Hussein Ibish
speaker
241 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 May
Hussein Ibish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
a real human rights violator from the point of view of human rights norms it executes a lot of people rule of law does not apply in the way we would expect dissidents when they are found when they exist suffer you know arrest and imprisonment and long sentences and even if they go as far as saying
parts of the country should secede or leave Saudi Arabia, they can be executed, and they are sometimes. So it's not a happy story on human rights at all, but it's just way better than it was. And there are certainly more alarming cases around the world. You couldn't really say that around the time of the murder of Jamal because Saudi Arabia was really one of the worst violators at that time.
And now I think it's almost back to normative Saudi behavior. Hardly a good standard. It's a very low bar, but it's very different than he was years ago.
Yes. I think he's trying to reduce American exposure and involvement in conflicts in the region. Not in the region, but in regional conflicts. So, for example, the lifting of sanctions on Syria is a response to Gulf countries saying to him, in effect, You say you want us to handle our problems, fine. We want to invest in Syria and build.
We can't have any influence in Syria if we don't spend money there because we don't have a militia or an army in Syria. The only way to get their attention is by investing in reconstruction and in other services where we can build constituencies of friends who will represent our interests and by extension yours.
And we can't do that if every time we write a check, we have to worry about the Treasury Department slamming us. So if you want us to handle our business, you've got to take these sanctions off. The deal with the Houthis in Yemen is undoubtedly directly connected to another conflict ending or conflict containing policy of Trump, which is the negotiations with Iran.
Trump definitely wants a deal with the Iranians, another version. of the Obama peace deal, which he railed against, but is trying to resurrect, but he wants it to be longer and stronger and tougher on Iran. And he can get all of that because of what happened to the Iranians under Biden. I mean, he'll never give Biden the credit,
for having put Iran in this situation, but it was under his presidency that Iran was crippled in its regional status. And the biggest blow by miles was the Turkish-engineered downfall of Assad in Syria. That's why letting the Saudis and the Emiratis and others do what they can in Syria without sanctions is part of that.
He needs to take advantage of this moment of Iranian weakness and the fact that they need 20, 25 years to rebuild their power and to rethink their national security strategy, because it was all based on the idea that Arab militia groups led by Hezbollah in Lebanon would provide a powerful forward defense. against Israel and ultimately the United States. And that was tested and proved untrue.
Hezbollah was decimated by Israel. So Iran is in very bad shape. It needs to rethink everything and it needs time. And Trump understands this and Trump wants a deal because he doesn't want to be put in a situation of having to confront the Iranians militarily. And Iran wants a deal. And the only country left that doesn't want such a deal is Israel. With Obama, the Arabs were totally against it.
But now they're all for it because they want calm and regional stability.
I mean, it certainly incentivizes Trump to think very carefully about doing what he can to restrain Israel's worst impulses in Gaza. The situation in Gaza is so dire after more than 70 days of complete blockade, no food, no medicine, no water, no electricity, no shelter, nothing, no supplies into Gaza.
people have been reduced to the point of starvation that's that's where we're headed here and it's a crime it's certainly a war crime and it's probably a crime against humanity what the israelis are proposing to do is to go back into gaza with full force force all the population 2.2 million who are not hamas fighters and cadres and officials into a
tiny enclave in the south where they will be kept as supposedly protected, but actually kind of herded. where they'll be kept with what the UN says is very totally inadequate plans for their food and water and medicine and shelter. Meanwhile, Israel proclaims it will scour the entire rest of the country for anything and everything connected with Hamas and destroy it. Gaza delenda est.
You know, the bottom line is this is kind of the war that the most extreme factions in Hamas have been waiting for. It provides them with an open-ended, long-term insurgency. Now, obviously, the Israelis can rely on brute force to crush Hamas. But I think they've started to get the hint that as long as there are Palestinians in Gaza, there will be some form of Hamas.
Because Hamas is not a list of people and equipment. It's a name. And if you take a bunch of Palestinians and some of them say they're Hamas, then there will be Hamas. And that's likely to persist no matter what Israel does. And we're getting closer and closer to the end goal of where I think the logic of this for Israel goes, which is depopulation.
Gaza has to be depopulated of Palestinians in order to be free of Hamas. And because the two go together in Gaza under the circumstances, right?
Everything that has happened in the region incentivizes him to stop the Israelis from going ahead with this plan, at least as it has been structured now. It's too extreme. It's too brutal. It's too genocidal. It's too over the top.
And I really think the fact that he made such close friends again and reinforced his relationship with these countries that don't want that, both at the emotional and the strategic registers, that need it not to happen in every possible way, is really important. It gives him every reason to hold the Israelis back and say, guys, come on, don't do this. Don't do this this way. Don't do it.
And he is the only person in the world at the moment who has real leverage over Netanyahu because of the nature of the Israel-U.S. relationship.
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