➡ Chris Farrell hosts “On Watch”, a Judicial Watch podcast discussing untold news and recovered history, inviting engagement from the audience. In one episode, he interviews Andrew Doran, a senior research fellow at the Philos Project, on his unique insight into the Middle Eastern issues, highlighting Israel’s resilience, concerns over America’s moral decline, and Israel’s anxiety toward its intelligence agencies’ failures.
➡ The text discusses concerns about escalating tensions between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah amid Hamas’s actions. The speaker participated in a Middle East policy conference, highlighting media portrayal of the conflict, where Israel was quickly blamed. He expresses surprise over the U.S. government’s swift pressure on Israel and talks about the difficult situation for Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducting operations in complex urban environments. The speaker considers the attitude and perspective differential between Israelis and Americans and remarks on the unexpected reaction from some sections of American academia and media towards the Middle East conflict.
➡ This text discusses the external influences and criticism impacting Arab communities, particularly Palestinians, and it also reviews the backlash certain Middle-Eastern countries such as Iran and Lebanon received due to their extremist stances. Additionally, the complexities of Lebanon’s internal situation, the potential for escalating violence due to rocket attacks, and the political implications of the U.S.’s stance on Israel are highlighted.
➡ The conversationalist discusses the political state of Israel, observing its rightward shift while noting its liberal elements, such as publicly funded abortion and a prominent LGBTQ+ scene. Further, they discuss the complex U.S.-Israel relationship, Israel’s perception of changing American ideologies, and concerns about anti-Semitism. They also consider Israel’s domestic issues, including abortion politics and the socioeconomic challenges within the ultra-Orthodox community.
➡ The speaker discusses various conflicts and issues confronting Israel, including the underemployment of the Haredi community, a hostile anti-LGBT movement in Jerusalem, the lack of widespread patriotism, an uncertain relationship with the UN and EU, demographic shifts, and an unease about their place in the global community given their compact size and the threat surrounding them. Additionally, religious freedom and relations with Hamas, EU, and other entities are mentioned. The speaker is involved with the Fellows Project that seeks to create open dialogues and establish better relationships with diverse groups in the Middle East.
➡ Andrew Doran, a Senior Research Fellow at the Philos Project, discusses his insights on the recent attacks by Hamas on Israel, providing viewers with a clearer understanding of the situation. Despite his personal absence on social media platforms, his work is readily available on the Philos Project.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is on watch. Welcome to On Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch podcast, where we take a dive behind the headlines to cover news that the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know about. We also try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. We really appreciate you joining us. Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast. Leave us a rating. Also, email us with your ideas, your comments on what we’re covering.

Give us your idea of what you’d like to have us take a look at or interview. Folks, today we’ve got a real treat. We’ve got my friend and colleague Andrew Doran, who’s a senior research fellow with the Philos Project. Andrew happens to be in Jerusalem right now. Andrew and I have known each other for literally decades. Full disclosure, we’re good friends. We’re former colleagues. We’re continuing to be colleagues, just in different places on the map.

So welcome, Andrew to on watch. Thank you, Chris. It’s great to be with you. Thank you so much for joining us. Andrew, you are uniquely qualified to discuss all things concerning the Middle East in your past life. You, in fact, founded, really created an organization called Indefense of Christians IDC, which looked at protecting the rights and really, I guess, the dignity of the Christian minority in the Middle East.

You’ve done a lot of very interesting work. You’re currently with Philos project? So, first of all, give me you’re sitting in Jerusalem. What are your impressions? What’s going on now that this war has kicked off? Yeah. Thank you, Chris. I think it’s very remarkable, the courage and resilience of the Israelis. You hear a lot of people comment over here on American culture, and they will say things like, we don’t really have the luxury of transgender ideology.

We don’t really have the luxury for all the things that have kind of caused a sort of intellectual, spiritual, moral rot in the west and in America, in our elite institutions, because they’re surrounded by enemies which sharpens their focus. And I went down several days ago with a friend who’s retired from the IDF, retired from the Jerusalem Brigade. And we went down toward Gaza, near Gaza, to bring some supplies to soldiers.

And last Saturday, October 7, over 250,000 people reported for duty in a country of a little over 9 million people. So there were outside military bases. It’s a country the size of New Jersey. So outside military bases, there were just cars lined about a mile each way outside the road, and people left from wherever they were. If they were at breakfast, if they were running errands, they drove immediately to the base because the country was under attack.

Right. So you noticed that there aren’t men on the street. You notice that people into their 40s, people my age were called up. So you notice that. And I was walking down the street in Jerusalem, and I saw an older fellow maybe ten years older than I am, jogging and looking at me, kind of throwing a bit of a skeptical look, and I think he might have thought, why aren’t you called up? Right? You’re a shirker.

