 And welcome back to Sync Tech. This is Keeping the World Company, and we're going to talk about connecting the violence in Israel, as we have that, and Ukraine. Don't forget Ukraine. And for this show, we have my co-host, Tim Appichella, and our special esteemed historian guest, Gene Rosenfeld. Thank you so much for joining us, you guys. Good morning. So let's talk about the violence in Israel, and if there is a connection, and to the extent there is a connection between that violence and Russia and Putin. You know, it strikes me that what's happening in Israel serves his interest. It distracts everyone. It distracts the United States. I think he hopes it will distract Congress even further, and to the extent that they want to give money, they'll give money to Israel and not Ukraine, so he's a happy young man. And I wonder what you guys think about that. I wonder what you think the connection intended or otherwise direct or otherwise between this invasion of sovereignty in Ukraine and the complete invasion was intent to destroy in Israel. Tim, you go first. Your thoughts? My thoughts to the initial part is, you know, connections. And on a very generic basis, the connection is evil and violence is contagious. It's just a generic concept, and I've seen it over the many decades of my life, and it's evil is just contagious, and Putin is evil, Hamas is evil, and there's your correlation. On a more specific basis of, you know, are there direct linkages, I think that's yet to be proven. Well, we'll have to wait and see what, you know, back channels are taking place between Putin and Iran, and then certainly from Iran to Hamas. We know that Iran has been a logistics supporter with money and weaponry for Hamas for quite some time. Is there a direct correlation between Iran and Hamas on this specific tack? The Wall Street Journal seems to suggest that, but I think we need to wait and see what else is coming in there. That's kind of my first thoughts right out of the gate. Okay, first thoughts. Gene, and I try some Aristotelian logic with you. So we are pretty, pretty sure that Iran is behind this, not only to provide weapons as it has in the past, and money as it has in the past to Hamas, but you know, it's also providing these advanced drones to Russia and providing weapons of the same kind to Hamas. So there's a connection there. And you know that Vladimir Putin is indebted to Iran for that. Furthermore, Iran is a pariah. It likes being a pariah. It's been a pariah since Jimmy Carter. So if you take, you know, the dots and connect them, even with dotted lines, what you get is not only does this benefit Vladimir Putin, but, you know, he's had conversations with Iran and encouraged them. What do you think, from an historical point of view, bringing it up current? Okay, as you know, I'm a historian of religions. We're social scientists. We're under the rubric of history, but what we do is more general than that, and we connect the dots and we look for patterns. I'll just give you a quote, a recent quote, Kislinger, who does not believe that these patterns of coincidences are patterns of events or coincidences. Russia has not only been involved recently in Ukraine, it's been involved in Azerbaijan and Armenia, the quick blitz created by Azerbaijan to go over Nagorno-Karabakh. It's been involved in Kosovo in recent days. And did you know, as a historian of religions, I look at the religious symbolic aspect of these things to diagnose. Putin's birthday was the day before this attack. That's not a coincidence. Let's talk about some other symbolic things. The hallmark of terrorist attacks, and I've been studying this in South Africa, it appeared on the scene, are anniversaries because terrorists have their own calendars and calendars are formed by significant events to them happening on certain days. It's been 50 years almost to the day of the Yom Kippur War. That's another coincidence anniversary. And there are others as well. Simchat Torah, the end of the readings of the Torah for the year after the High Holy Days occurs. It's an important day for the Jews. So the Battle of Kaibar in 628, al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, has just said that this is in essence a symbolic reenactment of the Battle of Kaibar in 628 when Muhammad took out the Jewish tribes in Medina who were opposed to him. So all of these factors historically and symbolically point to a religious terrorist attack from the perspective of Hamas. And Hamas is in league with Iran in the sense that Iran al-Quds, the military arm of Iran, have been meeting in Beirut in recent days since August with the four parties that started this. There are four. There's Hamas, there's Hezbollah, who are both agents of Iran. There is also the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, which is an old militia group, and Palestinian Islamic jihad, which took 30 captives in this. So in essence, the idea is to encircle Israel on the west, north, and south with hostile parties and to spring this surprise attack. Primarily they're doing this because in May of 2021 there was an uprising over al-Aqsa Mosque. Whenever the al-Aqsa Mosque is attacked, people like myself who look at religious terrorism expect payback. It's been in the