PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: How Israel sells militarism at home and abroad
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
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Jennifer Cutler
Welcome to the +972 Podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Jennifer Cutler, Podcast Producer at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
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Jennifer Cutler
In June 2025, the Israeli Ministry of Defense published a press release — in English — announcing that Israel had broken its own defense export record for the fourth consecutive year.
Defense Minister Israel Katz called it “a direct result of the successes of the IDF and defense industries against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, [and] the Ayatollah regime in Iran”.
War, in other words, is the sales pitch. And business is good.
But behind the rhetoric is a system. That shapes not just weapons but ideas.
To discuss … Today I am in Jerusalem with Sahar Vardi, an Israeli researcher and anti-militarist activist and co-founder of DIMSE — the Database of Israeli Military and Security Export.
Thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Sahar Vardi
Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Cutler
So Israel is at war, again, and living here, even as the missiles fly over our heads, this has begun to feel almost normal.
You get used to the sirens, you get used to seeing the off-duty soldiers in flip-flops with M-16s slung across their backs and you feel the extent to which Israeli society is militarized. Something that is noticeable even in so called peacetime. And I do want to mention that this militarization is not experienced equally. It looks very different depending on who you are and what ID you have. But as an Israeli who has spent years studying this phenomenon, how would you characterize what it means to live in a militarized society? And what are you seeing right now through this framework that most people around you are not?
Sahar Vardi
As you said, Israel is extremely highly militarized. With the exception of Ukraine, and up until five or six years ago, Israel every year was always, by all the rankings, the most militarized. And it’s interesting to ask, how is that even measured? What does that mean, the most militarized? Part of it is obviously conscription, that’s a huge part of it. Part of it is how much is militarism part of culture, of education systems, of the entire kind of way in which the political system functions, the economic system functions; military industries are also part of this. Part of it is just a question, literally, they count how many tanks per person, right?
All kinds of different ways of saying what is a very militarized society, and in all of those, Israel just ranks extremely high. Now I think we can, you know, calculate missiles per capita and get a pretty high ranking on that. But I think that, as you said, how that affects people or how it’s normalized is very, very different depending on who you are. For me as an Israeli growing up here, the idea of seeing soldiers in flip-flops, as you said before, with their M-16s walking around the street is something that we see before we know how to speak, right? Like kids walk out the street at the age of two, and they don’t have words for things yet, but they see the world around them, and then they see guns, and they see soldiers, and they see, once they learn how to read and write, they see street signs.
If I take the names of the streets of the neighborhood that I live in now, half of them are names of military operations. A lot of these military operations are military operations from ‘48, and so actually, it speaks about the displacement of Palestinians and that’s what that street sign says. For Israelis, it says, “Look of victory, Independence Day,” and for Palestinians it’s, “Look at what created the Nakba.” It’s a constant reminder, not only of militarism and its “victories” for Israelis, but also the price for Palestinians.
I think on a much more daily basis, if we think about just those guns on the streets, just the soldiers walking around, as Israelis, we are educated or kind of told that those are there to protect us and we’re supposed to feel safe when we see guns on the street. While a lot of us can criticize that, for the most part, that is how our mind is constructed. But the exact same weapon on the street, for a Palestinian seeing it, tells a different message. It tells them you are supposed to be afraid. This weapon is there to control you and that’s an invisible message that just walks down the street every day. It’s a message to me that says, “This protects you, and also there’s something to protect you from.” It’s a reminder of threat, and for a Palestinian, it is, “You are being controlled, and your life can be taken at any moment by all these people with guns on the street.” That’s before war, before any form of anything actually happening, just the kind of status quo, the normal.
Jennifer Cutler
In arms marketing, combat proven is a standard term. But the quote I read at the beginning from Israel Katz is naming ongoing wars as part of this marketing concept. What does combat proven mean in this context?
Sahar Vardi
The concept of combat proven or battle proven that we see literally stamped on products — I mean, this was a nice quote of the Minister of Defense — but I remember going to military expos and you have like a poster of some drone, an Elbit system, Hermes 450 drone, whatever, and it literally has a stamp on it saying battle proven. That is literally the sales pitch. It’s not even some theoretical press release.
First of all, there is an idea in the world, and we can talk about how that narrative was created, but there’s an idea in the world that the Israeli military is a good one. Not good in moral senses, but in practical terms.
