Gaza’s Troubled Cease-Fire Efforts, Harris and Trump Debate, Toronto International Film Fest, and More Podcast

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, tensions remain acute in the Mideast as efforts intensify on a Gaza war cease-fire, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump square off in a much-anticipated presidential debate, and the annual Toronto International Film Festival features a host of indie films. It’s September 5th 2024, and time for The World Next Week. I’m Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I’m Carla Anne Robbins. Bob, let’s start in the Middle East where Hezbollah and Israel are again pounding each other with rocket fire, renewing fears of a wider war. The Israeli Defense Force’s recovery of the bodies of six hostages–it’s incredibly tragic–who were executed in Gaza, ignited mass protests across Israel with many Israelis blaming Prime Minister Netanyahu for his refusal to come to an agreement with Hamas on a cease-fire for hostage deal. Egypt and Qatar are working with the U.S. to prepare what they’re calling a final cease-fire proposal. Of course, we’ve heard about that before. With so much ferment and tragedy, are we any closer to getting an agreement?

MCMAHON:
It certainly doesn’t feel like that, Carla, and it’s hard to overestimate the emotions that are accompanying this latest set of developments with the hostages. They were by many forensic accounts people who were alive up until closely before their bodies were discovered, so they were executed by Hamas. Hamas has indicated it would execute other prisoners short of a deal if there are troops bearing down on them. So this is part of what makes the stakes of this so high and Benjamin Netanyahu is under intense pressure from the families of the hostages as well as members of his right-wing coalition pressuring him about a deal. On the one side, families saying, “We need a deal. We are close to a deal. Why can’t we finish this?” The right-wing coalition saying, “Let’s not cave, we’re not going to give into the Hamas terrorists.” And Netanyahu himself continues to navigate this.

And the latest comments from Netanyahu, rather extraordinary, this week, he came out and basically doubled down on what has been a new line of argument about this corridor that separates the Gaza Strip from the Egyptian border. It’s about a nine-mile-long strip known as the Philadelphi Corridor, and he’s basically saying they are not going to leave this unpatrolled, that they are not going to just pull out and leave it to Hamas to, in his words, “funnel in weapons” and continue to mount their war against Israel. So apparently, this corridor was not even mentioned in previous deals that Israel had reportedly signed on to, that many, especially U.S. negotiators have said is 90 percent done. But boy, that 10 percent is sure compelling in terms of now what to do about whether or not there are going to be any sort of patrols in this corridor.

And then there’s another issue that continues to be a tough one to sort out which is the amount of Palestinians who are being held by Israelis to be released. I think the number is close to eight hundred at point. So there are about a hundred or so hostages still being held. Just not sure how many are still alive, although the six who were just executed showed that there certainly are some that are still alive. And it gets to the broader point too that you mentioned, Carla, which is there is a hot conflict going on, whether it’s between Israeli and Hezbollah forces, and by the way, that conflict has now killed more than five hundred people by recent reports. There are intensified Israeli activities against what it says are Hamas rebels within the West Bank. And, there continue to be attacks from the Yemen-based Houthis on Red Sea shipping, and when they can, against Israeli targets, just to name a few areas.

ROBBINS:
And the fact that we still haven’t seen the Iran retaliation.

MCMAHON:
And haven’t seen seen this much anticipated…Right. What will Iran do for the killing of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran during the inauguration of its new president? So there’s so many different fronts here, so much anxiety, and this is a potential…As bad as it’s been in the last eleven months or so since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, there’s potential to get worse, which is why the U.S. in particular is really keen to try to bring this to an end.

ROBBINS:
It’s really public. What Hamas did was just absolutely horrifying, executing these hostages as IDF forces were bearing down on them, and since then, they’ve released these videos coerced from the hostages, incredible psychological torture of the families and the Israeli public. But Israelis are blaming Netanyahu for being the obstacle to a hostage for cease-fire deal. The U.S., President Biden has been quite critical of Netanyahu for seeming to agree to a deal and then going back on it.

He has faced fierce protests before. Let’s remember, before October 7th, the country was riven, huge divisions over this judicial reform. Not a popular guy, and he’s faced fierce protests before over the failure to get a cease-fire, but these protests seem to be different to me in the last few days. The public anger is just really, really high, and not just at Hamas but at Netanyahu himself. Is there any sign he’s losing his grip on power or more willing to compromise? You used the term doubling down. Is he just refusing to do anything about it?

