909: Israel and Hamas | Out of the Loop

909: Israel and Hamas | Out of the Loop

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:03] Ryan McBeth: I think the one final thing is to remember the human. 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.” If 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. You won't feel so crazy about going after your enemies.

[00:00:40] Jordan Harbinger: All right, welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to improve your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional Russian spy, gold smuggler, astronaut, or music mogul.

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[00:01:29] Today, this is Out of the Loop on Israel and Hamas. This is a very basic overview of the Israel and Hamas conflict based on current events. Namely, those current events are the attack that Hamas perpetrated against Israel and the first response from Israel. That's all that was available at the time of recording this, so I know people might be like, “You are doing it one sided.” This is recorded at a time where there just wasn't much going on in the way of response. In fact, as we record this they are still fighting in Southern Israel, inside Israel proper.

[00:01:57] So don't mistake our focus on specific events for deliberately ignoring something that might've happened. This is one of those episodes that is going to be out of date the second it's released. And so, thanks for your understanding when it comes to that. For those that have been under a rock Hamas, a group in Palestine in the Gaza Strip executed an attack against Israel using paragliders, boats, motorcycles, something like a thousand plus fighters, tunnels under the ground and other vehicles killing hundreds of Israelis.

[00:02:24] Injuring thousands, mostly civilians, and it's barbarists. I mean, we're talking about beheaded children and things like that. It's just really, really, really violent and really gross. This is the start of a new conflict. Many are calling this Israel's September 11th or their Pearl Harbor. Our discussion today, it's going to be friendly for those who don't know much about this area of the world or what is going on there.

[00:02:44] You've seen the news, you're, you sort of get it, but you're not quite sure about all the parties and the history of that stuff. We also have some details that for geopolitics nerds like myself will be pretty interesting, I think, so it's great for beginners and intermediate slash advanced, in my opinion.

[00:02:58] It's important to remember in this episode, Hamas is not all Palestinians, Palestinians are not all in Hamas or supportive of Hamas. Israelis aren't all soldiers that terrorize Palestinians and want to genocide everybody. And they're not all the Mossad, and the Mossad isn't all Israelis. I know I'm going to get hate for this.

[00:03:12] This is one of those episodes where you can't even cover it in an attempt to be neutral without getting completely reamed. And I'm just, I guess I'm here for it. I've got my friend Ryan McBeth with me today to cover this. He is former military and former intelligence, and he comes at this not from a political perspective, but from a tactical perspective.

[00:03:30] We're really just giving an overview here in hopes that y'all will be able to wrap your head around what is going on and what might happen next. You guys requested this. That's why we are getting this episode out, like, within just a couple of days, even though some of the team is on vacation here.

[00:03:43] You guys requested this. Personally, I'm glad that you did, because I was interested in covering it and didn't think I could do something in time. And Ryan just sort of fell in my lap with some, frankly, pretty damn good analysis. Here we go, Ryan Macbeth, Out of the Loop Israel and Hamas.

[00:04:01] So this situation is moving pretty fast, and thanks for taking the time to do this. A lot of people are going to say, you're not quite an Arab Israeli conflict guy, but tell me why anyone in their right mind would pick Ryan Macbeth to cover this particular incursion into Israel here with Hamas.

[00:04:16] Ryan McBeth: I'm not exactly an Arab Israeli conflict guy, but I do know a little bit about anti-armored warfare. I spent 20 years in the military on the army side doing anti-tank and heavy weapons work. And I did a couple of deployments overseas. I speak a little Arabic, I talk like an Egyptian, which is better than walking like an Egyptian or driving like one.

[00:04:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I knew that was coming. Yeah.

[00:04:38] Ryan McBeth: I eventually got a job working for Central Federal Services doing something called C4ISR, which means Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance. So basically, I find bad guys using technology. And once I found those bad guys, then give that information my client. My client can take action on that.

[00:04:56] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:04:57] Ryan McBeth: When the Ukraine war started, I knew a little bit about anti-armored warfare. I started a YouTube channel. I used to do programming content, software content, and I did a couple of videos on why tanks explode. All of a sudden, people are interested in what I had to say about tanks.

[00:05:12] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:05:13] Ryan McBeth: We actually study a lot of the Arab Israeli wars quite extensively in the military because many of them are used as case studies for what works and what doesn't when it comes to armed warfare.

[00:05:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the wars in the Middle East, especially the ones that involve Israel, have all been kind of the stuff of legends in many ways. It depends what side you're on, of course, but you think about things like the Six-Day War. It's like, oh my gosh, all these countries are invading. Wait a minute, they all lost.

[00:05:36] What happened? It's just like, in these quick turnarounds, I don't know if that type of thing is possible these days. It's a completely different landscape with different military tech as well. But first, I want to caveat this podcast, by the way, because I think a lot of people are like, “Oh good, Jordan's going to tell me who I should be rooting for in this conflict.”