Jennifer Cutler
Effective.
Sahar Vardi
Yes, effective. There is that concept in the world. That in some ways means that when the Israeli military chooses to use a specific weapon, it must be good. It must be effective. Because otherwise why would a military that knows what it’s doing use it? So that’s already a sales point in and of its own. Now, there is quite a lot of technical criticism of that, of saying, “What battlefield?” When Israel tests a new system in Gaza that has no air defense system, zero any aerial capabilities, their military capabilities to begin with are nothing to be compared even close to any modern military of an actual state, for obvious reasons. What are you testing that weapon towards, right?
Jennifer Cutler
So how did the Israeli military get this reputation for being so uniquely effective?
Sahar Vardi
It’s a great question of asking how, why is it that people see it as so, as you said, effective? Part of it is that I think in many ways, the more militarized the state is, the more you just see its military. You see it everywhere and that’s already a marketing tool. That’s already something that says, “Well, if it’s everywhere and it looks the way that it does, then great. It must be doing something.”
The other aspect of it is that Israel in one way or another has been in combat, or the Israeli military has been in combat since its creation to this day — nonstop. There was not a single moment in which there was not combat involved. Most of that combat is ongoing occupation, which we can, again, from a military perspective, ask, is it even military? It’s policing — it’s not actually military activity in many ways, right? You’re controlling a civilian population. That is not an actual military activity; that is not a battlefield. But the way that the world sees it and looks at it says the military has been active every single day since its creation, that’s got to count for something, and gone through quite a lot of wars, many of which it was unclear if this military will come out victorious from, and has.
Obviously this is more true historically, right? ‘67, ‘73, I mean victorious is a big word for that, but still, those kind of showed Israel as a small military that relatively to its size manages to take on larger militaries, and that built a narrative. Then you continue using it, you continue using the military, but also with years, I think we need to understand that this became a much more global system. If we look in the 80s and 90s, and definitely today, what happens with military systems is they are global industries in which both militaries and private industries train each other, give each other equipment, trade it around the world, and so Israeli weapons and the Israeli military industry is not only battle proven here, It’s battle-proven around the world.
I also want to say, Israel has had the advantage that over the last 40 years — 30, 40 years — all of its combat has been against countries with clearly inferior — or not countries, for the most part, against bodies — with clearly inferior military abilities. Most of what Israeli military does is occupation and ethnic cleansing, now genocide against Palestinians with no standing military. When it’s not that, it’s Hezbollah in Lebanon. It’s mostly militias, right?
This is the first time in, again, 40 years almost, right? Since Jordan and Egypt, that Israel is actually fighting a country with a standing military. That’s a very low bar of war, right? But this is the first time that’s happening and people are dying in the streets of Arad and we forgot to think about what war looks like, what war actually is, because we’ve been so focused on an occupation.
Jennifer Cutler
We saw that after 9/11, there was a big global expansion in the demand for the type of toolkit that Israel developed through, as you said, the occupation, meaning crowd control, border surveillance, counterterrorism, all of these things. What is Israel offering in this market that other countries don’t?
Sahar Vardi
Counterinsurgency is the thing, was the thing, in warfare up until five years ago, right? In many ways, the Ukraine war changed a lot of that. But with the exception of that, most of the combat that we’ve seen, most of the warfare that we’ve seen for decades now, has been what’s called counterinsurgency, has been against terrorist organizations or drugs or all these conceptual wars, right? War on terror, war on drugs, war on immigration. Conceptual wars require a very different kind of fighting. They don’t require heavy tanks and they don’t require heavy artillery in the same way. They require control of a civilian population. They require much more surveillance. They require much more policing. They require much more techniques that have to do with just, you need the entire population to feel constantly controlled because insurgency comes from everywhere by definition.
That is what the occupation is. This is exactly what Israel has been doing for decades and developed all the tools and techniques, and a lot of it, again, is far less weaponry. It’s far less the technology involved as much as the paradigms of fighting, and in that sense, Israel doesn’t only export a lot of arms, it exports a lot of training, because a lot of it is about training. I think it’s important to also think about it’s not just training of controlling a civilian population. It’s also training on how to do it, and on how to do it today in an era where everyone has a camera and everything’s going to be documented, like there’s a lot of things that happen there as well.
