[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC STING] - We're joined by our good friend, Julie Roginsky, Democratic strategist and principal at BARO Strategies.

Good to see you, Julie.

- Great to see you, Steve.

We're not here to debate or discuss the Middle East 'cause I don't understand it on so many levels.

I'm just trying to learn like everyone else.

But I will say we need to discuss this.

When you see protests on college campuses, where is the line in your mind between pro-Palestinian rallies versus an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, dangerous to Jewish students protests?

Where's that line for you?

- Well, you know, much like that old adage about pornography, you kind of know it when you see it.

But I will say this, if you are marching and you're saying, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," I'm gonna say two things about that, either you don't really understand what that means and you're getting caught-- - Explain it.

- Well, what it basically means is that from the river, which is the Jordan River, to the sea, which is the Mediterranean Sea, that land is the state of Israel that is populated by Jews.

And when you're talking about liberating, what used to be known as Palestine, not just the West Bank, and not just the Gaza Strip, but that entire piece of land from the river to the sea, what you're basically talking about is the eradication of the state of Israel.

And what you're talking about is the genocide of Jews from their ancestral homeland.

And the one thing I wanna add about that is, you know, there's this whole phrase about, on college campuses, which really just drives me crazy, about how Jews are some sort of colonial occupier.

That's the other big thing on college campuses, that you see this white colonial occupier.

First of all, 50% of the Jews living in Israel are what's known as Mizrahi Jews, which means that they come from the Middle East.

So if you believe that Palestinian Arabs are not white, neither of these people, they come from places like Iraq and Iran and Egypt and other places that Jews were chased out of, and no longer exist in those countries, despite the fact that they lived in those countries for millennia.

The other thing I wanna talk about is the fact that what kind of occupier are you talking about?

If you know your Bible, you understand that Jews have been in what is now Israel for thousands and thousands of years.

Jesus Christ was a Jew, he lived there.

Even before Jesus Christ obviously, there was a huge Jewish presence there.

So if you think a bunch of Holocaust survivors coming back, bedraggled and on the verge of death, coming back after the war to their ancestral homeland and building something out of the desert that not only bloomed, but prospered and became an incredibly powerful, you know, they call it the startup nation, that's not being a colonial occupier, that's people coming home and-- - Why is this personal for you, Julie?

- It's personal for me... Look, I was born in the Soviet Union.

I'm a Soviet Jew, right?

So I've seen this movie before, and I grew up living in the Soviet Union in the '70s as a Jew.

And I cannot describe to you the horrible discrimination, the horrible, just really state-sanctioned discrimination and aggression towards the Jewish minority in the Soviet Union back then.

I used to see, because it wasn't so long after World War II, people with numbers on their arms, many more than you see here in the States.

I mean, it's Holocaust survivors who somehow made it back alive.

And to me, it's personal because I see how it ends, and it ends as it always does for the Jews, whether this goes back to 80 years with the Holocaust or 800 years, or thousands of years, where you feel very alone, right?

Because you're considered not a minority by people who are screaming about how you're a white colonial occupier.

But yet everybody else considers you as the Charlottesville, you know, as the Charlottesville marchers did about how, you know, "Jews will not replace us."

You're always the other.

And what upset me is the constant contextualization, I guess.

No sooner were these people murdered on October 7th, than on October 8th, people started talking about how the Jews deserved it and how this was some sort of war of retaliation.

Nobody deserves that, nobody deserves that, and that's-- (indistinct) - But Julie, stay on this.

We're taping this on...

This is where it gets tricky because this program will be seen later.

- Right.

- Again, the war is raging between Hamas and Israel.

But to those who argue, as we do this program on the 14th of November, enough, meaning for Palestinian women, children, babies in hospitals, and the suffering going on there, the message has been sent by Israel.

How the heck do you eradicate Hamas, a terrorist organization, without thousands and thousands of innocent Palestinians being killed just by living where they live, Who can't, quote, get out so easily?

There's no question.

But that question really should be posed to Hamas.

Why are they building bunkers underneath hospitals and daycare centers?

- But why can't we pose it both to Netanyahu and Israel and to Hamas?

- You're not gonna get an argument from me about Netanyahu.

He should have been gone, not yesterday.

He should have been gone years ago.

So you're not gonna get an argument from me that part of the reason that there's so much anger at the Israelis right now, is because you have a racist government in place, a really, Jewish supremacist government in place that has been doing everything they can to oppress the Arabs in the West Bank and even those living in Israel, and-- - But what message would you send to those Palestinian Americans and others who say, "Hey, you know what, we're... " Again, October 7th spoke volumes in terms of this horrific massacre of innocent Israelis.

But now you've got this going on in this ongoing situation where thousands and thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed.

What would you say to those folks right now?

- Well, what I would say is, look, there was a ceasefire in place.

Hamas broke it, right?

So it's not like if we put a ceasefire in place, there's any guarantee that if Hamas remains in the Gaza Strip, it won't be broken again.

- Right.

- I'll also say that Hamas is basically ISIS, right?

You can't be a free person living in the Gaza Strip.

You can't be gay, you can't be a woman walking around the way I'm walking around.

You can't have plurality of religion.

It's basically ISIS.

So I say that because, let's work together to eradicate Hamas slash ISIS.

Get rid of Hamas, and then let's work together to lean on the Israelis to really have a two-state solution that links the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem.

All of us should have a vested interest in this.

None of us wants to see this kind of carnage happening on either side, but it's going to continue to happen until you stop empowering the worst elements of this.

This is... Hamas is funded by Iran.

It is funded by the Russians.

It is funded against the most autocratic regimes in the world for one reason and one reason only.

They want dissent and they wanna sow discord.

These are not people in the community of nations who wanna build something better.

- Before I let you go, Julie, is there any part of you that's optimistic about how this ends?

- I'm optimistic only in one sense.

This was so jarring and so awful, that the only solution to this, from my perspective, and I think from the perspective of probably even many Israelis, is that there's only a two-state solution that's possible after this.

And that was very much stalled.

And as you saw, the Israelis were annexing and annexing and annexing, and they were building more and more settlements in the West Bank.

And the Netanyahu regime was obviously secretly cooperating with Hamas to keep them in place.

So there are no angels on either side here.

I fully acknowledge this.

I'm hopeful that this will finally have the accountability for this right-wing Israeli government that they require, and that somebody more rational comes into place on both sides.

And that includes the Palestinian Authority who's given up the opportunity to have a two-state solution every time it's been presented to them.

I'm hoping that cooler heads will prevail.

And I'm hoping that this is kind of the slap in the face for both sides that both need to finally come to the table and say, "Enough is enough.

We've had 80 years of this, we've gotta stop.

We've gotta work on something better."

- Thank you, Julie.

- Thank you.

- We'll keep talking.

I'm Steve Adubato.

More importantly, Julie Roginsky, see you next time.

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