And I will say the full extent of the horror is we probably know now more than we don’t. And what we know is pretty awful. It’s pretty god awful what was done by Hamas. And it was a shock to Israelis. It was it was a real shock. And they let their guard down. And you wonder how that could happen in a country. Americans, what is it, 1% or 2% serve? It’s a very small percentage of us who actually here.

There are only a handful of colleges and universities, and they’re all more or less equal in terms of their status. So you don’t have the gradations of you don’t have the academic class distinctions, I guess you might say, that exist in America. So there isn’t an Ivy League and then sort of a second tier and then like, good luck, you went to community college, kind of thing. Yeah.

No, it’s not like that here. You know what they ask you? What unit did you serve in? That’s the thing. That’s the thing. People fight, they use all their connections and sway to get into an elite unit, not an elite university. So that should give you a sense of the mindset. So it is a little bit shocking, disappointing what happened. And the country has been I spent about three months here this summer, two and a half months.

And I spent a lot of time while Israel was in the news for its domestic political controversy, the judicial reforms, the problems that have arisen from the absence of a written constitution, people not liking the direction that the country is taking, which is a decidedly conservative direction. The birth rate in Israel is 3. 13 per Jewish woman, which blows anything in the Western world out of the water.

It’s at least double, triple what’s going on in Western Europe. Certainly Hungary is excited because they’re at, like, 1. 3, and that still isn’t really good enough, but it beats Europe by a substantial amount. Let me ask you a question. You touched on the intelligence aspect of this. Has the internal domestic anger cranked up where people are feeling they’re aggravated, where they’re saying, how the hell could you have done this to us? You’re supposed to be on watch, on guard.

You’re supposed to be conducting very intensive both technical surveillance signals intelligence, imagery, but also human intelligence, trying to penetrate these Palestinian terrorist cells. How did you let it happen? Is there anger? I mean, it’s going to come out sooner or later, but is there currently anger in the Israeli populace towards their government? Absolutely. Rage, I would say, but everyone’s putting it on hold until this is over. Yeah, they’re channeling Hamas and not yeah, right.

I would imagine that at some point, it’s going to come out right? There’s going to be some kind of a commission. There’s going to be heads will roll kind of stuff that they were so caught just flat footed for this. Yeah. And I would defer to you on this point, but I will tell you my opinion, not based on really a lot of conversations, just sort of piecing things together because the Israelis are so good at intelligence, because they’re so good at security, because they have a population that is not only deeply patriotic, but multilingual.

There are still native Arabic, Farsi and other speakers coming into the country all the time. Those are the two most important languages. So they have sigant advantages, they have human advantages. But I have to say, and I could be wrong about this, this is just idle speculation. Idle, but this is speculation on my part. I think there was an over reliance on that. It was a religious holiday that fell on Shabbat.

Right. 2023. Tensions in the West Bank have been exceedingly high for about two years now. How did you not think coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, not that you needed, that there was enough. Right. I guess what I’m saying is they obviated common sense in favor of an over reliance on their own intelligence capabilities. And so you do see that. You do see agencies that make those governments make those mistakes.

Just forgetting common sense. You’re sitting in Jerusalem before we start to record, you commented that a short while ago a couple of siren, rocket or bomb alerts had gone off. What’s that been like for the past week? I guess Jerusalem. Obviously, it’s uniquely situated geographically, but have you been subjected to false alarms, real alarms? What’s been the activity level in Jerusalem? Typically when the alarms go off, the rockets, there’s some sort of percussion that follows.

They’re not wasting. So this is how precise the Iron Dome is. And my understanding of it is that they will let a rock, if a rocket is heading toward a treeline where there are no civilians, they’ll just let it go. I saw something like that out in Karim, just west of Jerusalem on Saturday, the morning when all this started, with a view down into the valley. It’s been rare that we’ve had it’s been several days since I’ve heard a rocket or impact.

And as I told you at the beginning, despite the fact that I have a background as a forward observer, I don’t know whether those two percussion blasts that I heard were the Iron Dome hitting the rocket, which is they have an 80% effective rate and it’s a civilian population. So I would imagine that is what happened or whether landed somewhere. But either way, people took to the shelter.

I was on a zoom meeting with about 15 people and got up and opened the windows so that glass, in the unlikely event that something happened glass wouldn’t take my eyes out. And then one of the windows went slamming shut because of the wind, which was scarier than the sirens. The Israelis are very tough people. Tel Aviv has been hit much worse. Obviously, what happened in the south is deeply been.

The north has been we can save this for a little bit later if you like, but if Hezbollah were going to go in, Saturday would have been the time, and they didn’t. And so the minor kinetic activity in the north seems to be a signal to leave Gaza alone. But the largest Israeli army in history is being mobilized, and that’s a very negotiating position. And they outnumber Hezbollah significantly.