[00:05:56] Or Jordan better not say that he's on XYZ side of this conflict or I'm going to unsubscribe. It's not a history podcast. We're not going to talk about who has a right to exist and where they have a right to exist. And Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong, but Arabs and Jews have been fighting in this area since the ‘40s and millennia before that.

[00:06:14] There have been little wars here and there between various groups that may or may not have happened the way that they are written in legends that they have been told in or written in.

[00:06:24] Ryan McBeth: Roughly since 1948. For the most part, that area was under the control of the Ottoman Turks since I believe, 1516. It wasn't until World War I that the Arabs and Jews got together and fought with the British to expel the Ottoman Turks from that area of Palestine. And to get them to fight, essentially, the British government gave them a deal. They promised the Arabs, “Hey, if you fight for us, we'll give you Palestine when all this is over with.” And they promised the Jews, “Hey, if you fight for us, we'll give you this area when everything's over with.” So never trust a British guy with a map and a pencil.

[00:07:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, or a napkin and a pencil, as the case seems to have been with this particular deal. The other part of this caveat is, we're going to get a few things wrong. I mean, it's an out of the loop episode where the situation's developing really quickly. But also, just with the historical stuff, I want to step in front of everybody who's going to say, well, actually, because we're going to get that from every side in this conflict, there's a saying, two Jews, three opinions. This is going to be like, two Jews, two Muslims, two people on the right, two people on the left, 68,000 different opinions. And I don't really want to hear any of them after this show.

[00:07:33] Ryan McBeth: And there's a couple of Christians and Druze in there as well.

[00:07:36] Jordan Harbinger: Right, yeah, and other groups that we're going to get well actually about in the email, because we didn't mention them in the caveat. I just said it's not a historical podcast. But let's dive into a brief recap of modern history of Hamas, because people will know that Israel was formed in the late ‘40s, and that was the British Mandate. What was it called? The Palestine Mandate?

[00:07:55] Ryan McBeth: British Mandate Palestine.

[00:07:56] Jordan Harbinger: The British Mandate Palestine. So that sort of divided everything up in this very messy way, which air quotes, “started this conflict.” But what about Hamas? Because people are asking me, wait a minute, what's Hamas? I've heard of Yasser Arafat. Is that Hamas? No, he's dead. And also wasn't part of Hamas. There's all kinds of different groups here that people don't really understand. And for many people, they've never heard of Hamas before, yet Saturday.

[00:08:19] Ryan McBeth: Hamas is actually an acronym. It actually bothers me a little bit when I don't see it all capitalized. But I guess it's colloquial now, like the word radar. Hamas actually stands for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah which essentially means the Islamic resistance.

[00:08:35] Jordan Harbinger: So now we see why they use this acronym, because it's hard to explain, and it’s long.

[00:08:41] Ryan McBeth: That's why they use the acronym. So this essentially grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement which actually grew out of Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood goes all the way back to I think, it was 1924. Muslim Brotherhood was always a thorn in the side of the Egyptians. And around 1986, Hamas appeared out of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip, which is a small piece of land that is on the southeastern coast of Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea, but it's roughly the size of Omaha, Nebraska.

[00:09:14] So you have quite a few people packed into this small area the size of Omaha, Nebraska. There was the first Intifada, I believe in 1987, where Palestinians rose up against the Israelis. And if you look at footage from back in the ‘80s, these are guys would throw rocks at Israelis. And it was mainly because living conditions weren't all that great.

[00:09:38] That was when we started to see some of the first suicide bombers. That was when we started to see people going into Israeli settlements. And the whole thing was a mess. Israel was inside Gaza and they were controlling checkpoints in Gaza. Life wasn't very good if you were a Palestinian. Now, you didn't have a lot of rights and freedom of movement, and that was a problem. So it's understandable why people were upset the Israeli military was in Gaza. [00:10:05] Jordan Harbinger: They formed in 1986 from the Muslim Brotherhood, and I remember hearing about the Muslim Brotherhood from the Tahrir Square Arab Spring, overthrowing of Mubarak because didn't the Muslim Brotherhood then come to power in Egypt and people were kind of like, “Oh, wait a minute. This sounds theocratic, and we were just secular. Is this any better?” And then, the military didn't like it and overthrew them. And that now here we are.

[00:10:27] Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Hamas is an Islamic movement. And Palestinians are relatively secular, but one of the issues is that Hamas tries to enforce things like hijab on women.

[00:10:42] There are some people there that believe that women are meant to be at home, that they need to cover themselves when they go out. And it's not as bad as Iran, but it's not that great either. It's not great if you're LGBTQ when you're living in the West Bank. There's horror stories there of guys who have to hide their identity.

[00:11:01] Or they get married and then, I guess we call it in America, just see other men on the down low. Not a good life living under that religious order. And in that particular religious order, actually took power in, I believe, 2006.

