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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “You can essentially divide the region between two sets of players. You have the, broadly speaking, Western-aligned players, which essentially consist of Israel and the non-Islamist Arab countries—countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE—and then, on the other hand, you have the axis of Islamism—of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadism. And that, these days, is mostly the Iranian regime of course, Turkey unfortunately under Tayyip Erdogan, and Qatar, Qatar being the lead financier of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Josh Hammer, host of the Newsweek podcast “The Josh Hammer Show” and author of “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.”

“Iran is the source of evil in the Middle East. We should be very clear about that,” he says. “This is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. They have been ever since the hostage crisis that formed this horrific regime that ended the Jimmy Carter presidency in 1979.”

What does an America First foreign policy look like? How does Trump’s Middle East strategy fit into it? And what about the U.S. relationship with Qatar?

“America has always been engaged on the world stage. So the fact that we’re not necessarily going to be going around crusading in the name of spreading liberal democracy does not necessarily mean that we have no interest in the world. We’re America first, but you have to be America smart as well,” says Hammer.

<em>Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.</em>
<h2>RUSH TRANSCRIPT</h2>
Jan Jekielek:
Josh Hammer, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Josh Hammer:
It’s wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me again.

Mr. Jekielek:
So I keep hearing about America first foreign policy, okay? Except that what that actually means to people spans such a wide range, it’s almost unbelievable. And so why don’t we start there? Give me a picture of that and where you believe it lands.

Mr. Hammer:
Okay, so the Right is obviously having a lot of foreign policy debates right now of Bush-era neoconservatism, which we can vaguely define as a felty loyalty to abstract ideals, perhaps at the expense of the concrete national interest. So to kind of put some fine teeth on that, President Bush’s
second inaugural address, the so-called Freedom Agenda from January 2005, speaks in very grand terms about how human beings all throughout the world aspire to the same universal ends of Western liberalism,
Locke, Jefferson, and so forth there. And that philosophy, whatever its merits may be, had fairly ruinous results, I think, in many ways in practice. So the America First movement, I think, largely arises from a rejection of that.

However, you’re totally right there. The terminology America First really only goes so far. I mean, you know, who is not America First, right? I mean, I’m America First, you’re America First. I assume most people watching this are America First. I am someone who came of age in part in the post 9/11 era. At 9/11, I was 12 years old. It was a huge turning point for me.

Like many in this country, I was in middle school, to be clear. I was initially a supporter of Bush-era policies when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan. Like many, I fairly quickly sobered up from that. So I have been in this murky middle between neoconservatism and isolationism, to use these kinds of two overused terms, for my entire adult life there.

So the America First movement in many ways was something that was welcomed to me because I’ve been thinking and saying a lot of this for years. The devil is always, though, in the details. America First means that the American national interest is the sole and exclusive criterion for American foreign policy, that we’re not going to have a foreign policy that is solely predicated upon trying to ally with democracies that act in a similar function to the Congress because of universal ideas about free people there. And part of that is going to countenance alliances with countries that might not share our same moral or ethical foundations if they happen to, for instance, share our enemies. It’s like my enemy is my friend sort of situation.

So to kind of take the example of the Middle East, you know, a realist foreign policy would be much more comfortable with an alliance with a country like Saudi Arabia, for instance, than a neoconservative foreign policy would be, because this is clearly a country that does not share our morals, ethics, background, values. I mean, they literally just allowed women to drive a few years ago, right?

But in the Middle East, for instance, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the Saudis are quite fearful of Iran. They don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon there. So this is kind of the America First vision that I think President Trump in many ways has inaugurated. I think it’s actually no accident, speaking of Saudi Arabia, that his first foreign trip in both 2017 and 2025 started in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He’s kind of making a firm declaration that this is my vision of realist foreign policy there.

I think another element of America First is necessarily grappling with the fact that we live in an era where scarcity of resources is a real thing, that the era of America as the world’s policeman, as it is said, is necessarily over. And we necessarily do have to focus this entry on America’s number one gravest threat, which is China and the Chinese Communist Party. But as pertains to the Middle East in particular, the relevant question then is how can America best secure and protect its interests in this region while then prioritizing mid to long term assets and military and all that into the Indo-Pacific to deal with China. The brilliant insight, I think, of President Trump during his first term using this America first realist mentality was that you would embolden your allies in the region to essentially protect and secure the region on both of your behalf because those allies then share your national interests.