And it’s always said that Hezbollah owns Lebanon, but I don’t think the Lebanese are crazy. Most of the Lebanese are crazy about the idea of going to war with Israel right now. The whole world saw what happened in South Israel, and I don’t exactly know what Hamas’calculus was, but to get the Israelis to overreact, how do you overreact to those? So a week ago today, I was in this panel or at this conference.

It was a pro Israel summit hosted in Budapest, Hungary, by the center for Fundamental Rights. I was supposed to talk about Biden Middle East policy, which I’m not sure I know what that is, but I ended up talking more about sort of the intelligence, the military, and the psyops part of this equation. And I made a mistake. I said it was my estimation that the Israelis would have about a week, essentially, of good press.

I don’t mean it. That’s a very coarse way of expressing it. But anyway, the Israelis would get the benefit of the doubt for about a week and then it was going to flip. And it was going to flip decidedly to the Israelis are busy committing war crimes and the gazans are suffering and the Palestinians are victimized by blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I wasn’t even close. I mean, I don’t think it went 48 hours.

I don’t think Wednesday so the conference was Monday. By Wednesday, BBC, the rest of a lot of the press were haranguing on Israel, that their reaction was over the top, they exceeded their self defense mode. You know, all the language, you’ve seen all the same reports. Isn’t that astonishingly quick? I thought it was a week, but I was way wrong. It was days. Two days. That was it.

Yeah. I would say I was a little astounded, too. I’m also a little bit astounded. The know, with Secretary Blinken flying all over the Middle East and Biden saying one thing, but trying to prevent a war in the north, or trying to prevent Israel from cleaning up Gaza, I was a little bit surprised that the Israelis have acceded to that so far. I think that they should. Well, I think that if you look at what happened here in the days after 911, if people had said, well, it’s time for restraint and clear thinking, and we don’t need to go after Al Qaeda.

People would have said, are you mad? And if you look at the very personal nature of the atrocities, that would have been a very charitable are you mad? Anyway, that’s one way to express it, yeah. Right. Yeah. I’m very surprised that our government is putting up this much pressure, putting this much pressure on Israel this quickly. And I’m also surprised that given the disposition of Israelis at the moment, that Israelis have acquiesced.

But I’ll also say every, you know, jewish friend in America I talk to, they all say things that Americans in the same situation would not say. They say, well, we have to understand that Hamas is not all Palestinians, but we have to understand that there has to be some sort of solution here. We can’t continue to have a presence in the West Bank, okay? You wouldn’t hear that from Americans.

Now, that’s not all Israelis. It’s not all American Jewish supporters of Israel, but you hear a lot of measured thoughts that I would not the Israelis are keenly aware of the scrutiny that they’re going to suffer. Right. I mean, they know exactly what’s going to be reeled out against them. One of the things we talked about is urban combat is a nightmare to send a ground force into a dense area like that with even just the physical structures, let alone civilian populace.

Although they told them to get out, a percentage always stays. You’re moving doorway to doorway, house to house stuff’s booby trapped, there’s car bombs, there’s snipers. It’s a nightmare for a conventional ground force to operate in that environment. And now, on top of that, you’re under a microscope. God forbid you react to sudden movement, and you shoot instead of pausing an extra 5 seconds, which can get you killed, you’re going in to clear a building, and they blow the building up on top of you.

I mean, it’s horrific on the part for the IDF, who knows that they’ve got to watch out for civilian casualties and then concurrently, they’re trying to run hostage rescue operations. Right. This is a military it’s a mind blower. And I don’t think that the press is discussing this. I don’t think American commentators or press or political scientists or even military experts are discussing just it’s very difficult situation.

And at the same time, they can’t afford to let these guys from Hamas continue to operate. I mean, there’s no second chance here. There’s no oh, well, maybe next time. Not when they’re grabbing people as hostages and dragging them back into Gaza, right. Not when they’re deliberately, maliciously willfully executing women. And they changed hamas changed the rules on this, and now they’re upset because the counterattack back. What did you expect them to yeah, well, I think we sort of know what Hamas I think we know what Hamas expected because the israelis will release 100 prisoners to get the corpse of an IDF soldier back.

So what are they going to do for living women and children? I think that was the mindset. I think the Israelis have pivoted now, and they’re saying, well, if we negotiate, then this will never stop. Hezbollah and Hamas will try and come over non stop. They’ll try and come over every week, grab a hostage and go back, and the entire country will be taken. My my thought was yours, which is that they’re going to be conducting ground operations at the same time they’re trying to do hostage rescue.

And that’s immensely difficult. And so I think there was the IDF vets I’ve talked to, and others have just said that there’s just the sense that we’re not getting it. We should expect to get no one back. And I think of it as like the hostages, as awful as this is, because there are women and children, elderly there, and the people on Flight 93 sort of did it freely.