[00:11:16] Jordan Harbinger: In the Gaza Strip.

[00:11:17] Ryan McBeth: In the Gaza Strip.

[00:11:18] Jordan Harbinger: Hamas took over. But this is an election, right?

[00:11:20] Ryan McBeth: In a general election, it was Hamas versus Fatah. And Hamas got more votes. And over the next five days after they won, they just started murdering guys in Fatah.

[00:11:30] Jordan Harbinger: And Fatah is Yasser Arafat, who has since passed as Yasser Arafat's party. They were in control of what? The Palestinian Authority, which...

[00:11:37] Ryan McBeth: Palestinian Authority.

[00:11:38] Jordan Harbinger: And that controlled Gaza and the West Bank back then?

[00:11:41] Ryan McBeth: That controlled Gaza and the West Bank, and since they've split. Essentially, it's a nation in two areas, like Burma and Pakistan.

[00:11:48] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So, tell us what the West Bank is, because people have heard of that, and then I think right now are going, “The West Bank? Wait, is that a bank of something? What is that?”

[00:11:57] Ryan McBeth: The West Bank is on the left side of Jordan, and it's fairly close to Jerusalem. It's an area roughly the size of Delaware. And quite a few Palestinians either are living there or they fled there after the Israeli independence in 1948.

[00:12:15] Jordan Harbinger: So when we think about where Palestinians live, they live in Israel, they live in other countries across the world, of course, diaspora.

[00:12:22] But they also live in the West Bank, which is the West Bank of the Jordan River, which is why it's to the left of Jordan, as you put it, which I love that look left, right, up, down, fine, we're looking at a map. The Gaza Strip, which is where the incursion into Israel happened from this past weekend.

[00:12:40] And each one of those sections, of what you might call Palestine, and even if you're not including Israel, these areas where the Palestinians mostly live, they have two different governments, one of which is Hamas in the Gaza Strip, one of which is Fatah or the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, who is not necessarily a part of this incursion, at least not yet, not publicly, as far as we know. Correct?

[00:12:58] Ryan McBeth: Yes, and occasionally you'll see rocket fire come from the West Bank. In a lot of ways, the Palestinian Authority, I believe a lot of their government workers, they haven't been paid in over a year, and they've been on strike, and trash hasn't been picked up in a year. There's actually a huge problem in the West Bank right now with illegal trash dumps. People are just making their own dumps, and they're getting into farmer's fields, and goats are eating stuff they shouldn't eat, and it's a real mess.

[00:13:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Gaza for that matter, this is like refugee camps, essentially. A lot of people will say it's an open air prison. I've been to the Gaza Strip, this was in 2000, and it was rough.

[00:13:37] We're talking about a lot of incomplete houses that don't have any windows and just have carpets over these huge places where there would normally be a wall, lots of piles of garbage, a lot of burning tires, a lot of just kids playing in garbage or with old bike tires. I remember, I was staying with a Palestinian family and their parents had worked for the Palestinian Authority, but they had Hezbollah flags all over their house.

[00:13:59] So I got kind of a quick lesson in, wait a minute, I thought your dad worked for the government. Actually, he hates the government. So he's like this inside man for Hezbollah. What's that? We had a lot of conversations about that kind of stuff, and we'll get into some of that. But these are not nice places to live and the Palestinians are generally not allowed to leave.

[00:14:18] There's plenty of exceptions. Many of them work in Israel, worked in Israel. A lot of times, they'll send their kids to study abroad, depending on how privileged they are. But mostly you can't leave. And there's not adequate water supply, there's not a lot of electricity. These people are living in pretty desperate conditions, and I'm not trying to justify any violence here, but people are often asking me, why would they do this? Because there's no sense of upward mobility, freedom, or anything like that. So, there's a lot of desperation in there. And that's part of the problem.

[00:14:46] Ryan McBeth: If you don't feel that there's a lot of opportunity, and then someone hands you a gun and a headband and a uniform, Now you're somebody and if all of your friends are joining Hamas and you're not a member of Hamas, “Yeah, I just want to work in my dad's bakery.” Come on, guys.

[00:15:02] When you're a young man, and you think you're invincible, so I guarantee you every single Hamas militant that entered Israel on Saturday, they thought they were going to be the ones that were left alive at the end. Nobody ever thinks it's going to be them that gets killed. I'm sure when you're 18 years old, when you're young and you feel indestructible, it's really easy to take that headband and take that rifle, and go into Israel because your friends are all admiring what you're doing. But the end state is there's really no positive outcome to what happens after that. And I'm not sure what the end game is.

[00:15:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this gives us an overview of what Hamas is. This gives us an overview of the Palestinian Authority, in brief, the West Bank and Gaza. But Hamas, by the way, have they never allowed elections again since 2006? I don't remember being able to find any other elections since they came to power.

[00:15:54] Ryan McBeth: I actually don't recall. You could be right about that.