planning since then. The guest, the mastermind planner of Hamas, Muhammad D, started the ball rolling at that time. So from their perspective, this is payback and revenge, and part of the attempt still not to accept peace with Israel. It's part of the ongoing war that Israel has been involved in since 1948. There have been six to eight wars, and it's not the apartheid accusation that Amnesty International and other naive agencies have been pro-ing to the world that Israel is an apartheid regime. Yes, there have been atrocities on both sides, but this is more like the prolonged war between the Irish Republican Army and the UK if you want a terrorist parallel. Tim, you have thoughts. I have thoughts because I agree this has been fueled for political purposes based on religion for millennials. Millenniums. Here's the question I have because we recently learned that there was a proposal that Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel may enter some kind of pact of cooperation and agreement of cessation of hostilities. To what degree, Jean, do you think that Hezbollah was threatened? It's power base threatened because if there's cooperation and if most Sunnis believe that Mecca is their chosen place of worship, that there would be no need of hostilities against Israel should Saudi Arabia enter into an agreement with Israel. So to what degree do we think this attack was based on to preserve their power base of conflict based on religion? And that was the motivation for this attack. Yes, what I just said does not exclude the other motivation, geopolitical motivation. The United States actually trumped with the Abraham Accord, started the ball rolling, and Biden has continued it. There is a policy of normalization in the Middle East. We set aside the two-state solution with the Netanyahu regime that's not in the cards. But this whole notion of normalization and the incipient agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia to make peace is very threatening to the Palestinians because they've been put on the back burner by countries that have formerly not cooperated with the United States until there is a solution for the Palestinians. But Saudi Arabia has put that aside that people in the Middle East and these major countries that have not yet made peace, they want peace and prosperity. They don't want war. And the Palestinians are believing that their cause is being lost. And that's one reason why they're appealing to Western organizations like Amnesty International to bring up the case against Israel in the international court. And so this serves also Russia. I spoke a couple of weeks ago about Russia's grand design. Putin just spoke at the annual meeting of the Balda Club discussion group that he hosts as his kind of Russian Davos every year. And he is urging a new world order of multi-polarity. Now this is a word that David Leonhardt took up in the New York Times and shame on him because he picked it up from a sub-stack guy named Noah Smith and I don't know what Noah Smith's background is. But this is Russian propaganda. The Russians and the Chinese don't want a multi-polar world. They want to destroy American hegemony. And how do they do that by creating chaos? The management of chaos is the watchword for a new world order. And once the United States and Western Europe decline, Russia believes it can. It has a vision of not an empire but a civilization that will dominate the Eurasian continent. And this is called Eurasianism. It's been in the cards in Russia for many years. It's neo-fascist and we need to watch out for the terms that we used. Don't use that term multi-polarity. You know, let me use the term license. If you see one state in violation of the liberal world order attack its neighbor, then you say, hmm, maybe that's permitted now. If you see one state threatening to attack Taiwan, for example, and other states around it, that's license, isn't it? And so what you have is a degradation of the liberal world order where one invasion encourages another one. I know that's a different level than what you were talking about. But what are your thoughts about license? License? License. In other words, if one state attacks another, it suggests that that's fair game now. Well, as Kissinger also observed, this is approaching the great power rivalry eras of the past. We see it's in the run up to World War II. This concerns me greatly. We have a dictator whose life, he's 71 years old now on his birthday, Putin, is not for long. If you looked at him recently, again, his health is being brought up. He's very puppy, looks like he's on steroids. And he has a grand vision for Russia to take over economically and geopolitically from the United States. And he's developing this by reaching out with a new narrative. It reminds me of the old days of the Communist International when there was all this propaganda going on about the Soviet Union. This new narrative is his vision of Eurasianism. And we talked about that before. And so this all plays into his hands. And I believe there is, you can connect the dots between Russia, Iran, Hamas, Kispola, Ukraine and the United States. And I also fear with Kissinger that we are in a run up to or in the first stages of a World War III, which is not