But the hostages in Gaza are kind of like the victims on Flight 93, that they will have to unfortunately, they will not make it perishing will probably save lives. That’s the horror of the situation. It’s also occurred to me, Chris, I don’t know what you think about this, but in an age where before Twitter and social media, when young people would be and everyone would really be watching the same handful of channels for news, I think the attention of the west that was the case still in 2001.

I think the attention of the country and of the west and of the world would be focused on the same thing. And I think everyone would be kind of working from the same information. That’s not really the case anymore. And of course, there’s a great deal of trust in what Hamas puts out and skepticism about what the Israelis put out, despite the fact that the have, you know, documentary footage, they have various agencies filming international folks along verifying what’s going on.

There’s skepticism about that. I think that what we saw on October 7 has awakened a number of people to the nexus between a lot of European city streets, american college campuses, and terrorism in the Middle East right there, because that’s an excellent thing to focus on. I was discussing media reaction to the attacks, but there is this other sort of ecosystem. They’re distinctly different places, but the mindset that binds them together is similar.

And that is what you just said, which are various enclaves in major European cities, American universities and what was the third element? You said there was a third element, the literal war here, the conflict here, the terrorism here, the terrorist ideology there’s also sort of this there’s an elite. I don’t know where to geographically put them. But there’s an elite, maybe even in the entertainment world I’m not sure who feels that in some portions of the entertainment world that they feel that they’re going to get out in front on social media and say, well, and then there’s also the, you know, Rashida Talab crowd that unapologetically thinks that what happened last know was great.

So tie that together. What are American universities doing? What is the academic culture of America that this has been advanced as some great and noble deed? Yeah, my primary education, undergraduate, and even law school were all conducted in the Catholic ghetto, so to speak. So my exposure to and I don’t know that the military or even the State Department gave me much more than just a slight window into elite academia, but talking to a lot of friends who’ve taught or lived or studied in that world and reading about it, certainly a lot of it goes back to Edward Said.

Right. Orientalism much of this just feels like a footnote to Edward Said’s Orientalist critique. And that’s a critique, of course, that ends up infantilizing Arabs and Palestinians in particular. And I think, you know, it is a tragedy what’s happened to the Palestinians, but they have not been passive agents in their own tragic history over the last century. They’ve rejected piece after piece. They’ve been told to by a mix of Western elites and Arab governments, the same governments who would never take them.

Right. They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Right, yeah, I do want to come back to that to the 20% of Israel’s citizenry who are Arab Muslims. But yeah, the death cult of organizations like Hamas and Azbalah, it feels mean when you get into child sacrifice. You’re talking about a real pagan ethos. They are so far beyond Islam, which is why I think you’ve seen so many Muslims speaking out.

I think a lot of people in Iran appeared to have been horrified. People in Lebanon were horrified. So even these bastions of terrorist activity have been pretty keen to distance themselves, for the moment anyway, from the horrors of October 7. Sadly, that’s a distinction that I haven’t detected. So who within the Lebanese or Iranian communities that even they’re offended? Because mostly I see everyone going to polar extremes and not a lot of thoughtful analysis or no one’s conscience has been shocked.

So can you give me an example or two of Iranian outliers? Yeah, I think even Saturday or Sunday of last week there was a soccer match in Tehran and the sponsoring agency that put it on showed the Palestinian flag and the audience began chanting, shove the Palestinian flag up your ass. And I saw this on Twitter and I reached out to a buddy whose wife speaks is from Iran and speaks Farsi fluently, lives in the United States now.

And he said, yeah, that’s what they’re saying. And there were a number of Iranian expats who took part in solidarity protests with Israel and the Jewish people in France and other certainly, you know, the DC area. There’s a huge Iranian expat community and doesn’t get a lot of attention. But everyone I spoke to was a Trump supporter. They were all for putting pressure on the regime. They don’t like, obviously, sanctions that target civilians instead of the bad actors and the IRGC and their government.

But they are very anti regime in Lebanon. Odly enough. It seems as though Iranians get away with speech that’s critical of their government in public. I’ve not been to Iran, but I’ve been to Lebanon several times, and it depends on where you you know, Lebanon is really three or four countries. It’s not one country anymore. Yeah, it’s one state, but barely that’s mostly a failed state. But you have Christian enclave, sunni, Shia, even Druze among Lebanon.

So depending on where you are in Lebanon, you will hear people who are extremely critical of Isbollah, but that’s flirting with death. There was a woman yesterday or the day before who was down on the southern border with a camera with a camera crew, and she confronted Hezbollah militants on the border. And I don’t quite know how that was resolved, but that was a know, there was a lot of courage.

You see courage among the Lebanese, but if you’re Israel, you’re looking north, and the only thing you don’t see that nuance, you don’t see the complexity of Lebanon. All you see is a country where the national army and the government is afraid to stand up to a terrorist organization, and you see a speculative state, and you see 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed your way. Hamas is kind of the B team.