MCMAHON:
If nothing else, you look at the career of someone like Netanyahu and he’s a very skillful politician, a survivor, and he is standing now on the pillar of Israeli existential survival and he’s taken on this issue of this corridor as a key sticking point, and I think he’s going to try to ride it as much as he can. The pressure is, again, incredibly intense, and reports you’re hearing out of Israel showing just a really wrenching response of family members, both of hostages, people not even directly connected to hostages. There’s just a great deal of concern in Israeli society. There’s a lot of other things going on too. You mentioned the judicial reform aspect. There’s also an issue coming to a fore about whether Orthodox Jewish Israelis can serve in the military-

ROBBINS:
Or should serve.

MCMAHON:
Should serve and should be compelled to serve, so issues like that are playing out. There’s a right-wing coalition, as we talked about before, that is leading the government. They were elected there so there is a portion of the population that supports that. There are settlers who are also creating difficulties in the West Bank, and in some cases, taking actions in their own hands against Palestinians, and so that adds to the difficulties in the country. And so I would say Netanyahu has shown again and again his ability to survive all this, and the question is, is the U.S. going to present what it’s calling its final agreement proposal and then in some way distance itself? That seems unfathomable. Or are the U.S. elections going to bring to a fore a new chapter in this or are we looking at another month of this really difficult, wrenching process that’s going on?

And are other countries in the neighborhood going to do anything more? Again, most experts say, look, it’s really about the U.S. and the Israelis, but there are other interlocutors. The Egyptians obviously have a keen stake in that border area, Qatar has been the go-between with Hamas, and other Arab states, while they have still maintained a relationship with Israel, have indicated mounting concern about what’s happening too. So I would say I think we’re looking at this continuing for still several more weeks, possibly up to the one-year anniversary of these attacks, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Incredible tragedy, and I do want to move on to the debate in which I suspect Gaza will be a topic. But we had that image, an extraordinary image in Gaza this week in which fighting was paused for several days so the WHO could vaccinate tens of thousands of children against polio, and it is a reminder that people can stop fighting and children have suffered enormously in this war.

MCMAHON:
I’m glad you mentioned that. That’s if not a ray of hope, it is a clear indication that there are ways in which you can stop the fighting. These are phased cessations of activities to allow healthcare workers a safe zone to come in, to allow people to come out, parents to bring their children out of hiding and shelter and to come out and get vaccinated, and apparently, it was very successful. You don’t want on top of everything else a polio outbreak there, and this is part of the world where people live very close to each other so it’s of great concern to the Israeli public as well.

ROBBINS:
So what you would say to yourself, you’ll vaccinate these children to stop them from getting polio and then start the bombing again? The tragedy is enormous and the insanity of it is enormous.

Well, Bob, let’s bring our conversation back to the U.S. Next Tuesday, ABC News will host a presidential debate, so far the only one that’s scheduled, between Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After considerable huffing and puffing, both camps have ended up where they started and have accepted the same rules as the June CNN debate between President Biden and President Trump, no live audience, muted mics when the other candidate is speaking. President Biden’s disastrous performance last time around led him to pulling out of the race in favor of Harris. What are you going to be watching for this time around?

MCMAHON:
Well, for starters, as with the previous debate, I’m not expecting much debating as in a thoughtful exchange over, let’s say, the merits of comprehensive U.S. immigration reform or the rules-based international order and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

ROBBINS:
For that, you have to come to this podcast.

MCMAHON:
One would have to come to a sober think tank for that perhaps, Carla, and this podcast, yes. As we saw in the previous debate, we’re going to be looking at things like demeanor and temperament and speaking coherently in the moment, as well as sprinkled in between any signs of new positions. Former President Trump had a recent appearance on Fox News where he signaled the types of things he’s going to bring up, such as candidate Harris’s previous position to fracking. She had supported a ban on fracking. She’s changed that position on it. That’s a big deal in a state like Pennsylvania where a lot of jobs and livelihoods are linked to fracking and the extraction of fossil fuels among other things.

There is going to be a lot of talk about the border, and again, as former President Trump indicated, he’s going to link Vice President Harris to border policies, and what he says is the ruinous policy he charged in the last debate against President Biden referring to hoards of mentally ill and criminals and so forth coming across, streaming across the border.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Vice President Harris handles that type of criticism, but also how she counters in terms of policies that Trump himself has supported, and also where they agree. Interestingly, coming up as they are going into this debate is a potential administration move to block the acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, a Japanese firm, which supporters of the deal say would preserve thousands of jobs, which opponents such as both Trump and Harris say is something that should not be allowed. This is something that’s a bedrock U.S. company that needs to continue to be wholly U.S.-owned. It’s part of U.S. infrastructure, economic infrastructure let’s say, and as will be argued before the body that oversees such deals, is a matter of national security. So how much will that kind of thing come up in the debate? Not sure. You won’t be hearing great expositions about the merits of free trade in this debate. It’s going to be about protecting the American worker in various ways, Carla, so that’s going to be interesting to note as well.

