 You're talking to a largely libertarian audience. And on libertarian social media this week, there's been various clips of Ron Paul circulating around. And I wanted to play one of those to open up that conversation about what the US role in Israel and Palestine has been and should be moving forward. So let's roll that clip of Ron Paul from 2001, voting against a sort of, voting against a resolution that would have condemned a Palestinian bombing of Israel at the time. And he was the sole Republican to vote against that. And this was the speech he gave in support of his vote. So let's roll that. We hear today talk about being, having solidarity with Israel. And others get up and try in their best way to defend the Palestinians and the Arabs. So it's sort of a contest, should we be pro-Israel or pro-Arab or anti-Israel or anti-Arab? And how are we seeing and doing this? And it's pretty important. But I think there's a third option to this that we so often forget about. Why can't we be pro-American? What is in the best interest of the United States? We haven't even heard that yet. I believe that it's in the best interest of the United States not to get into a fight. A fight that we don't have the wisdom to figure out. Now, I would like to have neutrality. That's been the tradition for America at least a century ago. To be friends with everybody, trade with everybody, and to be neutral unless somebody declares war against us. But not to demand that we pick sides. Now, I have a proposal and a suggestion, which I think fits the American tradition, that we should treat both sides equally, but in a different way. Today we treat both sides equally by giving both sides money and telling them what to do. Not a million dollars here or there, not a hundred million here or there, but tens of billions of dollars over decades always trying to buy peace. And my argument is that it generally doesn't work, that there are unintended consequences. These things backfire, they come back to haunt us. So I think we should start off by defunding, defunding both sides. I'm just not for giving all this money because every time there are civilians killed on the Israeli side or civilian killed on the Palestinian side, you can be assured that either our money was used directly or indirectly to do that killing. So we are in a way an accomplice on all this because we fund both sides. The policy of foreign non-intervention where the United States is not the bully and doesn't come in and tell everybody exactly what to do and put these demands on. If we didn't do that, yes, we could have some moral authority to condemn violence, but should we not condemn violence equally? Could it be true that only innocent civilians have died on one side and not the other? I don't believe that to be true. I believe that it happens on both sides and on both sides, they use our money to do this. I urge a no vote on this resolution. What do you think of Ron Paul's idea that America would be better off and actually so would Israel and Palestine if the US just cut off aid altogether to both sides? What I would say is probably not directly answer that, but I would say that so far, I think that the Biden response has been good. I think that the attack was just appalling and I think that the administration, unlike honestly a lot of people around the world, have recognized how horrible the violence was. The United States, to the best of my understanding, has told Israel that it will support it with the iron dome, that basically you need to replenish the stocks and it's very expensive because its adversaries have so many of these rockets and that the United States will provide assistance, which is defensive assistance in that area. And that I also support, I was surprised to see this, but such a swift dispatch to the Eastern Mediterranean as a deterrent. Again, I think that that's strategic and although the polls might disagree and think that that's too much American involvement, it comes at very low cost for the United States and could actually save money and prevent future incentives, which could increase the risk of embroiling the United States more in a wider Middle East conflict. So in my mind, those are the three main responses of the Biden administration, it's been rhetorical, it's been for defensive weaponry, especially with the iron dome and then also moving the ship closer to Hezbollah, to warn Hezbollah, Andy Raun and I believe that US diplomats have been in touch with both of those international actors telling them, that they're warning them that the United States could get involved. So thus far from what I've seen, I have approval and I'm not sure that the Biden administration's response has necessarily rankled those who are sympathetic to a more libertarian approach to foreign policy. Yeah, but what about this point that sort of pouring money into the region over the years, under this pretense that it's gonna get in the right hands and it's gonna be used in a way that advances US interests in the region that it just hasn't worked out that way. There's been, since its inception, about a quarter of a trillion dollars gone into Israel, several tens of billions to Palestine, about half a billion to Palestine since the Biden administration took power and we don't know how that money has been used, presumably at least some of it has been used to obtain rockets or other weapons to go into Israel. I mean, I know we're in the midst of a fight right now that it might be hard to think about these questions, but going forward, is that something that needs to be rethought, the amount of aid that's the US aid and weapons going into the region? I mean, I wanna provide a little bit of context here. And that is when it came to the origins of in Israeli state and US levels of support for Israel, the US ended up supporting Israel, not for strategic reasons, for humanitarian reasons and the aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as domestic political reasons because of course, some prominent American Jews were very much in favor of Truman recognizing Israel. US support for Israel stayed relatively low until after the Six Day War. It wasn't immediate, but after that, there was the so-called War of Attrition around 1970 and at that point, really shown in the Six Day War, but it took a little couple of years, you can see a major, major uptick in US military support for Israel. And all of a sudden, Israel was seen as not just worthy of support for domestic reasons or humanitarian reasons, but as a strategic ally in the context of the Cold War. And Israel was useful strategically to the United States in the Cold War as the main US proxy in the Middle East. The Soviets had them on their side and the US had Israel on its side. When the Cold War ended, the case for Israel became harder to make for groups like APAC because they had been used to selling Israel as a strategic asset in the context of the Cold War. And then what made it even tougher was a decade, a little more than a decade after the Cold War ended, you had the 9-11 attacks where Osama bin Laden listed a whole lot of reasons for why he attacked us, but one of them was essentially US relations with Israel. And so increasingly, it seemed that American citizens were wondering, well, what should we get out of this deal? Not only is Israel no longer a strategic asset, but it might even be a liability. One of the reasons why I think that the US has had such a strong relationship with Israel beyond the typical causal explanations, domestic American support, sympathy, shared values, et cetera, all that is something really simple. And that is that in general, Israel has shared very similar enemies as the United States. And so when DC thinks of who its enemies are, they're often really similar to the enemies which are shared in Jerusalem. And we see that working with respect to US relations with Saudi Arabia, terrible relations with Iran. And I think that there's a lot of sort of emotional value which translates into support at least at the policy level by having a lot of the same mutual enemies. And a lot of the enemies actually make it easy because they'll actually say death to Israel, death to America. And it creates a very sort of easy opening for people like Lindsey Graham to say, not only do we have shared enemies, but we therefore have shared interests in that essentially like Nikki Haley might suggest an attack on Israel is an attack on America. But I just wanted to provide a little bit of context to listeners in terms of how we got to this point in terms of the trajectory of US support for Israel. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Max Abrams about Hamas' attack on Israel. For another clip, click here. For the full conversation, click here.