One of the good examples I think is the Beijing Olympics. This was a while ago already, but in the Beijing Olympics, while China displaced about a million people to build all the stadiums for the Olympics, there was a training with Israeli border police of Chinese police. For me, that was a question: Chinese police know how to control a population. Again, it is able to displace a million people. Israel would not have been able to displace a million people in that way. They have their own systems of oppression. They do not need us to learn how to do that.
But it was a question, why would they? And one, again, this is a theory, but one of the things that was kind of talked about in that context is that because of the Olympics, they needed not only to displace a million people, they needed to displace a million people when the cameras of the world are on them. That’s a different thing than just normally displacing a million people, what they would do for building a dam, right? Which has happened also in other situations.
So that’s also a tactic that you need to learn, right? Israel, in that sense, is very good at training the militaries and police forces of countries who see themselves in the same way, because that’s the bloc that needs those kinds of tools to control the populations. One that doesn’t look as bad or that can be justified in a specific way. That’s another angle or another “added value,” of Israeli training that you might not have with Chinese training, just from that example.
Jennifer Cutler
So at this point, is there a meaningful distinction between selling arms and selling the doctrine behind it?
Sahar Vardi
I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction. The fact is that once you start using a tool, then it becomes part of your thinking, and the other way around. You start thinking in that way, you develop tools that fit that thinking, and that’s always the kind of relationship that humans have with technology, generally. But it’s also the relationship that militaries have with technology. The export-import part of that is just a global system feeding each other.
You do have the examples of, for instance, in 2014, well just before, the Ferguson protests were happening. Israeli border police trained with St. Louis police. Then Ferguson happens, and there’s mass protests, and the response of the police force is, we need to control a population. They were just trained by Israeli border police, the unit that was created to control Palestinian civilian population, or in military terms, the enemy civilian population. That is what they are there to do, to control the enemy civilian population.
Again, the U.S. police do not need Israel to be racist and militarized — it has been far before the Israeli state existed. These trainings are not a country telling another country, “This is how you oppress, now you become an oppressor.” Its systems of oppression exchanging how to do this better. It comes with technical tools, but it also comes with an ideology. This is how you do it. For me, one of the examples of that was after the Borough Market shooting in the UK, this was also over a decade ago now. But there was a training of UK police, London police, with Israeli police. Again, we don’t know what happens in those trainings themselves.
But the spokesperson of the Israeli police after it said, “What we train them on is to make sure that next time it won’t take so long, eight minutes, for the terrorists to be neutralized, to be killed.” Now, thinking about UK police — that is for the most part unarmed police — that is the reason that it took eight minutes, because most police and most definitely most people on the street do not have guns, which also makes the UK a country with very few gun murders per year, surprisingly, because people don’t have guns. There’s a lot of advantages of not having guns in society that probably saves way more lives than that one incident taking eight minutes.
But when the Israeli police come in, and say, “Next time won’t take eight minutes because here it takes 30 seconds on average,” what could they possibly be training people of, right? It is about pushing more guns on the street. There’s no other way of doing that. That is what the Israeli tactic and knowledge of how to do things is, is push more guns to the street without ever asking, “What is the cost of that?” It’s not being asked here. Nobody asks, “What is the cost now of pushing literally hundreds of thousands of guns — there’s 300,000 new gun permits into the street?” Right?
What does that do to domestic violence? I’m not just talking about people who are killed at home with guns, but just threatened by the fact that there is a gun in the home, right, what about that? What about suicides? We have seen that here already — because having a gun next to you makes it easier and you’re already in a ridiculously stressful situation. What about accidents, which again we’ve already seen here, people killing their friends accidentally because they’re playing with guns? None of that is at all in any way part of the discourse.
The only thing that matters is militarized security. It also makes us think that there are no other forms of security in the world. The military industrial complex is built on this idea that you start developing weapons, and then you develop better ones, and better ones, and better ones. This is all just technology-based; this is all just the development. But then an ideology comes in that says, “This is how we protect ourselves, by having the better ones. Then the other side will also have the better ones, that’s actually good for us, because then a war remains a cold war, right? That’s what we need. We need everyone to increase militarization and that’s how wars actually don’t happen.”