like the other World Wars. It's a combination of a Cold War and a World War where you have these very major regional wars and aggressions happening along with cyber war and an attempt to disrupt the internal politics and stability of the United States, which is what Russia calls the hegemon. Yeah, you know, Tim, in order to examine what's happening in both Israel and Ukraine, we have to look at the United States about Congress, about the divisiveness, about the chaos in the House of Representatives. What's the news and what's the configuration? Is he going to be able to correct that, to relieve the chaos? Oh, that's a great question. I don't even think Steve Scalise knows whether he's going to be the individual that takes the mantle. You know, this is what happens when you start falling populism. You know, your leaders are populists, and you have this separation of peoples within a country. Certainly Israel has experienced that with Netanyahu. We see that in other countries. We had that with Boris Johnson. He was a populist of sorts. So this is what we get when we elect leaders that are not dedicated to the advancement of people. And it is borders or internationally that they're isolationist, by and large. And what feels the isolationist? It's usually immigration issues. That's dictator's foothold into any line of politics within a country is illegal immigration and their desire to keep the immigrants out at all costs. And that is a social wedge issue that wins the day. And it's not by coincidence that, you know, there seems to be an acceleration of Putin, you know, putting his arms around the shoulders of his buddy buddies, countries of chaos. And I think, and Gene's spot on, it's a matter of creating chaos. And if you've noticed since the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia and Putin, Putin's reaching out to those agents or those countries of chaos have been greatly accelerated and more or less successful. So in this case, sanctions have actually backfired a little bit because of this acceleration of cooperation. A lot of things backfiring these days. You know, Gene, I struggle with the apparent differentiation in Congress among the Republicans between aid to Ukraine, which many of them are increasingly reluctant. And now since last weekend, aid to Israel, which many of them have made public statements to the effect that we need to support Israel. And just it's just an impression, but more of them seem to support Israel than seem to support aid to Ukraine. Can you can you do you see the same difference? Can you explain the difference, you know, between the attitudes on the one and the other? Well, I can start right with the younger Republicans on the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives who haven't lived long enough or absorbed enough information or education to understand what happened in the 1930s and the 1940s. We have not done a good job about educating our children about World War Two, the Holocaust and fascism, which is called populism. But let's let's be real here. This is fascism. And yes, Ukraine and Israel are just two separate hot events in this new hybrid war that we are in. Basically, the powers, the great powers of the world, which would be the United States primarily, then China, then Russia, are trying to polarize the entire world into two camps, to minimize our camp to maximize their camp. The way they do this is by not China, but Russia, stirring up these kinds of little hot wars and to divide and conquer. That's a military term that works. It worked for 500 years of colonialism and it can work with us too. So we have to be very, very careful. And the Republicans have to be on a learning curve pretty fast that anytime there's radical polarization, people take extreme sides, you're heading toward a conflict. There's a train coming down the track. And they have to understand that Ukraine is responding to Russian aggression. That Israel is responding to Palestinian extremist terrorist aggression, which is being, which are proxies of Iran, which basically is supplying Russia with drones to fight Ukraine. So this, this is very definitely connected. And Zelensky understands that Zelensky is Jewish and he knows, and he is now going around the world again for his message that Ukraine and Israel are fighting the same enemy. But you see the Republicans don't connect those dots. They don't see the same enemy. And I'm sorry to say that people in the United States don't either. Years ago I taught a course and I taught about fascism and my students came to me at UCLA and they said, thank you. We've never heard this before. And I thought to myself, wow, that's not good. Well, speaking of students, you know, it's one thing to see Hamas act like barbarians. And indeed, we should never, ever forget that. Unfortunately, the news cycle moves on. You know, there's a risk that people will forget the barbarism. But in the college campuses of America, and in right wing groups, or let me say maybe left wing groups, there are groups that support Hamas and that support the Palestinians. And for every protest that people do to support Israel around the country over the past few days, there's a certain number of protests supporting Hamas. Extraordinary. And there