Day 596 - Haviv Rettig Gur on US President Trump's Mideast vision
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.4 • 864 Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with ToI senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur.
Last week, US President Donald Trump completed a four-day trip to the Middle East, his first official state visit of his second term.
He struck economic deals in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and, in lifting sanctions against Syria, made a bold move that could reboot the wartorn country.
On May 13, Trump delivered an almost hour-long speech at the Saudi-US Investment Forum at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that gives deep insight into his plan for the Middle East and beyond.
Rettig Gur examines this speech and explains its significance. We hear how it reflects Trump's diplomacy, which in many ways harkens back to an earlier style of US policy. And we hear how, while the speech only names Israel once, it is actually a leitmotif.
And so this week, we ask Haviv Rettig Gur, what matters now.
What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves and video edited by Thomas Girsch.
IMAGE: US President Donald Trump speaks during the Saudi-US investment forum at the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center in Riyadh on May 13, 2025. (Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Times of Israel's What Matters Now. I'm your host, Deputy Editor Amanda Borschal |
| 0:07.7 | Dan, here with our senior analyst, Kaviv Rettigur. Chaviv, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a long time. |
| 0:15.5 | Really leading into that, Amanda. I know. Nobody can do a Rish like Amanda. |
| 0:20.6 | It's good to be here. It's so great to have you. |
| 0:23.3 | And what we are planning on doing today is going through a speech that U.S. President Donald Trump gave on May 13th in Saudi Arabia and discussing its implications for the Mideast and also Israel specifically. |
| 0:38.9 | So we're going to talk about all of this and more when we're back. |
| 0:48.4 | Tolkien's trilogy was a perfect book to send to a POW. |
| 0:58.9 | Very well-defined good and evil. And it was a great escape from the physical environment that we were in. It's November 16, 1973, and we're at the military |
| 1:05.8 | section of the Lode Airport. A red and white, DC-6 passenger plane lands lands and out of it comes a stream of young men. |
| 1:13.5 | Ten men known collectively as Shvuyay Milchameta Atasha, the POWs of the war of attrition. |
| 1:20.6 | All of them had been held, most of the time together, in an Egyptian prison for more than three |
| 1:25.6 | and a half years. So it was very much a kibbutz. |
| 1:29.9 | I want to draw your attention to a small, tattered bag, Menachemani is holding. |
| 1:34.7 | That brown knapsack actually held a treasure. |
| 1:37.7 | A manuscript that would make these men in their unlikely story momentarily famous. |
| 1:42.7 | It was the fruit of their communal work during the years in which |
| 1:45.6 | they were held in one of Egypt's most notorious dungeons. The Hebrew translation of the Hobbit. |
| 1:53.2 | Check out the Israel Story episode, The Hebrew Hobbit. Find Israel Story wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 2:13.4 | I'm Amanda Barshall, Dan, here with Chaviv Rettigur. |
| 2:22.4 | Chaviv, you know, it's so rare that our editor-in-chief sends around a link and asks everyone on staff to take a look at it. And that is the case of the transcript of the speech that U.S. President Donald Trump gave to the Saudi U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh on May 13th. It was so important, he felt, that we all read |
| 2:38.8 | these words in order to get a sense of Trump's mindset, according to what he feels is his |
| 2:45.9 | mission as U.S. president, specifically in the Middle East, but not only, it really laid out a lot of his, |
... |
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