There was an entire paradigm around that concept, right? That is the reason that Israel — according to foreign sources — has nuclear weapons, right? The reason that Iran is even talking about that is that historical paradigm of saying, “If we all have these weapons, we won’t be able to kill each other. We will have better weapons and kill more people.” But that was already that game between technology and ideology and how they just build on each other. Now we’re at a whole other level of it.
Jennifer Cutler
So since October 2023, Spain, Slovenia, the UK, and others have suspended or restricted arms sales. Last July, 12 countries committed to a full embargo at a summit of the Hague Group in Bogota. But defense exports keep rising, and it seems like governments are telling their public one thing, but the data proves another thing. How is that happening?
Sahar Vardi
There’s two main ways in which countries bypass what they’re stating. First of all, most countries, what they declare and have declared during the genocide is, “We will not sell arms to Israel,” which is very one side of that picture. What they don’t say as much is, “We will not buy arms from Israel.” It’s an easier sell to make, saying, “Well we don’t want the missiles that are manufactured here in this country to go and be part of genocide.” That’s easy for people in their minds.
But then if that other country during genocide is developing and creating more weapons and selling them to you, then that revenue that you are giving them is funding that. What else is it funding, right? That’s what allows that to happen. So that’s, first of all, one thing. There are countries who understood that as well, and civil society who pushed to understand that as well. Let’s be clear, this is all very much activist-based and none of it is what governments think is the right thing to do. So they pushed to also cut sales from Israel and buying Israeli arms.
You have countries like Spain that did do that and said and even canceled a deal that they already had for spike missiles. Then magically, a few months later, Spain is signing a contract with a German company, nothing to do with Israel, that happens to be called Eurospike, nothing to do with a spike. It builds missiles that are called Eurospike, that are exactly the Israeli spike just in its European edition, and are made by a German company. 20% of that project is still owned by the Israeli company that creates the spike; all the technology is coming from that, and all the development is coming from that, and 20% of the money is going back to there, but you’re not buying from Israel, you’re buying from Europe.
This doesn’t only have to do with the pressure about not wanting to be complicit in genocide from Spanish civil society, it also has to do with the fact that it is better economically for Spain to be buying this from a German company because you’re within the EU system. The taxation is much better, all the investment, and there are now a lot of EU policies that have to do with increasing EU militarization because of the Ukraine war that reward in different ways — if it’s investment, different interests. rates, and so on — increasing militarization, purchasing weapons in Europe from the European group, the European bloc.
So for Spain, this is a win-win, right? For Spain, this is going to be better economically and nobody’s going to notice — I get to say, “I’m not buying weapons from Israel,” but I still get the same product. The fact that they want the same product enough to cancel a contract and then do that contract again, just in a different way, also tells you something. I think it’s important because 54% of Israeli arms exports now are to the EU. Within that context, where you see rises, spikes in the stocks of Israeli military companies, like Elbit Systems, is not when there’s another military operation here, not because something happened during the genocide, not even with Iran.
The real spikes are when Trump forced NATO countries into increasing their military spending to 5% of their GDP, or when that investment policy came in from the EU itself, saying, “There will be economic benefits for European countries when there’s more investment from their side on military spendings.” That’s when Elbit Systems stocks go up, because everybody knows what that means. It’s important for me to say that because when we think about the activists in Europe calling to cut any form of military relationship with Israel, we also need to be thinking about decreasing militarization in Europe, you can’t disconnect the two. It’s just not going to work. You can’t demilitarize or forcibly try to demilitarize one place when there’s so much demand for this.
Jennifer Cutler
I think the economic piece of this is really interesting and something that’s not talked about enough, because Israeli military expenditure is a state expense, but there’s a private profit. The Ministry of Defense is bragging about sales, but I have to ask, who’s actually profiting from the success of the Israeli arms industry?
Sahar Vardi
The Israeli military industry is today, for the most part, privatized but not completely. One of the big three companies — Israel Aerospace Industries — is still not privatized. It is extremely politicized: there’s a lot of connections between the Likud and the industry. It’s very politicized, but it’s not privatized yet, which means that while there’s a lot of people and executives there who make a lot of money in bonuses and things like that, most of the revenue is still in a way state revenue, right? We can also say that goes directly back to genocide in its own way.