Hezbollah is for real. Yeah, of course, has guided missiles. They actually have Telemetry versus the Hamas rockets from the last century that are shoot it over that away and let it rip. There’s not a degree of precision. It’s like a V. One V, two buz bomb over London. Yeah. And on that point, just quickly, the reason Jerusalem, because of where it is, is rarely targeted is because they can’t be sure that they’re not going to hit a mosque, that they’re not going to hit a Muslim residential area, and so they’re extremely careful about that.

Hezbollah, on the other hand, can, with their rockets, distinguish east from West Jerusalem. If that heats up, they could just do devastation despite the Iron Dome. So among the it’s a gross term, but it’s probably accurate among the smart guys that you’re hanging out with, you guys are smarter than the average bear, the sort of academics and intellectuals, the policy guys. What’s the mood, what’s the view of how this is playing out? It’s not just an academic exercise.

There’s blood and bone involved in this. So what do you and your colleagues what are your conversations about? Well, I don’t know if there’s any kind of a consensus, and a lot of things could turn very quickly. I think it was pretty clear that Iran and certainly Hezbollah didn’t want to. There was no coordinated plan to attack on October 7, which would have been, if you were going to attack, that was the time to do it.

There wasn’t that sort of synchronization. Yeah, there wasn’t that sort of synchronization. Which leads you and there are reports coming out now that there were some people who kind of went for a ride along, so there were some Gazan workers. There is evidence that the victims knew some of the killers, which means that some of the Gazan workers, day laborers, who were going back and forth from Gaza, murdered the people who were giving them jobs, which is quite grisly and horrific when you think about you consider how many millions of Palestinians are employed by Israelis.

And so that’s going to leave a big mark. I was talking to a former state Department policy planning colleague who was also of the opinion that Iran and Hezbollah were probably shocked a little bit when they saw what was done, when they saw burned corpses, when they saw the slaughter of defenseless civilians. I think they probably understood this is going to play very badly. I’m not saying that they, that they cared about dead Israelis.

I don’t think that they did for a second. And they were probably cheering, but they probably also realized, well, this is going to reflect poorly on us, and we’re probably going to lose the Europeans who are the ones who tend to be the western Europeans, who tend to be a little bit more sympathetic. But as you say, everyone’s forgotten that now. Everyone’s starting to develop amnesia, even while we have live toddler hostages in Gaza.

So it’s not clear. It’s still possible that things could get hot in the north for any number of reasons. The difference between the 2006 war, if you look at that, the 34 day war, and now where you have minor kinetic activity, but it isn’t escalating into a huge war. All of that changed in Syria, where the Israelis really, through a series of different tactics, developed a limited strike exchange that allowed things not to escalate the way that they did in 2006 into a full war, and that’s continued.

They’re sort of playing still by those rules. Even Hamas is playing by different rules, of course, but Hezbollah and the Israelis are playing by the rules that kind of developed in Syria, where you could hit Hezbollah targets in Syria, but not when they crossed into Lebanon. So there have been strikes in Syria and to and back and forth between Syria and northern Israel, but not to the extent that we saw in 2006.

If I were Israel, and I’ve got people flying in from Peru, from America, from Brazil, from Europe, all over the world to come enlist, and I have my army called up, I would take my time. I would train it, I would move it north, and I would negotiate. And I would ask the American administration, with its really good contacts in Iran, to talk about let’s talk about these 150,000 Hezbollah rockets.

And I realize that’s a very high stakes game, and I don’t know that the Israeli government will be able to withstand pressure from our government not to do that. But in a vacuum, all things being equal, I think that would have to seem very tempting to the you know, let’s deal with Hamas and asbola here and now, what? We have the army and we have the national will.

We’re united, and we have certainly some in the west who were with us. So you were sitting in the State Department not too long ago, and you know, the career operatives that are embedded in the day to day operations there, and you see the language and the sort of posture that Biden Blinken take on Israel. Is there going to be one of these schizophrenic moves where we say, we’re with you forever and then we end up screwing them? Or what’s your sense of there’s the rhetoric and then there’s the pressure that’s brought to bear? What’s the tension on that? Yeah, I have a friend who came here, moved here many years ago from Canada, and she has six children.

She’s orthodox, but she also, I think, considers herself something of a liberal, progressive leftist. Although in Israel, being center left is kind of the equivalent to being center right in America. That’s how conservative the country has gotten. And she she was she’s one of these very idealistic people, and I really respect and admire her a lot of integrity. But I think October 7 changed a lot of things, and she was very excited about Biden’s words, and I was thinking, don’t mark the words, mark the deeds.

