Newt's WorldNewt talks with Brigadier General Anthony Tata (U.S. Army, Retired) about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. The Israeli Defense Force has taken control of the border crossing at Rafah and is focusing on destroying Hamas targets. There are also ongoing talks of a ceasefire to free remaining hostages. Tata provides his expert analysis on the situation. He believes that Israel must destroy Hamas to ensure the security of the Israeli people. They also discuss the rise of pro-Palestinian protests in the United States, and Tata's career as a novelist.
On this episode of Nutsworld, Israel's tanks to entering Rafa and have taken control of the border crossing. The Israeli Defense Force has stated it is limiting the scope of the operation to destroy Hamas targets as the Israelis invade. They're also ongoing talks of a ceasefire with Hamas to free the remaining hostages. There's so much going on with the Israel Hamas war. I just wanted to speak with someone with expert knowledge, so I'm really pleased to welcome my guest regulator, General Anthony J. Tata, US Army Retired Tony. Thank you for joining me on Nutsworld.
Great to be with you, mister speaker.
You know, Hamas fired rockets at the Kramshaloms crossing a corridor connecting southern Israel and Gaza on Sunday, reportedly killing at least four Israeli soldiers delivering assistance. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin net Nyaho indicated that a Rafa invasion is likely. Nen Yaho said, in the terrible Holocaust, there were great world leaders who stood by idly. Therefore, the first lesson the Holocaust is if we do not defend ourselves. Nobody will defend us, and if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone. Israel Defense forces on Monday urged one hundred thousand people in the southern Gaza city to evacuate via text messages and phone calls and drop flyers warning of danger. Nen Yaho said on Monday that seizing Rafa, which Israel says is the last significant Hamas stronghold in Gaza, was vital to ensuring the militants can't rebuild their military capabilities and repeat the October seventh t on Israel that triggered the war, and Israel's been warning for months that it plans to cend troops into Rafa. How do you assess the current situation.
Mister speaker. A lot to unpack there. I think the first thing that we should remember is Carl von Clausewitz's maximum that wars politics by another means. And so when you see all the Hamas Shukin and Jivan and juke In, Okay, we'll release the hostages. Then they mortar people. Okay, we want to cease fire. They're maneuvering. They're cornered right now, and they're trying to maneuver out of a tight spot. And so Israel has really three or four major factors that contend with They have the far threat and Iran that has attacked them and they've struck back. They have at the operational level all the Sham militia groups Hespala, the Sham militia groups in Syria and Iraq disrupting their operations more close in. And then of course Samas. They've got a factor in US support. Imagine that support from this administration, and that seems to be like a sin wave. Sometimes it's strong, sometimes at Ebbs. And then they've got the tactical fight that you referenced there in Rafa, and so this is really four dimensional warfare that they've got going on, and they must destroy Hamas. There is no security for the Israeli people if Hamas survives this war. For the life of me, I don't understand, mister speaker, that the Biden administration's infatuation with Iran or their support for essentially Hamas veiled as support for the Palestinian people and withholding ammunition, if that assertion is true, that this administration without ammunition as Israel begins to ramp up for really its last tactical should be its last tactical fight to complete the destruction of Amas. I mean, what was Trump impeached for withholding ammunition from Ukraine. So I think about these things. Israel is well poised. They are putting their own troops in harm's way by giving so much warning, surprise, deception, momentum, are all tactics and maxims of military operations. They're given all of that up and the name of protecting civilians and the name of trying to help the civilians move to these safe areas. Leaflets, loudspeakers, text message, everything, all the psychological operations to get people moving so that they can come in and defeat Hamas. And we know that Hamas uses human shields, they won't let them leave, and any civilian casualties in my view or at the hands of Hamas, regardless of who launches the mortar round or the artillery round or the bullet.
I was really surprised after all the effort that had been put into Gaza that apparently in Rafa there may be four or five brigades of the last stand of the Hamas soldiers and that's really a pretty large number. So this would be ultimately a real fight.
