In this Judging Freedom episode, Max Blumenthal discusses the fragile Gaza ceasefire, calling it a temporary pause after two years of devastation. He blames Biden for ignoring a 2024 peace proposal and praises Trump for finally forcing a deal driven by personal ambition. Blumenthal reveals Hamas’s role in maintaining order, Israel’s reliance on armed proxies, and Netanyahu’s political weakness amid public anger. He warns that Israel may soon resume attacks once hostages are released, as Trump’s “victory” masks continuing instability and suffering in Gaza. The conversation exposes U.S. complicity, political hypocrisy, and the war’s human cost.
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Judging Freedom Podcast
Streamed live on October 13, 2025
NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, October 13, 2025. My dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thank you very much. Max, what is your take on the events in Tel Aviv today?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, there’s too much to say in 30 minutes, but I’m actually just after two years of continuous genocide and what we witnessed. I’m actually stunned that it may be coming to an end, but I’ve become cynical. We witnessed several pauses over this period and I think this may just be another pause between wars. I think that it’s very fair to say though that this and it’s what I’ve been saying on your show on our live streams at the Greyzone for the past two years is that this could have all been stopped with one phone call. Finally, the phone call arrived and the will from the Trump administration came as Trump became obsessed with his legacy and obsessed with obtaining the Nobel Prize. And he provided instructions to Steve Wickoff and sent his son-in-law from seemingly out of the wilderness who has a clear stake in some real estate in the neighborhood to make this deal happen. And the US finally demonstrated some flexibility in forcing both sides to get to a yes without having all terms immediately agreed upon.
But the reality is that Hamas had always been flexible. And this isn’t just me saying that. This is a veteran Israeli peace processor from the sort of liberal peace camp who had emerged as a back channel in 2024 between the various factions Hamas, the US, Israel. His name is Gershon Baskin. I’ve interacted with him for years and I always considered him to be sort of someone who hyped himself up as more important than he was. But it turned out he actually had real access to what was taking place. And what Baskin has said, and he wrote this in the Times of Israel recently, is that in September 2024, the same deal that was just made, but tens of thousands of lives lost later was on the table. And it was not only on the table. Every side was ready to commit to it except the Biden administration wasn’t pushing Netanyahu or Israel. Why? What else was happening in September 2024? That’s when Israel began its campaign to maul Hezbollah, to begin to assassinate all of its leadership, to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah as he was negotiating a ceasefire as he was working on negotiating a cessation of conflict in the south of Lebanon and they killed him. And the Biden administration, the people around Biden, especially Brett McGurk, who today is working for the Saudis through in a series of Saudi arms industry linked tech firms. Brett McGurk became so enthralled with the idea of destroying Hezbollah along with Amos Hochstein, the Israeli-born negotiator for Lebanon for Biden, that Biden sat around and did nothing. This is also corroborated by Kamala Harris’s own memoir where she said that every time she would bring up the concept of a ceasefire, Biden would say, “Well, I’m a Zionist and then he would proceed to ship more 2,000 pound weapons to Israel.” So, this could have all been done by Biden. Tony Blinken could have had these Israeli PS and captives who are now being released on the White House lawn. Biden could have vied for the Nobel Prize, but he chose not to. Tens of thousands were murdered. Hundreds are being pulled from the rubble every day that we didn’t even know were dead. Gaza is 83% destroyed. And so this is the actually the legacy of Biden’s this is Biden’s failure. And Donald Trump has gotten the quote unquote win after several betrayals of the peace negotiators of his own. So again, my feeling today is anger, bitterness, sorrow because this could have all been ended a long time ago and many of the Israeli captives in Gaza who were killed in mostly Israeli air strikes would still be alive as well.
