Tuesday, July 01, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
BANNON: I’m pretty good at knowing where the puck’s going, and it’s going here—there’s going to be a major reset. It’s going to happen bc the American ppl demand it. Israel is not an ally. They’re a protectorate. They haven’t been involved in any alliance. When Soleimani was… pic.twitter.com/dkcKaf9mgP
— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) June 26, 2025
Elder of Ziyon points out that Bannon is wide of the mark: of all the things for Bannon to hang his claim of Israel being a protectorate, he rests his case on Israel not helping the US in the assassination of Soleimani.
Bannon is wrong.
Associated Press quotes NBC News about how Israel helped the US pinpoint Soleimani's location. It also refers to Yahoo News, which reports specifically that Israel supplied the US with his cellphone numbers, so they could track him down.
This is not the only detail Bannon gets wrong. Near the beginning of the war, Bannon hosted Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and author of The Virtue of Nationalism and The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul, and other books. Bannon tells Hazony that Netanyahu caused Trump to detour from his stated goal to rely on negotiations with Iran:
The course he [Trump] wanted was a negotiated deal as he just said, right there, 'I'm talking to these guys. I'm on the phone. I want to negotiate a deal.' Why suddenly we have to go with where we have 12 or 13 months [till Iran goes nuclear]?
We can give Bannon the benefit of the doubt that he had not yet realized that Trump's public pushing for negotiations was a ruse. But Hazony reminds him that Trump did not limit himself to endless diplomacy.
You and I both remember President Trump in his first speech, laying out this policy. He was already saying it last December, and January, and February, when he came into the administration. President Trump, as far as I'm aware, has not budged an inch, not an inch. He must have said this a hundred times. His policy was Iran cannot get a nuclear bomb.
If we can get it by negotiation, that's what we're going to do, and if we can't get it by negotiation, then we're going to have to do it some other way. We've all heard him say this over and over and over again.
Bannon does not push the issue. Instead, he tries a different tack, hammering away on why Israel had to attack Iran so soon, on Thursday-Friday. He claims that Netanyahu pushed for the attack on Iran for the most crass political motives, and in the process destabilized the region and brought the United States into the mess.
We back Israel more than anybody. And the question still is, why did it have to go Thursday and Friday night?
And now we know it's regime change. The problem the Maga right has with this, it looks like a crass, political move by Bibi Netanyahu, who is vastly unpopular in Israel. I think his popularity is 30%.
So let's take this example that Tucker brought up, the supposed 30% popularity rating of Bibi Netanyahu. So I heard that this evening and I went and I checked it and the most recent polls put Bibi Netanyahu at 54 percent, 30 points ahead of Naftali Bennett, who is the number 2 contender for the prime ministership, a 30 point spread. By the way, if you go back a month or 2 and take a look at the same poll before the war, you'll see that it was almost exactly the same.
There's been nobody anywhere near Bibi Netanyahu in terms of popularity as far as appropriateness, to be the Prime Minister of the state of Israel for years.
So look, we have to get back to the point where all of us natcon, nationalist conservative people, we have different views on different things, but we've got to get back to the point where we're having a reasonable conversation where the information that we're using is information that's based on facts. That's unfortunately, not what's happening.
Ha'aretz represents the leftmost 5% of the Jewish population in the state of Israel. It's a newspaper with a very small circulation that has a great deal of prestige because it's read by our lefty elite classes. But look into it. Not only is Ha'aretz historically the newspaper that opposed the establishment of the state of Israel, but the Shocken family that founded it was anti-Zionist; they were against the establishment of the state of Israel. It is a newspaper that, over the years, has fought tooth and nail for what we in Israel call Post-Zionism, for the elimination of the Jewish character of the state, for the elimination of the right of return to Jews to the state of Israel, and on political issues.
What you just saw last night was the latest iteration of how the US-Israel relationship actually works. It isn't Israeli dependence on America, it is the opposite. It's Israeli independence and using that Israeli independence, I want to argue America essentially invented a new security architecture for the world, and it's the old architecture it has always had with Israel. Israel is a very different ally from Japan or Germany, or the Philippines or Taiwan or many, many other countries--South Korea,you name it--that depend on the United States.
Israel does not depend on the United States and israel's enemies need it to be dependent on the United States and constantly argue that it's dependent on the United States and mostly they argue that because of their own egos, because Israel has yet to be destroyed.
This is foundational to Trump's brand of isolationism. The United States can still secure the world, protect the world, and police the world without having to secure, protect, and police it.
And the basic idea is the ally does the heavy lifting. The local ally and the United States comes in to deliver the coup de grâce. That's exactly America's value-added, without all the massive cost to the American people, the American economy, American blood and treasure. And the Israelis have just demonstrated what that relationship could be and Trump was convinced by the Israelis. Not by Israeli begging, not by Israeli dependents, but by Israeli independence.
The Israeli willingness to go it alone, the Israeli willingness to deliver massive strategic successes--that's what brought Trump in. If the Israelis had hobbled along and tried to strike, but hundreds of missiles had hit the Israeli civilian front and Israel had failed to take out launchers, failed to strike a great many of the nuclear sites, failed to decapitate half of the regime's leadership, Trump would not have joined. Trump would have pressured Israel to stop.
This posture by the Israelis, this willingness to go it alone, to do things that don't fit the calculations of others is what first created the American strategic support for Israel.
If I were Taiwan today, I would double and triple down in the Taiwanese capability to face down China. You want America behind you? Make sure it isn't too much American blood on the line, when the war comes. Ditto, Japan. Ditto South Korea. The way you hold America is, by being able to defend yourself. America will come in and deliver its grand strategic element that it can add to your strategy, because it has that scale, because it has that technology. America doesn't put boots on the ground anymore, and America is not going to bleed for anybody. And I don't blame it.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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