It is going to be a real fight, and I think the operational pause that Israel has done has given them the time to conduct what we call intelligence preparation of the battlefield. They have signals intelligence, they have imagery intelligence, they have layers and layers of intelligence human intelligence that they can try to figure out where the hostages are, figure out where command posts are, figure out where the disposition of the enemy. And at the end of the day, mister speaker, you're talking about house to house grunt fighting like we saw in Fellujah and Rama and tough places, tough fights that our marines and soldiers saw in Iraq. And so I think we're getting ready to see something here that is going to be brutal. And we can't be distracted by the information operation led by the Islamist extremists around the world that are trying to say, you know, the Israelis are killing tens of thousands of children and that kind of thing.
I'm confused because on March eighteenth, Biden's National security advisor Jake Sullivan said, quote, our position is that hamas should not be allowed to safe Haven and Rafa or anywhere else but a major ground operation. There would be a mistake. Close quote. Now, if you oppose a major ground operation, you are by definition turning Rafa into a sanctuary city for terrorists. What am I missing here?
It's just more of Jake Sullivan's double speak. Right, This foreign policy is moot before it even leaves their mouths because they're trying to have it both ways. They're trying to win votes in Dearborn, Michigan and Minnesota from the Islamic populations there because those are swing states. And they're also trying to pretend like they're supporting our strongest ally in the Middle East. And they're really on the horns of a dilemma. And you literally cannot have it both ways. You can't support the terrorists and support Israel. You just can't do it. And so yet they would be much better off picking one side or the other and not letting domestic politics in their craven drive for power to influence the national security of the United States and the world. And so Netta has been very clear he needs to destroy Hamas. I agree with that assessment. I've worked very closely with the IDU, but as an undersecretary and as a general.
For example, the European Commission President Ursula vonder Lyon said last Monday that the Bloc would take action should Israel invade Raffa. She said, quote, I think it would be completely unacceptable if not in Yahoo would invade Raffa, adding if he did, her executive would sit down with our member states and act on that. What do you think she's talking about? I mean, what kind of action are they going to take?
Yeah, there might be some economic action on the fringes. I saw that, and I asked the same question, what the heck is she talking about. Israel is in a fight for its national survival and we cannot, mister speaker, underestimate the influence of this information operation that the Islamist extremists around the world, within our own universities there in America and throughout Europe. They've got a vice gript on the West. Sadly, the corporate media parrots a lot of this and gives airtime to this and credibility to it, and it's quite frankly, just a big information operation. People need to go. I've been under the Arned Dome, I've been to the southern border of Israel, near Gaza. I've been up in the mountains in the north in the Golan, I've seen how vulnerable israel Is and people who make these kinds of statements need to go walk into those tunnels that come in from Gaza as I did and see how vulnerable the Israeli people are. Netna who is on the right path. He can't be distracted by President Biden or European Union or any other quote unquote world leaders that are somehow beholden to this Islamic influence that seems to be gripping the West right now.
Well, Nanya who says that the goal has to be the absolute destruction of Hamas, some people argue that, in fact, that's impossible, that you're not going to be able to totally destroy Hamas because fanatic gorilla movements have huge resilience. What is your take, Is it possible if they work their way through Rafa that they will have functionally destroyed Hamas.
I'll rely mister speaker on my military training. Defeat has a doctrinal definition of breaking the will to fight. Destroy has a doctrinal definition of breaking the means to fight. So I don't think they're going to break the will to fight. If there's a few Hamas zealots left They're going to still have the will to fight, but they can come in and destroy the means to fight, the capability to launch rockets twenty four to seven at Israel, and I think that's what NETANYAHUO is talking about, is destroying the capability to do harm. There's always going to be true believers out there that want to carry a suicide bomb into a cafe or whatever, but the at scale large operations is what I think that Yahoo is talking about preventing.
I'm curious not something that's maybe a political as much as military. I don't understand why Israel allows the Hamas high command to operate in nice apartments in Gutter. I mean, if you're going to go after the soldiers, it strikes me that you ought to find some way to make it very dangerous to be one of the political public leaders of an organization dedicated to wiping you out. What is your take? Why are they so tolerant of Hamas leadership at that level.