[00:15:57] Jordan Harbinger: I looked this up and I could just be missing something. But as far as I can see, Hamas just simply did not allow any other elections in the Gaza Strip. Now, supposedly they maintain a wide support base. They did come to power by winning an election, like a majority vote. But their charter essentially says Israel must be pushed into the sea and doesn't have a right to exist.

[00:16:20] It's not a government where Israel can go, “Okay, okay, okay. Look, we’ll turn the electricity back on again and we're going to build some hospitals and some schools, and you guys calm down.” That's not really in their DNA. And you might think, but if they live there, don't they want to live in peace? And we'll get to why that's not necessarily going to be a possibility and why the people who live in the Gaza Strip aren't necessarily the ones who are making the decisions here.

[00:16:43] But can you tell us what happened on Saturday? Because I think a lot of people are going to go, “Okay, great, I know that something happened and it's all over the news,” but what specifically did Hamas do and what is Israel doing in response?

[00:16:53] Ryan McBeth: Hamas essentially launched a raid. A raid is a military action where a unit enters and strikes an area, and then withdraws from that area.  And usually raids are designed to harass an enemy, accomplish some sort of sabotage objective, destroy points of key terrain, or destroy key military units. In this case, this raid was designed to cause terror. And the raid was designed to capture prisoners that could later be traded for some of the 4,500 or so Hamas prisoners that Israel is holding.

[00:17:28] What's special about this raid is its incredible complexity. This has been in the works for years. No doubt in my mind this has been in the works for years. Soldiers come over the land border. They had drones. Drones took off, and some of these drones attacked Israeli sites, attacked Israeli tanks, attacked Israeli bunkers, what are called OPLVs, observational posts listening posts.

[00:17:51] They dropped grenades and weapons on these, just like we've seen in Ukraine. The next phase of the operation was actually breaking through the border fence, which was done with explosives or in some cases, bulldozers, and militants rammed through those gaps. They breached these gaps, and they rammed through.

[00:18:07] There was also sea insertions. So people took small boats and they inserted themselves above Gaza from the sea. They also use paragliders. This was actually unbelievable to see because it takes roughly a month to learn how to fly a paraglider. So, it is hard to believe that Israeli intelligence did not pick up on a bunch of people with a sudden interest in paragliding.

[00:18:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I wondered about that, right? So they're flying around on these paragliders. How do you train with that? Because you're not allowed to fly things from what I understand in Gaza. without permission, and certainly not without being seen. And so, it must look a little weird when it's like, yeah, we have a paragliding club and it's got a kind of a ridiculous number of members, and they all got this hardware. Like that's just a strange hobby for a bunch of people in a refugee camp to suddenly take up.

[00:18:54] Ryan McBeth: I can say that maybe a likely scenario would be that some of these militants were trained in Iran and then brought over for the actual mission. That would make a lot of sense. They were trained in Iran, maybe Lebanon. Although Hezbollah, which is a similar organization in southern Lebanon.

[00:19:14] Jordan Harbinger:  Similar to Hamas.

[00:19:15] Ryan McBeth: Well, they're not exactly friends, but they both have similar objectives. Hezbollah is Sunni Muslim and Hamas is mainly Shia Muslim, which is weird that Iran is supporting Hamas because Iran is mostly Shia.

[00:19:28] Jordan Harbinger: That's what I thought, because they also support Hezbollah, do they not?

[00:19:30] Ryan McBeth: Yes, they do.

[00:19:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Iran is supporting both of these militant groups, even though they're not necessarily the same belief religiously, which to me, a lot of people online are saying, “Oh, religion this, religion that.” Yes, okay. The cover is religion. But when you're talking about this kind of conflict, a lot of this is just down to practicality, in my opinion.

[00:19:47] A lot of this is, Iran doesn't like the United States, it doesn't like peace in the Middle East, because everybody else in the Middle East kind of hates Iran at this point. So, when those countries get along like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera, that's bad for Iran. They don't really care that the book they have is slightly different from the book the other guys have. This is more like, “We just want to mess up the chessboard as much as possible because that buys us time.” What do you think?

[00:20:12] Ryan McBeth: A lot of it's power. Iran wants to flex its muscles. It doesn't necessarily have an expeditionary military. They can't necessarily send an aircraft carrier someplace to project power.

[00:20:23] But what they can do is they can fund terror. They can fund terrorist organizations. Those terrorist organizations can act as a proxy for Iran. And there are no shortages of men who want to feel special, right? And some Iranian guy comes to you and gives you the first steady paycheck you've ever had in your life and hands you a gun and gives you a headband and says, “Okay, you're in charge of these people.” How special do you feel?

[00:20:47] Jordan Harbinger: I’d feel pretty darn special.

