How The Results From The US Midterm Elections Could Impact The Political Stalemate In Israel

0:02Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is David Daoud. He's a senior fellow at the FDD. David, thanks so much for coming back on.

0:12David Daoud: Always a pleasure to be on, Brittany. I'm really grateful you're back on joining me this week because last week Israel held their first election since October 7th and we discussed where things stood. Then this week, as everyone knows, the United States had elections of our own. And I want to talk about where things are right now in terms of the election in Israel and the deadlock that we saw, as well as what the results from the midterms mean both for Israel as well as the war against Iran. And to recap where our conversation left off last week, Israel's longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he suffered a setback, but not a defeat.

0:48His political bloc lost 11 seats, but still had five more seats than the opposition led by gadi eisencote neither though secured enough seats for majority in the knesset israel's parliament arab-led parties on their side they made history this election they won 19 seats now you and i are sitting here it's a week and some change after israel's election where do things stand now uh well right now what's going on are uh

1:14David Daoud: consultations uh between uh the president and the individual parties and actually for those who speak Hebrew, it's a very interesting process because the consultations are actually live broadcast. So you can actually sit there and see, watch the president and his team talk to the delegations that are coming in from the individual parties. And the president presses them on questions and, you know, platforms and kind of where he wants to see things go. And really what's coming across, there were day one of consultations, I think was yesterday. Today is the second day. And he really doesn't want a second round of elections.

1:52David Daoud: So right now, in terms of endorsements, Prime Minister Netanyahu still has not secured 61, but neither has the opposition. The Iran party, we talk about the Arab parties. I think, first of all, it's a mistake to kind of lump them all into one bucket because there are actually four Arab parties, three of which are operating under the joint list rubric. So this is an alliance of three different parties. And then you have the Ram party. Ram is, you know, it's called an Islamist party. It's not exactly, it's kind of a more traditionalist, conservative Muslim party. But the second in command right now is actually an Israeli Jew.

2:37David Daoud: You have Segolovich, who is a police commander. And Raam's approach is integration, gradual integration of Arab Israelis into the mainstream of Israeli society and into Israel. And here's the critical part, as a Jewish state. So they're not trying to change the system. They're not trying to say we don't want Israel to have a Jewish identity. They're not overtly Zionist. You have Segoloviches, but the party officially is not overtly Zionist, but it's not explicitly anti-Zionist either. and Mansour Abbas, the head of the party, has said repeatedly that he recognizes that Israel was created as and should remain a Jewish state, full stop.

3:17David Daoud: Now, that doesn't mean that he doesn't have limitations on what he can and can't do, and this is part of the problem. So Mansour Abbas and the Iran party are officially agnostic on one of the issues, the critical issues of Israel today, which is ultra-Orthodox conscription. I believe we talked about this during the last term. So this is Israel's fastest growing demographic. They think they have like, even if we compare them to Arab Muslims in Israel, they have four times the reproduction rate and ultra-Orthodox neither serve in the army nor contribute economically. And there's a massive welfare state in Israel that's made to sustain their lifestyle.

3:55David Daoud: They basically just sit and learn Torah all day. And it's a massive drain on the economy. It's a massive impact on the taxpayer where, you know, cost of living is the number one issue in Israel. And, you know, they're not serving the army, and there's a manpower shortage in the IDF. So this issue affects all these aspects of Israeli society. And the Ram party is not endorsing ultra-Orthodox conscription when the Zionist opposition, right, the parties that are running against Netanyahu have said ultra-Orthodox conscription, universal conscription, is one of the planks that they ran on, and they're not willing to sit with any party be it ultra-Orthodox or Arab or any other party that doesn't endorse universal conscription.