NAPOLITANO: How soon before the IDF resumes bombing?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, right now what they’re doing is they’ve activated their proxies in Gaza. Israel has armed and is protecting behind the so-called 53% line of Israeli control a series of ISIS linked gangs and collaborator families specifically Yasser Abu Shabab and his gang who— Yasser Abu Shabab who somehow got a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a feature in Bari Weiss‘s Free Press and is just a local gangster whose main achievement was looting all the aid that was coming into Gaza and making sure that it was sold back at extremely high prices to the starving population. They’re now in firefights block-to-block against Hamas and they have killed notable people in just the last 48 hours across Gaza as well as the Doghmush family, a notorious gun running family in Gaza who has collaborated with Israel. And this is being used by the pro-Israel press in the US to paint Hamas as some kind of vicious band of killers because they’re actually trying to clean up what’s left of their own society. Donald Trump on Air Force One was asked about this and he said, “Actually, we’ve given Hamas the leverage and the latitude to start restoring stability in Gaza.” He actually let one slip. You’re not supposed to say that. And what’s happening now is that aid is actually getting through. The trickle of aid that’s coming in is actually getting through because the bandits that looted it throughout the last two years are no longer present. Let’s be clear, these were Israeli-backed bandits and their job was to prevent the aid from getting in. And they were promoted by all of the Israeli intelligence collaborators in our own society. How soon will it begin? Well, I’ve seen instructions that came out in Telegram channels in Hebrew for Israeli soldiers who are guarding the 53% line and behind there closer to the Gaza frontier with Israel. And they’ve been told that if you see anyone approaching from Gaza, shoot near them, but don’t shoot them. We need to wait until the hostages come out. Once the hostages are out, then we can fire at will on anyone inside Gaza. So I think once Hamas gives up its leverage, as it has been forced to do, we will see more Israeli violence directed against the population in Gaza. We will see more Israeli efforts to push Hamas into confrontation. And I think that there’s another element here, which is Netanyahu’s own political future.
NAPOLITANO: Here’s the comment that you talked about where Trump says– I think this is on Air Force One. He approved Hamas as a police force in Gaza. Chris, cut number 10.
I’m sure you’ve seen reports of Hamas rearming instituting themselves as a Palestinian police force take, shooting rivals.
TRUMP: What does they are standing because they do want to stop the problems and they’ve been open about it and we gave them approval for a period of time. You have to understand they’ve lost probably 60,000 people. That’s a lot of retribution. They’ve lost 60,000 people and the ones that are living right now were in many cases very young when this all started and we are having them watch that there’s not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished. You know, you have two million people and probably it’ll be less than that, but you have close to two million people going back to buildings that have been demolished and a lot of bad things can happen. So, we want it to be… we want it to be safe. I think it’s going to be fine.
REPORTER: Mr. President…
TRUMP: Who knows for sure, Katie, but I think it’s going to be fine.
NAPOLITANO: Does this mean that Hamas is going to be performing official governmental functions in Gaza with the express consent of the United States government?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, first of all, they always have been throughout the genocide doing all they can to maintain municipal functions and to police the streets and to maintain order. That was the point of the Israeli-backed gangs — to show that Hamas can’t maintain order and that they need to be replaced. It’s also important to mention that on October 7th, 2023, Hamas actually declared its intention to give up governmental control of Gaza and to have a technocratic government replace it. Their red line is their ability to maintain self-defense capacity, to maintain their weapons. They will not give up their weapons.
And so what they wanted was perhaps a government of unity with someone like Marwan Barghouti, who’s been languishing in Israeli prisons for 20 years, at the top with people from Fatah, supporters of Hamas — all in a unity government playing a technocratic role in just maintaining the government, with Hamas kind of in the shadows making sure that Israel couldn’t reinvade or resettle the Gaza Strip. But because of the refusal of Israel and the Trump administration to support a unity government, and Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas now refusing to release Marwan Barghouti, the only popular unifying figure outside Hamas and Fatah, Hamas is basically left holding the bag of maintaining the rubble of Gaza — and they’re doing a very efficient job of it.
Having been in Gaza twice, I saw them doing a pretty efficient job of maintaining order in this walled-off ghetto. And they are also doing so amid a policy of ambiguity about their arms, which is a major, catastrophic defeat for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had promised his constituency total victory. There is no total victory for Netanyahu. You can see a sort of icy rapport between him and Donald Trump at the bizarre festivities today in Jerusalem.
NAPOLITANO: Here’s Trump going off text — one war criminal asking another war criminal to pardon a third war criminal. Cut number 11.
TRUMP: He’s got 60 billion in the bank. Sixty billion and she loves… hey, I have an idea, Mr. President. Why don’t you give him a pardon?
By the way, that was not in the speech, as you probably know, but I happen to like this gentleman right over here, and it just seems to make so much sense. You know, whether we like it or not, this has been one of the greatest wartime presidents. This has been one of the greatest wartime presidents. And cigars and champagne — who the hell cares about?
NAPOLITANO: Of course, he referred to Netanyahu as the president, and we know he’s the prime minister. The cigars and champagne were worth $139,000. I don’t know — does Herzog have the ability to pardon Netanyahu?