So Israel, for instance, is the state in the region, in this case, that shares pretty much all of America’s core interests in the region there. You know, Hamas, Hezbollah, for instance, these are U.S.-recognized foreign terrorist organizations there. So the realistic prescription for the Middle East would be to essentially embolden your allies to kind of take care of this region, not necessarily by feeding off of the American teat, but simply by having leeway to more or less do their thing. And then that’ll allow America in turn to kind of focus over the next 20, 30 years on its true grave challenge, which is China.

What America First is not to me is being synonymous with this old kind of fortress America mentality of simply shrinking up like a hermit into its shell and pretending like the world does not exist. That’s not America First. American foreign policy has never, ever truly, truly, truly acted like that. I mean, the Barbary Wars against the Barbary pirates off the coast of Tripoli and Algiers, off the southern Mediterranean Sea, those are the second and third wars that we faced after the Revolutionary War against the British there in the early 1800s.

The reason that Thomas Jefferson built up the United States Navy was in response to these Barbary Muslim pirates, actually, in the Mediterranean Sea. So America has always been engaged on the world stage. So the fact that we’re not necessarily going to be around crusading in the name of spreading liberal democracy does not necessarily mean that we have no interest in the world. We’re America first, but we have to be America smart as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
So as you mentioned, the president’s first trip was to the Middle East. And how do you analyze what happened there? Both, you know, what the president was trying to accomplish, but also what the countries he was visiting were trying to accomplish.

Mr. Hammer:
So, like 2017, his first trip begins in Saudi Arabia, and he has this big speech at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, kind of calling for the, you know, the formal end of, you know, the Bush-era nation-building project there, which is correct. That project should be ended. You know, your mileage may vary as to whether or not this was the proper venue to do so. Saudi Arabia infamously was, you know, the sponsor of some of those 9/11 hijackers. But the country is very different now than it was back then.

I mean, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, this really is a very, very different Saudi Arabia. Look, under President Biden, who mollycoddled the Iranians, much like President Obama did before him, when during the Biden presidency, the Chinese essentially tried to seize on this American shooing to the side of the Arab Gulf states.
The Chinese tried to come in and tried to make really firm inroads with the Saudis, with the Emiratis, to try to bring them into the Belt and Road Initiative there. It was actually a major deal that the Saudis and the Chinese reached throughout the exact year 2022, give or take, but kind of right in the midst of the Biden presidency there.

So I think part of the geostrategic goal of this first Trump trip to the region was to peel back these moderate, non-Islamist Arab states, countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, from the Chinese sphere of influence there. And then there’s, of course, an economic portion here, too. I mean, these dollar signs are insane, what these Arab countries are pledging to invest. We’ll see what that looks like in practice.

I mean, it’s hard to say exactly, right, how exactly the steel worker in Western Pennsylvania or someone in Oklahoma will exactly tangibly benefit from this? Maybe. I mean, it’s just hard to say. I mean, we’ll see what that means in practice. But certainly that was part of this trip as well. But geopolitically peeling back the Saudis and Emiratis from the Chinese sphere of influence, I think is part of the equation there.

Now, here is where I think I see a little bit of a difference and what frankly gives me a little bit of a pause for concern there. The first Trump administration’s foreign policy acting on this America First vision, I think, recognized that you, at least sticking to the Middle East for a second, that you can essentially divide the region between two sets of players. You have the, broadly speaking, Western-allied players, which essentially consist of Israel and the non-Islamist Arab countries, countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE.

And then on the other hand, you have the axis of Islamism, of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and jihadism. And that, these days, is mostly the Iranian regime, of course, Turkey, unfortunately, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Qatar, Qatar being the lead financier of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I got a little worried on this trip, I’m being very candid with you, when the president really kind of rolled out the red carpet in Doha with the Emir of Qatar. I think Qatar is actually a very problematic country there. Now, we’ll see what happens. Maybe I might be missing part of the picture. It’s possible that, you know, that there are conversations behind the scenes that I’m not privy to.

You know, perhaps President Trump is saying that in exchange, you know, for this, you’re going to stop doing all these sorts of bad things that you’ve been doing for years there. So it’s a little too early to make judgments there. But I would just encourage, you know, the president and his team to, you know, to be focused on this Middle East foreign policy from the first administration that was really laser focused on emboldening your friends and punishing your enemies there, which I think kind of is one of the consummate ways that this America First vision plays out in practice. But overall, overall, a lot of positives to take away from this trip.