[00:20:50] Ryan McBeth: We've seen it work in the Donbas, where Russia rolls in and says to everybody, “Hey, you guys are ethnically Russian, right? Let me give you some money. We're going to start a militia. We're going to take over the town hall.” So, Iran knows how to play people. And Iran is looking out for Iran. They want to be able to control that chessboard.

[00:21:10] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Ryan Macbeth. We'll be right back.

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[00:24:00] Now back to Ryan McBeth.

[00:24:04] 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, that's still happening.

[00:24:35] Ryan McBeth: 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 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.

[00:25:02] Jordan Harbinger: Sort of contradicts what you said earlier about them wanting to stay alive. But I'm curious where you're going with this.

[00:25:08] Ryan McBeth: I 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.

[00:25:29] 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 are going to grab Israeli soldiers or Israeli civilians and bring them back.

[00:25:49] Those guys were better equipped than the people who were just rolling into houses. So 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.

[00:26:01] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:26:13] Ryan McBeth: That's certainly what it seems like. What I haven't seen are any anti-tank missiles. They didn't bring any heavy weapons with them. There are some mortars that Hamas uses. They use 120mm mortars and 81mm mortars that have been supplied by Iran. Those might come into play when Israel actually enters Gaza with their reserve forces.

[00:26:35] 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 on to 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.

[00:27:06] 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.” Because 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.

[00:27:25] 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.

[00:27:47] I think that maybe some of these younger guys who are given the gun and the headband were sold a bill of goods here. You'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.

[00:28:00] Jordan Harbinger: Right. The hole in the fence, yeah.

[00:28:01] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:28:13] Jordan Harbinger: Merkava's the Israeli tank?

[00:28:14] Ryan McBeth: 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. This vehicle can actually shoot down rockets that are headed toward it.

[00:28:28] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:28:29] Ryan McBeth: And so does the Namers, which is Israel's main armored personnel carrier, the day 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 attraction system.

[00:28:53] Jordan Harbinger: 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 from me though. What do you think?

[00:29:02] Ryan McBeth: Yes. They have some of the best signals intelligence in the world, which is one of the weird things. 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.

[00:29:32] When you're in the dark, and you're not getting orders from anybody, it's going to be absolute chaos with Hamas. Now, 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.

[00:29:50] 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?

[00:30:07] They've probably got about three days, four days of effective urban defense. I 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 CASEVAC 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.

[00:30:27] 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. It's certainly possible that some of the Hamas leadership might think, “All right, these guys get wounded, hopefully the Israelis will take care of them.” Or there's the other option, they just don't care.

[00:30:44] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:30:58] 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 in hospitals and schools, and things like that, and they use human shields.

[00:31:13] It'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.

[00:31:33] 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. They're in their villa, swimming in the pool, taking calls.

[00:31:46] Ryan McBeth: 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 or a militiaman and when are you a gangster? There's a reason why my family isn't in Northern Ireland anymore.

[00:32:03] 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 the hospital administrator?

[00:32:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you don't have a choice.

[00:32:14] Ryan McBeth: Even if you don't like Hamas, what choice do you have? You’re not 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.

[00:32:36] 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, and 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.

[00:32:58] Jordan Harbinger: Does Hamas let the civilians evacuate those buildings?

[00:33:02] Ryan McBeth: They're probably leaving as well. You can be a shaheed 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.

[00:33:20] And 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.

[00:33:31] Jordan Harbinger: 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, and is a guy whose brother got killed fighting the Palestinians in his special forces capacity as well?

[00:34:03] 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.

[00:34:19] 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.

[00:34:31] Ryan McBeth:  Yeah, roughly. Yeah.

[00:34:33] Jordan Harbinger: And that lasted longer than two weeks and that wasn't nearly the provocation. That was about rockets hitting kibbutzes or essentially farms, among other things. This is way worse. This is almost like September 11th for Israel.

[00:34:44] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, what did we do after September 11th?

[00:34:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we were not out in two weeks.

[00:34:48] Ryan McBeth: We lost our minds.

[00:34:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we lost our minds.

[00:34:51] Ryan McBeth: We lost our minds.

[00:34:52] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly.

[00:34:53] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:35:01] 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 and it's a pile of goo.

[00:35:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yep. Yep. 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 the Ashkelon.

[00:35:30] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:35:40] Jordan Harbinger: A lot smaller, yeah.

[00:35:41] Ryan McBeth: 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. Israel 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.

[00:36:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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.”

[00:36:17] And it's, “Don't you have to get up and go shooting or something?” “Sometimes. It'll be fine.” Yeah, there's a lot of it. 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.”

[00:36:32] Ryan McBeth: 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, you know?

[00:36:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I didn't think about that.

[00:36:44] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:36:51] Jordan Harbinger: That'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.”

[00:37:14] 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.” And it was like, “Oh my gosh, you're with soldiers on the bus. How romantic.” It was really an exception to every rule.

[00:37:27] 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.

[00:37:46] 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. This 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.

