909: Israel and Hamas | Out of the Loop

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24:42So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now back to Ryan McBeth. I want to get back to the raid. We mentioned paragliders. We mentioned people taking fishing boats up the coast. The Israeli Navy used to blast those things out of the water. So what happened there and what else happened in the raid? Because from what it looks like, and again, by the time this episode comes out, it's going to be outdated. But as we speak, there are Israeli special forces still fighting militants in Israel that have taken over schools, apartments, taken a bunch of hostages, are fighting from Israeli homes and apartment blocks.

25:21That's still happening. Yes. And one of the things that kind of surprised me in analyzing some of the footage of the Hamas militants when they entered Israel is that I didn't see any first aid kits on their belt. I didn't see any armored vests with trauma plates, armored plates, plate carriers, and I didn't see any water. None of these guys had The canteens, water bottles, camelbacks, none of that. And that actually kind of leads me to believe that some of these guys didn't expect to go home. Sort of contradicts what you said earlier about them wanting to stay alive. But I'm curious where you're going with this.

25:55I believe there were two objectives. One objective was to cause terror. And I believe some of those people who were causing terror and going door to door, essentially pulling Israelis out of their homes or shooting Israelis in their homes, that was one objective. Another objective was a festival that was going on where they just tried to shoot as many people as they could and take away others as hostages. Some hit military outposts. I know that some vehicles were captured, but Hamas didn't know how to use these vehicles, and they had to abandon them in place. But what's interesting is that it seems like from the footage I watched, the people who were on the snatch teams, which are guys who were going to grab Israeli soldiers or Israeli civilians and bring them back, those guys were better equipped than the people who were just rolling into houses.

26:41So just the fact that they don't have any water on them leads me to believe that a lot of these militants did not expect they were going to be coming back. So there's maybe two different types, right? The guys who are just instructed to kill as many people until they get killed and the other guys who are instructed to grab as many hostages as they can transport effectively and then go back to Gaza. That's certainly what it seems like. What I haven't seen are any anti-tank missiles. They They didn't bring any heavy weapons with them. There are some mortars that Hamas uses. They use 120 millimeter mortars and 81 millimeter mortars that have been supplied by Iran.

27:16Those might come into play when Israel actually enters Gaza with their reserve forces. That might get bloody because I believe the end state for the operation is Hamas forces Israel to enter Gaza to rescue these prisoners. they want civilians to be killed and they want the world to see Palestinian civilians being killed. The world forces a ceasefire onto Israel. They force Israel to leave Gaza and some of these prisoners remain behind and they're held for years and it uses bargaining chips for Hamas soldiers that were captured. So I think that's the end state that Hamas believes that they perform this operation, they'll have two weeks before the world says, okay, that's enough.

28:02Because Israel is going to make the first battle of Fallujah, the Marine Corps engaged in Iraq, look like an episode of Teletubbies. Israel knows what they're doing. They know how to fight in an urban environment. They have a fairly good army. They have reservists who are motivated. They have good equipment. They have night vision. They have body armor. They have first aid kits. They have water. They know how to supply their troops. And what's coming is nothing that Hamas can even comprehend. I think that maybe some of these younger guys who are given the gun and the headband were sold a bill of goods here.

28:40You're going to be a hero. And it's really easy to be a hero when you're running through that breach that you just made. The hole in the fence. It's a lot harder to be a hero when a Merkava is bearing down on you. Your buddies are dead. There's bullets flying in the air. At that point, all you're going to want is to not be there. Merkava is the Israeli tank. Yeah, the Merkava 4 is Israel's premier tank. And this vehicle, one kind of interesting feature on this vehicle is that it has what's called an active protection system. So this vehicle can actually shoot down rockets that are headed toward it.

29:15Wow. And so does the Namers, which is Israel's main armored personnel carrier that they use for their active duty forces. I think what is interesting is if Hamas is going to use drones, drones dropping armor-piercing grenades on top of those tanks, that's going to totally negate the active protection system. And that's something we saw in Ukraine, although I don't believe any vehicles in Ukraine, even the Russian ones, have an active protection system. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how this happens with the drone warfare. The Israelis are probably also very good at electronic warfare. That's just a guess for me, though.

29:49What do you think? Yes. They have some of the best signals intelligence in the world, which is one of the weird things. Like, again, why didn't they see this coming? They have some great signals intelligence. I know Israel cut off water. They cut off electricity. Sooner or later, those cell towers, odds are that Hamas is using radios, they're using runners, and they're going to be using cell phones as a backup source, as a secondary means of communication, in order to execute attacks or prepare a defense. When you're in the dark and you're not getting orders from anybody, it's going to be absolute chaos with Hamas.

30:26Now, odds are they have probably been briefed. Hey, go to this safe house and fight. And when you can't fight anymore, you run out of ammunition, go to the safe house down the block. They probably practiced that. They probably know the first two safe houses and fighting positions to fight from. Hamas's leadership probably doesn't believe that some of these militants who are going to be fighting Israel are going to live any longer than the second safe house. But if they do last longer than that second safe house, now what do they do? They've probably got about three days, four days of effective urban defense.