I think you’re right. I think we’ve already started that think, you know, Lincoln flying around, Lincoln’s Shuttle diplomacy to try and stop Israel from taking obvious and natural steps to defend its interests and its know, we’re trying to hamstring the Israelis, and this operation hasn’t even really begun. As soon as they bring up the law of the law of land warfare, as soon as that is invoked, you know that they’re pulling back on the reins as hard as they can.

Yeah, we were talking about this just a little bit before we jumped on the call, and it’s a good time to talk about it now. The American Israeli relationship is much deeper than lobby organizations or government. These are very deep ties, and it goes back a very long way. And our societies are in many ways very similarly constructed. There’s a lot of affinity. There’s the same sense of the primacy of liberty and personal responsibility and personal dignity.

There’s also a very strong civil society here. So I guess what I’m about to say is you can have daylight between the Israeli government and the US. Government and still have two people who have a lot in common and a. Lot of very strong ties. And I say that because I think Americans would be very surprised to I think most Americans have a kind of 1985 understanding of Israel, which is probably what I had before I came and spent a lot of time here.

Israel is increasingly traditional conservative, but a number of Israelis have said to me, when you reach that point of candor they just say, look, we think and I’m summarizing several conversations now, but we think American elites have kind of gone insane with the ideology. We’re playing the long game with America. We’re hopeful because of the American people, but American institutions have really gone off the deep end, and they’re deeply aware of the problems of anti Semitism on campuses and deeply aware that anti Zionism is rolled into a number of different ideologies and that it’s code for anti Semitism.

And so there’s been a lot of yeah, I think there’s been a lot of concern over the direction that America is going. And I think Israelis understand the neighborhood that they live in. They would much rather have peace with the Gulfies. They would much rather have peace with those who are prepared to make it in the neighborhood where they live. In terms of what the State Department might be thinking, yeah, I think you nailed it.

The thinking with Lebanon inside the State Department, and I think the US government for a long time was, let’s try to buy time. Let’s play the long game. Well, the long game favored Iran, and it really always did. And so it favored Hezbollah and it favored Iran. And here we are. It’s 2023. It’s 40 years after 1983, October 1983, which is a time that all Americans ought to remember.

And we’re at a time of heightened terrorism. Lebanon on the brink, and a carrier group in the eastern Mediterranean. So we’ll see how it goes. I tend to agree with you. I think this administration is not going to have Israel’s back. And that’s a disappointment. Yeah, the carrier group is nothing but a publicity stunt. I mean, it’s awesome and it’s powerful and it’s big and it’s a lot of stuff, but they’re busy worrying about their drag shows.

I just don’t see it as being anything that’s going to actually take action. It’s a big distraction in large part. I want to touch on three things before we close out. So we talked about Israel’s conservatism, and that it’s sort of growing over Israel. Believe me, I’m pro Israel, and I support the right to defend themselves and to destroy Hamas. Don’t get me wrong, but Israel’s got its own little kind of schizophrenic position.

You’ve got publicly funded abortion there without even a question. Tel Aviv has its own very, let’s say, know, LGBTQ scene that is sort of promoted or winked and nod. So they’re about as schizo as we there’s. There’s a whole lot of America that wants nothing to do with biden’s crazed gender ideology or biden’s open borders, which puts us at grave risk. But that’s what is talked about, incessantly.

But I think most of what you can call it real America or the square states in the middle, they don’t care about anything about that. Does Israel have the same thing? You’re saying that they’re more and more conservative across the board, but they still have inconsistencies in their own sort of abortion? It’s interesting because abortion here is more restrictive than it is in the United States, at least depending on where you’re talking about in the United States pre 2022.

And after last year when Roe was overturned, it suddenly became politicized here. It was something that was kept out of politics, but it entered politics there after our it entered politics because people on the pro abortion right left in America, sensing the rise of traditional values and religion and conservatism, wanted to make sure that these were enshrined. So we’ve actually brought a couple. It did, yeah. So I met earlier this year with an Orthodox fellow who left his job as a lawyer to run a crisis pregnancy center here in Israel.

And they count every single I think it was like 73,000 babies since they set it up. It was founded by a Holocaust survivor. And we went after we went to Yadvashem, and when we spoke to a couple of people who explained how it works, especially in the religious community, you have to sit down and talk to a rabbi. There has to be a related health issue. But most women who seek abortions in Israel are doing that because are doing so out of poverty, not out of it’s not a lifestyle choice.

It’s usually sometimes from religious families. And that might sound like that’s going to fall very hard on Christians, especially Catholic ears. The Jewish teaching on abortion actually comes from the Talmud, and I don’t remember all the details, but it was like the last rabbi to weigh in on a subject of a woman who fell down a flight of steps while she was pregnant and whether or not she could be compensated for the loss of the child.