[00:38:11] 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.

[00:38:25] Ryan McBeth: I think you answered your own question. So, I work in the intelligence community. How about I go to my boss with that? Imagine 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.”

[00:38:56] Jordan Harbinger: Nah. Too much, too daring.

[00:38:57] Ryan McBeth: It just, it sounds like a James Bond movie.

[00:38:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it does.

[00:39:00] Ryan McBeth: 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 to the 9/11 commission that kind of looks into where the failures were.

[00:39:10] It 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 frontend 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.

[00:39:33] But actually, I vote for the boldness of the plan. They might've known about this plan and discounted it as just something that was too bold and just too hard to actually organize.

[00:39:43] Jordan Harbinger: We 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.

[00:40:00] So these big players in the area, Iran is better off when they are all in fighting, 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.

[00:40:17] Don't think that's going to work. I think MBS Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of Saudi Arabia, he wants to submit 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.

[00:40:37] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:40:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we have a ton of Iranian listeners. They know I'm not talking about them. They know they live in a theocracy. They're in the streets protesting that all the time.

[00:40:53] Ryan McBeth: There was a kid who wrote me. Do you know they have Apple stores in Iran?

[00:40:57] Jordan Harbinger: I did not know they had Apple stores in Iran. How is that they're not sanctioned?

[00:41:00] Ryan McBeth: 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, that 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 that is sanctioned by Apple.

[00:41:25] Jordan Harbinger: It's a fake Apple store.

[00:41:27] Ryan McBeth: 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 who want to get out. Yeah, 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.

[00:41:53] Probably at least two years. And people have said, Russia gave permission or Russia helped fund this, Wagner helped train this Palestinians. Russia can do battle 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 do you involve him for? You have Iranian training.

[00:42:12] They work perfectly well. They know what they're doing. They know how to train people on weapons. In fact, you don't need Wagner. Why would you have that additional expense? I don't see this as being something that was trying to derail the peace process. It might've 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. And it just might've been a convenient time to execute the attack.

[00:42:43] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Ryan McBeth. We'll be right back.

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[00:45:23] Now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan McBeth.

[00:45:28] What is going to happen from here? You mentioned that the Israeli response is going to make-

[00:45:34] Ryan McBeth: Fallujah look like an episode of Teletubbies.

[00:45:36] Jordan Harbinger: Right, yeah. We're just trying to predict the future here, but what does that entail?

[00:45:40] Ryan McBeth: It's going to end up clear hold bill. 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 six percent 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. They'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.

[00:46:06] And they're going to continue to do this with some of those Merkava tanks and some of the Namer 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 Sagger, which is an anti-tank missile, a wire-guided anti-tank missile, the AT-3 Sagger.

[00:46:40] They should also have the Konkurs, at least a copy of a Russian anti-tank missile, and some of them might have the Kornet, which is a pretty good Russian anti-tank missile as well. I know that Hezbollah used a Kornet 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 has quite a few, or they're going to call a JDAM strike directly on that building.

[00:47:05] Jordan Harbinger: What's a JDAM? Is that like a surface-to-surface missile?

[00:47:08] Ryan McBeth: It 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 you ever heard of frangible ammunition?

[00:47:26] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-mm. But I know what that would mean.

[00:47:28] Ryan McBeth: Okay. Yeah, so frangible ammunition might be something that when it hits drywall, it just explodes in a puff of copper, right? 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 speeds. So, 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 DIME 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.

[00:48:12] Jordan Harbinger: Oof.

[00:48:12] Ryan McBeth: That's not going to be good for you.

[00:48:13] Jordan Harbinger:  No.

[00:48:14] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:48:24] Jordan Harbinger: It'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.

[00:48:38] 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.”

[00:49:03] “And 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, 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.

[00:49:19] Ryan McBeth: 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, and that's actually one method of insertion that I didn't mention. There's actually tunnels underneath Gaza, so you might make the tunnel longer. That might be a possibility.

[00:49:38] I could see them, and Israel has a term, they call it D-9ing. We're just going to D-9 this whole area. A D-9 is a caterpillar bulldozer. They could just D-9 all the houses in a 3-kilometer area by the border, and just tell everybody, “Sorry, you got to move back.”

[00:49:55] Jordan Harbinger: They haven't signed the landmine treaty.

[00:49:56] Ryan McBeth: They haven't signed the landmine treaty?

[00:49:57] Jordan Harbinger: They have not, no.

[00:49:58] Ryan McBeth: Okay.

[00:49:59] Jordan Harbinger: Along with the US, Russia, China, et cetera. But I ask this because I've been to the North and South Korean DMZ, and that thing is just a massive minefield. Depending 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 it just blows up and burns everything around it.

[00:50:16] 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.

[00:50:29] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, it certainly is a possibility. That might be something that they're going to have to consider. I don't know Israel's endgame. That's what's scary for me. 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.