4:37David Daoud: So that's point one. The second hang-up with Ram specifically is that the leadership of Ram, Mansour Abbas, has yet to call Hamas a terrorist organization even once. He's condemned October 7th. He has said cryptic statements like, I have an unequivocal answer, I just don't want to state it now. Regarding when he's asked the question of whether Hamas is a terrorist organization, including in consultations today with the president. And he's just not said the T word. Now, you know, he's given explanations as to why this is. I personally think that he believes that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

5:13David Daoud: He's just not trying to go too far out of lockstep with what he believes, you know, the sentiment of certain segments of the Arab population. Or again, he's going for gradual integration, kind of slow rolling integration. Because if you go too fast, right, given the tensions between Arabs and Jews in Israel for 78 years, You go too fast, you try to push things too quickly, you might end up failing. So he's taking a gradual approach. But right now in the post-October 7th environment in Israel, Israeli Jews need to hear this. And that's equally understandable given what happened on October 7th. They need to hear universal condemnation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

5:50David Daoud: So that's Rahm. But let's say even that Rahm endorses ultra-Orthodox conscription and Mansour Abbas says what he believes, which is that Hamas is a terrorist organization, even there, the opposition wouldn't have a coalition. They would only have 53 seats with his numbers. I think his party got eight seats. Then you have the joint list, right? I think they're also in consultations with the president today. The joint list is a collection of three Arab parties that are explicitly anti-Zionist, that are explicitly against what they call the Israelization, the process of Israelization of Arab Israelis.

6:28David Daoud: They want to keep Arab Israelis in terms of their identity, in terms of their belongings, in terms of their sentiments, connected to Palestinian identity. They want the benefits of Israeli statehood and of equal citizenship in Israel, but without the commensurate obligations. They are also against ultra-Orthodox conscription. Critically, they want to shrink the defense budget. The perception among all these three parties, and if you look at their platforms, they lay this out, is that the IDF as an organization is a negative organization, right? So they want it weaker. They want it weaker in terms of manpower.

7:00David Daoud: They want it weaker in terms of spending. This obviously is a non-starter in post-October 7th Israel, given the threats that Israel is confronting. And there are practical dimensions to this, right? So even if they were to endorse the government from the outside, right? Because you don't necessarily have to have 61 within the coalition as long as you have 61 endorsing the government in some fashion, or at least abstaining from refusing the government being sworn in. Let's say that this government comes sworn in today. Statutorily, by April, May of 2027, there has to be a budget. Now, you have to have certain numbers to get the budget passed.

7:43David Daoud: Now, if the Arab parties, the joint list specifically, refuse to endorse increased defense spending or current defense spending, then you won't have a budget. And according to basic law of the Knesset, Section 36A, so Israel doesn't have a constitution. It has what is called a collection of basic laws. These are quasi-constitutional laws. So according to this basic law that runs the way the parliament, the Knesset operates, automatically you have elections. Automatically. It's not even, you know, the Knesset, if you can't pass a budget by the statutory deadline, if the Knesset dissolves, you go to automatic elections.

8:19David Daoud: So this is a big issue between these two parties. or between these two blocks that kind of prevents governance, right? It's one thing to make a government. It's one thing to swear in a Knesset. It's an entire other thing to actually do the business of government, which is to govern. And this is a critical issue, the divergence on defense spending. The other divergence is on threat perception, right? The Joint List does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization. They've never said it. And I think their views on it, the views of their leadership, given that they are more Arab nationalist in their orientation, especially a party like Balad, one of the constituent parties, again, explicitly anti-Zionist, explicitly viewing Zionism in all its iterations as just inherently unjust and racist.

9:06David Daoud: And they won't reconcile themselves to Israel being a Jewish state. They want to change the system. So, you know, what they view as a threat to Israeli security differs fundamentally from what the Israeli Jewish mainstream view as a threat. So in terms of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, right? So on the Zionist opposition side, even when it comes to Netanyahu, all sides agree that Iran is a threat, that Hezbollah is a threat, that Hamas is a threat. They differ in how they want to deal with it, in the approach that they want to choose to deal with it, they want to use to deal with it. With the joint list, it's not even a difference of approach.

