to touch the Gaza Strip with a barge pole.
All the Arab countries understand that it is an enormous headache. In order to have any chance of peace, you need to destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza, and deradicalize Palestinian society. Of course, none of them want to touch this immense challenge.
So it is a very sensible interpretation to say what President Trump is trying to do is to tell the Arab states, "You need to roll up your sleeves and play a role in the peaceful reconstruction of Gaza and the removal of Hamas from power."
But then again, when it comes to President Trump's plans to take over Greenland and Panama and other ideas around the world, no one knows what is serious at the moment and what is just a hot air balloon to gauge reactions.
What would a deradicalization program look like? Because a lot of people would regard that as slightly frightening sounding.
Well, deradicalization in Gaza means what denazification meant in Germany after the Second World War. This war needs to end with the people of Gaza blaming their regime for bringing this disaster on them. If the Second World War had ended with the immense destruction that the Allies wrought on Germany, with Germans nursing their wounds, praising the Nazis, and blaming the Allies for their destruction, World War III would have come just a few years later.
Instead, there was a re-education program, and Germany was encouraged to rebuild and move away from the ideology of the Nazis. There was a Marshall Plan which came after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and Germany and Japan are now both prosperous democracies and strong Western allies. The same can happen in Gaza.
The Gaza Strip has so much potential if the people of Gaza and whoever governs Gaza decides they want to live in peace next to Israel instead of being committed to a forever war, a forever jihad against Israel until it is destroyed. They have to be weaned off not just Hamas's rule but also its ideology.
That's all interesting but very contentious stuff. I want to ask you a little bit about Iran because perhaps really the more pressing and immediate news story was what happened, what the White House declared about Iran after B.B. Netanyahu and Trump met, which is back to maximum pressure sanctions and an absolute commitment to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon at all costs. Is that really the agenda from that meeting, and did he get what he wanted there?
Well, 2025 is going to be crunch time. Israel has made clear it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, and military action is absolutely on the table. The Iranian regime, which leads crowds in chants of "Death to Israel, death to Israel," cannot be allowed to gain the weapons to bring death to Israel.
Obviously, we would prefer negotiations and a diplomatic solution, but if that fails, the worst-case scenario is Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. The prospect of a military operation to take out Iran's nuclear facilities was much scarier when it still had Hamas pointing thousands of rockets at Israel. It was much scarier when Hezbollah had missiles that could bring down towers in Tel Aviv. It was much scarier when Iran still had the Assad regime.
But it has lost all of those assets; it's lost its air defenses. Israel will now be looking at the possibility of taking military action against Iran if diplomacy fails. Now, President Trump didn't give Israel full protection and say, "Yes, I will back military action if diplomacy fails," but he's also made clear Iran cannot gain nuclear weapons, and he definitely cannot allow himself to go down in history as the president on whose watch the Iranian regime acquired weapons of mass destruction.
What's your understanding of the current state of the relationship between Netanyahu and Trump? Because as the ceasefire was being broken, there were lots of reports, lots of talk about disgruntlement, some expressions of disgruntlement between the Trump circle and Netanyahu in his circle. But yesterday that seemed to be put on the side.
I couldn't help thinking, looking at Netanyahu during the press conference, he was making some slightly strange expressions when Trump was talking. I don't know whether the Prime Minister was surprised by the president's proposals, whether he knows that this is a bargaining tactic to gain leverage to advance normalization with Saudi Arabia, or whether this is a real proposal.
But it's certainly a huge shift from the previous administration. The president and President Biden were on very rough terms by the end of that administration. We remember, of course, America freezing certain weapons shipments to Israel. Here we have a welcome change. We have a regime, we have a government that is saying clearly the Hamas regime cannot remain in power in Gaza at the end of this war.
Immediately release the weapons that Israel needs to continue that, and through its diplomatic intervention, was able to bring about that ceasefire agreement that has seen hostages returning to their families. I think this is an administration that understands the role of Israel as a regional power, as a regional ally for the United States, and sees that Israel's goal to defeat the Hamas regime that is still holding American hostages is an American interest and something that they want to promote instead of trying to force Israel to go back to the reality that existed on October 6th, in which Hamas is still in power in Gaza, still threatening to invade and massacre our citizens.