[00:50:47] 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.

[00:51:03] Because ideally, you go house to house, and you either kill or you arrest every single member of Hamas. Now, 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 for the weapon in the backyard and say, “Oh, I go to university.” So is he a member of Hamas? Is he not? You can't just arrest every single military-age male.

[00:51:25] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:51:33] Ryan McBeth: That could be something that Israel could do.

[00:51:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:51:38] Ryan McBeth: 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. So, if you see a situation where women are picking up arms and women are fighting, or women become suicide bombers, now, what do you go?

[00:51:57] Jordan Harbinger: 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 and 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?

[00:52:18] Ryan McBeth: 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. You 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.

[00:52:33] 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.

[00:52:51] Maybe with an exception of Iraq and Iran to an extent. Turkey is an Arab, has a self-defense NATO standard military. They 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.

[00:53:14] 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, 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?

[00:53:29] I can see Hezbollah attacking Israel from the north and opening up a second front because the supply lines are fairly short. In 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 that have formed, then maybe the Lebanese army could actually regain control of the southern part of the country, right?

[00:53:55] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:53:56] Ryan McBeth: I've 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.

[00:54:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh, I'd love to visit Lebanon, but not right now.

[00:54:10] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, so when you look at the idea of other countries entering war, what are the logistical capabilities of those countries?

[00:54:16] Jordan Harbinger: That's a good question I hadn't thought of. Yeah, it's real easy to go, “We're going to declare a war against Israel.” Cool. Thanks Fiji. You're out of the running though. No offense to Fiji. I'm sure they're great.

[00:54:25] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:54:35] Jordan Harbinger: Wait. Are you joking? I can't tell if you're joking or not.

[00:54:38] Ryan McBeth: 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, that's where I met with the Fijians, and they'll spend time at home. Essentially, Fiji has a reserve force, and these guys are activated. They do a tour, and they go home.

[00:54:59] Jordan Harbinger: 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 are already crossed off the list.

[00:55:08] 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?

[00:55:17] Ryan McBeth: Hezbollah? Look, like I said, I talk like an Egyptian and I'm also from New Jersey. So English isn't my first language.

[00:55:23] Jordan Harbinger: I got it. 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.

[00:55:30] Ryan McBeth: When you say the word for God, you say Allah. Hezbollah is literally the party of God.

[00:55:34] Jordan Harbinger: 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.”

[00:55:48] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, I think they might get a little more kinetic and it might happen 10 years from now.

[00:55:51] Jordan Harbinger: Yes, I think so.

[00:55:53] Ryan McBeth: I've actually read a book about the Mossad. It was called By Way of Deception.

[00:55:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, great book.

[00:55:57] Ryan McBeth: And 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.

[00:56:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, whacked. I mean, I'm sure the Hamas leadership in Qatar, I jokingly said by the pool taking calls, they're probably not by their own pool taking calls.

[00:56:14] 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. “Ah, 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?

[00:56:39] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:56:57] Let's see for ISR. That's command control communications, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. They’re using software to figure out what the bad guys are doing. I would not be surprised if at some point, they saw the bad guys leave and six months ago the bad guys are going to a lot of meetings, all the chatter. I'm sure you've heard the term intelligence chatter.

[00:57:15] 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 you might have seen an increase in chatter six months ago. You 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, and this wasn't really on their radar screen.

[00:57:36] 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?

[00:57:43] Jordan Harbinger: 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 time. 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.

[00:58:05] Ryan McBeth: I would not have been surprised if each of the cells that were involved didn't know that other cells existed.

[00:58:11] Jordan Harbinger: The paraglider attackers, the motorcycle attackers, they all thought they were the only plan, yeah.

[00:58:17] Ryan McBeth: 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 get killed, maybe they were going to come back. The people that were stashing guys, they might have had a bigger picture as to what was going on based on their equipment and so on.

[00:58:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, 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?

[00:58:48] Ryan McBeth: 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.

[00:58:55] Jordan Harbinger: They've done it before.

[00:58:56] Ryan McBeth: They attacked Iraq in 1982, the Osirak 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.

[00:59:17] 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 SEAD 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.

[00:59:41] 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 Serbs air missiles, take care of their fighter planes. So about the only way you could do it is if you sent a bunch of planes to Saudi Arabia and you use that as a staging area. And the Saudis are like, “Hey, let's do this together.”

[00:59:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:00:00] Ryan McBeth: I've often said that if Iran ever develops a nuclear weapon, I'm not too concerned about them shooting it at Jerusalem. I'm concerned about them shooting it at Saudi Arabia.

[01:00:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:00:09] Ryan McBeth: Let's get rid of the Sunnis, and then we can run the whole Middle East.

[01:00:12] Jordan Harbinger: 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. I think this is a couple of years ago.

[01:00:29] Ryan McBeth: 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. See, 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.