9:44David Daoud: It's a difference of even naming the threat. So again, when it comes to governing on critical issues, that gap may be too unbridgeable. And you take the joint list out, I think there are 19 seats for all Arab parties. That's 11 seats. That's 11 seats that the joint list has, without which this government can't be formed. but if it is formed with their either endorsement or inclusion then it won't be able to govern another thing that they were saying today I believe it came out today the joint list that one of their conditions for entering the government is the creation of a Palestinian state Israeli public sentiment is not there today in the post-October 7th reality so you know they They have the numbers, but they're playing perhaps impractical or non-pragmatic hardball when it comes to these ideological issues because they feel that they are the kingmaker, the joint list.

10:45David Daoud: And I think they're trying to extract as many concessions as possible. The problem is these concessions go to the heart of what the Zionist parties promised their electorate. It's what they ran on. It's what they eked out every little vote on. So to compromise on those issues would be to betray their voters. So this is the stance that we're at today. One critical party that did not endorse either candidate. So you have the ultra-Orthodox parties. One is Schas, which is the Sephardic, I guess, nominally ultra-Orthodox party in terms of its leadership, in terms of its party composition. Its base is not necessarily ultra-Orthodox.

11:27David Daoud: Its base is very varied. Schas has suffered a lot of setbacks in this election. they endorsed Netanyahu. United Torah Judaism, which is the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox Party, whose base is Ultra-Orthodox, not just the leadership, not just the party composition, they refused to endorse anyone. Not refused, they declined to endorse, rather. And I think with United Torah Judaism, what they're trying to do is see which candidate is going to offer them more concessions on the issue that matters to them, which is mainly exemption from conscription, which is probably a non-starter, should be a non-starter for the Zionist opposition, and subsidies, right?

12:11David Daoud: These two parties tend to not be, they don't tend to align. I know they've sat in right-wing governments for a very long time, but ideologically they're neither really properly aligned with the right or the left. They're aligned with whomever will give them exemption from conscription and subsidies for this massive welfare state that is sustaining their community's way of life. So that party, the United Torah Judaism, which was sitting with the Netanyahu government, is now not endorsing anyone explicitly. So it seems to be a stalemate. We'll see at the end of the day today what the outcome is.

12:48David Daoud: Then President Herzog will decide who is more likely to be able to form a coalition. And that person will be tasked kind of first round. Here's your first try. Go try to form a coalition. I think they have 28 days to do that from the date of endorsement, 14 days extension if the president allows it. And then if they're unable to, then the second likeliest person, another person gets a try. If that doesn't happen within kind of that time limit, then it goes back to the Knesset, the parliament. And the parliament then decides whether they can vote on any individual, They can vote on any random parliamentarian to say, well, you go decide to form a government or they can send it back to elections.

13:34David Daoud: So we're still kind of in the very early phases, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of lack of clarity and, you know, some surprises. But, you know, we're still seeing kind of the Netanyahu Zionist opposition camps still within their basic numbers. I appreciate you breaking that down and getting in the weeds there because I'm coming off of covering American politics, specifically the midterms results yesterday. And it seems like night and day, right? Because those results here in the U.S., they were pretty decisive. What you're describing is very seemingly messy and nuanced here. And President Herzog, he said this weekend the elections are over.

14:16Now is the time to face reality. And I know you said we're hanging in a time of uncertainty here, but do you have any indication of what that reality could be? Do you think, is it leaning more towards Prime Minister Netanyahu? Is it leaning more towards the leader of the opposition, Eisencoat? Could there be somewhat a dark horse that appears? I mean, what does that look like to you specifically?

14:43David Daoud: Well, first thing you noted, I want to address, our elections here are much more straightforward. You're elected on a Republican ticket, you're part of the Republican caucus or whatever, the Republican bloc, and vice versa with the Democrats, where we don't have any uncertainty about who won the Senate and who won the House. In Israel, yeah, it's a lot more complicated. Not only that, occasionally you have defectors, and this is something that the Zionist opposition is relying on. Victor Lieberman, who's the head of one of the Israel Beit Enu party, the third largest party in terms of the Zionist opposition parties, has been talking about defectors from Likud coming over to the opposition side.