31:00I also don't know what they're going to do with their wounded, how they're going to treat their wounded, or whether there's even a plan to Kasevac their wounded, or whether they're just going to rely on the Israeli army to treat their wounded, which is actually something the Taliban used to do. the Taliban used to try to fight their way to the Americans so they wouldn't have to surrender to the Afghan army because they knew the Americans would treat them better. Wow. It's certainly possible that some of Moss's leadership might think, all right, these guys get wounded. Hopefully the Israelis will take care of them.

31:29Or there's the other option. They just don't care. Yeah, they just don't care. And a lot of people are probably wondering how on earth did this kind of decision get made? You hinted at it before that they want to instigate retaliation so they can get propaganda videos of Israel blasting huge groups of people. And Hamas is known to use human shields, not just Israelis, but their own people as well. I know that people don't like it when people say things like that, but it is true. There's a lot of documentation on this. They store a lot of missiles and weapons and hospitals and schools and things like that, and they use human shields.

32:01It's an effort to get Israel to kill civilians. Not that maybe they need to be egged on too much to do that, but at least they try not to blow up huge numbers of civilians from what it seems like, then again, I've been wrong about that. And I know people are going to get angry that I even said that. But I think in many ways, Hamas wants as many dead Palestinians as possible. And I mean that because that does well for them. And Hamas's leadership, people don't know this, and I had to look this up to verify it. Hamas's leadership is in Qatar. They're not in Gaza. They're not going to get blown up.

32:31They're in their villa swimming in the pool taking calls. Here's the other issue. If you take a look at, and I know I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but if you take a look at the IRA or some of the Ulster Defense Forces, at some point, when are you a freedom fighter and when are you a freedom fighter or a militiaman and when are you a gangster? There's a reason why my family isn't in Northern Ireland anymore. If you're a member of Hamas and you roll into a hospital and you say to the hospital administrator, listen, we're going to put some rockets in your basement. What do you say as a hospital administrator?

33:00Yeah, you don't have a choice. Even if you don't like Hamas, what choice do you have? You have a fighting back. It's tough to fight back against gangsters and thugs. Now, Israel, they try their best to minimize civilian casualties. One of their tactics is something called roof knocking. And roof knocking is where if they decide they're going to destroy a building, from what I understand, they'll call people in the building. They know their phone numbers. They'll call people, say, hey, get out of the building. We're going to bomb it in 10 minutes. And then they drop a small bomb on top of the building.

33:31And this bomb doesn't destroy the building. it just hits the roof and explodes, and it doesn't go through the roof. It just lets everybody know, you got 10 minutes to get out of this building. And then after everybody's out of the building, or in 10 minutes, they take down that building. Does Hamas let the civilians evacuate those buildings? They're probably leaving as well. You can be a Shahid if you want to be to a missile, but that's not going to get you remembered. When push comes to shove, everybody thinks they're going to be a hero, but when bullets are flying by your head. I know that I personally don't like the idea of dying inside of a concrete building.

34:07And you could say, does Hamas let people leave? They probably want to get out of that area too. I don't want to die in a collapse. I think if I have to fight an enemy tank, I don't want to be close to that building. That completely makes sense. I'm sure there's ways around this if necessary. I was just curious if that was a thing, keeping civilians and other folks inside infrastructure to essentially create more casualties, right? Because again, Hamas's game plan on this was so confusing because I thought, okay, how are you going to attack Israel when they have Benjamin Netanyahu, which is by all accounts, pretty right wing in Israel and his ex-military special forces, right?

34:45And is a guy whose brother got killed fighting the Palestinians in his special forces capacity as well. It's like, this is a guy who's probably been itching for a while to do something and is now empowered to do that and now has moral license from the rest of the free world to go and do something like you said for two weeks i think israel's got a long memory i don't think it's going to be over in two weeks i think two weeks they start getting calls to slow down which they ignore for two to three or even more weeks it depends i remember watching the invasion of lebanon 20 years ago or so roughly and that lasted longer than two weeks and that wasn't nearly the provocation that was about rockets hitting kibbutzes, essentially farms, among other things.

35:28This is way worse. This is almost like September 11th for Israel. Yeah, what did we do after September 11th? Yeah, we were not out in two weeks. We lost our minds. Yeah, we lost our minds. We lost our minds. Exactly. Yeah. So if you've seen some of the footage of Israeli reservists boarding their vehicles and their families are seeing them off and people are cheering and waving flags, again, that's all well and good when you're getting on that vehicle and people are throwing you candy. you're going to want to be back there in a couple of days when you just stuck your hand into your friend's face.

36:00And it's a pile of goo. Yeah, yeah, that is true. Although talking to Israelis now, it's such a small country that almost everybody I've talked to there knows somebody who's been personally impacted. So, hey, is your family okay? Yes, immediate family, but our family doctor's son is missing and he lives in Ashkelon. Everybody had someone in the Pentagon or in the Twin Towers. They knew someone who was somewhere on that day. And Israel's a lot smaller. A lot smaller, yeah. If you're ultra-Orthodox, you don't have to serve, but everybody serves in the military. And it's a very unique military because it's conscription, but it's almost more like jury duty.