But the other two are already privatized. One was privatized, Rafael — half privatized — and the second one, Elbit, is private, and most of the other companies are all private. Today, the majority of the market here is private, which means that if we see a huge increase in sales, it’s like any other private industry, right? There’s a lot of people making a lot of money. There is a tax revenue that comes in from that. We need to say it. There is a tax revenue that comes in, but that tax revenue is never going to come close to NIS 39 billion in 40 days, which is the estimate for how long and how much this will cost, right? It’s never going to come close to the public expense of war. The income from war is always going to be for the most part private and for a few people and never going to come close to the numbers of the public expenses on war.
Then also we talk about stocks, right? A lot of these companies are publicly traded. When we talk about who profits from it, investors profit from it. Just a month ago or so, the Tel Aviv stock market issued like a new stockpile — a new really attractive combination of stocks that is the security industry. There’s an index, a security index now that you can invest in that specifically. That is exactly the companies that are profiting now and going way up now, right? Theoretically, anyone can profit from it now, but we know how the stock market works, right? It means rich people get to invest and make their money even more. That is a layer of private profit directly — plus from investment — and what it comes from is all public expenses. That just feeds into where we are as a society generally, right? Israeli society is time and time again in the top ones within the OECD of inequality.
Jennifer Cutler
Yeah, in the top five, Israel is number five. The U.S. is number one. But in Israel, this actually wasn’t always the case, Israel was one of the most equal countries in the world in the early 80s.
Sahar Vardi
That’s exactly it. Israel started privatizing to the level that we know it in the mid 80s onwards and today is at that level. Exactly what that means? Those crazy gaps: a health system that used to be really good and today still is, relative to a lot of other places, (again I’m speaking to a person who’s a U.S. citizen so we’re not as bad) but it is not getting the budgets that it needs.
The entire welfare system, we see it especially budgets for social workers. We see it in what used to be a kind of social security. That net of support for people is nowhere close to where it used to be. That is not just because there isn’t enough money, it is because we keep spending it on other things. We talk about right-wing governments — they’re right-wing all the way, right? They’re also right-wing, saying, “We should not have welfare.” That’s the reason that the biggest union in this country, the Histadrut, actually went out and called for a strike during the protests of the [judicial] overhaul. They don’t care about traditional right or left in the context of human rights or Palestinians or anything of the sort, obviously. They also don’t care about the judicial system so much. They cared about the fact that this right-wing government is all the way to the right, including crushing unions.
But then you add to that an expensive war. If you just look at the priorities of the country right now, we are spending, we, as if it’s me, we are spending between NIS 1-1.6 billion a day on just the military, on this war with Iran. On the interceptors, on bombing Iran, on the flights there, all of these things.
The city of Ashkelon, right, has been asking and needing to fight for NIS 40 million for shelters, right? I mean, Arad and Dimona are also very good examples of that just now, the missiles there. The budget for sheltering doesn’t come through. Definitely not as fast. Definitely not in those numbers.
How is that security? Even in just that very narrow idea of what security is, security is not actually the priority. Not actually — that which allows people to live. Then, if we think about what’s gonna happen at the end of this round, right, when Israel has spent the NIS 39 billion that the military has requested for this operation. Okay, NIS 39 billion. What happens to Israel’s economy the day after? For much, much smaller numbers of the first two and a half years of the genocide, we’ve seen public transport prices rise by 64%, we’ve seen the healthcare system struggling, we’ve seen social workers not being able to get new positions, we’ve seen the welfare system falling apart, and a huge deficit.
The prices of food — of everything that we pay — just go up with salaries not. Now, every time there’s another round, people are being sent off — not fired, put on leave, but unpaid leave — so people, actually, their daily security, their ability to finish the month, the ability to know I’ll be able to pay rent, and that if I need it, there’ll be a hospital that’ll be able to see me in a reasonable period of time and treat me, and that there’ll be enough beds in the hospital, and that if I am unemployed, the money that I will get from the state will be enough to see me through these very, very basic things that are about security, are not part of our discourse at all.
Every operation like this gets us so much further from them, and yet we’re willing to pay that price.That is a very concrete price. Again, not only in the lives of Iranians, right, that close to 2,000 have been killed, not only in the lives of people in Lebanon, that we’re also talking about hundreds of kills and probably going to get to thousands, not only of the people here in this country who have been killed, and it’s not just killed, it’s injured, its houses demolished, destroyed — infrastructure. The environmental aspect of this, we’re not even starting to talk about it, but this is an energy war. The way that it is fought is, among other things, by bombing energy sources. The environmental impact of that is crazy.