15:23David Daoud: Now, the way Likud is structured, or Prime Minister Netanyahu restructured Likud. So when Likud was created, Likud means consolidation. When Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister, brought together Likud, he deliberately brought together different ideological streams and consolidated them under this kind of big tent party. And the internal election process was very democratic. It was very raucous. You had different tension points pulling in different directions. So you didn't have like an ideologically,

15:58David Daoud: like an ideological lockstep in Leku. It's certainly not absolute loyalty to one person. Prime Minister Netanyahu has restructured that. He's gotten rid of kind of these internal dynamics that existed in Likud, the different centrifugal forces in Likud. And now it's much more structured in a loyalty to the person structure. So I don't know who the defectors are. There are probably two or three names that one could see, but that's not enough to get over the 61 mark. So that would be one of the dark horses that you start to peel away maybe those two or three names. You know, you get Ram, perhaps you get, you know, One of the parties that endorsed Netanyahu to flip, I think Shas is very likely, given that ideologically they classify themselves as a Zionist party.

16:46David Daoud: Unlike United Torah Judaism, a lot of their base does serve in the army. So there is much more of an inclination to go with the Zionist opposition. You could start to see something like that. Another dark horse scenario is a unity government. I mean, this is something that President Herzog seems to not want a second round of elections. I mean, if we think of starting in 2019, Israel had multiple rounds of elections in succession because nothing came out decisively. 2022, you finally had a government that lasted for four years for the first time in God knows how long, right? Most of these governments is another thing that, you know, our presidents, unless there's an impeachment process, they last for four years.

17:28David Daoud: That's the standard. In a parliamentary system, if the government loses enough confidence, you have early elections. That could happen in a year. That could happen after four years. So all these election rounds together, right, they keep Israel in political paralysis. They cost the taxpayer money. It's better to avoid them. So you could have, you know, out of desperation, a national unity government. Now, what does that look like? Could Prime Minister Netanyahu retain the premiership, enter a rotation agreement with Gandhi Eisenkot, where Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to serve for two years, the first two years, Eisenkot serves the next two years.

18:05David Daoud: There have been different arrangements like this in the past where Prime Minister Netanyahu has entered into with rivals. He hasn't kept the promise to do the rotation. He's actually collapsed the government and gone to elections early before that, but that's one possibility.

18:19David Daoud: We will see what happens with the joint list, whether they decide to be more flexible and pragmatic on their demands and say this is the best we can get for now. And we endorse Gaddy Eisenkot from outside of the government. And that could keep a minority government that then, and this is something that Yair Lapid has talked about, Yair Lapid is the co-chair of the Beyahad party, the Together party with Naftali Bennett. It's the second largest party in the Zionist opposition bloc. He's talked about starting, you know, with a modest, perhaps even a minority government and then broadening the coalition afterwards by bringing other partners in or, again, getting breakaway members from these other, from, you know, the other side, what would then be the opposition side to join the government.

19:09David Daoud: That's a possibility. But there's also always the possibility of second elections. you know if this if time runs out second elections are very much a possibility and a certain man by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu is a very large interest in this going to second round of elections because if you think about what it took to even get these 48 seats plus the 19 seats you know that are being counted separately for the Arab parties all the stops were taken out yeah something like 65 ,000 Israelis come from abroad to vote. Traveling to Israel is not cheap, right? So they're not likely to come for a second round.

19:46David Daoud: So that's going to take out a numerical obstacle. You're also going to have perhaps some kind of sense of demoralization set in that on the opposition side, on the Arab side as well, given that, you know, we think about it this way. Well, we pushed as far as we could, and we couldn't even get Netanyahu, Netanyahu's party to not be the largest in Israel. It's going to set in a certain sense of demoralization. And even if, you know, in absolute numbers, Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't gain in the second round of elections, if fewer people vote for the other parties, there's a lower turnout rate.