But there are sharp divisions on not only things like immigration, but Ukraine policy. Obviously, President Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to bring it to an end. He can have one phone call and bring it to an end and so forth. Will Harris hold him to account for that and have him explain what that means? That would be interesting. She’s very much been a staunch supporter of the transatlantic alliance and support for Ukraine as an important bulwark against autocracy, against violation of sovereignty, against Russian aggression, right?

So again, how much will any of these types of things emerge as policy difference versus the noise and the atmospherics, even without a live audience and with muted mics and so forth? How much are we going to get into any sort of exchange of ideas? That’s going to be probably a lesser issue as we get into the atmospherics.

ROBBINS:
And then of course, reproductive rights.

MCMAHON:
And you get into reproductive rights and other issues involving health policy in terms of response to pandemics, past and potentially future and so forth. Really stark differences there between the two candidates. Harris is definitely going to make a big deal about the reproductive rights and holding up Trump as a threat to that, which as seen, Democrats had gained in the past in polling on that issue.

ROBBINS:
Even though Trump has been claiming he’s going to be the right defender of reproductive rights and-

MCMAHON:
In vitro fertilization, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how those responses are. And again, a backdrop to all this, Carla, is incredibly close polling, razor-thin, especially looking at the swing states and the so-called “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, but also some of the southern states that are seen as crucial – Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina now. Polling is just showing repeatedly, very close.

There is definitely wind in the Democrat sails with Kamala Harris’s campaign coming on fully on board post convention. Trump has had to pivot obviously from what he was looking forward to, which was campaigning against Biden, to this new phenomenon of a Harris campaign. But they are making and look poised to make a lot of arguments about tying her to what they see as failed economic policies that are hurting a lot of Americans, and polling is showing that seems to be effective to some extent.

ROBBINS:
What do we know about her debate style? I went and looked back at the one debate she had against Vice President Pence last time around, and all I can remember is that fly on his incredibly white hair, but she did quite well in that, didn’t she?

MCMAHON:
She, by all accounts, had performed well in that debate. It is said to be a good format for her, for her style of speaking. She’s not so much the orator, the flaming orator or being able to weave eloquence like Barack Obama on the campaign hustings, but in debate type settings–and this is a former prosecutor we’re talking about–she’s said to be comfortable and effective. Trump’s done more of these. This is I think number seven for him, and he was asked about preparations for it at his event on Fox the other night and basically saying, well, there’s only so much you can do. He’s ready for it. He tends to dismiss the need to do super prep.

ROBBINS:
At the same time, he’s claiming that ABC is not going to be fair, so he’s lowering expectations which is part of the game here, although more than lowering expectations, claiming it’s not going to be fair. I think one of the things I’m going to be watching as a journalist is whether or not the moderators are going to behave less like potted plants than the CNN moderators, who I thought, honestly, failed because they didn’t push the candidates. They let them say things that were just not true and didn’t force follow-ups, and the notion they had fact-checking online, nobody’s paying any attention to the online fact-checking. The moderators are not debating but I think they have a responsibility to help shape the debate, and we’ll see what ABC does, if they do a better job.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it would be good. It’s why I started out with a bit of a facetious comment about what the debate will yield. It would be good if they actually tried to maintain a format that at least sought to tee up and require actual comments about issues as opposed to exchanging back and forth in ways that might generate more heat than light, but yeah, I agree. I think it would be good to see that. We’ll have to see what comes out of this and whether there’s another debate, whether the candidates think it’s worthwhile having another debate, Carla.

Carla, I want to cross over to Canada now, specifically Toronto. Some have likened to New York run by the Swiss, but they have a very well-known international film festival that gets in between Cannes and Venice and it has a more of an indie vibe. There’s said to be more public attendance, and sometimes it gives an early peek at blockbusters too. Carla, I know you avidly follow films, both indies and the blockbusters. Can you say Megalodon? So Carla, what should we be looking for at the Toronto Film Festival?

ROBBINS:
Are you talking about the Meg?

MCMAHON:
The Meg, yes.

ROBBINS:
The Meg is a big hit in my household, yes. We’re big Jason Statham fans, yes. Okay. So a raft of big movies or small movies that have made it big have premiered at Toronto, and the list of some big ones that have come out: Pride and Prejudice, Slumdog Millionaire, Black Swan, The King’s Speech, Silver Linings Playbook, 12 Years a Slave, La La Land, I, Tonya, and last year, American Fiction.

