Clarification of my Views Regarding the State of Israel and the Gaza War

Setting the record straight on whether I am a supporter or opponent of Israel

President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two leaders have had an increasingly strained relationship as Biden has faced the loss of much of his liberal base due to his blank check of support for Israel’s war in Gaza, threatening his re-election prospects.

May 6th Update: Mere hours after Hamas approved a US mediated Egyptian-Qatari cease fire proposal, Israel began military strikes in what is believed to be the start of a major Israeli offensive in the southern Gazan city of Rafah where nearly half of Gaza’s population has taken refuge from the invasion. The Biden administration had previously suspended a congressionally authorized arms shipment likely in response to concerns Israel used a US supplied munition in a strike that killed seven humanitarian aid workers on April 1st, which if deliberate was a violation of a law banning the use of US munitions against civilian targets.

It was recently brought to my attention that some of the statements that I made during a recent interview discussing the merits of my Gaza War peace plan were controversial and may have been perceived by some as anti-Israel or perhaps even anti-Semitic. Accordingly, I want to set the record straight. Not only have I never been in any way anti-Israel, I have been a lifelong supporter of the State of Israel. Anyone who knows me can attest to that.

Back in 1988, while I was serving as a US Army ROTC cadet, I wrote a lengthy term paper praising the Israeli Defense Force for their military triumphs during the Arab Israeli Wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 against much larger and more numerous enemies. I have stated for the past couple of decades that if I could give up my life to go back in time to assassinate mass murdering Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in 1939 before the Holocaust began so I could save the lives of six million Jews while preventing or ending the Second World War shortly after it began, I gladly would in an instant.

In June 2001, while I was serving as a US Army Headquarters staff officer with responsibility for all military research and development cooperative agreements with the Middle East, I travelled to Israel as part of a Department of Defense delegation. I also developed a friendship with the Israeli Military Attache at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, who was a Colonel in the IDF. From 2003-2005, I worked as a consultant at the Missile Defense Agency on agreements with Israel on the Arrow missile defense system. While I was a friend to Israel then as now, I strongly opposed Israel’s decision to share state-of-the-art US military technology with Communist China over the past quarter century as I believe it has caused significant damage to US national security. I believe it is important to recognize the fact that US and Israeli national security interests do not always coincide.  

I also think it is very important that a distinction be made that just because I oppose some of the actions of the Israeli government with regards to its war in Gaza that must mean I am anti-Israel. However, criticizing the actions of the US or a foreign government doesn’t mean you oppose the nations they lead. I have been extremely critical of the increasingly authoritarian Biden administration, which I view as fundamentally anti-American. Accordingly, my criticism of Biden’s policies does not make me in any way anti-American. Quite the contrary. No one loves the United States of America and is more anxious to defend it than I am. Similarly, I am very concerned that US allies such as Israel pursue policies that help to ensure their national security along with our own and prevent wars or end them as quickly as possible after they have started.

As I have written previously, the mass murder of nearly 1,200 Israeli civilians by Hamas was horrific and Israel was duty bound to defend itself by bombing Hamas and engaging in a partial invasion of Gaza just as it did in 2009 although I disagree with Israeli plans to continue the war indefinitely for years to come in the belief that a peaceful solution to the conflict along the lines I have proposed is much more in line with Israel’s national security interests. During the interview, I strongly denounced the far-left, anti-American, George Soros funded, pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic protesters, many of whom are committing acts of violence at colleges across the country, intimidating Jewish professors and students, waving Hamas flags, and attacking patriotic American college students who are trying to defend the US flag. I would not be unhappy to see them deported and have us replace them with foreign citizens who love America.

The problem we are facing in the US right now is not a rise in Islamophobia as the White House keeps claiming but rather a disturbing increase in anti-Semitism, which, alarmingly, is higher now than it has been in many decades. I have a zero-tolerance policy for anti-Semitism on my Real War Substack. If anyone posts anti-Semitic comments in response to my articles, I immediately ban them. When a member of a Signal group I am a member of posted anti-Jewish remarks in the chat referring to an alleged Zionist conspiracy, I was the first person to admonish him for his bigotry.