By the way, Syria, I mean, taking away sanctions, maybe a little premature on the removal of sanctions. But, you know, there are reports that al-Julani, who, let’s be very clear, I mean, former al-Qaeda terrorist in Damascus, he’s not a, let’s be very clear who we’re dealing with. But apparently they’re having negotiations at some level about possibly normalizing ties with Israel. And that obviously would be a tremendous result if it’s at all possible.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. I mean, fascinating. Just a little bit on Qatar, you know, there’s a giant U.S. military base in Qatar. So I think for a lot of people, it’s viewed as an ally.

Mr. Hammer:
Very, very complicated country, right? So this is a tiny, tiny country, first of all. We’re talking here about 3 million people at the most. A fraction of that are actually the native Arabs. We’re talking here about 500,000 to 600,000 Arabs. The rest are these imported workers from Nepal and India there. But an extravagantly wealthy country. Sits on one of the world’s, if not the world’s, single largest natural gas field. Qatar lavishes money throughout the Western world. They’ve been doing this strategy for decades and decades.

They also are very savvy. They make strategic investments. So Qatar actually owns, I forgot the exact percentage, but it’s like 15 to 20 percent, maybe a little less than 10 percent of the Empire State Building. They’re the number one foreign state investor into American universities since 9/11, literally number one, more than Russia, China, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, you name it, they’re number one there. So they pour money there.

But this is a country that likes to have it both ways. Yes, they host Al Udeid Air Base. That’s America’s largest air base in the region there. And I believe they gifted that, didn’t they? They probably did because, again, this country has a lot of resources. And they allowed, actually, America to launch its strike that killed Qasem Soleimani from Al-Udeid Air Base, which is actually quite notable.

On the other hand, Al Jazeera is state-sponsored Qatari television. And when Donald Trump took office the first time back in 2017, the non-Islamist Arab countries, namely the Saudis, Emiratis, Bahrainis, and so forth, were so fed up with Qatar’s sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood via Al Jazeera, they actually announced a diplomatic boycott of Qatar. This is actually the GCC crisis, a major diplomatic crisis that Donald Trump walked into back in January of 2017.

His instincts back then were to side with the Saudis and Emiratis
against Qatar. That crisis ends up unwinding with no particular resolution. So, look, at best, this is a problematic country. At worst, it’s worse than that. It’s nefarious. But they do lavish a lot of money. They have a lot of money to throw around there. And my only thing would be let’s try to get some strings attached to this money. Let’s try to make sure that in exchange for this there, you guys are going to focus on the good activities, less so on the bad activities.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about Syria a little bit. You know, it’s a fascinating exploration because I would have never guessed, you know, say six months ago, that even the concept of having Syria somehow be involved in the Abraham Accords was even a possibility. And maybe we should actually talk about how the Abraham Accords fit into all this too.

Mr. Hammer:
Yes. Look, if Syria were to make peace with Israel, that would be obviously a landmark thing. Syria has been one of Israel’s foremost enemies since modern Israel was founded in 1948. I mean, without question. I mean, literally ever since the Israeli war for independence against the invading Arab armies there, it was really Jordan, Egypt, Syria that led those initial wars. Whether it was ‘48, ‘67, ‘73, Syria has always been one of Israel’s arch enemies. So if that were to actually happen, you know, that would be a very, very, very big deal.

Having said that, let’s be careful because of who we’re dealing with here. I mean, this guy, al-Julani is kind of his adapted name there. He’s essentially a puppet of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey there. This is someone who was a peripatetic Al-Qaeda terrorist for much of his life, kind of wandering across the region, taking up arms on behalf of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra Fund, various other Islamist outfits. At least at one point, the State Department had a pretty significant bounty on his head, if I’m not mistaken there.

Now, is he a net improvement over Bashar al-Assad? Probably. I mean, the balance of equities probably are in that camp. Assad was obviously a murderous tyrant and a horrific, horrific human being, I mean, gassing and killing over half a million of his own people, but arguably, even more importantly for American strategic purposes, he was just a pure puppet of Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah in Iran, which are, you know, not friends of the United States. So geopolitically, it’s probably a net improvement there, but just be very, let’s be very, very careful who we’re dealing with.

The big thing in Syria, aside from the possibility, the very intriguing possibility of Syrian-Israeli normalization. Syria has a lot of ethnic minorities. There’s a Christian population in Syria. There’s a Druze population in southern and eastern Syria there. And there have already been pretty well-documented reports, unfortunately, since the new regime took over in December of some of these minority populations being repressed quite violently at times there.

Because again, when someone who’s a former al-Qaeda jihadist comes into power there, there’s going to be very Islamist people around him there that they’re going to seek to kind of stamp out differences in the name of Sharia supremacism and Islamism. So let’s see what happens there. But the mere fact that there’s a possibility of normalization between Israel and Syria, as I said, is a very, very, very big deal.