And the decision was no. And so the pro choice ethos comes out of that. But when Israelis say pro choice, even I’m talking like center left people, they really don’t think of abortion here in terms of elective abortion or abortion as a means of birth control. What they mean is someone who’s raped hard cases make bad law, as we say. Abortion is much more complicated here. It’s becoming less common here.

So the abortion rate here is going down, the restrictions on it are going down. But of course, because of pressure from the left here and in the United States, it’s more difficult for people who run crisis pregnancy centers. But on the LGBT, yes, it’s true, you will see rainbow flags in television, but when you talk to someone who says, oh, yes, I’m all pro LGBT, and you start getting into transgender ideology and talking about what’s happening in America, you get this stunned look, and they don’t believe you.

They think that you’re making something up, and they’re really not following what’s going on in America. They have their own lives, and they’re pretty shocked and horrified. So what you run into is silence. And so everyone I’ve talked to, center left, center right, more or less agrees that the things going on in the United States, those could not happen here. Yeah, but that’s disgust. It is like, everybody like, you don’t have gender wars here.

Everybody gets married very young. I think the average age in Israel is 28. It’s one of the youngest countries in the world. So you walk down the streets, everybody’s you don’t have middle aged bachelors dating 25 year olds. A, because they don’t let somebody get to, you know, middle aged without being married, and B, there are no 25 year old girls, girls to marry. There’s mandatory service. And people the kids here grow up young.

They marry young. They have big families. And those who like the ultra Orthodox who are exempt from service, they marry young as well. And they have very big families. That, I think, is a much bigger problem in Israel. The haredi ultra Orthodox community, they don’t serve in the military. They’re underemployed. They are a very quickly growing demographic, and they live in poverty, often on assistance. They send their wives to work.

There are kind of poorer, harati neighborhoods. The crime rates are extremely low, and they study tara, but they also panhandle. And I can’t tell you how many times over the last few years in Israel I’ve had an unemployed Haredi fellow come up and panhandle, even at the Western Wall. I had that experience the first time that I went there. And that’s extremely common. And these are some of the real problems for Israel.

But I do think on the I would bet, as with other things on the LGBT, like, they have a very active and hostile anti LGBT movement here in Jerusalem, and it is kind of Jerusalem against Tel Aviv in that sense. And in the north, in Galilee, where it’s only 45% Jewish majority Muslim Galilee, there’s not a lot of interest in that. But there’s also not a great deal, depending on where you are, of patriotism in Israel.

But for everything I just said, there’s an exception. Yeah, I’m sure. So two points also I want to hit. One is, what’s your read on how the well, let’s think of it as globalism. What’s your read on how the United Nations and the European Union are currently coming at the war and a month from now, what’s your gut instinct on how they’re going to the big globalist, multinational organizational view of little New Jersey sized 9.

5 million people fighting tooth and nail for their existence? How are they going to interact? How are they going to deal with what’s going on? I really don’t know, because Israel is extremely unified at the moment, and I don’t know in terms of what Israel does and what Israel thinks. I think what Israel thinks is that they have a growing population, and they look at Latin America, they look at Africa, they look at Asia, and they say, where are our allies here, long term? They look at Europe and they see what the west ought to see, what the United States ought to see, which is a continent in demographic decline that’s about to undergo some extremely difficult decades that it has brought upon itself.

They see the rise of China. They have good ties with India here. Israel and India have very good ties, despite the fact that India has parted ways over the Ukraine war with the So. I think there’s a very close affinity, cultural affinity with America that’s very different from Israel’s relationship with Europe. I would hope that Israel would stay the course, so to speak, and do what’s in its own interests in the weeks and months ahead.

But our government will listen to the EU. Our government really cares about the EU, our senior diplomats who want to be posted in Paris and Rome and London and Berlin, even though Europe isn’t that significant, instead of seeking out posts in the IndoPacific region. We’re really very much in the 18th and 19th century in that sense, in terms of our diplomatic priorities by region. But I think our government cares, this administration cares what the EU thinks.

It cares what the UN thinks, and so we will end up, in consequence, putting a lot of pressure on. But but the Israelis know. They know that the EU hates shortly after the attack, I think it was Monday or Tuesday, wall Street Journal came out and reported that there were meetings between Hamas and the IRGC in Beirut. I don’t know if you saw those reports. They’re pretty specific as the date, time, location, and they also were kind know, wondering about how they pulled that off without Israeli intelligence detecting it through any number of different INTs.

You’d be able to see, hear, watch, know that. Do you buy that? Do you buy the organized, train funded, intel, logistics, support Iranian connection to Hamas on this attack, or do you think otherwise? I do. But I can also imagine a scenario whereby Hamas decides we’re the upstart at the table when we’re sitting down with Isbala and the IRGC. Let’s make a statement. Let’s go our own way, and they have their own agenda.