36:37Israel doesn't really pay their conscripts all that well. I think it's 350 to 1 ,000 shekels a month, which works out to$100 to$350, roughly. They actually call it cigarette money, from what I understand. Yeah, they do smoke a lot. Or a little, depending on how much they get paid. Yeah, but you're right. It's like jury duty. That's a great way to put it. You'll meet people who are in the Israeli army and they're like, how's the army? Oh, it's great, man. I'm hooking up with a different girl every night and I'm drinking all this. And don't you have to get up and go shooting or something? Ah, sometimes.

37:09It'll be fine. Yeah, there's a lot of that. I mean, I'm sure they have basic training, but a lot of it is, yeah, I go home every weekend to have dinner with my mom. But you're in the military? Yeah, but I'm 30 minutes away from home. From what I understand, the reason Israel does that is that number one, they want their kids to have a connection with their parents and the parents served in the military as well, most likely, but also they don't want to feed them. Yeah. I didn't think about that. That's why you see soldiers hitchhiking on the side of the road with a rifle because they're trying to get home for Shabbat.

37:38That's true. I forgot about that, man. We picked up a lot of hitchhikers when we were in Israel and I was on a bus and I remember some of the other people being like, I'm not comfortable with us picking up random dudes carrying automatic weapons. And I'm like, you are in the wrong place because these are all 20 year old, 19 year old kids. And we're picking up 20 of them because we have 20 free seats and we are taking all of them as far as we can. It was a tour group with a bunch of American college kids. And they were just like, my mom would not like this. And it's like, call your mom and ask if she's okay with the IDF.

38:08And it was like, oh my gosh, you're with soldiers on the bus. How romantic. It was really an exception to every rule. Okay. You brought this up a little bit earlier. Why didn't world famous Israeli surveillance and intelligence capabilities see this coming? You have Israel being superhuman, legendary level human intelligence, spy operations, black ops of all kinds, military operations, surveillance and technology, the Iron Dome. I mean, when you think of Israeli capability, you think of innovation. You think of the best spies in the world, stealing nuclear secrets from everybody, the United States included.

38:42This is such an epic failure. it's almost impossible to believe that they got away with it. It's even worse than September 11th in many ways in terms of an intelligence failure because September 11th was civilian stuff being commandeered by hijackers overseas to crash into towers. This is, we got paragliders, thousands of rockets and boats, military vehicles and equipment, and hundreds or even thousands of fighters, and nobody saw it coming. It was just, it's ridiculous how much they missed. I think you answered your own question. So I work in the intelligence community. How about I go to my boss with that?

39:18Imagine you're a junior intel analyst and you go up to your boss and you say, hey, I just got this intercept that it looks like they're planning a raid with paragliders, boats, drones, thousands of people coming under the border. How fast are you going to get shunted to the desk where you're inspecting text messages? Right. I think that could have been the case where they saw the intelligence and they're like, nah, nah. Too much, too daring. It sounds like a James Bond novel. Yeah, it does. This level of boldness. I could easily see someone taking a look at this intelligence. I'm sure they're going to have an equivalent of the 9-11 Commission that kind of looks into where the failures were.

39:57It could also be siloed communication, where one group is going, wow, why are these guys buying paragliders? And another group is going, wow, how come these guys are storing these front-end loaders near this other place over here? It could be siloed communications, And we might see something similar to Israeli Department of Homeland Security after this, where people can get together and they can share intelligence. But actually, I vote for the boldness of the plan. They might have known about this plan and discounted it as just something that was too bold and just too hard to actually organize.

40:30We saw in the news before that people were saying things like Iran doesn't want Israel and Saudi Arabia to negotiate peace because, of course, if Israel and Saudi Arabia are no longer at odds with one another, they can turn their focus to Iran because Israel already has peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan, things like that. So these big players in the area, Iran is better off when they are all infighting, not when they say, hey, you know, we can trade with Israel and all make money and forget about this. Iran doesn't want that. But many people postulate, okay, Iran got Hamas to do this because it rocks the boat so much it's going to derail the Saudi peace process.

41:05Don't think that's going to work. I think MBS Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of Saudi Arabia, he wants to cement power. He wants to make money. He wants to get a defense agreement with the United States, which is the carrot in this particular equation. This seems like a speed bump, if that. And I've also heard you say that you don't buy that justification either. Tell me about that. Iran doesn't need an excuse. Let me rephrase that. The government of Iran doesn't need an excuse. It is incredible how many Iranian fans that I have. Yeah, we have a ton of Iranian listeners. They know I'm not talking about them.

41:36They know they live in a theocracy. They're in the streets protesting that all the time. There was a kid who wrote me, you know they have Apple stores in Iran? I did not know they had Apple stores in Iran. How is that? They're not sanctioned? They're not sanctioned. This kind of blew my mind. This Iranian kid, he's a fan of my show, and he wrote me and he said, Ryan, I'm thinking about going to school for computer science. Should I buy a Mac? Should I buy a PC? And that's what I learned, that Iran has these Apple stores that actually people will go to Turkey, they'll go to Qatar, they'll buy Macintoshes, they'll bring them back, They'll sell them at a steep profit inside something that looks like an Apple store.