Mr. Jekielek:
So, and, you know, you’ve recently written a book about, you know, Israel and civilization. So we’re going to talk, we have to talk about Israel. How does this, what is Israel’s role in all of this, in your mind, from the perspective of an America First policy?

Mr. Hammer:
The key thing about Israel is that more than any of the other countries in the region, even the non-Islamist Arab countries, we share precisely the exact same enemies. Pretty much precisely. I mean, are they literally identical? Okay, fine. I mean, like, maybe not, right? I mean, maybe the Mexican drug cartels are more an enemy of the United States than Israel. But when it comes to the threat of jihadism and Islamism there, we’re dealing with shockingly similar threats there. I’ll give one very concrete example. So last year, at some point in the second half of the year, some decision was made to really start escalating and going after higher profile jihadi targets.

So for instance, in late July in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, disappears while being in Tehran for a funeral. And around that same time, there was a major Lebanese Hezbollah jihadist by the name of Fuad Shukr, who was assassinated as well. And then this culminates in the assassination, the bombing of Hassan Nasrallah, the decades-long head of Hezbollah, hiding in his bunker in Beirut, Lebanon, and then the death of Yahya Sinwar, the October 7th mastermind in southern Gaza.

But Fuad Shukr, who I mentioned, and then there was another top-ranking Hezbollah commander by the name of Ibrahim Aqil, who were both taken out by the IDF during this time span there. And I like to focus oftentimes on Fuad Shukr and Ibrahim Aqil because it’s actually very instructive to the point I’m making here. So who are Fuad Shukr and Ibrahim Aqil?

They are the masterminds of the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombings that slaughtered 241 U.S. Marines and of the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut the same year that killed 60 to 70 men. These two men, Shukr and Aqil, had U.S. State Department bounties on their head of $5 to $7 million, respectively, for literally over four decades, from 1983 onwards, until the IDF took them out as part of this kind of Michael Corleone, five families style of reprisal in the year 2024.

So to me, that’s what America First looks like in practice there. It’s not necessarily saying that the United States military has to get involved in hunting down American enemies. Rather, it’s in this particular case, kind of relying on an ally that has the same enemies as you are to just basically tell them, go do your thing there.

I get asked this on campus a lot, Jan. I get asked, how does the U.S. benefit from the U. S.-Israel relationship? There’s a lot of ways that the U. S. benefits. There’s obviously technology. Talking on a cell phone is Israeli technology. There’s a lot of examples to count. There’s intelligence. There’s missile defense.

But the most concrete way, the most obvious the lowest of all low-hanging fruit ways in my opinion that the U.S. benefits from this particular relationship, especially from an America First perspective, is that you get dead jihadis like Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, and yes, the State Department-designated bounties like Ibrahim Aqil and Fuad Shukr, and you get this without a single American boot or anyone being involved, frankly, in any way whatsoever.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a lot of fear among some parts of the America First or MAGA movement of war with Iran, bombing Iran around purported nuclear capability. Unpack that a little for me.

Mr. Hammer:
So there’s multiple levels of possible threat with Iran. Look, Iran is the source of evil in the Middle East. We should be very clear about that. This is the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism. They have been ever since the hostage crisis that formed this horrific regime that ended the Jimmy Carter presidency in 1979 there. And by the way, just an example to kind of drill home the message that this regime does not simply hate the Jews, that this regime actually really hates America and by extension the West.

So I was here in D.C. last summer speaking at a conference on similar issues, and I saw someone in the back kind of vigorously nodding along, like aggressively nodding along. Sure enough, he actually finds me after the talk. This guy was born and raised in Tehran. He lived there until he was 16 or 17 years old.

He told me that in their schools in Tehran, their state-sponsored schools, their version of the Pledge of Allegiance that they say in school every single day, it’s, I solemnly vow to do all that I can today to destroy the little Satan of Israel and the big Satan of America. And this regime that has acted on it since the get-go, when it comes to the hostage crisis, through their proxies, Hezbollah, the Marine barracks slaughter in Beirut in 1983, roadside IEDs during the Iraq counterinsurgency, during the David Petraeus-George W. Bush era in the early aughts.

So let me just first stipulate that even though it is not and has never been my stance that the United States should directly drop bombs, I have never once called for direct military involvement against Iran. I’m not going to do so now because it’s not my stance. Let me just first say that the world would be a better place if that regime were to go. You know, there’s this thing on the right that I think people have gotten allergic to the idea of regime change. It’s become like a dirty word. I’m not saying the United States has to do it. That’s the key part here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, but the argument is that, you know, this is what was with the Assad regime, you know, falling with Hezbollah collapsing and so forth, right, people say, well, you know, be careful what you wish for because you might get something worse.