have been contentions on college campuses of great universities, formerly great universities. You can disagree with that, Jay. Like Harvard, like Yale, and my alma mater, NYU. Most interestingly, NYU had a counter protest in favor of Hamas and the Palestinians and the militants and all that. And the Wall Street law firms that had extended offers to the graduates of the law school reversed their offers. They said, you want to protest in favor of Hamas? No job for you, not only now, but later you're done. Which I find very interesting, an interesting statement from Capital Concentration, like Wall Street. So there's reaction to the reaction to the reaction. But what are your thoughts about this? We have, as Gene said, we have a tremendous amount of ignorance. It's not just in previous generations. It's in this generation. They're all over the college campuses supporting Hamas. Can you figure? I go to the source, and I hate to take a global 13-mile overview of this. But it's not that they don't know. It's just that they don't want to know their history. They do know their history to some degree. But who's telling them to ignore history? Who's telling them to, I'm the Pied Piper. And what I think and what I want is what you should think and what you should want. And I'm sorry, but all roads lead back to Donald Trump. Maybe I have a Trump-Durain syndrome or something like that. But I'm telling you right now that we have members of Congress that are far smarter than they purport to be, certainly when they get in front of a camera. And yeah, do I agree that we have falling down severely when it comes to teaching civics to elementary, junior high, and high school? Absolutely. We need to get back to that quickly. How do you fight for democracy if you don't know what it looks like? And civics is sorely lacking in our public education. And I couldn't agree with Gene Moore's about the lessons learned of World War II and how we entered into it blindly. And how Germany failed to see what was coming by following Madman. And that Madman is not too unlike Putin. And in my opinion, not too unlike our former president, Donald Trump. Well, in 2017, I published an article in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence that outlined what fascism is. I particularly focused on Mussolini. And I then traced the development of American fascism and the rise of the charismatic leader Donald Trump. And I am continuing that project right now. So yes, Tim, I do agree with you, but I think it goes back before Donald Trump too. There are certain reasons why fascism resonates with the population of people who feel, again, marginalized like the Palestinians do, very, very dangerous to marginalized large populations in a country not respond to their needs. So they have legitimate grievances. There is, however, an epidemic of ignorance in the United States. And one of the reasons for it is unfortunately the development of social media. We have to train this generation in critical thinking from the get go and how to distinguish among sources what you can rely on and what is just noise and propaganda. Because that is a weapon that's being used it to great extent in this hybrid war. It started out with Trump's speech, his inaugural speech, American carnage. There was no American carnage. It was all drummed up by Stephen Bannon. And so we have a multi front war that we have to engage in. Great powers don't want to take great casualties anymore. They want other people to take the casualties for them, but they want to manipulate the field, the battlefield. That's what I feel Putin is engaged in. And I think he knows his time is short. He's not a young man. He has some kind of illness that hasn't been, you know, exceeded to by our director of the CIA. He doesn't want to he doesn't want to go there for various reasons. And we don't want a wider war with Iran right now. Every time one of these things happens like this incredible Blitzkrieg on Israel, the Blitzkrieg on Ukraine, the idea of that is to call forth an extreme reaction. And of course what you get in the journalism right away are the terrible things that have happened to human beings. And it's true, but it's all oriented toward people uniting against an enemy. You have radical polarization, then you have conflict. I certainly hope that Israel and the United States are very, very careful not only not to extend this to Iran, but also to be very careful how they approach Gaza, because if they aren't starting right now to talk to Qatar or some other nation about these hostages and saying on the one hand to Hamas, this is what we will give you because, you know, we really suffered a defeat here and we have to give you something back. And on the other hand, with the iron sword, as Israel calls it, to go after Hamas in a way that isn't going to turn the world and Putin's unaligned outreach against Israel. Tim, you know, Gene talked about social media and we have talked about social media for a long time and how destructive it is. And there's been news over the past few weeks that all the big social media houses have reduced or terminated their monitoring apparatus. So anything can get on there. And in fact, it does. And there's a lot of disinformation about this