What's really happened is that America and Israel are increasingly aligned on the view that the two-state solution is dead and that other things need to be created out of it. Israelis since October 7th have grown much more skeptical of the so-called two-state solution. That's partly because on October 7th, Hamas massacred many supporters of the two-state solution.
The villagers in the kibbutz who volunteered their weekends driving guards and children to the hospital were burned alive and abducted on October 7th. So many supporters of a two-state solution are dead, and many others in Israel are saying, "We pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. We uprooted settlers, we pulled out the army in the hope that this territorial withdrawal would be a first step towards peace, and it exploded in our faces."
We got the Hamas Jihadi regime that burned people alive on October 7th. Now, what's the West Bank? It's not a small piece of territory tucked in the corner of the desert; it's 20 times bigger than Gaza. It's a mountain range; it overlooks Tel Aviv. You can see the sea with your naked eye. It surrounds Jerusalem and leaves Israel 9 miles wide.
Israelis are now saying, "Hang on, if we withdraw while the Iranian regime is threatening more expansion and the destruction of Israel, while the Palestinians are still chanting from the river to the sea, then a two-state solution is not going to solve the conflict. It's only going to make things worse. We're going to take what happened in Gaza on October 7th, and it will happen a thousand times worse in the West Bank because that is what Hamas is trying to do now."
Hamas has been trying to take power in the West Bank to build its terrorist cells in order to launch similar October 7th-style attacks from the West Bank. Israeli society has become much more hawkish. People have become much less willing to take risks for peace, to make risky concessions because they say we just don't have the wiggle room we did.
We did an experiment with Gaza when we pulled out in 2005; it exploded spectacularly in our faces. Whatever political accommodation we reach with the Palestinians in order to end this conflict is going to have to be based on Israeli security control west of the Jordan River. Because if Israel doesn't have ultimate security control, then Jihadi groups will, and we can't allow that to happen.
The problem then is getting Arab neighbors to agree to that. Because while President Trump might get on board with that thinking, there doesn't seem to be any clear sign that the Arab states surrounding Israel do.
I'm not sure I agree. For many years, the whole Arab League had a single position: no peace with Israel, no recognition with Israel, no normalization with Israel until it solves the Palestinian issue. But then who got fed up? The Emiratis got fed up waiting for the Palestinians to make peace. The Bahrainis got fed up waiting for the Palestinians to make peace. The Moroccans got fed up, and they all signed the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020, normalizing relations.
We now have normal relations with the UAE. There are flights every day—more flights from Tel Aviv to the UAE than there are to London—because they understood that relations with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the biggest tech powerhouse in the Middle East, is a boon for them.
They're not going to wait for the Palestinians to give up their forever war, their forever jihad against Israel. What Israel is hoping now is that the Saudis are going to do the same. They're not going to wait for the Palestinians to put aside this century-long war and make peace with Israel. They're going to say the good thing for Saudi Arabia is peace with Israel. It's military cooperation with Israel against Iran; it's trade with Israel in order to normalize, in order to modernize Saudi Arabia's economy.
Instead of going inside out, starting with the trickiest conflict and then normalizing relations with the Arab world, the trend we're seeing is starting on the outside with the countries that have no territorial dispute with Israel making peace with those first, and then you make your way into the trickiest conflict.
Well, the key one there will be Saudi Arabia, and as yet, they don't seem very enthusiastic about anything other than a two-state solution. While we were on the road to normalization before October 7th, part of the reason that Hamas launched the October 7th massacre was to try to scupper Israeli-Palestinian normalization.
It's also part of the reason that the Iranian regime has been funding Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis—to try to throw a spoke in regional normalization. The Saudis are going to try to save face somehow, but for what it's worth, both the Trump administration and the Israeli government are pretty convinced that the Saudis are not going to insist on Palestinian statehood.
I'll tell you why: because in the present circumstances in the Middle East, with the Iranian regime trying to sow chaos and instability, when you look at what they did in Gaza, when you look at what they did in Lebanon, when you look at what they did in Yemen, I think even the Saudis understand that any power vacuum Iran is going to try to fill.
A Palestinian state would become an Iranian client state, an Iranian puppet state, and that would go against Saudi Arabia's interest. They want stability in the region, and by taking on Hezbollah, taking on Hamas, and paving the way for the fall of the Assad regime, Israel is showing its neighbors in the Middle East that it is a strong and dependable ally.
Elon, we'll leave it there, but thank you very much for coming on to the Americano show.
Anytime, Freddy.