John Mearsheimer

Given what happened to the Israelis, given how shocked they were, given the level of fear, given the level of rage, they were going to lash out.

And I don't believe that was in their interest.

I think it would have made sense to think about it and to think about a smarter strategy than they're now employing.

And I think, you know, the Americans blew it.

The Americans gave him a bear hug and a green light and said, we'll give you all the weaponry you need and go out and do it.

And I don't think that was the smart thing to do.

Look, in the wake of October 7th, the Israelis had no good strategy.

It's not like there's a magic formula that they just didn't see, and we should have told them what the magic formula was.

That's not true.

They were, in a sense, caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of what to do.

But there are smarter things and dumber things, and I think the Israelis—

lashed out in ways that are counterproductive.

I think, you know, going on a rampage and, you know, killing huge numbers of civilians is not, it's obviously morally wrong, but it's also just not in their strategic interest, right?

I mean, because it's not going to buy them anything.

And in fact, it's going to cost them because people all over the planet are turning against Israel.

I saw an Israeli think tank today that has been tracking protests around the world, gave some figures for what it looked like between October 7th and October 13th in terms of the number of

protests around the world that were pro-Israel versus pro-Palestine.

And then it looked at the numbers from October 13th up to the present.

And I think the numbers were 69% were pro-Palestinian in the first six days after October 7th, 69%.

And I think 31%, take these numbers with a grain of salt, 31% were pro-Israel.