war. Furthermore, and this is not new, you have otherwise responsible media organizations that put the focus where people suggest it should go. What I mean more specifically is you have all this footage coming in from people who have been injured in Gaza. And, you know, that's a daily grind of people running down the street, not unmindful that there are cameras there, right? Who knows if that is acted out or what about people putting, you know, injured people in ambulances and the like, you know, just trying to tear your heart out about all of the, all of the, you know, the damage and injury in Gaza. And relatively less coverage of what happened in Israel and what is happening now in Israel. And I mean, maybe it's a fine point, but I think that they are being manipulated, the media is being manipulated by those who feed it these clips and photographs. And, you know, at the end of the day, you have seen more about the you know, the injuries in Hamas than you have about the massacres in Israel. So, and this has been the case in previous wars between Hamas and Israel. It always really troubled me to see the press kind of favor in terms of their selection of footage, the people in Hamas. So, are we getting a straight story here? Is there anything we can do about social media, about conventional media to turn the tide on public opinion? Because it's very dangerous for people in other countries like the U.S. to get news that makes the Israelis look bad. My initial thought is the first casualty of war is the truth. That's an old quotation. And the bottom line is for not only this war, World War II, World War I, the civil war and any other war, how you spin the images and spin the newspapers back in the day. And now in this case, how are you going to spin social media? That is goes hand in hand with a dictator's playbook is control of media and the images and the messaging of media. And unfortunately, yeah, I think our media is being manipulated, but that's always been manipulated. And that's unfortunate. And you're spot on about the lack of regulation on social media. We had Jeff Portnoy here on this show many times about hands off social media to preserve the First Amendment. I'm a big believer in some guardrails as it pertains to social media. And as you know, Jay, I've said a thousand times let's separate editorial and opinion from the factual news desk. But there you have it. We don't have any of those regulations in place. And I suspect those who are susceptible to conspiracy theories and fake images will gravitate to them and pick them up and carry it. And that's just how we're going to be dealing with this. Yeah, I've seen those the footages of the, you know, the plight of Palestinians now being bombed. And yeah, it's disturbing because very quickly it looks like the messaging about the atrocities that took place in the kaboots along that border are soon being forgotten. And now we're on the second phase of the media, the media presentation. And that's now the plight of Palestinians, you know, trapped in a God strip area and their helpless victims. So we have a juxtaposition of messaging here. And I don't care for it. Jean, what do you think about that? You mentioned the social media aspect, but it's media in general, isn't it? And we can't get straight on this until the media gets straight, if ever. What do you think? I think we need to understand and to give voice to the fact that this is a hybrid war and that social media is being utilized as a force multiplier to create chaos, to advance a false narrative. And an Israeli general has already warned that the coverage and the visuals coming out of Gaza once they go in are likely to change world opinion toward Israel. That's why I'm saying that this ultra right-wing government in Israel, which for many years, the extreme right coalition that he's got regards the Palestinians as subhuman. I'm sorry to say that, but I've heard people say that. And likewise, you've seen the atrocities perpetrated by the terrorists that came through the fence and massacred men, women and children. This level of barbarity is creates an emotional resonance with both sides. The fact is, Gaza is one of the most densely populated cities on the face of the earth. You've got two million people crowded into this area. You've got Palestinians who have no way out. You have a siege right now where Israel hopes that by cutting off water and electricity and supplies and hospitals running are not able to function, that that will bring them to their needs. But the people who are perpetrating this, they're a very small group of people. They are in it to the death. And they are basically holding all of their own people hostage without giving them the opportunity to escape. Wow. It's not a happy picture. Not in terms of the present and not in terms of the future. But here we are at the end of our time, Jean. And I want to ask you the kind of toughest question of all. Here we are in a global evolution toward chaos, toward confrontation, toward hybrid war and so many levels as never ever seen before, enabled by technology and new highly technological weapons. And by state actors who are as cruel as you can find in history. And so how is this going to play out? Because these guys have an