42:12So it's a fake Apple store. It's a fake Apple store. And when you have people like that, people who want to live the American dream, inside every Iranian is an American wanting to get out. Iranian people are great. The Iranian government, on the other hand, I think they want to wield that stick. So I think you're right in the sense that I don't really see this being a targeted effort toward a peace process with Saudi Arabia because I think this is probably in the works for years, probably at least two years. People have said Russia gave permission or Russia helped fund this, Wagner helped train the Palestinians.

42:50Russia can do bad all by itself. We don't need to make stuff up about Russia. So when you look at the idea of Wagner coming in, what the heck gave Wagner for? You have Iranian trainers. They work perfectly well. They know what they're doing. They know how to train people and weapons play. In fact, you don't need Wagner. Why would you have that additional expense? So I don't see this as being something that was trying to derail the peace process. It might have been convenient to execute at this particular time, but also it was the end of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which is celebrating the harvest and marks the end of all the Israeli holidays.

43:24And it just might have been a convenient time to execute the attack. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ryan McBeth. We'll be right back. back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discounts, and ways to support this show are on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan McBeth.

44:01What is going to happen from here? You mentioned that the Israeli response is going to make... Belusha look like an episode of Talmud. Yeah. So we're just trying to predict the future here, but what does that entail? It's going to entail clear hold build. So essentially, these Israeli forces are going to go block by block, and it's going to be tough fighting, and a lot of people are going to get killed. My rough guess is they're probably going to sustain about 6 % casualties per day. That doesn't necessarily mean killed. That's going to mean wounded as well. They're going to have to go block by block.

44:33They're going to have to clear the house. They're going to have to mark the house as cleared. They're going to have to move on to the next house. And they're going to continue to do this with some of those Merkava tanks and some of the NIMR APCs in support. And it's going to be rough going. They're going to get 200, 300, 500 meters a day, house and house and house. That's probably what it's going to look like. If they run into a machine gun nest, or they run into a bunker, or they run into anti-armor weapons, pretty sure they have the ROD, which is a copy of the Russian Sager, which is an anti-tank missile, a wire guide, an anti-tank missile, the AT-3 Sager.

45:12They should also have the Concours, at least a copy of a Russian anti-tank missile. And some of them might have the Coronet, which is a pretty good Russian anti-tank missile as well. I know that Hezbollah has used a Coronet in Lebanon. to attack tanks and even some civilian vehicles. So if they encounter an anti-armor position, odds are they're not going to assault it unless they're pressed for time. They're going to call an Apache helicopter, which Israel is quite a few, or they're going to call a JDAM strike directly on that building. What's a JDAM? Is that like a surface-to-surface missile?

45:41It is an air-to-surface missile. JDAM stands for Joint Direct Attack Munition. It is a GPS-guided bomb. Israel also has these weapons called DIME bombs, which means dense inert explosive metal or dense metal explosive. Have we ever heard of frangible ammunition? But I know what that would mean. Okay. Yeah. So frangible ammunition might be something that when it hits drywall, it just explodes in a puff of copper, right? So dime bombs are essentially metal that are pressed down into a dense core. And then when that bomb explodes, there's not any shrapnel. All you have is this dense metal moving out at supersonic speed.

46:21So if you're very close to the bomb, you're going to have a bad day. If you're further away, since the metal will slow down a lot faster, it's going to cause fewer civilian casualties. They might be using these. Now, one of the problems with the dying bombs is that they don't have shrapnel that you can detect on an X-ray. So just imagine thousands of particles of metal embedded in your body. That's not going to be good for you. But ideally, the shrapnel doesn't fly as far as the metal does. So it is a way to reduce casualties. Although if you are in the wounding zone, you're not going to have a good day.

46:57It's always the civilians who pay the price for this crap, right? We got Hamas leadership by the pool taking calls in Qatar. You've got a lot of the fighters who are dead or they're going to have safe houses or they're going to evac or they're going to disappear into the civilian population. And you're just going to have a bunch of dead Palestinians and Israelis. Do you think they'll set up some sort of DMZ type buffer zone? It seems like if they blew a hole in the fence, You can try to make this fence and wall a lot stronger, or you can say, okay, we're going to cut half a mile of your territory and we're going to create a giant minefield with a bajillion checkpoints that you can't get through with motorcycles and vehicles.

47:35And yeah, all the people that used to live there, I don't know, but we're knocking those buildings down and oh, that hospital and school that was there. Oh, I guess you got to rebuild it somewhere else. That seems like a, hate to use the word, reasonable strategy, but it seems like a reasonable strategy for trying to prevent something like this happening again. Yeah, I'm actually not sure whether Israel has signed the landmine treaty. I'm pretty sure the border around Gaza is not mined. One of the things that the Palestinians got very good at is tunneling. There are tunnels. That's actually one method of insertion that I didn't mention.

48:05There's actually tunnels underneath Gaza, so you might make the tunnel longer. That might be a possibility. I could see them, and Israel has a term. They call it D-90. We're just going to deny this whole area. And a D-9 is a caterpillar bulldozer. They could just deny all the houses in a three kilometer area by the border and just tell everybody, sorry, you got to move back. They haven't signed the landmine treaty. They haven't signed the landmine treaty? They have not. No. Okay. Along with the U.S., Russia, China, et cetera. But I ask this because I've been to the North and South Korean DMZ and that thing is a massive minefield.

