EXCERPT:
FRIEDMAN: "Well, if you've been following me from the start, you’ll know I was very wary about Israel going into Gaza for two reasons. One, it clearly had no end game. It had no defined end goal. And so, it was launching its army against Hamas in retaliation for the murderous and barbaric attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7th. Fully justified by Israel in responding to that, of course, but it had no end game. That is, it had no political goal in Gaza in mind that would allow Israel to either stay there indefinitely in a way that was politically and diplomatically sustainable, and have some Palestinian partner. Why doesn’t it have an end game? Because members of Israel’s far-right government under Netanyahu refuse to have any talk of Palestinian state or the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank taking over Gaza. So, I was worried about that. Second, all you have to do is follow Israeli politics to know that the elite there is not together at all. There’s lots of infighting within the elite. And when you launch a war as important as Gaza, without an elite that is aligned, that’s very unnerving to me. So, the war has now inflicted terrible damage on Hamas infrastructure and on Gazan civilians, thousands of people have been killed. And it’s gone — at some level, the Israelis have discovered a lot of tunnels, they've inflicted a lot of damage, but if you read Haaretz this morning, their top military correspondent, the war is also going very, very slowly, very costly. Israel is a reserve army, so its high-tech economy. Lot of those guys, they are working for the high-tech companies that you guys have reported on, are now in the streets of Gaza. So, it’s not in a long-term sustainable situation."