The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

After 15 continuous months of truly heinous and incomprehensible carnage in Gaza at the hands of Israel and their patrons in Washington, a cease-fire deal has finally been announced that, at least nominally, is intended to end all hostilities between the two sides. The deal is to take formal effect on January 19 — one day before Trump will be inaugurated, which is exactly the date by which he demanded that Israel agree to a deal — and while much is clear in terms of what the future entails, what remains is in doubt, much of it, including whether the violence will, in fact, end. Whatever else is true about any of this, this is an inarguably and comprehensively positive event. 

The people who have been most brutalized since October 2023 — namely the people of Gaza — are out in the streets celebrating it as such for understandable reasons. Anything that puts an end to the constant bombardment, famine, arbitrary detention, torture and constant loss of innocent lives that they have endured for 15 months must be seen as an event to celebrate, whatever else is true about it and whatever the future might entail. 

For days now, anyone with any basis for knowing about what this process has entailed has said that the only reason this deal is finally happening is because Donald Trump not only insisted on it but applied exactly the kind of pressure on Israel and Netanyahu that Joe Biden simply was unwilling and/or unable to apply. This is the consensus of anyone with knowledge of the negotiations, including many of the Israelis on Netanyahu's right, who are enraged that this deal is being done and are blaming Trump for doing it, a betrayal of Israel. Nonetheless, Joe Biden – the very same person with the melting brain who has unconditionally funded and armed the Israeli destruction of Gaza for the last 15 months, incapable of imposing even a single limitation or having his word honored at all – had the audacity to stand in Qatar today and aggressively take credit for this deal as his own diplomatic success. That's nothing short of laughable. 

But it does raise two important questions that we want to examine. The first is: what does all of this signal about a Trump presidency and his foreign policy? And also raises the question of what this deal will actually lead to: will it really finally restrain Israeli aggression against Palestinians, or were the Israelis promised things like the right to annex both the West Bank and Gaza in return for agreeing to a deal right before Trump assumes the presidency? We will examine, question and cover all of that. 

And then: two of Trump's key national security cabinet choices – Defense Secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State nominee, Marco Rubio –testified at their confirmation hearings. Both of them made some notable statements about wars and foreign policy – in the case of Rubio, ones that are clear deviations from what he has long maintained, particularly about the war in Ukraine – and those also provide some substantive insights into what a second Trump presidency may look like.

For reasons I think ought to be obvious, there are few topics, if there are any, that we have covered more frequently and more extensively over the last 15 months than the Israeli destruction of all civilian infrastructure and much of civilian life in Gaza as a response to the October 7 attack inside Israel.

The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Three stories this January 13:

First of all: now that the 2024 election is over and Joe Biden is on his way out, it's becoming acceptable in previously silent sectors of the media to document what a complete disaster Biden's Israel-Gaza policy really has been not just for Gaza but for the United States. “60 Minutes” – which has been solidly pro-Israel for many years – presented a decent segment on Sunday night detailing just how disastrous this has been and how it's an open secret in Washington that the Israelis are acting both criminally and adversarial to the United States and its interests. We’ll show you this important sea change.

Also: today Joe Biden announced that he was christening a new American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as the George W. Bush aircraft carrier, an aircraft carrier George W. Bush gave his notorious speech in which he declared “mission accomplished” about a month into the Iraq war. These are all the same people George Bush, Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, whom Democrats just a couple of decades ago, really even just a decade ago, were calling all the things they now call Trump: a fascist, a Nazi, a war criminal, etc., etc. This is not just morally twisted but very illuminating about the character and ideology of the modern-day Democrats. 

In our last segment: there's a bizarre yet revealing tennis in the world of women's professional tennis. I know this seems like the sort of thing that we would not normally cover – and it isn't: this is not exactly a sports show – but the whole thing is really indicative of a certain kind of liberal cultural identity-ism that ends up patronizing women and treating them like fragile children in the name of protecting them. So, I want to tell you about this scandal. It's a really fascinating one to see the dynamics at play. 

There's a big sea change with a lot of different issues and how they're being discussed in mainstream American discourse. Now that the election is over, there's no longer a need to work so hard to try to defeat Donald Trump or to help push two lame candidates, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, over the finish line.

The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

We speak today to the president of the Hind Rajab Foundation, Dyab Abou Jahjah, about the work of the group in tracking IDF admissions of war crimes, the legal proceedings this group is bringing against them around the world and the very serious and credible threats of violence and murder that they are predictably enduring from Israelis as a result. 

There was a fascinating case in Brazil last week where a federal judge, unbeknownst to anybody, had a case before the court that urged the court to detain and criminally investigate a soldier from the Israeli Defense Forces, an Israeli citizen who had traveled to Brazil in December to vacation in Brazil. The court accepted that request and ordered that soldier be criminally investigated. As it turned out, though, before the court could issue that order, either the police or the prosecutor or someone inside the court leaked to the Israeli government that this was about to happen, and they were able to smuggle the soldier out in the middle of the night to Argentina. 

Obviously, it's pretty interesting that the person charged with war crimes was in Brazil and then fled to Argentina given that's where most Nazi war criminals went after the Nuremberg trials and after World War II – to hide. That's where all the Nazi hunters, the iconic Nazi hunters, like Simon Wiesenthal and others would find all the Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann in 1961, he was hiding in Argentina. So, that symbolism shouldn't be lost. 

The reason this is happening is that Israeli soldiers have been endlessly posting on social media –they even got criticized by Donald Trump for doing it – incredibly sadistic and obviously criminal and illegal actions that they're proud of and that they feel when they post on their social media and celebrate with music and dance and jokes and fun. 

The Hind Rajab Foundation was created in the wake of the absolutely horrific murder of a six-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza that you're about to hear about. That was her name Hind Rajab. 

This foundation was created to track down and create dossiers on the war criminals in the IDF who are publicly boasting about their war crimes and then use the force of the law – nothing else – to go around the world in order to make sure that countries that are signatories to the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute, and therefore duty bound to investigate war criminals on their soil actually do so. And that's what just happened in Brazil and that brought the attention to the work of this group. 

We spoke to the president of this group, Dyab Abou Jahjah, about the group's work in tracking these IDF admissions of war crimes, the legal proceedings the group is bringing against them around the world, including the one they just brought in Brazil. There are many others, and also the very serious and credible threats of violence, or terrorism that they are getting, not from anonymous Israelis, but from top-level Israeli officials, in public, all as a result of the success that they are now having in scaring Israelis about whether or not they're going to be able to travel freely if they participated in war crimes and publicly documented them. 

I find this work that he's doing very noble not just because of the obvious need to enforce laws about war criminality, but because of the obvious dangers that he's knowingly incurring and that he knew, obviously before he did it, he would incur. These threats are very real, given the complete sociopathic willingness of the Israeli government to cross any line, which they've demonstrated over and over. I found the interview very affecting and very enlightening and I strongly believe that you will, too. Here is our conversation with Mr. Jahjah. 

The interview: Dyab Abou Jahjah 

G. Greenwald: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's great to see you and I appreciate your coming on. 

Dyab Abou Jahjah: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, the organization of which you're a part is the Hind Rajab Foundation. And it made a lot of big news over the last couple of weeks, in large part because of a success that you had in Brazil, where you were able to convince a federal court that the presence of an IDF soldier on Brazilian soil obligated the Brazilian government to investigate that person for war crimes, he was able to end up escaping Brazil, fleeing Brazil but it caused a lot of concern in Israel, a lot of anger in Israel. And I want to get into the details of that. But before we do, can you talk to me a little bit about the Hind Rajab Foundation and how it got that name?