48:38Depending on when you go there, sometimes those mines explode because there'll be like a brush fire that just starts or an animal will get in there and set off a super old mine and just blows up and burns everything around it. And I was just thinking, yes, they can tunnel. But if you're putting seismic detector devices around there along with landmines so people don't go and tamper with them and you've got the whole thing observed and it's a shoot to kill zone, it's harder to then blast a hole in the fence and ride through with motorcycles. Yeah, it certainly is a possibility. That might be something that they're going to have to consider.

49:07I don't know Israel's endgame. That's what's scary for me. Yeah. I can see what Hamas thinks their endgame might be. I don't know what is the end state for the operation. Anytime you get into an operation, you don't know your end state, that's how you get something like Afghanistan. What's our end state? For Hamas, I know their end state. Their end state is world opinion comes down on Israel. A lot of people are killed. Israel leaves. That's their ideal end state. And they have some hostages they can trade. I don't know Israel's end state because ideally you go house to house and you either kill or you arrest every single member of Hamas.

49:42Now, I can't necessarily tell if somebody is a member of Hamas. I don't know if they issue ID cards. The guy can take off his headband, throw the weapon in the backyard and say, no, I go to university. So is he a member of Hamas? Is he not? You can't just arrest every single military age male. I was going to say, they can just say, you know what, we're going to arrest every military age male and see what happens and then trade them for the Israelis that have been taken, Hamas or not. That could be something that Israel could do. Yeah. And I think that would be fairly effective. Now, what would be interesting is I think it was in 2002, and I remember reading about this, Hamas gave permission for women to jihad.

50:22So if you see a situation where women are picking up arms and women are fighting, or women become suicide bombers, now what do you do? Yeah, this is a very scary and horrible kind of no-win situation for every single party on every single side. Do you think other countries will enter the war? Syria, Lebanon via Hezbollah, Jordan, Egypt. Jordan and Egypt have treaties with Israel. So I'm going to go ahead and cross those off the list unless you disagree. But what about Lebanon via Iran's proxy, Hezbollah or Syria for that matter? I don't know. That's an interesting question. And one of the things that I've talked about in the videos is that there's four different kinds of militaries.

50:57You have expeditionary militaries. It's basically the United States, France, Great Britain, to a lesser extent, Russia, China is trying to develop an expeditionary military. You also have self-defense militaries. Most of the armies of Europe are self-defense militaries. You have internal security militaries. Most of the militaries inside of South America, those are internal security militaries. And then you have what are called palace guard militaries. And that is most of the armies of the Middle East, maybe with an exception of Iraq and Iran to an extent. Turkey is an Arab, has a self-defense NATO standard military.

51:33They don't have a palace guard military. So if you are the leader of an Arab country, you want your forces in your country protecting your own kingdom. You don't necessarily want to send them overseas. And the other problem is that you might send them overseas, but how do you feed them? How do you supply them? What are the logistics? It's really easy to say, oh, what if this country entered a war? All right, how do they get the troops over there? How do they feed the troops once they're there? How do they get ammunition? I can see Hezbollah attacking Israel from the north and opening up a second front because the supply lines are fairly short.

52:09In a lot of ways, I think the government of Lebanon might welcome that because essentially the army and Hezbollah are at parity. I don't think the army of Lebanon would mind if a couple of Hezbollah guys got killed, the Israelis did it for him. Then maybe the Lebanese army could actually regain control of the southern part of the country, right? Right. I met Lebanese officers before who were in American training classes, and they are some of the hardest working guys I've ever met. And they want their country to be a paradise again. Yeah. Oh, I'd love to visit Lebanon, but not right now. Yeah. So when you look at the idea of other countries entering war, what are the logistical capabilities of those countries?

52:49That's a good question I hadn't thought of. Yeah, it's real easy to go, we're going to declare war against Israel. Cool. Thanks, Fiji. You're out of the running, though. No offense to Fiji. I'm sure they're great. I will say, Fiji has three infantry battalions, and one of them is in Lebanon, one of them is in the Sinai Peninsula, and one of them is home resting. Wait, are you joking? I can't tell if you're joking or not. No, I am not. Essentially, Fiji has a military, they have three battalions, and they mainly do peacekeeping duties with the United Nations. And these guys will serve time in Lebanon, where they act as peacekeepers, and they'll serve time in the Sinai Peninsula.

53:23That's where I met with the Fijians, and they'll spend time at home. So essentially, Fiji has a reserve force and these guys are activated. They do a tour. They come home. Interesting. I had no idea. That was a bad example then because what I was thinking is Syria, who's a little bit busy right now. Jordan and Egypt already cross off the list. And by the way, you say Hezbollah. I say Hezbollah. Is that correct? Because I felt like I put the emphasis on the wrong syllable there, but you said it the same way that I did. So what happened? Hezbollah? Like I said, I talk like an Egyptian and I'm also from New Jersey.

53:54So English isn't my first language. Because other people are going to write it and go, Hezbollah. It's Hezbollah, not Hezbollah. But I don't know what it is now. Now I'm totally confused. When you say the word for God, you say Allah. Hezbollah is literally the party of God. Okay. I'm sticking with it then, regardless. Do you think Mossad goes after Hamas leadership in Qatar? Do you think that's a thing? Israel likes to do that kind of stuff, right? They like to show up and be like, we're just going to poison these three guys with something horrible. Yeah. I think they might get a little more kinetic and it might happen 10 years from now.