[01:00:55] Jordan Harbinger: 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. You think the Jews have taken some shit through history. You haven't met the Kurds. My God.

[01:01:08] Ryan McBeth: Yeah, I've talked with Iranians, guys who I was assisting when The Shilmani was murdered, and people were protesting. I talked to these guys. That guy mentioned the Kurds. It's like they flipped a switch. These Iranians were talking about the Kurds like, “Oh, whoa, okay. Didn't mean to go there.” It was like sitting down with your racist uncle. “Whoa, okay. Yeah, you just said that.”

[01:01:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I’ve 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.

[01:01:37] Ryan McBeth: I 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.

[01:01:46] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[01:01:56] Ryan McBeth: Dude, you can say anything you want. How many tankers do you have?

[01:01:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. True.

[01:02:01] Ryan McBeth:  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 gets shot down? You 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.

[01:02:23] 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.

[01:02:41] I believe there's a carrier in the area. I know there's one in the Med. I think that's a Gerald R. Ford. I could have 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 Hormuz. Because Iran, once in a while, may just like to take over ships and hold people hostage. “Y'all, you violated our border by two inches.”

[01:03:02] Jordan Harbinger: Here it is. Stealth F-35 fighters and other warplanes, so we do have stuff there, which doesn't surprise me.

[01:03:08] Ryan McBeth: 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, Marine Corps F-35Bs, and that can be a heck of a problem. A couple of F-35Bs, some Tomahawk missiles, that'll ruin Iranian air defense’s day.

[01:03:28] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. Although the US stepping in directly to fight with Iran because of this is, I'd like to say it's farfetched and unlikely, but I guess you just don't know. You just don't know.

[01:03:37] Ryan McBeth: 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 oil refinery. Wrong place, wrong time. That's not what I want to see.

[01:03:48] Jordan Harbinger: 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, but 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.

[01:04:02] Ryan McBeth: I think the one final thing is to remember the human.

[01:04:04] Jordan Harbinger: I agree.

[01:04:05] Ryan McBeth: 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.”

[01:04:27] If 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.

[01:04:46] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[01:05:02] And 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.

[01:05:22] Ryan McBeth: 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. And 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.

[01:05:47] Jordan Harbinger: Ryan McBeth, thank you very much.

[01:05:49] Ryan McBeth: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

[01:05:53] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Egyptologist and television host Ramy Romany.

[01:05:59] Ramy Romany: 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 percent of ancient Egypt, 88 percent 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. Now, 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.

[01:06:32] 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. And 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?

[01:07:05] 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 archeologists 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.

[01:07:30] Jordan Harbinger: For more about Ancient Egypt and Ramy'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 sider. This is a really messy, messy situation, and I don't see how it will ever really end completely. I don’t.

[01:07:53] 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. Many in Hamas don't like the alliance with Iran.

[01:08:08] 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.

[01:08:26] 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. It's inaccurate, it doesn't do any service because it just makes us write the whole thing off.

[01:08:44] Because, of course, religious conflict is something that seems unsolvable. This is “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’s 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.

[01:09:07] 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? They 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.

[01:09:22] That type of security, 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. 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 Islamization of their society.

[01:09:46] When I was there, there were plenty of women walking around with no hijab. Now I think that's quite enforced. I have no firsthand knowledge of this. But in all the pictures I see, the people are dressed way more conservatively than they were when I was there. Human rights watch is also chronicled what it calls systemic abuse as part of Hamas in Gaza. These people are really taking it from all ends, right?

[01:10:04] 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? Okay, fine. They haven't had one for 20 years, but surely there's a bunch of ground support.”

[01:10:21] 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.

[01:10:39] 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. It's really hard to say, “Oh, they have a wide base of support.” We just don’t know.

[01:10:57] 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.

[01:11:15] 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. I really don't understand. And I'm not alone. It's not that I'm uneducated on this.

[01:11:29] 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 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.

[01:11:57] All 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/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. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. I'm going to be doing some giveaways there. I'm trying to get sponsored 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. Who needs 20 air filters? Not this guy.

[01:12:41] Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well, that's over at jordanharbinger.com/course. I'm @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

[01:12:51] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise 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.

[01:13:27] Male: Swindled is a true crime podcast about greed. The anonymous host, who refers to himself as a concerned citizen, tells true stories of white-collar criminals, con artists, and corporate evil in a dark and deadpan narrative style that will leave you trusting nothing.

[01:13:43] There are episodes about the disturbing histories and practices of food giants such as Nestle and Chiquita. There are episodes about man-made environmental disasters, such as the Bhopal gas tragedy and the BP oil spill. There's even a swindled episode about Mother Teresa. Nothing and no one is off limits.

[01:14:01] Critics have called Swindled remarkable and enraging, horrifying and maddening, meticulously researched and true, for the love of money is the root of all evil. 100 plus episodes are waiting for you. Listen to Swindled at swindled.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.