BLUMENTHAL: It would be absurd. He would be overriding the entire court system. But what a revealing exchange there on so many levels.
First, pointing to Miriam Adelson, who’s Donald Trump’s top American donor, but she’s in Israel kind of engineering the entire ceremony. He mentions that it was because of her and her husband that the US moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which was a major provocation — which I believe actually helped pave the way for October 7th and put more pressure on the Al-Aqsa compound. Remember, the October 7th operation from the Hamas side was called Al-Aqsa Flood.
He then turns to Miriam Adelson, asks her does she love Israel more than the US or the US more than Israel, and she wouldn’t answer. And I think we all know what the answer is. So he calls her an Israel-first. Trump actually seems to understand the absurdity of the entire moment. And then he mocks the idea of $140,000 in gifts to Netanyahu because look at what the Trump administration is doing. I mean, its golden age– is basically a Zionist gilded age — or we could say gilded age — for the techno-feudalist elite that are basically paying him off.
And you have FBI agents walking in and handing bags of cash to his henchmen like Tom Homan, and they’re taking it for bribes. So for Trump, this is just business as usual. But the real takeaway here is that Netanyahu does need a pardon, because now that the war is over, his political future is threatened. His coalition could come apart.
Recall that just two days ago, during the almost equally bizarre scene of two of Trump’s real estate associates — one of whom was his son-in-law, whose father was a big investor in Trump Incorporated — Charles Kushner and Steve Wickoff. When Wickoff mentioned Netanyahu before a crowd, a more grassroots crowd in Tel Aviv, there was nothing but boos. They hate Netanyahu. Netanyahu is unpopular. He commands the largest constituency of any political figure in Israel, but it’s a small constituency, and he’s hated.
And the hostage families consider him to be not just a hypocrite, but someone who betrayed them and who refused to make a deal again and again. So he needs a pardon so that he can actually relinquish power at some point. Otherwise, he’s going to have to start another crazy war. Netanyahu needs a regional war right now in order to hold together the coalition.
And you could see seated to his left was Itamar Ben-Gvir. I mean, this is a guy who has one seat for his party, Otzma Yehudit — maybe two seats — that’s it. And he’s been holding the whole thing together.
NAPOLITANO: Yeah. I want to play a cut from November 29th, 2023, where a young man on this show predicted much of what you just said now.
NAPOLITANO: Can the Biden administration exert enough pressure on Netanyahu to get him to stop the ethnic cleansing once the ceasefire is over on Friday?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, the Biden administration could end the occupation of Palestine tomorrow. They could have a Palestinian state while we’re doing this live stream. All they have to do is say, “No more spare parts for your F-16s, no more F-35s, and it’s over.” Because Israel depends — its occupation depends — entirely on its direct line to Washington.
NAPOLITANO: Imagine that Biden was actually worse than Trump — that Biden could have stopped this then, with the same deal on the table that was accepted last week.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. I mean that just goes back to what I said at the beginning of our conversation, sourcing Gershon Baskin’s back-channel remarks. But this was something any observer could have clearly known. And I identified the main reason why the Biden administration didn’t want to do this as ideological.
There were also careerist reasons. Look at Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, who day after day — I mean, I was clashing with him literally on October 8th — day after day, lying about the atrocities in Gaza, telling the world that Israel has the right to defend itself and that it’s always Hamas’s fault whenever a ceasefire is abrogated or when a deal can’t be made. And as soon as he gets out of government and starts going on the podcast circuit, he admits that it was Netanyahu every time that would move the goalposts and break the deal.
What he can’t say is that the Biden administration didn’t force Netanyahu back to the table and also refused to destroy his government. I mean, Netanyahu has been an enemy of the Democrats for his entire career, and they’ve always been afraid to shatter his coalition. They could have broken up his coalition if they wanted to, but their concern was always for the stability of Israeli politics and society. And so, they kept him in power. They empowered him. They armed him. And they made sure that he could escalate all the way to starting an unprovoked war with Iran that dragged the U.S. into the conflict.
So now you have Tony Blinken — there’s so much gaslighting going on today, and it’s so disgusting. It fills me with rage. You have Tony Blinken on Twitter posing as though he actually was never in government and he’s just happy to see a deal. And then you have the Israelis and all of their propagandists telling us that actually the Israeli public wants peace. Jared Kushner praised them for showing that they would never stoop to the level of their enemies.