54:24Yes, I think so. I've actually read a book about the Mossad. It was called By Way of Deception. Yeah, great book. Israel is pretty darn good at that. But honestly, if they were going to do something like that, why wait? Everybody wants to be the king, right? Until the king starts getting whacked. I mean, I'm sure the Hamas leadership in Qatar jokingly said by the pool taking calls. They're probably not by their own pool taking calls. They're probably checked in somewhere a little bit more secure because they have to know that Mossad is now, I assume also watched them leave their place and go somewhere else, which is going to be one of those intelligence failures that they find when they do the investigation.

54:59Ah, we noticed the top three Hamas officials all left and went on vacation the same week and tried to disappear. And we found them over here, but we didn't think that was a weird coincidence. That's going to be one of those things, right? That's kind of where I come in. That's C4ISR. You go like, wait a minute. Someone from China goes to South America, and then six months later, all of a sudden, there's an increase in the price of palladium. And it's because China bought up a mine and shut the mine down because they want to increase the prices of all their other mines. That's C4ISR. That's Command Control Communications, Intelligence Balance Reconnaissance, using software to figure out what the bad guys are going.

55:36I would not be surprised if at some point they saw the bad guys leave. And six months ago, the bad guys were going to a lot of meetings, all the chatter. I'm sure you've heard the term intelligence chatter. And that just means that, hey, these guys are using their phones more. They're communicating more. They're planning something. That's chatter. So they might have seen an increase in chatter six months ago. They probably saw an increase. I wouldn't be surprised if this took about 18 months to plan. That's why I don't think Russia was involved at all. Because 18 months ago, Russia was just invading Ukraine.

56:06And this wasn't really on their radar screen. I don't think Vladimir Putin said, hey, 18 months from now, two years from now, we're going to be stuck in Ukraine. Let's have this other war, right? Yeah, I would also imagine that if you want to keep something secret from the world's top intelligence service, the fewer parties involved, the better. Maybe don't have Wagner and Russia, whose communications are constantly being penetrated by the NSA and the CIA at all times. You probably don't really want that kind of chatter in there. I would imagine this was quite tightly controlled between Iranian intelligence and Hamas.

56:38I would not have been surprised if each of the cells that were involved didn't know that other cells existed. The paraglider attackers, the motorcycle attackers, they all thought they were the only plan. Yeah. They probably, yeah, they thought they were the only plan. I think that's the only way you can get something like this to work because everyone thought they were doing their own thing. It was going to be a suicide mission. They were rolling, do their thing. Maybe it killed me. They were going to come back. The people that were statching guys, they might have had a bigger picture as to what was going on based on their equipment and so on.

57:10Yeah, but also maybe not. Maybe they thought they were going to kidnap a few dozen Israelis and come back, and that was going to be the end of it. Who knows? Do you think Israel bombed something in Iran for their role in this mess? That's tough to do because in order to do that, you're going to have to violate the sovereign airspace of a number of nations. They've done it before. They attacked Iraq in 1982, the Osirik reactor that was bombed with F-16s. I don't believe Israel's ever directly attacked Iran. The only way they could do it is if Saudi Arabia gave it a wink and a nod and Israel ferried their planes.

57:50And remember, when you're dealing with a fighter jet, F-16, F-15, F-35, which are the three main fighter jets that Israel has, for every pound of fuel that you carry, that's one less pound of bomb you can carry, right? And if you're going to go into Iran, you're going to have to have seed or suppression of enemy air defenses. So you need to carry anti-radar missiles with you to take out their radar before you start hitting installations. You're going to have to carry planes that do anti-air work. So you're going to have to take care of their radar, take care of the Serb's terror missiles, take care of their fighter planes.

58:21So about the only way you could do it is if you sent a bunch of planes to Saudi Arabia and you used that as a staging area. And the Saudis are like, hey, let's do this together. Yeah. I've often said that if Iran ever developed a nuclear weapon, I'm not too concerned about them shooting it at Jerusalem, concerned about them shooting it at Saudi Arabia. Yeah. Let's get rid of the Sunnis and then we can run the whole Middle East. I mean, it is possible that Saudi gives the wink and the nod to Israel to do that. I mean, Saudi and Iran are bitter enemies. I know that Israel had attacked Iran before, but I think it was a cyber attack and then I think there was an attack launched from inside Iran that was later blamed on Israel, some sort of drone thing.

59:00I think this is a couple of years ago. Oh, I do recall that there was a drone attack. I actually believe that came from some of the Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq. So that can happen. Something like that, a drone attack against Iran. Iran does not like the Kurds all that much. I don't know why. The Kurds seem to be great people to me. But it seems like everybody in the Middle East, Turkey, Iraqis, Iranians, a lot of these guys don't like the Kurds. They fight well and they want their own country that has a piece of each one of those countries. So I understand it. God bless the Kurds, man. Those are some brave people.

