🇮🇱🇺🇸 One of the more heated debates the show has hosted, Cenk Uygur and Yishai Fleisher went head to head over whether the U.S. should keep backing Israel at all.
Fleisher, an Israeli rabbi and spokesperson who lives in the West Bank, framed Israel's expansion as defensive and historic:
"Judea and Samaria is ancestral indigenous Jewish land. It's ours. It's going to be ours."
On U.S. aid, he argued the number is smaller than it looks and flows back into American companies anyway, and said he'd support ending it:
"It's $3 billion, which is pennies in terms of American government spending, and it goes right back into American companies. I myself would like to see the end of that assistance, I want Israel to be independent."
Cenk, founder of The Young Turks, argued the relationship has cost the U.S. far more than the aid figure suggests:
"We've spent $8 trillion in wars for them, and now we're out of missiles, not just for this war, throughout the world. What we should do is decouple in every way, not give them another dollar, and go back to the 1967 borders."
On the territorial expansion itself, his read was blunt:
"Nobody attacked you from the West Bank, and you're carving it up as we speak. It's a settler colony that keeps expanding by importing people from other parts of the world."
Two sides that clearly aren't converging on where this ends. Where do you land, decoupling or standing firm?
Thank you both @cenkuygur & @YishaiFleisher