Mr. Hammer:
Totally. And, you know, no country actually understands that exact mentality better, frankly, than Israel. That actually, in many ways, is the Israeli mentality, by the way, is to deal with the devil you know rather than the opposition. In fact, you know, in 2002, when the war drums were beating for the Iraq war, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Rumsfeld, all that, you know, It was actually Ariel Sharon, who at the time was the leader of the Israeli Right.

So Sharon actually called President Bush and essentially said, you’re going to destabilize the region. You’re going to have the wrong guy. By the way, during the Obama administration, when we had the whole debate over whether to use force to topple Bashar al-Assad over the chemical weapons scandal, the Israelis, generally speaking, were not in favor of that
either.

In fact, after Hamas took over in Gaza in 2007, same thing. The Israeli mentality was we’re not going to contain Hamas. You know, they call it mowing the lawn. We’re not going to eradicate it because what comes next could actually be even worse. You know, then October 7th happened, and there literally is no such thing as worse, so therefore they have to go. But that really is their mentality, actually. It’s very much a deal with the devil you know.

The reason that I think that the Persian example is different is because even though this regime has been in power for four and a half decades there, there is still a bit of a mismatch between this fanatical Islamist zealotry and the Persian people. Persia was a very secular
country prior to the rise of the Islamic Republic there. Polling that I’ve seen that looks at the Middle East, and they try to poll to assess rates of anti-Semitism in the various regions there, most of the Arab countries, basically all of them actually, even the Western-aligned ones,
have higher levels of anti-Semitism than Iran or Persia. Because again, there’s this vestigial kind of Western aligned kind of Islamism skeptical sentiment that runs there. So I’m skeptical of the notion that a regime replacement would be worse than what is one of the worst regimes on planet Earth along with North Korea.

Again, I’m not saying that the U.S. should directly seek to impose this. That’s not my stance. My own stance on this personally is very similar to the first Trump administration’s approach of maximum pressure. And they brought this back again to an extent when it comes to crippling sanctions, so forth there. I personally, you know, I’m not in love with coupling these sanctions with negotiations because the mere fact that you’d be entertained negotiating to me projects a little bit of weakness.

But the most recent rhetoric that I’ve seen from the administration, from Steve Witkoff and so forth, is actually pretty hardline on the zero enrichment red line, that there can be zero enrichment of uranium. The latest that I saw is that the Ayatollah Khomeini said that we fundamentally reject this. So it seems like the negotiations are at something of an impasse, actually. We’ll see who blinks first in this kind of grand game of chicken, I suppose.

But this is the problem, that you’re dealing with fanatics. I mean, this is not a normal regime. You know, the reason that mutually assured destruction could work during the Cold War is that the Soviets were a bunch of Marxist atheists. And they could be counted on, I mean, atheism is wrong, to be clear, but they could at least be counted on to engage in something remotely resembling a sober analysis as to whether or not your civilization will be nuked to hell. But these are not rational actors in Tehran.
This is a genuinely fanatical ideological regime there that wants to spread its ideas of the Shiite supremacist revolution throughout the region and throughout the world.

So if push comes to shove, and there’s no deal for Iran’s nuclear programs there, and it looks like they genuinely, truly are about to acquire nuclear capacity there, the absolute most that I think America could play a role here do tactical or operational support for an IDF-led mission to strategically bomb some of the nuclear sites there. And what that means in practice probably is maybe a couple of ad hoc bombs, maybe midair refueling. Probably not even that, because I think the Israelis are capable of doing that there. This whole operation, by the way, would probably take just a few hours.

You know, people are talking about this like this would be like Afghanistan 2.0. It’s just not true. I mean, we’re talking here about essentially like an overnight raid. So I think a lot of the fears are frankly overblown. Having said that, I prefer that Iran just gives up their enriched uranium, that they give it up. And ideally, in the long term, I hope that the people of Iran end up being liberated from this absolutely horrific fanatical regime. Ideally, that that uprising would, of course, come from the Persian people themselves, not imposed by Western force.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m thinking about the port of Haifa in Israel. The Chinese have increased their operations, been granted by the government, increased ability to operate in that port area. How do you explain that?