All of this destruction, all of this crazy price for something that we know is not gonna give anyone anything, but also just a very technical jewel price tag that everyone’s going to feel at home. Every single person is going to feel in their pocket concretely. Yet that is, that is the priority, prioritization of a society.
Jennifer Cutler
It’s so tempting for me to end this conversation by asking, how do we fix all of this? But I actually want to end with something that we touched on in the beginning, which is questioning the narratives around us. Something that I hear a lot is that imagining a less militarized world is a naive position. But the system we currently have isn’t delivering sustained safety, or stability, or prosperity for most people, so perpetuating it seems naive to me. But I also don’t think something this entrenched gets dismantled overnight. How can we reconceptualize security in a society where militarization is the default and the narrative is so deeply entrenched? How do we even begin to think about change at this scale?
Sahar Vardi
I don’t know how we do any of that. I don’t know how we manage to, as you say, change a narrative that is so much part of the core identity of who we are as a society. I do know that there’s so many openings, so many factual aspects of it. For me, it’s always really interesting that while we know exactly when — obviously it’s all around us — every Holocaust Memorial Day, Soldiers Memorial Day, and what we call the National Days, Independence Days, those are days in the calendar that are totally there, and everyone in school and everything’s happening, but none of us know what the date of the peace accord with Egypt was signed on or the peace accord with Jordan.
The only two things that actually drastically change security in this country, in the very short history of this country, that’s not part of our narrative. That’s the first thing that needs to happen, right? There needs to be a ceremony in every school where we wear white t-shirts and instead of crying about soldiers who were killed, celebrate a peace accord and all the soldiers who were not killed since then, right?
How do you change it? That’s how you change narrative, looking at reality and saying, “This is the part of reality that I’m going to highlight.” I don’t know how you do that within the context that we’re in. Even that sounds like, who’s going to do that? We don’t talk about it, but we’re kind of in a world war, right? There has not been, since the Second World War, a war that so many different countries were actively involved in. There are 13 countries actively involved in one war now. That is a world war. It just doesn’t have to do with Europe, so we don’t call it that. But otherwise, it is, right? We’re sitting in a world war.
There’s been another huge war happening for years now. I know this sounds stupidly naive right to be sitting in the middle of this craziness and we’re sitting here in a shelter so we know that we don’t need to get up in the sirens but generally speaking sitting in the middle of sirens and missiles and I’m saying we need to be talking about demilitarization. I know it sounds stupid, I do, and it sounds naive. But I think that part of it needs to be with us reclaiming the idea of realism. We can’t let ourselves get pulled into that militaristic discourse that says, “I need to prove to them why this is not going to work in military terms, A, B, C, D, and why what I will offer will definitely 100% work, which nobody can do,” before we even start the conversation.
No, they need to prove themselves. We need to, again, I don’t know how, but change that discourse and change how we see ourselves. I don’t think I’m naive. I don’t think I’m not realistic, I think this is realpolitik at its finest, it is saying demilitarize this world. That is realistic.
You want to talk about any form of realistic reaction, response to the climate crisis? Demilitarize this world. You’ll have the money there in a second, very easy. Nobel Prize laureates wrote a letter back in 2021 suggesting a 2% cut over five years of military spending globally and showed exactly what you could do with that in terms of renewable energy, at the time it was COVID so in terms of dealing with the economic effects of COVID and vaccinations and everything, all the healthcare systems had to do with that, like world hunger, everything you could solve it just with that.
That’s realistic that’s 50 Nobel laureates from physics and mathematics who really know how to make this calculation giving you a very realistic and very detailed plan exactly on how to do it and nobody listens. That’s crazy, but I think that if we don’t push that — if we don’t push a narrative that says, “This is not naive,” saying, “This is not how security is created. That is a fact. It is naive to think that if we do this over and over again it will do anything, it hasn’t, it never has — that should be naive.” We need to be saying that because if we don’t, we’re not touching the root of the issue. This round might end and the current form of genocide in Gaza might decrease, but things are not going to change until we say, “This cannot be our priority.”
Jennifer Cutler
Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.
Sahar Vardi
Thank you for having me. It was a really interesting conversation.
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Jennifer Cutler
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