20:20David Daoud: That's going to mean more seats for him, more seats for his bloc if they remain motivated. So second round of elections, very likely going to go in Netanyahu's favor. So it's really in the interest of the Zionist opposition to try to make as many compromises, as many weird permutations of what could happen right now, lest they lose out pretty big in the next round. To that point, Israel saw the largest turnout in history since 1999. But I'm curious, because in the United States, we had our own elections this week, and the results were viewed largely as a referendum on President Trump and Republicans.

21:02Republicans got absolutely pummeled. Democrats took control decisively of the House and the Senate. And J.D. Vance, the vice president, he released this long tweet or ex post rather on social media. It was a postmortem of what exactly happened. And he said that it wasn't turnout. It was that our voters, Republican voters who voted for the Trump fans ticket in 2024, they voted for Democrats in 2026. And a part of that was he said that he believes that voters want to see the United States change our relationship to Israel. Do you think that that postmortem slash the results of the election in the United States will have any impact on the stalemate we're seeing in Israel?

21:50It should.

21:51David Daoud: I mean, look, it's not just now that Israeli politicians, especially on the Zionist opposition bloc. I mean, I'm an avid follower of Naftali Bennett. I think out of all those candidates, he's, you know, in terms of temperament, in terms of planning, in terms of experience, he's the most, you know, qualified person in that entire mix to be prime minister. He's had his, you know, his finger up to the current coming from the United States for some time now. He's talked about the damage that's, and it's not just him, right? There's a cognizance of this in Israeli society generally. Now, you have those that'll say, well, we can go it alone, right?

22:32David Daoud: Israelis do think that they don't have a dependence on the United States or that the dependence on the United States or the alliance of the United States is somehow optional. I don't think it is. Absolutely not, right? Even more so than the$3.8 billion that I suppose we used to give to Israel. We won't be giving to Israel by the end of the year, so that's unclear. More so, more importantly than that is the diplomatic backing we give to Israel, without which Israel's global standing would be very different, without which, I mean, I don't think the Israelis that are kind of knocking this idea or think that they can go it alone understand how much room that creates for Israel to even have trade partners stay in Europe.

23:14David Daoud: And Europe, the EU is Israel's largest trade partner. So if we pull our diplomatic backing from Israel, leave it to fight its own battles diplomatically even. Forget militarily. I don't think we should be fighting Israel's wars. Obviously, the whole utility of Israel as an ally is that it's able to defend itself by itself and even able to take care of our interests in the region without our involvement. That's the utility of Israel as an ally. And without the$3.8 billion, again, you're talking about a first world economy with its own means of raising taxes and raising revenue if they would tax their own citizenry.

23:53David Daoud: But when it comes to international legitimacy and how much this facilitates bilateral relations between Israel and other countries, I mean, you wouldn't have the Abraham Accords if it weren't us giving backing to the Israelis. You wouldn't have these trade relations with the EU. You'd have much more pressure from the European Union if it weren't for our backing. And what that would translate into is in a much more restricted and isolated Israel, So you do have recognition of this. I think Gadi Eisenkot, who's not a fluent English speaker, perhaps him, you know, perhaps someone on his team translated something that he said, had a massive tweet on this, right, in terms of the change that Israel has chosen in terms of its direction, given the midterm elections, right?

24:32David Daoud: I think Israelis are responsible. Israelis are very much cognizant of the fact that these tides that have been corroded between Israel and the United States need to be mended, not just with the Republican Party. I think a lot of Israelis, whether they're on the right or the left in the responsible camp, if you will, understand that hitching Israel's train exclusively to the Republican Party has been a mistake, given that democracy is not predictable and Republicans aren't going to always win, neither will Democrats. So you need to have bipartisan support. So the restoration of bipartisan support.

25:09David Daoud: And they're also cognizant of, you know, whether we take President Vance's statement at face value. I think it's an oversimplification that, you know, is the U.S.-Israel relationship one of the factors that led to this outcome? Very likely. Is the U.S. war with Iran, in which Israel is intrinsically tied. One of the factors that impacted this outcome, of course it is. To deny that is to deny reality. Is that the top issue that Americans went and voted for? No, I mean, this is another thing we have in common with the Israelis. We're complaining about the cost of living, rightly so. Now, the war impacted that, obviously.