Mr. Hammer:
The American perspective, I think in Israel or any other allied country throughout the world, would be to not let or not be favorably inclined towards the Chinese getting more involved there. Israel’s rationale, on the other hand, is essentially this happened or it recently escalated, which is unfortunate, but it started to pick up steam during the Biden administration when they were trying to kind of balance between the superpowers there. I’m not happy about that. I mean, no one who supports close U.S.-Israel ties as an American should be particularly happy about that there.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let me put it transparently. It’s not good for Israel. It’s certainly not good for America. It’s not good for anybody, I think.

Mr. Hammer:
Look, China is unfortunately a superpower. I mean, they just are. And I think a tiny country like Israel is going to have to, you know, think at least that it has to learn how to play nice, at least when it’s not under kind of the, you know, monolithic security blanket of a different superpower. And it’s not entirely clear whether they are at this particular stage there. But, you know, it’s ultimately a reminder that however close two countries can be, U.S.-Israel, U.S.-Canada, U.S.-whatever, I mean, no two
countries are going to share the exact same interest in every single issue every single time. It’s just not possible. That’s not how foreign affairs works.
Israel has some level of relations with China, although China has been very pro-Palestinian, although that’s actually fighting up and moderating over the past literally just five, six months or so. We’ll see where that goes.

But look, I mean, regardless of what it looks like in Haifa today, and again, I don’t think that the Chinese control the port, but they might have some presence there. This is an example of, inevitably there are going to be instances where no two countries share the exact same national interest, right? So the United States’ perspective is that China should not get involved here because this is a strategic port and we don’t like China. I agree with that. I’m an American. From Israel’s perspective, this is kind of all going down during the Biden administration. Biden was a very anti-Israel president. They’re trying to essentially try to have a relationship of some sort with the world’s two largest superpowers there.

Mr. Jekielek:
How do you respond to people who see an outsized influence that
Israel has in this town, D.C. and lawmakers and so forth?

Mr. Hammer:
So I think that there are a lot of reasons why Israel comes up more often than most countries of its relatively modest size and population in American discourse. The most obvious reason for that is that America, although it has dwindling church attendance, to this day remains a much more religious country than most other Western countries. You know, as then-Senator J.D. Vance put in a speech in this town just about a year ago, the way that J.D. put it was he said that for as long as America continues to be a predominant Christian country, there are going to be tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of Americans of good faith who have a particularist, idiosyncratic reason for caring about the fate, the stability and security of this tiny sliver of land between, as the hooligans would put it, between the river and the sea. And that entails the holy sites, obviously. That entails the place where the story of the Bible happened, where Jesus walked, and so forth. So there are obviously going to be additional reasons why people care about this particular issue.

But I think a lot of people also care because, especially after 9/11, you look at the opinion polls on support for Israel, they actually spiked after 9/11. After 9/11, from 2001 to 2004, like early Bush administration there, levels of U.S. support for Israel reach historical highs because they recognize in the aftermath of this horrific Islamist blow, you know, 3,000 dead Americans, they realize that Israel’s fight in many ways is America’s fight because we’re facing fundamentally not the exact same threats, but many,
many of the same threats. So I think it’s also just a very practical assessment of that particular reality that also drives a lot of the support in Washington, D.C. there. But some of these influences, I think, tend to be greatly exaggerated. So for instance, AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], right?

I’m actually no fan of AIPAC. I’ve been a critic of AIPAC for my entire adult life. AIPAC essentially exists to get this massive decennial memorandum of understanding [MOU], this $3.8, give or take, billion annual aid appropriations. You know, I make a case in the book calling for that aid to be phased out, not cut off the spigot. I think that would be a bad thing.
But I think it’s ultimately a mutually toxic bear hug, and it would be best for both the U.S. and Israel to actually extricate themselves from that. So because getting that aid package passed is one of AIPAC’s, probably their single biggest priority, then I’m not a fan of AIPAC there.

But let’s just take AIPAC on their own terms. You know, the one fight where we saw that AIPAC does not control this town, that the old, you know, Mearsheimer-Walt hypothesis of the so-called Israel lobby is not nearly as powerful a boogeyman as these fear mongers portray it as. The reason that we saw, or at least one instance where we saw that play out concretely, was the whole JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] Iran nuclear deal debate. This is the second Barack Obama administration there.

AIPAC invested a lot of resources calling on their activists,their supporters, call your congressman, call your senator, call Chuck Schumer and so forth there. Tell them to oppose this terrible nuclear deal with Iran. And guess what? AIPAC lost. Okay. You know, the so-called Israel lobby lost. The rumors of their control of American foreign policy are tremendously exaggerated.