59:37You think the Jews have taken some shit through history. You haven't met the Kurds. My God. Yeah. I've talked with Iranians, guys who I was assisting when the Shalmane was murdered and people were protesting. I talked to these guys. I mentioned the Kurds. It's like they flipped a switch. These Iranians were talking about the Kurds. Oh, whoa. Okay. I didn't mean to go there. It was like sitting down with your racist uncle. Whoa, okay, you just said that. Yeah, I have also experienced that. You don't admire anything Kurdish in front of anybody who's not Kurdish and also from the Middle East because they will not turn it off.

1:00:11I can see a drone attack coming from Kurdish-held areas. That could be a possibility. A fighter attack, man, that's a lot of refueling. It is. I know Israel has threatened this before, though. They've said things like, this is a red line, and if the United States doesn't do anything, we're going to go blow up, what was it, Natanz or something? Dude, you can say anything you want. How many tankers do you have? Yeah, true. I think Israel has four tankers, and then you got to get them there. And then what do you do for SAR? What do you do for search and rescue if one of these Israeli pilots get shot down?

1:00:42You can talk a great game. I have no doubt in my mind the Israeli Air Force has a plan, but I don't see how they can execute that plan without flying over a sovereign nation like Iraq, like Syria, Saudi Arabia. And then they have to fight their way through Iranian defenses, fight their way through Iranian fighters, launch their attacks, and then go home. Now, if you had an American aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, which I believe we do have a carrier there right now, that could be an issue. We could shut that down pretty darn quick. I believe there's a carrier in the area. I know there's one in the Med.

1:01:17I think that's a Gerald R. Ford. I've sworn there is a carrier in the Arabian Sea. and I know that the Marines and the Navy are guarding ships in the Strait of Armies because I ran once in a while. They just like to take over ships and hold people hostage. Yeah, you violated our border by two inches. Here it is. Stealth F-35 fighters and other warplanes. So we do have stuff there, which doesn't surprise me. I think, again, I'm pulling this out of my head. They probably have a squadron of F-35s, so we're talking maybe 12-ish planes. Marines, Marine Corps F-35Bs, and that can be a heck of a problem.

1:01:54A couple F-35Bs, some Tomahawk missiles, that'll ruin Iranian air defense's day. Although the U.S. stepping in directly to fight with Iran because of this is, I'd like to say it's far-fetched and unlikely, but I guess you just don't know. You just don't know. I don't know, and I hope it doesn't, because like I said, I have a lot of Iranian fans, and I love all of them. Some kid's dad is working at a factory. Some kid's dad is working at an moral refinery. Yep. Wrong place, wrong time. That's not what I want to see. Any final thoughts on this Hamas-Israel conflict? Again, by the time this comes out, this is all going to be up in the air.

1:02:27But I think hopefully some of our predictions still hold water. The ones that involve the least amount of death and destruction, although I'm not going to hold my breath for that. I think the one final thing is to remember the human. I agree. People have said that I'm anti-Russian. I am more pro-Russian than Vladimir Putin. So I don't want to see any of those kids die. I don't want to see another Hamas fighter die. I don't want to see another Israeli soldier die. It's really easy to sit in front of your computer and say, oh yeah, we should kill them all. We should wipe them out. We should just kick them all out of the Gaza Strip.

1:02:59If you've been in combat, it's a lot harder to understand why people feel that way when you've seen death up close, when you've picked up body parts the size of Chicken McNuggets. When you're 48 years old and your best friend is a bottle of liquor. You won't feel so crazy about going after your enemies. So I guess that's my final thought. Yeah. Yeah. It always is the civilians who pay the price for this. It's going to be a lot of Palestinian civilians. We're going to see a lot of Israelis die, civilian and otherwise. And it's just a waste because the people who make these decisions are all going to be safe and die of old age, most likely.

1:03:34And that's the real tragedy here is that, yeah, it's going to be a bunch of teenagers and young people who die on both sides and people who die of preventable diseases because they can't get clean water, medicine, and things like that. Generations of kids growing up in crappy circumstances that aren't going to get any better, that have been now set back 10 years from zero, back another 10 or 20 years from there. There's people in the West Bank right now who they had cancer treatment scheduled. They were supposed to have a colonoscopy. There's an excellent guy. His name is Johnny Rogers. He has an NGO that he called the Help is on the Way UA.

1:04:07And he essentially drives around Ukraine in a van. This guy helped someone on the front lines near Bakhmut get dentures. You don't tend to think about the civilians that need dentures in the middle of a war. Yeah, remember the human. That's my final thought. Ryan McBeth, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me on the show. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Egyptologist and television host Rami Romani. We're talking about 6 ,000 years of history. Everything you see about ancient Egypt today, everything that we've discovered, is calculated to be about just 12 % of ancient Egypt.

1:04:4388 % is still hiding under the sand. Egypt is mentioned in so many different sources of history. One of the sources is obviously on ancient Egyptian walls. There are very similar stories in the Bible. I personally believe that the Bible stories, whether completely true or not, they were always inspired from true stories. But I'm trying to finish the alignment of religious history and ancient Egyptian history. I find it fascinating. I think the key to our future is in our death. Today, you study the dead to make sure you're prepared for the future. We have the dead. We have mummies. They're just dead people.