25:45David Daoud: There were certain, if you ask me, mendacious campaigns that try to tie the price of eggs at the supermarket to somehow, you know, I don't know, the evil Israelis bleeding our citizenry dry. So there were elements of that. But ultimately, what Americans want is a better cost of living. But the perception that's being created, right, the perception that's being created is that Israel is a big part of this. So I think changing that on the Israeli side, dealing with that on the grassroots level, is something that they're cognizant of. that Naftali Bennett has even talked about restoring the relationship with the United States, again, not just on the official level, but doing grassroots work to where the average American starts to see Israel as a positive partner to the United States rather than being susceptible to this impression that Israel is our misfortune as a country.

26:42David Daoud: So there is cognizance of this problem. The question is, how do you go about it? and can't even go about it until a government is formed. I wanted to talk about how or if the United States' relationship with Israel would change following the midterms because President Trump, he talked a little bit about that perception in an interview with Fox News on Election Day. And he made an announcement. He said that Netanyahu and him have made this deal that the United States would stop giving Israel$4 billion in aid this year. He said they don't need it and will help Israel if they need it. And the country has been a great ally.

27:19He also said the Israeli government was fine with it because they've become a very successful country. And he also said that this was Netanyahu's idea. He talked about how the relationship between the United States and Israel has played out politically in the United States. He mentioned that the left uses the$4 billion payment that everybody knows about when it's no secret as a signal of unfairness, and we can't allow that to happen. He also mentioned, I don't like that because you know it's too easy a target. It's almost too easy a target. He also said this, why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don't need it?

27:54He did mention, though, that Israel could still buy weapons from the United States. What do you make of President Trump's announcement there?

28:02David Daoud: Look, I think he's trying to make sure to stanch the bleeding. He realizes there's a vulnerable point, and he's not wrong that Israel doesn't need it. Again, you're talking about a first world economy. We're not talking about a country that is struggling anymore. The Israelis themselves have from different, that's not just Prime Minister Netanyahu, different Israeli officials have talked about for years weaning Israel off of American aid. And again, look, they're going to have to come up with that$4 billion somehow. And this goes back to integrating the ultra-Orthodox. You have out of a country of 9, 10 million, you have about 1.5 to 2 million people who aren't contributing in any way.

28:44David Daoud: If you get them into the army, the burden that takes, I mean, look, one of the issues now is you have reserve duty, right? So Israel's army is a citizen army. So you take someone out of their day-to-day life and they do reserve duty. It tends to be 28, 30 days. Now reserve duty is going on 100 days. And for each reservist, right, that you have, there's two economic impacts. The economic impact of having that reservist, you have to pay for that reservist to be in reserve duty. I forget how much it is a month. But then there's the economic loss of taking that individual away from their place of employment.

29:24David Daoud: Now, that could be someone who works at a restaurant. That could be someone who's a high-tech CEO, who's not just away from his job for, say, 30 days out of the year, but 100 days out of the year. So there's an economic loss and an economic cost. And if you have the ultra-Orthodox making that$20 ,000 up, the manpower deficit, that economic loss is taken away. The cost is also deducted, right? And now you have them contributing in the economy, working, paying taxes. You also take away if you shrink the welfare state, right? That's another economic burden on Israel. That$4 billion is right there in the Israeli economy.

30:05David Daoud: It's just a matter of shifting around the burden to actually have equality of burden. They don't need it from us. Now, is that alone going to be enough? No, I don't think that's alone going to be enough because the people making this claim are not doing so based on some, you know, objective metric of what's fair or what's accurate. I mean, the way they make it sound is that, and the public perception that they're trying to create these campaigns is that Israel's making our lives harder here. That it's not just the$4 billion that we give them. There's this entire, and look, the$4 billion usually come back to us.