MCMAHON:
Those are all significant, big and good.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, some were small that made it big. Some were always big and they decided to roll it out in Toronto, so there’s a lot to watch for there. Our fabulous researcher, Helena, came up with a great list, and I spent a lot of time looking at it, and some of them you can find trailers, a lot of them you can’t find trailers so I’m just going to have to look at the descriptions to try to figure out what intrigues me. So I could have done twenty but we don’t have the time for it, so I’ll just give you a few.

I’m intrigued by something called The Brutalist, and this is a multilingual international co-production between the U.S., UK and Hungary. And it’s the story of an imaginary Hungarian Holocaust survivor, an architect named László Tóth who’s played by Adrien Brody, who emigrates to the U.S. after the war. And he’s working with a highly controlling patron played by Guy Pearce who wants him to build a brutalist masterpiece in Pennsylvania. Now, I’m not a big fan of brutalist architecture. We’ve got an enormous amount of it here in DC. You know the Forrestal Building, the Hirshhorn, HHS, some would say some of these things are pretty big eyesores. Other people would say that it is this height of modern Bauhaus architecture, no embellishment, enormous amounts of concrete. Here he is, this Holocaust survivor with this uber-WASP patron, and they’re going to build this concrete with some marble, I gather, masterpiece.

And I know it’s not politically correct, I really love the Fountainhead movie by Ayn Rand, and this sounds like it has a taste of this. An incredibly ambitious driven architect, and it’s directed by Brady Corbet who also did Vox Lux, and it also stars Felicity Jones as Tóth’s wife. She’s a concentration camp survivor. And it’s three hours and fifteen minutes long-

MCMAHON:
Wow.

ROBBINS:
…And it’s going to be presented in seventy millimeter at the festival to reinforce that feeling of an epic, but I’m in. I looked up the term brutalism. It’s often attributed as emerging from the French word, béton brut, meaning raw concrete, and I may not be all in for brutalism, but I’m certainly going to watch the movie.

So another one that intrigues me is something called Conclave, and that’s another international co-production and this one is U.S.-UK. And it’s directed by Edward Berger, the German who won the Oscar last year for best international feature film that we talked about for All Quiet on the Western Front, which I thought was an extraordinary movie.

MCMAHON:
It’s a great movie, great movie.

ROBBINS:
And for that alone, I’m willing to watch this, but it also has some-

MCMAHON:
Spooky soundtrack too.

ROBBINS:
Yes, that was an extraordinary soundtrack. So this is the story of the political battle that unfolds over seventy-two hours. The College of Cardinals meets to elect a new Pope and the two leading candidates are…one is a reactionary, an openly racist cardinal, and another is a very progressive cardinal. And it has this, I like to say, an all-star cast with Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini. She is not up for the papacy, not surprisingly. But I think it says a lot about the state of politics within the church itself as well as an extraordinary cast, so I’m intrigued by this. So, that’s the Conclave.

And there is a Georgian movie, which is more of your indie description here. It’s called April and it tells the story of an OBGYN living in a rural town in the foothills of the Caucasus who not only delivers babies, she also secretly performs abortions for women who come to her desperate for care. And her work is investigated after a stillbirth happens on her watch, and there are also rumors of her abortion work that’s surface. And as she battles to defend her career, she begins to question her own decisions.

The doctor sounds both heroic but also a textured character, and given the increasingly problematic politics of Georgia, I think it sounds like a movie that’s really worth watching. The director, Déa, and I’m sure I’m going to mess up, her name is Kulumbegashvili, and the lead actress, Ia Sukhitashvili, spend considerable time in a local maternity ward in the town where the story is set, which also happens to be the director’s hometown, and they even filmed in the clinic’s courtyard. So it sounds like something that is very relevant for what’s going on given the assault on reproductive rights in the United States as well as the assault on so many rights inside of Georgia.

And finally, because we only have limited time, but here’s one that really, I’m definitely in for and it’s called All of You. And I probably shouldn’t fall for this but I love rom-coms, although I’m not sure this one is a com, and I really love Brett Goldstein who both stars in and co-wrote the movie along with British director William Bridges. And you probably know Goldstein from Ted Lasso, which he starred in as Roy Kent and he also co-wrote. As for this movie, the convention seems really predictable. It’s the near future and Simon and Laura are best friends. She takes a test that is supposedly guaranteed to match you with your soulmate. She finds said soulmate, but Simon and Laura may really be the true match for each other, and life unfolds and I gather timelines bend. I’m ready to give it a chance if only so I can do the Roy Kent chant, which I can’t do on our podcast.

MCMAHON:
You can’t give it a try? We will put these as we have before on our show notes page so that those listening and wondering, “What did Carla talk about?” will see the link to the movie and maybe even the trailer as the case may be.

