Because the Israeli disposition, the Israeli approach is to maximize what it can get, there is not an enlightened self-interest understanding of another party here.

There is simply, at any given moment, what does the power dynamic allow? And that power

dynamic has an interminate. It has an Israeli US component. And then it has a third component,

which is often the weakest of those three legs, which is what can the other party, either the

direct party in an asymmetric as it is throughout this

relationship with Palestinians, with Lebanon, with Syria, whoever.

Welcome everybody to a new episode of the Makdisi Street podcast.

We're delighted to have with us today, Daniel Levy, who I'll introduce in a minute.

I just want to say if you can support us on Patreon, we'd very much welcome your support.

And if you can give us a good rating on the social media platforms that you follow us on,

that would be helpful as well, not for our vanity,

but rather to boost the visibility of the show. Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S.

Middle East project, which emphasizes the Palestine-Israel issue alongside regional conflicts, trends,

and geopolitics. From 2012 to 2016, Levy was the director for the Middle East and North Africa

at the European Council on Foreign Relations. And prior to that, he was a senior fellow and

director of the New America Foundation's Middle East Task Force in Washington and a senior

fellow at the Century Foundation in New York. So Daniel, welcome to our show. It's a pleasure to have you on.

It's a pleasure to be with all of you.

We thought we would begin, Daniel, by talking about what's going on catastrophically right now,

especially in Gaza, but not only in Gaza, the wider kind of situation that surrounds Gaza as well.

A lot of people have talked, including yourself

and ourselves, about the differences between Trump and Biden when it comes to the question of

...