I mean, Donald Trump just took his first trip to the Middle East. He didn’t even go to Israel. You know, on the contrary, he stopped, as we said earlier, in Qatar, a country that Prime Minister Netanyahu was calling out for being a duplicitous state sponsor of terror as recently as like a month ago. So I don’t think that Israel really controls American foreign policy nearly as much as, frankly, the anti-Semites think it does.

Mr. Jekielek:
And it’s interesting that he did, given that, you know, I don’t think you could argue that this is by far the most pro-Israel administration, right?

Mr. Hammer:
Yes, I mean, like, look at the people around them. I mean, like, Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel. I mean, the guy has personally led, I think, over like 100 trips, you know, for various evangelicals. I mean, Mike Huckabee, obviously all in on this issue. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, obviously, all in on this issue has been ever since his earliest days in Florida politics in my state of Florida. Pete Hegseth, definitely a huge Zionist. You know, he’s I mean, Pete Hegseth has literally said that Americanism and Zionism are the two pillars of Western civilization.

Mr. Jekielek:
And just very, very basically for the benefit of our audience, because this is one of these words that is thrown around kind of meaning all sorts of different things to different people. Zionism.

Mr. Hammer:
Okay. Zionism is a word that is considered controversial. It should not be controversial. It literally just means that you believe in the Jewish people’s right to a nation, to self-determination in their ancestral biblical homeland. If you believe in such a thing. Look, Judaism is not a universalist faith like Christianity. It really is a nationhood. And as a nationhood, it is tied to religious practices, yes, but also tied to a concrete part of land, the land of Israel. It literally has been since the book of Genesis. I mean, it’s right there in the scripture. But Zionism just means in contemporary political context that you support the Jews’ right to live freely, safely, and securely in their ancestral homeland.

By contrast, by the way, I think anti-Zionism is also a greatly
misused term. You know, some people say, oh, you can’t criticize Israeli policies. Yeah, of course you can. My wife is Israeli. I mean, anyone who’s ever met any Israelis knows that they are more likely than anyone to disagree among themselves. I mean, there’s a lot of truth to the
old punchline about two Jews, three opinions. There’s a lot of truth to that. I mean, no one criticizes the policies of the Israeli government more than Israelis themselves, really. So that’s not being an anti-Zionist.

What is being an anti-Zionist is to call for the eradication of the state of Israel and to do so with particular fervor, intensity, and zeal that one would never apply to the nations of Japan, Indonesia, Paraguay, Brazil, and so forth. I think there’s a lot of confusion about these terms, but that is how I would define them. Fortunately, Israel is a legitimate state under international law for literally all three various reasons that Israel can be a legitimate state under international law. So there are three basic buckets of how a state can acquire legitimacy under international law.

First, there is history, endogeneity. Israel pretty transparently has that. We have an unambiguous archaeological record establishing that the Jews have been there for thousands and thousands of years. I don’t know if you’ve been to the City of David in Jerusalem. It’s one of my absolute favorite parts of Jerusalem. It’s essentially a grand excavation archaeological site.

I’ve been there multiple times, but on my last trip there, my tour guide really kind of stunned me. He reads a verse from the book of Jeremiah, which refers to a particular coin, and then he literally takes out the coin that they had just uncovered like a few days ago from the archaeological excavation. So like under the first test, endogeneity history, Israel pretty clearly satisfies that test for legitimacy under international law.

The second reason that it’s legitimate, you know, holding aside God, Bible, Revelation, and so forth. The second reason is that it has won its wars that
the invading armies have fought against it. This is not an aggressive war of conquest. They were established as independent in 1948. Harry Truman becomes the first president to recognize an emir 11 minutes later.
Immediately, the invading Arab armies, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and so forth, try to throw the Jews right back in the sea. Israel won. They won this war. They won their second independence war just 19 years later in ‘67,
and they won again in ‘73 in the Yom Kippur War.

So they’ve satisfied the second test as well, which is to defend your territory under the laws of conquest and the international law of war. The third, and I think most compelling as a lawyer myself, I think the most compelling reason that Israel is legitimate is because under well-established principles of how nations are formed under international law, it quite literally suffices here. So I’ll kind of just very briefly walk this through because it’s kind of a little legal nerdy.

So essentially what happens is towards the end of World War I, this is when the European powers start to decide how to carve up the Middle East. You get the Sykes-Picot Agreement there. You get the British Mandate for Palestine and so forth there. So the original version for the British Mandate for Palestine was divided between Mandatory Palestine, which was the Jewish part, the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, Gaza, and then the Mandate for Transjordan, which would become Jordan today.