1:05:26And what archaeologists struggle with all the time is, if I start digging into this mummy today to unlock secrets of the past that would help us in our future. Am I doing it too soon? Am I hurting this mummy? You want to dig, you want to find more, you want to know more about the past. But if you dig now with the tools you have now, you might hurt some of the data that is stored into all these little pieces. It's a massive dilemma that archaeologists have to deal with. And today, we do have technology good enough to tell us so much about these mummies, so much about the past that we never knew before.

1:06:02For more about ancient Egypt and Rami's daring escape, check out episode 784 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Again, this is a conflict with absolutely no winners and a lot of bad actors on, frankly, all sides. I'm not a both-sides-er. This is a really messy, messy situation, and I don't see how it will ever really end completely. I don't. I've got some ideas, and they're all gross. They're all terrible. So I really don't know what to expect from this. Everything in this situation is way more complex than we were able to describe in this episode. For example, Hamas is not a uniform entity even itself.

1:06:39Many in Hamas don't like the alliance with Iran. Furthermore, as mentioned on the show, Palestinians are largely a secular people. I know it doesn't seem that way, right? Because you think, oh, all of this violence must be religious. You'll see chatter online about how it's all about God and religion. But really, that is not the case for most Palestinians or frankly, even for most Israelis. Religion is a convenient boogeyman for this. And while it does contribute, it's not the whole story. And we should resist the idea that this boils down to Islam versus Judaism or something like that or some other oversimplification.

1:07:12It's inaccurate. It doesn't do any service because it just makes us write the whole thing off. Because, of course, religious conflict is something that seems unsolvable. This is a quote unquote unsolvable, but for totally different reasons. I, of course, acknowledge there are religious extremists on both sides. That is part of the problem, but it is not the whole problem. Another key to understanding Hamas is the fact that its goals and the goals of the Gazan people, so the Palestinians that live in Gaza, are not necessarily in alignment. The Gazan people, they live under an Israeli blockade. The blockade is backed by Egypt because people are like, why don't they just go around the other side?

1:07:47They can't. They're also walled in from there. I've seen the wall with my own eyes. I've seen the checkpoints. I've been to this area of the world right up against it. That type of securities, obviously, by design, severely restricts the movement of goods and people in and out of the region. And I was there 20 plus years ago. This is before they had the wall that is there now. So it's way more restrictive now. And it was restrictive back then, too. Under Hamas rule, Gazans have also reported repression and arbitrary arrests and sort of Islamatization of their society. When I was there, there were plenty of women walking around with no hijab.

1:08:22Now I think that's quite enforced. I have no firsthand knowledge of this, but in all the pictures I see that people are just way more conservatively than they were when I was there. Human Rights Watch has also chronicled what it calls systemic abuse as part of Hamas in Gaza. So it's not just, these people are really taking it from all ends, right? They're walled in by Israel. They're walled in by Egypt. They're also being abused by their own crappy ass government in Gaza that has refused to hold elections for the last almost 20 years. And I know what people will say, well, wait a minute, they had an election?

1:08:50Okay, fine, they haven't had one for 20 years, but surely there's a bunch of ground support. We really have no idea how much of the population of Gaza Hamas really represents. We don't really know. There have not been elections there in decades, really. You can't really poll very easily there. And even if you could, how accurate is that? It's a repressive society because Hamas is a corrupt and oppressive regime. A lot of people, I think the last poll I saw there was like 70 plus percent of Gazans said that Hamas was repressive and authoritarian, and a majority said that they didn't feel safe speaking out against Hamas in any way without fear of repercussions.

1:09:25So it's really hard to say, oh, they have a wide base of support. We just don't know. And even if we assume they do, I think if you're a mother or a father, as I am, and you live in that society, what you're not doing is saying, you know what we should do? We should bring the full might of the Israeli army down on us like a hammer. You are just trying to get by and maybe leave one day. You are not trying to get killed. And these fighters that have gone out there and committed this, let's just say, I doubt that was a very popular decision. It might feel good in the moment, but the strategy behind it is bewildering.

1:09:57I really don't understand. And I'm not alone. It's not that I'm uneducated on this. I've looked everywhere, expert analysis. And when I talk to experts and call them or email them, even the top Hamas experts are like, you know, I've been tracking this for 20 years or since, you know, 1986 when they were formed. And I'm not really sure what the hell they were thinking on this one. So if you're a little bit lost, I hope this episode helped, but there's not going to be a bunch of clarity on this for a really long time, if ever. But of course, as always, in the meantime, it's always the civilians who pay the price for this kind of stuff.

1:10:30All things Ryan McBeth will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or just ask the AI chatbot also on the website. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter, and every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect lessons and takeaways. So if you are a fan of the show, and I hope you are, and you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways from the deep cuts in the catalog, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that.

1:11:00jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. I'm going to be doing some giveaways there. I'm trying to get sponsor products and stuff. Man, the legality of all this stuff is kind of a pain in the neck, but I'm determined to give away stuff because I've got a lot of stuff and I'm not. Who needs 20 air filters? Not this guy. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. That's over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm at jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:11:32Remember, we've rised by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. And if you know somebody who's interested in the Middle East conflict or is asking questions about this kind of thing and is maybe a little bit lost, definitely share this episode with them. Or your geopolitics nerd friends, they're going to love this stuff too. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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