advantage. They understand history better than Congress does. They understand how you play this game of aggression and making the other guy fight your war as a proxy. How is it going to play out? And what is the result here over the next year or two or three? Depend on. I know it's a hard question. I don't know. We have to really go to a recent past, examine and study what we could write and what we did wrong. We're not good at that in this country. We just move forward. Years ago I went to a lecture by a Stanford historian. I'm a Stanford grad and I was there at the conference. And he gave a whole overview up to that point in the 1960s or 70s. No, it was in the 80s or 90s. Recent history. He just didn't mention one thing. He didn't mention the Vietnam War, which to my generation, not the boomers, although the boomers were involved, the silent generation, Biden's generation was the major conflict. It was our 9-11, basically. And it affected us directly because there was a draft. So, you know, with social media, it's a two-edged sword. It's how we use it. It also gives greater transparency and gives opportunity to those who are legitimately fighting for their own freedom and democracy. It's how we use our technology. It isn't the technology itself. It has no life force in it, except what we give it. We have to be aware of these things. Last part to you, Tim, the last word to you. What's your summarization? What's your synergistic look at this? Well, Gene has got me thinking about the visual images of media and what's that going to look like if there is a full invasion of the Gaza Strip and the plight of those Palestinians that are trapped in the Gaza Strip. It takes me to all wars. And I'm thinking of World War II specifically, where aerial bombing campaigns that never before took place in World War I, like they did the Blitz of London, Berlin was reduced to rubble through aerial bombing campaigns. Look at Dresden, the firebombing of Dresden. Look at the firebombing of Tokyo. These things never occurred before. And those that say that this was, you know, against humanity, we get to the point of war, where war is against humanity. War is a thing that we should never dip our toes into, yet we do time and time again. And why is that? Well, the civilian population seemed to be taken, you know, the short end of the stick each and every time. And I don't know if it's a rationalization. Maybe Gene can help me out with this in the future, whether it's a rationalization that, well, you put that leader in place, now you own that leader, and you're responsible for the leader. And if that leader does horrific chaos things to other nations, then unfortunately, the civilian population has to pay the price. I don't know if that's part of the thinking. But what I do know is that's the end result. And it will be no different for the Palestinians, unfortunately. And it will be no different that it was for those during the London Blitz, the bombing of Dresden, the destruction of Berlin, and the firebombing of Tokyo. It's a natural event of war. And it's got to stop. But we're just not civilized enough to do it. Gene, you want to take up a moment for a last statement here? We need to focus on hostages. We need to focus on doing more than just knocking on the ceiling of a high rise before we bomb it with a residence full of civilians. Speaking with Israel now, seeing we, because I'm absolutely in lockstep with Israel's right to defend itself. But Israel's going to hurt itself because what we did in the war on terror after 9-11 is we went into a rock, which was a huge mistake. I knew it then. And it played out exactly as I thought it would play out. And it's something we're suffering from even today. So before we overreact, remember, this is what the terrorists want. And if you want somebody who knows more than I and who I greatly respect, read Tim Snyder's recent Substack article on the overreaction that the terrorists want to provoke and how really careful you have to be. And when President Biden says we have to abide by the rules of war, sorry, once we go in there and make siege and have urban warfare and kill dozens of Israeli forces as well in those horrible urban warfare situations, we have to consider that it's going to hurt Israel enough just as much or more than Hamas. Yeah, the old days of Israeli macho may not be appropriate. And my initial reaction to what was happening a few days ago was at the end of the day, this is a battle for public opinion around the world, around the world and every media. And Israel certainly had command of that issue. And to some extent still does. It's a horrible thought, but the victimhood is a weapon too. And perhaps they ought to consider that when they decide to go into Gaza or not, to bomb Gaza or not, because you can use your, you can't reverse what happened, but you can use your victimhood in terms of garnering public opinion around the world. And they ought to think about that. Well, thank you very much, Gene. This has been a really important discussion. And Tim, thank you so much, both of you for your comments. I hope we can do this again soon. I hope everything is okay. I started out being sad, being outraged. And now I'm just scared. Thank you very much, both. Aloha.