I'm not sure that they are tolerant of it. Masade does a lot of things that you and I don't know about, and certainly Gutter and the GCC nations have stepped up their identity procedures and their immigration procedures or ability to move around in these GCC nations. I do a lot of business over in UAE. They know who you are, where you are pretty much all the time. And so what I have thought through is, even as a fiction novelist, thinking about next plots and that kind of thing, the how do you get to these guys when you've got every point of entry sealed up with facial recognition and eye scanners and cell phone trackers. It's a different era today for spies and operatives, and so I don't know that there's so much tolerating it as trying to figure it out.
One of the other side challenges has been the rise of the Hoothis as a forced trying to cut off shipping, and I was very struck apparently in the Houthis emerged as part of a civil war in Yemen and are funded largely by Iram. But the Saudis and the UAE had actually flown something like twenty three thousand missions against the Huthis before the most recent campaign, and then we look at the US in Britain and we fly maybe two hundred missions. Now, why would you think that a group which had survived twenty three thousand bombing runs, was suddenly going to be intimidated. Of course, they clearly have not been intimidated. They continue to be a threat, and we continue to have no strategy for dealing with them.
Right, Well, that's the key. There is no strategy. There is no vision. Remember the President Trump had a vision for unifying the Middle East through economic ties, and as a businessman, he understood that if you get economies working together, then the ship will right itself and a lot of the hatred will tend to have a way. The Biden administration has been just the opposite and focused on division, focused on appeasing Iran. There's no real unifying vision for the Middle East. You can't just leave it to its own design. So these pen prick responses, and they are responses. There's no strategy. There are pen pick responses that really do nothing to alter the situation. Except in Bolden. The Huti's to know, Okay, the big Americans attacked us, We're still here, so let's just keep doing what we're doing. We're getting paid well by the Iranians to do it. This is our mission in life, is the disrupt trade through the horn of Africa and surrounding areas.
It's kind of ironic that the region which looked under Trump like it really was moving towards a dramatically better future. And I think there was actually a speech about a week before October seventh, I think Jake Sullowan gave a speech saying how the Middle East had now become calm, it was now safe, it was now stable. And a week later, of course, it all blew up the most horrible terrorist attack of recent times. But if you're in Israeli, you have the hu Tha sort of to the south east, you have Hamash Drew south of you, you have Hesbalah north of you, you have a sort of broken Syria to your east, and then you have looming over everything, the continuing effort by the Iranians, who are the chief funders of terrorism, and who are working to build nuclear capability, and who proved the other day that they could fire an amazing number of missiles and drones in a coordinated strike. And I think we probably overestimate how successful our defense was and underestimate how much the Iranians learn from that trial run. But when you think of it that way, and you think of the kaleidoscope around Israel. What are there strategic choices of survival? Whis coming after the Holocaust and everything of modern times. Survival has to be their number one goal.
Right. If Israel is not a safe place for Jewish people, then nowhere is safe for Jewish people. It's not only physically true, but symbolically true universally around the globe. Netnya who has to make sure that Israel is a safe place for Jewish people. The thing I would add to your regional perspective there, which was I think very well done, is you have a waffling West, as we've talked about with the Biden administration, and we have the EU and this extremist Islamist influence that has a grip on the West. From Netanyahu's perspective, he's looking at this not only do I have sort of east, south and just north of me operationally, but strategically I'm surrounding. If I don't have good allies, it really all up to me, is what he's I'm sure thinking. And the thing that has impressed me the most about the IDF and the Ministry of Defense there that I worked very very closely with when we were doing the Abraham A. Courts to make sure that we were not negating Israel's key advantages. They very much know that they are alone in this fight, and they very much know that they have to be capable of defending themselves one percent of the time with zero support. Any support is welcome from Western nations, but I think that they go into everything saying, we got this, we can do it, We're trained to do it. And by the way, we have some capabilities that some of these other countries don't have.
And I think they showed some of that with their air strike back against Iran way of saying, remember, you know, we can come downtown if we want to.
Yeah, and you won't even know about it until you hear it on the news. Right.
Tom Friedman wrote a colin today that I'm actually writing a response to, in which he said that the Israelis have to choose between Rafa and Riod, that you can either have an alliance with the Saudis or you can go into Rafa. But if you go into Rafa, you're going to create an environment such that you can't have an alliance with the Saudis. It struck me that that was exactly backwards and in fact, if the Israelis prove that they are tough and they are determined, and they are reliable, they become more valuable for the Saudis who are dealing with a Biden administration in a Western Europe that is neither tough nor reliable.