30:46David Daoud: It's not that we're giving them$4 billion to go keep the lights on, right? These are credits that we give them for military purchases from U.S. corporations, from U.S., from Raytheon. So they end up spending the money here. That ends up helping with American jobs. But even putting that aside, even if they don't want to explain that nature of the relationship of the$3.8 billion that we give them, there is this perception that's being deliberately created that Israel is a freeloading country that drags us into wars. that is taking other benefits from the United States, that is messing with our politics to subordinate American interests and prioritize Israeli interests.

31:29David Daoud: It's a much broader campaign. Yes, the$3.8 billion perhaps forms kind of the center of it, the easiest thing to point to, but it's not the end of it. There is a conspiratorial mindset that now has been stoked and normalized when it comes to Israel. This is one element of it. I think it's going to be a long effort by responsible politicians from the Republican and the Democratic Party to talk about this relationship in responsible terms as it is. Even if there are negatives, let's actually talk about what the negatives are in realistic terms. Israel is not making the price of eggs higher in the United States.

32:10David Daoud: That's ridiculous.

32:14David Daoud: That's going to be an effort by our politicians. There's also an effort, like the Israelis aren't passive actors in this. There have been comments from Israeli officials in the Netanyahu government that have made it much harder and more politically costly to defend the U.S.-Israel relationship here in the United States. you know when when when ministers from benvir or smutrich's party or benvir and smutrich themselves sorry when members of those parties and benvir and smutrich themselves make bombastic inflammatory statements when they engage in inflammatory actions uh it becomes harder for responsible politicians here in the united states to say look we have criticism of the u.s israel relationship we have criticism of israeli actions but this isn't it right any defense of israel even against the nonsensical becomes politically costly here.

33:05David Daoud: So on the Israeli side, taking down the temperature, restoring the language of what they call mamlech tiyot, right? Statesman-like behavior, respectable behavior in government makes it easier for respectable U.S. politicians to defend the U.S.-Israel relationship to push back on kind of the more conspiratorial criticism of the U.S.-Israel relationship and not to suffer a political cost of it. Right now, that's not the dynamic. within the past two weeks, Israel had elections, the United States had elections. And I'm curious how you think these results are going to impact the war against Iran. Because in the direct aftermath of the midterms, both President Trump as well as Vice President J.D.

33:46Vance, they both in part blamed the war against Iran as a reason why Republicans really had these, got battered by Democrats here and why there was this blue wave. Now Democrats are going to be controlling the purse strings come January. We're seeing this political gridlock in Israel, like you and I have been talking about. Democrats won control of the House and Senate here. Republicans lost. And this was seen as a referendum on President Trump. How does all of this impact the war against Iran?

34:16David Daoud: Well, look, I mean, let's see where, let's go to where the buck stops, right? The buck doesn't stop, first of all, in Jerusalem. The buck stops in Washington, and it doesn't stop with President J.D. Vance, or Vice President J.D. Vance. It stops with president trump and president trump he's defended the war his comments were similar to vp advances but at the end of the day he said i had to do it right iran can't have a nuclear weapon so he he said he doesn't regret anything he said you know gas prices i understand i don't agree but i understand it's a short-term consequence for a long-term goal i mean what do you make of those those remarks too well he's not going i mean presidents don't admit failure right i mean president barack obama yeah of course i mean that's so political who would sit there and say hey you know what you're right right yeah and i mean just a specific answer like when president barack obama i think he was doing uh an interview with jeffrey goldberg his kind of exit interview with jeffrey goldberg at the end of his term described syria as one of his successes and we saw the slaughter that happened in syria so i wouldn't i mean you could say like it was a success to stay out of it you could say it was uh you know but to describe or i would just be I would have been mum about that.

35:24David Daoud: But this kind of goes to the disinclination of any politician. Very rarely do you find a politician or a president that says, I made a mistake. There's always this spin of, you know, this was not a mistake. Everything I've done was right. Everything I've done was justified. But let's look at President Trump himself over the course of, you know, what, six, seven months since February 28th. I don't know if my math is mathing up right now. But his objectives changed very quickly. First, it was regime change. Then it stopped being that. Then he was looking for a deal. And then it was that the regime had changed.