Although I have opposed most US military interventions from World War One onward, I strongly supported the decision of the Biden administration to shoot down Iranian missiles fired against Israel because, unlike Ukraine, I believe the US does have a security interest in defending Israel and preventing the Gaza war from escalating to a full-scale interstate regional war between Israel and Iran which had the potential to escalate to a nuclear war involving the US, Russia and China.

As a lifelong Christian conservative, I believe that the lives of every innocent non-combatant man, woman and child is of equal worth to God whether they are Christian, Jewish or Muslim. That is why I have spent my life attacking US and other international leaders who support the targeting of non-combatant civilians for death and destruction regardless of whether they are allied to the US or America’s adversaries. While I support self-determination for all nations and all people in principle as a lifelong nationalist, I am much more concerned with protecting and defending innocent, non-combatants and the lives of women and children and ensuring they have basic God-given rights than I am with what country they are part of. Accordingly, I would be fine with Israel annexing Gaza and the West Bank providing they granted full humanitarian rights of non-citizens to the Palestinians under their Basic Law, providing Israel granted the West Bank and Gaza and the right to elect their own leaders, as they would then be better off then they are today. However, I would much prefer to see the Palestinians given some level of independence, perhaps as an Israeli protectorate or two protectorates if Gaza and the West Bank remained separate entities.

There are a few misstatements I made during the interview that, upon reflection, do not accurately reflect my views. During the interview I was asked to explain why I stated that the Hamas attack on Israel was “largely unprovoked”, and I ended up equivocating in an attempt to find common ground suggesting it was partly unprovoked which does not accurately reflect my views. In fact, I stand by my original statement which I made in October 2023 that the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel were largely unprovoked. In addition, I stated that while Israel was justified in bombing and invading Gaza in response to the Hamas terrorist attacks, that did not justify an indefinite invasion and occupation of Gaza which was transforming a defensive war by Israel into more of a war of aggression. In fact, while I think Israeli has over-reacted to the Hamas attacks in terms of engaging in a collective punishment campaign against Gaza, I don’t think that Israel has committed any acts of aggression against Hamas at all. Quite the contrary I think Israel has been fighting a just war of self-defense against Hamas, albeit unjustly fought in my opinion. I also deeply regret my statement during the interview that Israel is treating Gazan civilians in a similar way as the Nazis treated the Jews before the Holocaust. While I believe Israel has been mistreating Gazan civilians, I understand how that comparison could be construed as offensive and I should never have made it because it was very inconsiderate of me to have done so.

While I have a lot of respect for former CIA officer Larry Johnson and greatly admire his service to our country and although I agreed with much of what he stated during the interview, I did not agree with his characterizations of Hamas, Iran and Communist China as not being aggressor powers and terrorist regimes, nor do I think the IDF is grossly immoral. That said, I agree with Larry that the IDF’s rules of engagement which resulted in three unarmed Israeli hostages being killed leave much to be desired and I blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his indefensible policy of bombing and starving Gazan civilians resulting in over 22,000 of them being killed to date.

As I stated I believe that Iran is the greatest source of terror worldwide and I called for a massive US bombing campaign against it in 2002-2003 in response to their support for Al Qaeda and to target and destroy their nuclear facilities. This would have been a far more preferable alternative to former President George W Bush’s decision to engage in an unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against secular Iraq which posed no threat to the US or its neighbors and which had disarmed itself of its modest chemical weapons arsenal at a time Saddam Hussein was offering to return to being a US proxy and continue to fight a war against Iranian terror.

There were a few areas in which Larry and I found strong agreement. One was that Iran masterminded the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel which were timed to prevent Israel from signing a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. I also strongly agreed with his assertion that America’s grand strategy of liberal hegemony and regime change wars have been self-defeating and have served to multiply America’s enemies and existential threats to our country while pushing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea into an ever-closer military alliance which could very well destroy the US and its allies including Israel some day soon. I also agreed with him that it was critical that the US must do more to pressure Israel to end its self-described “land, sea and air blockade” of Gaza to allow all humanitarian assistance to Gazan civilians to prevent hundreds of thousands of them from starving to death in the next several months.

