Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor at Jewish News Syndicate, sat down for an exclusive interview with The Michael Patrick Leahy Show on Monday during the first day of the 2024 Israel Summit at the Ramsey Event Center in Franklin.
Glick said she attended the Israel Summit to show “appreciation” for those “willing to stand up and make themselves heard” regarding supporting Israel.
“One of the things that we’ve seen very starkly over the past seven months is the scarcity of people who are willing to stand up and be counted on the right side of human history by standing with Israel against these forces of genocide that are arrayed against us,” Glick (pictured above) said.
“Part of the reason that I came all the way to Nashville for the first time at this time is because I wanted to show my appreciation… I think it’s very important for people to stand with us and for us to stand with the people who stand with us,” Glick added.
Glick, who was born and educated in the U.S. before moving to Israel in the 1990s, said she moved to the Israeli settlement of Efrat and joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where she was a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.
Even in the 1990s, Glick said negotiations with Palestinians were “never going to work” as the Palestinians were “breaching every single commitment that they made in real-time.”
“During those years, there was a lot of self-delusion on the part of Israel’s ruling class… They wanted to believe that – it was like battered woman syndrome, that if you blame yourself for the beatings that you’re getting, then maybe your husband will stop beating you – and that was sort of Israel’s thing. It was obvious to me at the time as a young officer in the army that this wasn’t going to work because the Palestinians were breaching every single commitment that they made in real-time as they were making – it was just all a lie,” Glick said.
“The need for self-delusion is deep when you’re desperate not to have to deal with difficult truths. So that was what was going on in the 1990s. Then, it all blew up in our faces in a most profound way in 2000 because the Palestinians refused peace, and they opened up a massive terror war against us. We had 1,400 Israelis murdered over the next four or five years and that was huge,” Glick added.
After serving in the IDF for six years, Glick worked for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his foreign policy advisor before returning to graduate school at Harvard University.
Glick eventually went into journalism in 2000 when she moved back to Israel; she first started as a senior commentator at a Hebrew newspaper before spending 19 years at the Jerusalem Post and now at Jewish News Syndicate.
Glick said Israeli media is similar to media in the U.S. when it comes to biased reporting.
“[Hebrew media] is like American [media]. I became a journalist because I got tired of the bias of the news, and I said if I can’t stand reading the newspaper, I might as well write it,” Glick said.
In regards to the current conflict in the Middle East between Israelis, Hamas forces, and other terrorist organizations, Glick said she is both pessimistic and optimistic about the pending outcome of the situation.
“I’m very pessimistic about what’s happening in the United States and what’s happening obviously in our neighboring countries and among the Palestinians with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and Iran and what awaits us with the war in Lebanon that’s been brewing. It’s been going on in low intensity, but it’s getting worse because they’re massively increasing their bombing of both strategic military installations and also civilian towns in northern Israel. What’s happening with the Biden administration is deeply disconcerting because they’re very hostile and to all intents and purposes have aligned American policy with the war goals of our enemies, which is something that we hadn’t really expected, we’d worried about it because it was an anti-Israel administration from the outset but it’s worse than what most people anticipated it could ever be. So that’s very upsetting,” Glick explained.
“On the other hand, the reason that I’m optimistic is because what’s really come through, particularly since October 7th, is the indomitable will to live and persevere of the Israeli people and the generation that’s coming of age now that’s in the army, that’s fighting, they’re just heroic, they’re inspiring to us, to their parents. I have a boy – not a boy, he’s a grown up – in Gaza now fighting. He’s in the reserves and he has a wife and three kids at home. We’re all empowered and strengthened by the courage of our kids and watching them and the fact that they’re just running to the fire to save the country really is an incredible source of confidence,” Glick continued.
“The people of Israel are incredibly heroic and courageous. So that’s the source of optimism,” Glick added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Caroline Glick” by Caroline Glick – קרולין גליק.