36:00David Daoud: So Iran was a fundamentally different country. And the new class of rulers were ones that we could make deals with. President Trump's inclination is not towards war. It's not towards long, long wars. I think he perhaps thought that the war with Iran would look similar to what we did in Venezuela. You know, in and out and done. So the longer that this war goes on, I think that's going against President Trump's own instincts. He is a, he's not entirely isolationist, obviously, but his inclination is more domestic, right? Those are his priorities. That's what he cares about. He wants to work on the Southern border.

36:38David Daoud: He wants to work on immigration. He wants to work on cost of living, making America great again, that entire package of promises, part of which was no forever wars, no Middle Eastern wars, no spending American blood and treasure for the sake of others. So it goes against his inclination. It goes against his electoral promises. And I think it goes against what he actually wants to work on. So he wants this work to be done. The problem is now that you've started something, you can't just walk away from it, especially on unfavorable terms. So I think we could see periodic punctuations of escalation between the United States and Iran, but that are used rather than, you know, to bring about regime change, that are used to strengthen the U.S.

37:24David Daoud: bargaining position in the negotiations. And obviously, like you noted, come January, it's going to be a very different reality. This war is going to have to wrap up one way or another. I don't see Democrats countenancing this for much longer. I also could see more Republicans rebelling against President Trump on this. So I think we're seeing, you know, I find it very unlikely that the war could restart in earnest. And look, as much as President Trump is not going to have a third term, he is concerned about his legacy. And he is concerned, I think, to some degree about what he will bequeath a successor.

37:58David Daoud: I think he wants MAGA to continue, the MAGA concept to continue beyond his presidency. We don't know who the successor will be. But I don't think he wants to see a Democrat in the White House come election time. So he's going to take that into consideration about what he does in the meantime and how much, you know, given that he's recognized, okay, the Iran war has done damage to the standing of the Republican Party, given that he did say, you know, people, when you go out and vote, imagine that my name is on the ballot. So in some ways this is a referendum on him and his worldview and his plans for America.

38:33David Daoud: He wants those to continue. So I think he's, you know, more likely than not, he's going to act in such a way that would enable a potential successor to have an easier route to the White House. But again, I could see periodic punctuations of violence with Iran to improve U.S. standing in negotiations, but not full-fledged. I don't know how we'd end it in two months before January anyway. And to your point, President Trump, he started this second term by trying to be the president who was that peacemaker, that global peacemaker. And if you have this unresolved war when you leave office, that's kind of incongruous with that title, right?

39:15David Daoud: Absolutely. I mean, you're absolutely right. He came in saying Ukraine, Russia was going to be resolved. That's not happened, right? Gaza was going to be done, not happened. Lebanon is still, you know, boiling. So peace in the Middle East is proving elusive to the president. Venezuela was, apparently, see if it's a success, right? Nothing can be judged from now. We have to see how this develops long-term. But yes, he was the president who came in and said, no new wars, right? This is his whole thing, that American blood and treasure should be spent at home and for American interests only. And not that there's not an American interest, I think, in confronting Iran.

39:55David Daoud: It just hasn't been explained adequately to the American people by this administration, by the proponents of the war. But yes, leaving that outstanding. I mean, that'll be, I mean, just think of the, you know, the Bush legacy and how that affected John McCain and even Mitt Romney. And how much of a boon that gave to President Obama when he was campaigning for the presidency. You'd be able to hammer against them to say, well, you're just continuing the old policy. You've bequeathed us a war. And if we think of, you know, Vice President J.D. Vance, he's probably positioning himself for Iran. it's going to be very hard for him to disassociate himself even though i think he was very much inclined against this war but he's the vp right uh people are going to lump you in regardless um and i can't imagine that there isn't talk between him and the president about you know make my life easier for for the next term so i can continue what you started building and if you looked at that post that he um posted after that election it looked like he was already trying to distance himself from the war with that lengthy post saying voters want us to end it this was the reason in part why we lost but david dowd we will leave it there thank you so much for breaking down these developments for us and as we see developments come out i hope you can come back on again i absolutely will whenever you want britney

41:31Thank you.