That was supposed to be the Arab part of this original partition there. Those were the borders under the British mandate until David Ben-Gurion declared independence in 1948. There’s a principle of international law called Uti Possidetis Juris, which essentially says that when a new state is formed in a part of the world, it assumes the borders of the previous existing entity in that part of the world. This is used throughout the world when it comes to the breakdown of Yugoslavia in the 90s, when it comes to Africa, you know, post-colonial Africa, we’ve used this same principle, Uti Possidetis Juris, to define borders.

So the upshot is that in May of 1948, when Ben-Gurion declares independence for Israel there, it inherited the exact borders of mandatory Palestine under the British mandate, which includes actually not just kind of Tel Aviv, whatever, but actually includes all of the land of Israel, Judea and Samaria, Gaza, and so forth there. Now, part of that was given up. Sinai was traded away for peace with Anwar Sadat in Egypt and so forth there. But that’s the basic international law. So Israel is legitimate under literally all the various ways that a state can be legitimate.

As a believer myself, you know, I simply think that there is an additional compelling reason to feel strong about this. And, you know, I think hundreds of millions of Americans, maybe even billions of people throughout the world kind of, you know, who are Jews, Christians, so forth, have a similar, you know, kind of natural affinity for reasons that are beyond international law. But international law is frankly more than enough to suffice for Israel’s legitimacy.

Mr. Jekielek:
Josh, as we finish up, you know, there’s been these significant forays by the administration as a priority, the U.S. administration into the Middle East. There’s been, you know, sort of rumors of some sort of disagreements between Netanyahu and Trump recently. What do you think is going to happen ultimately in the U.S.-Israel relationship?

Mr. Hammer:
Okay, so the first thing to note is, you know, the rumors of a Trump-Netanyahu rift are just that. They are just rumors. It’s very hard to try to sort fact from fiction. In fact, Brett Baier on Fox News literally asked President Trump about this point blank, and Trump dismissed it and said, no, Netanyahu was a very tough job. October 7th was one of the worst days in the history of humanity. He’s in a very difficult situation right now.
So it’s worth knowing that the one time that I’m aware of that he’s been explicitly asked about this possible rift, point blank, he’s emphatically denied it.

Now, there is a slight history of Trump and Netanyahu butting heads. Let’s, you know, let’s recall that in November 2020, you know, after the disputed election, Netanyahu did congratulate President Biden. In his defense, he didn’t really have a choice. I mean, you know, any foreign country has to be able to get along with the great country of the United States there. But President Trump was definitely upset about that, after all that he had done to support Israel during his first administration there.

You know, it looked like there was a rapprochement, that there was a real reconciliation. Over the past year and a half, Netanyahu went down to Mar-a-Lago. They had these photos, smiling, thumbs up and so forth. So it’s very hard to know. I think that what you’re seeing play out with all these kind of unnamed sources and anonymous people leaking to The Washington Post, New York Times and a lot of these articles, you’re seeing a real-time rift in the Republican Party and in the administration when it comes to the view of Israel, of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and of Prime Minister Netanyahu as an individual. I think there are a lot of people in the broader Trump administration universe there who are probably not fans, actually, of Prime Minister Netanyahu there.

Also, let’s bear in mind that this second administration seems to be even more focused on the economic transactional parts of international affairs and diplomacy than it probably was the first time around there. You know, I haven’t necessarily seen a headline, you know, Israel pledges to commit, you know, trillion dollars. I’m making up a number, but that seems to be thus far the easiest way to kind of curry favor with the Trump administration is to just open up your checkbooks. Easier said than done when you’re a country like Saudi Arabia or Qatar that has just extraordinary amounts of petroleum reserves necessarily.

But look, I continue to be optimistic about the U.S.-Israel relations, certainly under this administration. The longer term threat, very much so, is the younger generation of Americans, where the polls show that the 30 and under category of Americans tend to be split, you know, roughly split 50/50 almost when it comes to who you support between Israel and Hamas. That’s obviously deeply concerning there. But I would not be tremendously concerned when it comes to this particular administration. Ultimately,
there are a lot of rumors flying around there.

And, you know, look, the worst case scenario is that maybe President Trump says to Netanyahu, you know, you go be a little more independent. Not necessarily a bad thing. Israel should be more independent, frankly, of the United States there. I mean, that’s kind of the whole purpose of Zionism, the term that we just defined there, is for the Jews to be in control themselves there without kind of listening, you know, to any great, you know, benevolent superpower like the United States or anyone else at all there. So that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world.

Here’s How Trump Is Changing the Game in the Middle East: Josh Hammer