While I strongly disagreed with his assertion that the US is the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, I think there is no question that the US has funded and armed terrorists in Iraq, Syria and Libya some of which have killed our own troops as was the case at Tower 22 in Jordan a few months ago. The Obama and Biden administrations funded Iran with $168 billion which they used to build up their nuclear arsenal and fund Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Iraq while dropping economic sanctions against Iran which have served to greatly enrich the Iranian terror regime. The US also gave Iran $2 billion in direct military aid to Iran during the 1980s. The US should never have appeased, let alone armed Iran, and I believe we should have attacked Iran in retaliation for killing 800 US troops during the Iraq war instead of doing nothing in response to their attacks on US military forces.

I have been a lifelong champion of President Ronald Reagan’s policy of peace through strength which successfully managed the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union through diplomatic negotiations rather than war. My greatest concern is that both the US and Israel are pursuing policies that are creating and serving to maximize and provoke the very existential threats they should be trying to mitigate, minimize and deter against. I genuinely believe that Israel’s national security interest is to end the war in Gaza as quickly as possible and transform the Israeli-controlled part of Gaza into a demilitarized Israeli protectorate in which Hamas is banned from running for political office. An immediate cease fire and armistice agreement along the lines I have called for would not only serve to end the death and destruction in Gaza but it would also serve to massively reduce the existential threat Iran poses to Israel and restore peace and stability to the Middle Eastern region. So long as the war in Gaza continues, the threat of additional Iranian missile attacks against Israel will continue and the possibility that one or more of them will be nuclear-armed cannot be ruled out.

In conclusion, I want to express my sincere regret if any of my statements during the interview were perceived as offensive in any way to Israelis and/or Jewish Americans. I remain a strong supporter of the State of Israel itself even while I intend to continue to support policies and actions which seek to reduce and ideally end human rights violations being committed by the Biden administration and its allies abroad including Israel. I am very grateful for the continued support of the subscribers of the Real War newsletter and look forward to future discussions with you on this and other topics I have written about in the Real War Chat.

© David T. Pyne 2024

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently served as Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to a top-tier presidential candidate. He has also co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster” and his new book “Restoring Strategic Deterrence” will be published in early fall 2024. He serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Recent Media Interviews

April 5th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss the latest Biden administration statements relating to its support for Taiwan and its support for NATO membership for Ukraine. Here is the link to the interview.

April 13th—Interview with Brannon Howse and COL Rob Maness (USA Ret.) on Patriot TV to discuss the prospects that the war between Israel and Iran will escalate to World War Three. Here is the link.

April 15th--Interview with COL Rob Maness (USA Ret.) on Patriot TV to discuss the prospects of World War III with Iran and Russia. Here is the link to the interview. My segment starts at Minute 33.

April 18th—I will be presenting an extensive briefing at the Firm Foundation Expo at 8pm at the Mountain America Expo Center at 9575 South State Street in Sandy, Utah to discuss the increasing threat of World War Three with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran and what we need to do to avert it.

April 23rd—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss the FBI warning that the Chinese are preparing a Volt Typhoon cyberattack to take down US military bases and America’s critical infrastructure to prevent us from being able to effectively respond to a Chinese blockade and/or invasion of Taiwan.

April 29th—Panel Discussion about the war in Ukraine on a Twitter Space hosted by Mario Nawfal including LTC Daniel Davis (USA Ret) from 4pm-6pm MDT.

April 30th—Interview with Nima Alkhorshid on his Dialogue Works podcast to debate former CIA officer Larry Johnson to debate the merits of my proposed Gaza Peace Plan.

April 30th—Interview with the Strategic Culture Foundation to discuss the war in Ukraine and Ukrainian efforts to sign ten-year security agreements with the US and other NATO allies. Here is the link.

April 30th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on the “Talk with John” radio show on KTALK AM 1640 to discuss the latest developments in the Ukraine and Gaza wars including the Israeli and Iranian missile strikes and Speaker Johnson’s betrayal of US national security in passing $61 billion in aid to Ukraine. Here is the link to the interview.

Upcoming Media Interviews

May 6th—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss a number of blockbuster revelations relating to Russia, China and the war in Ukraine.

May 10th—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss the powerful successive G-4 geomagnetic storms that are predicted to hit Earth next weekend. I will discuss how another G-5 super-geomagnetic storm like the Carrington Event of 1859 that could shut down all US electronic systems for years or more is inevitable and the US has done nothing to defend against this existential threat.