I agree with you, mister speaker. I have a lot of respect for Friedman. You know, he's intellectual, but he's also a liberal, right so I saw that, and I think what he missed there is the air Persian fight, the Shia Sunni that's just not going to evaporate. That's not going to go away. And so if Israel is able to stand up for itself and Riyad and Abu Dhabi and some of these other countries they see the threat that Iran has coming in with their Shea militia groups into Iraq. They've almost got a land bridge all the way into Jordan with the Shia. It went too long ago. I ran attack Saudi Aramco with drones and rockets. So the standing up to Iran and its proxies I think plays well in KSA and UAE and some of the other GCC nations and the starter fluid of the Abraham Accords really did take hold and continues to take hold. As I see in my visits to the region over there, people want to get back to that this is all a distraction, intentional distraction from Iran to try to disrupt the economic development between Israel and some of the larger GCC nations.
What do you make of the rise of pro Hamas, anti Israel and anti Semitic activity in the United States. We're talking the day after there was a huge effort to disrupt a Metropolitan Museum gala. There's all the things going on on campuses. I suspect that the Democratic Convention in Chicago this August is going to be a huge challenge in crowd control. But what do you make of the scale of nationwide activities that this sort of exploded.
I think several years are decades ago, Islamic extremists took a long view on how to under in the West, and I think we're seeing all of that bubble up now, whether it's through institutions like education or politics. The progressive left is very much in bid with the Marxist Islamist ideology. I was a superintendent of one of the largest school systems in the country, public school systems K through twelve and I left that in twenty twelve, and twelve years later, I didn't see any of this. Yeah, there was liberal influence and all of that, but the momentum that this Marxist Islamic ideology has taken has really accelerated. I think social media is playing a factor in it. But it's almost like seeds haven't been planted for thirty years and now all of a sudden, they've been watered and fertilized, and now they're sprouting and growing fast. And it's a real issue because the Biden administration, in my mind, they don't have we have a unifying vision for the country. What they found. I believe my perspective is that the more divided we are, the better chance they have of maintaining power. Which is why I think you hear Biden's rhetoric be so divisive, particularly against the former president and the people who support him, and then all of the gender ideology and that kind of thing. I think that if the Biden administration sees that if we hate each other, they can parley that into political power. I think we've got willing accomplices, and I think we have a grand strategy from the center of Islamic extremism in Iran.
We just did a podcast where we took Reagan's comments as governor when he dealt with students at Berkeley, and he was very tough Ulternately, they sent in the National Guard, and he was determined to regain control of the university. And you look at Reagan's attitude, then you look at a place like Columbia and you just wonder, these people are totally out of touch with the real world. It's astonishing.
Go back to the week or two after the October seventh when Harvard president the other presidents were called in front of Congress and they didn't condemn the hate speech that was happening, the anti Israeli speech, anti Jew speech that was happening. And so they've made their own bid here right, And here it is May seven months later, almost to the day, and we have this uprising. And I think it's very different than the Vietnam era protests that was domestic internal policy about a war that the United States was directly engaged in overseas that you know, you had legitimate arguments on both sides. You know, you stop communism or it's not going to stop whatever here. What you have is an end fluence and information operation that has stoked anger and very gullible in my opinion. People young students that have paid organizers come in and take them to these rallies and campsites on these universities, and they're told what to do, and it's all an external operation. It's not all that organic as the Vietnam era one seem to be from my perspective.
Well, listen, I really want to thank you for bringing your military experience and your vast knowledge to share with us about what's going on. I want to thank you for joining us, and I want to mention to our listeners that your latest book, which is out now, the Faalanx Code Garrett Sinclair novel is available on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere, and we'll be on our show page. So thank you very very much.
Thank you, mister speaker. Always appreciate being it. I have a conversation with.
Thank you to my guest, Brigadier General Anthony Tata. You can learn more about Israel's invasion of Rapha on our show page at nutsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Ginger Street sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld consign up for my three free weekly columns at Gingishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