We never saw them stoop to the level of their enemies. We saw them stoop to the level of Satan for the last two years. Eighty-three percent of Gaza’s destroyed. Hundreds of thousands may be dead. We don’t even know how many are dead. I have lost track of how many massacres Israel committed.
Do we even remember when they bombed the Nasser Hospital three weeks ago, slaughtering journalists in a double-tap strike?
NAPOLITANO: Right.
BLUMENTHAL: They slaughtered — so everyone, virtually everyone I know in Gaza was killed or had their homes destroyed. Do we even remember November 2023, the Maghazi Camp massacre? Who remembers that? Israel dropped three 200,000-pound bombs in the middle of a refugee camp, slaughtered over 250 people, and it turned out there was no target there. And Netanyahu chalks it up to a tragic mishap.
Do we remember when they slaughtered 300 people in a market in the Nuseirat Camp to rescue four captives and wounded over 500 people? I mean, it just goes on and on and on, and we’re supposed to forget.
And look at these scenes of Israelis supposedly celebrating a ceasefire just because they’re getting a few Jewish lives out of Gaza — most of whom happened to have been, on October 7th, de facto concentration camp guards, active duty soldiers in the Israeli military — who are being treated so much better than the tormented Palestinian prisoners that we see come out.
One of them, Nimrod Cohen, he was a tank gunner who was pulled out of his tank. Hamas let him call his mom today on his way out. All right. Now, take a look at what’s happening to the Palestinian prisoners who are being marched out of their prisons, Bukele-style, with their hands tied behind their backs, pushed down, humiliated, then thrown into buses in sweatsuits.
The filming, by the way, is in complete violation of the deal. So, it’s just so hard to ignore all the gaslighting and to not be extremely angry about what’s happening now. You have this nation that claims to embody the legacy of the Holocaust telling us not only to forget — do forget, not never forget — but that this must happen again.
NAPOLITANO: Chris, play the Israeli hostage reacting very uniquely in the presence of his captors at the moment of his release.
Year 49. Yes, we continue with you. A total of 24 prisoners have been successfully handed over, and importantly, they all remain alive and well. One prisoner remains, bringing the total to 25. It is expected that the process of handing over the bodies of four Israelis will also be completed in the coming days.
NAPOLITANO: That was a young Israeli kissing his captors. Do you know who this is and why that happened?
BLUMENTHAL: I don’t, but I can assume why it happened, which is that Hamas, or the Al-Qassam Brigades, assigned each captive with guards who wound up functioning as their protectors throughout the war to keep them alive. And they did forge relationships with them on some level. Some of them actually became friendly; others, you know, it was icy, but they wound up protecting them from Israeli air strikes.
There was actually an instance — I mentioned the operation that killed almost 300 Palestinians in the Nuseirat Camp. That was to rescue Noa Argamani, who herself had been rescued by her Al-Qassam guards, who threw mattresses over her to protect her while their own bodies were exposed during an Israeli air strike.
NAPOLITANO: This fellow’s name, Chris just sent to me, is Omer Shem Tov. I don’t know if the name means anything to you.
BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. Well, we haven’t heard that much from him since he’s been out, but this was an embarrassing scene for Israelis in general, and there have been other scenes. One of the first hostages released was an old woman from a kibbutz. She was released in, I think, early November 2023, and she shook hands with her captors and said, “Shalom.” And it was at that point that Israel began to demonstrate real hostility toward these kinds of exchanges.
So look at the contrast between who is coming out of Israeli prisons and who’s coming out of Gaza and the condition that they’re in. And you can tell very clearly about the value that was placed on these lives. The Palestinian prisoners come out emaciated. Many of them have not shaven in months; their hair is matted. They still have wounds from handcuffs and beatings. They’ve been subjected to torture, including anal rape, which has been well documented.
And all we hear is propaganda still about October 7th and mass rape. But it was very clear Hamas had no reason to want these captives harmed because that was the only collateral they had. From a political point of view, it’s all the leverage they have now. They’re going to give up the leverage, and we will see what will happen. But I think that that becomes a really perilous moment where Israel could restart the war.
It does matter, by the way, that Trump didn’t get the Nobel Prize, because he still wants affirmation. And it’s really up to Trump once again to hold Israel’s feet to the fire — and he hasn’t done that in the past, and especially after thanking Miriam Adelson. I fear the worst.
NAPOLITANO: Max, thank you very much. I have to jump off and get on to another interview, but I deeply appreciate your time. All the best to you. We look forward to seeing you next week.
BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Judge.
NAPOLITANO: Thank you, Max, so much.