ROBBINS:
And if you haven’t watched Shrinking, which is another Brett Goldstein with Jason Siegel and Harrison Ford, a TV series that’s also quite fabulous. But I’m a huge Brett Goldstein fan, if not only because he was a writer who then decided sending his tape, his audition tape to the people he was working with on Ted Lasso and became…Have you watched Ted Lasso?

MCMAHON:
I certainly know of the Ted Lasso phenomenon. I have not watched a full episode of Ted Lasso, yet.

ROBBINS:
Roy Kent has an extraordinary potty mouth and he’s an extraordinary character. He’s quite wonderful, so I recommend that and that’s why I’m in for this movie as well, so effing Roy Kent, as I like to say.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, it’s now time to hear from our audience, as in the audience figure of the week portion of the podcast. There’s your ding that you love to wait for. This is the figure that listeners-

ROBBINS:
Roy, Roy Kent.

MCMAHON:
… vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_Org’s Instagram story. Our audience this week selected, “U.S. Seizes Maduro’s Air Force 1.” Carla, why is this significant?

ROBBINS:
I don’t think it’s going to change anything in Venezuela, but it’s a cool story. So the Justice Department says the plane was purchased through a shell company for $13 million in violation of U.S. trade sanctions, and they seized the plane because they needed to enforce U.S. sanctions law. But the real issue here is their ongoing effort to find some lever, any lever to change Maduro’s behavior, and we’ve been doing this for a really long time and really failing to do it. The State Department most recently recognized Maduro’s challenger in the late July election, Edmundo González, as the winner. Maduro of course has claimed to have won and his stacked election council and Supreme Court have ratified that claim. The plane looks really shiny. The decision to seize it and make such a big deal out of it, is it going to change Maduro’s mind? I doubt it.

We’ve done a lot bigger things in the past. After the 2018 rigged vote, the U.S. and dozens of other countries recognized the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s president. Unfortunately, that changed nothing. During the Trump administration, the Justice Department charged Maduro and a gaggle of his cronies with narco-terrorism. That sadly changed nothing. The Biden administration tried a less confrontational approach with Maduro and lifted some sanctions before the election in hopes that Maduro might allow them to go forward. They also hoped it was going to stabilize oil prices. That may have actually worked, but what did Maduro do? He barred the number one opposition candidate from running and then stole the election from her chosen number two. “Go ahead, seize my plane.” I think that’s going to be Maduro’s action to it, and he’ll probably just get another plane.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, as you indicated, carrots, sticks, carrots and sticks, none of this seems to have worked in regard to Venezuela under Maduro, who also it must be said, continues to be underestimated in his ability to cling on to power, either through manipulating votes or consolidating the power centers of the country. Because again, we look at another recent example. That wasn’t the case in a place like Bangladesh, for example, which is still dealing with a transition of its own and had an autocratic leader there, and yet some hold out hope that you’re going to see a more democratic Bangladesh emerge from difficulties there. But Venezuela, not so much luck, and the latest chapter also includes some regional pressure that he’s gotten including from leftist governments. It doesn’t seem to make any difference though.

ROBBINS:
Well, he still has the military with him, and a huge number of people chose, instead of staying and protesting, chose to leave. The country is in desperate economic shape but he still has enough money to buy off the military and to buy off his supporters. It would be wacky if it weren’t so incredibly depressing. On Monday, Maduro announced that this year’s Christmas holiday season would begin on October 1st, and I don’t think anyone’s going to be running out to buy tinsel but the Chavista government traditionally ups its handouts of food and aid packages in the Christmas season. So Maduro is going to do that even earlier this year and start buying people off, so it already smells like Christmas, as he said in his speech, and come January, he’s planning on being inaugurated again.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it’s distressing and you try to hold out some sort of horizon for some change, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to be possible unless there’s some other unexpected element within Venezuela at this point, and that doesn’t seem likely either.

ROBBINS:
So the plane has been moved from the Dominican Republic where it was seized and it’s sitting here, and Maduro is in power.

MCMAHON:
And that’s our look at the world next week. Here are some other stories to keep an eye on: Japan’s outgoing prime minister meets with South Korea’s president in Seoul; Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and the Irish leader Simon Harris meet in Dublin; and Algeria holds its presidential election.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you’re at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you’d like to reach out, please email us at [email protected], and I’d like to send a shout-out to the wonderful listener who wrote in and made a very persuasive point that I should stop referring to Benjamin Netanyahu as Bibi because it was overly familiar, and you’ll note that I have stopped that. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org, and opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today’s program was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra, and special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria, and this is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye, and be careful out there.