And it’s not all that long ago that Hamas and Hamas was sort of in the ISIS corner, at least ideologically, while husband was fighting them in Syria. That’s barely ten years old, and that was a bitter fight for Hezbollah. They really took it on the chops, and ISIS was no joke, and Hezbollah is no. So I think there’s, again, daylight there you have the Shia axis, and this is something of a new relationship.

And I think it’s not to say that Hamas isn’t. You can imagine a scenario whereby they would be keen to take money, training, weapons, and then sort of do whatever they want. Right. Do you think alcisi in Egypt is going to open the back door and let Gazins out through the south? I don’t think he is. And some of his statements just in the last couple of days have been very interesting.

He alluded to Egypt’s once thriving Jewish minority, and that’s not something you hear Arab leaders discuss very often. He’s made strong statements in the past about the dangers of militant or extreme Islamism. Yeah. Now he’s talking about the now extinct Jewish community, communities of Alexandria and Cairo. I don’t think any Arab leader is keen. They know very well the history in Jordan, the history in Lebanon. They’re aware, and you’ll even hear many people talk about this, that one fifth of Israel’s population is Palestinian.

And many Arab Israelis are deeply patriotic. They have no desire to be part of any Palestinian state that’s formed, if that ever happens. They have no desire to move to Gaza and live under Hamas. They are quite content. Maybe there’s an asterisk because they’re Muslim instead of Jewish. Israel is where Christianity, the Christian community here, is growing. It’s dying in the West Bank. It’s dying in Gaza. So it’s a very small community in Israel.

But I’ve been to 13 Muslim majority countries, and I’ve yet to see a place where the religious freedom of Christians is respected the way that it is in Israel. And you see Christians wearing crosses. But is it difficult to be a minority? Absolutely, it is. And there are difficulties that come with that. But Christians can complain about those things here. You may not complain if you’re a Christian under Hamas, or if you’re a Christian even in the West Bank.

They’re kind of hostage in those. You know, the PA is very and Hamas are both very pleased to say, look at our Christian minority, because that looks good. The optics of that look good. Right. You don’t see the Israelis doing that because they understand that it’s sort of a form of dangling dimitude, and it’s pretty offensive. They’ve been know. But that said, it’s such a small community. They also don’t really care.

They just don’t really take know you have equal rights and that’s it. Andrew, before we close out, I want to give you the last word. Tell us about what you’re working on, maybe with the Fellows Project or, I guess your last impressions or last ideas that come to mind before we close out this episode of On Watch. Yeah, thanks very much, Chris, and thanks for having me. It’s great to see you.

And the Felos Project, of course, has been extremely engaged with everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks. One of the things that I really liked about this organization. It was founded at the same time IDC was founded in 2014, and Robert Nicholson’s, friend of mine, founded Felos. And we were both in this space where we thought there’s something wrong about the traditional narratives of Middle East Christians.

You have to choose either the Arabs or you have to choose Israel. And that just felt like a false dichotomy. So I like the way that Philos I really admired the way that they would bring groups here. And you talk to everybody, and that’s one of the most common critiques that we get, which know, we go to the West Bank, we talk to Muslims, we talk to Jews, we talk to Christians, we talk to Jews and get feedback from all sides.

So those trips are obviously going to be halted for a while. There is a conference, actually, that we’re putting on next week. If I can figure out a way to get back without my flight being canceled. I’ve been too canceled already. I will be at this conference at Franciscan University on Nostra tate and Catholic Jewish Relations. And, yeah, we’re launching a coalition against anti Semitism. The Pilos Project has also been doing a lot of work in Armenia in recent months, bringing policymakers over there on a couple of trips prior to the annexation of Artsak.

So we do a lot of work in this part of the world. It’s nice to be away from official impersonal diplomacy and doing relational diplomacy on the ground with real human beings and not being around that oppressive bunch in that horrible monstrosity and Foggy Bottom. So I feel liberated. I’ve almost got my health back after your sanity got my sanity back after three years in the moldy viscera of Foggy Bottom.

But, yeah, we’re working on a lot of great things and speedlessproject. org, and people can check us out. Thank you for giving me thank you for reminding me to put that plug in, because I would have forgotten. Andrew, do you do any kind of social media? Are you out there tweeting or Xing or anything like that? No. And thank you, Chris. I ought to be I struggle with this.

I don’t yeah, I don’t I rely on yeah, I find it a little bit too demoralizing so quickly, lose my faith in humanity. But no, I’m not on social media. But you can find us on the Felos Project. Yeah. Andrew Doran, senior Research Fellow at the Philos Project, thank you so much for giving us your insights, your views from your perch in Jerusalem on what is going on with this outrageous, insane, vicious attack by Hamas on Israel and what’s going on and really what’s heading our way there’s.

A lot of your insights have very helpful. You really help people understand what’s going on and how things may or may not play out. We appreciate your time very much. Thank you, Chris. I’m Chris Farrell on watch. .