Bored of Peace - August 10, 2026

**Cenk Uygur** (0:12)
Welcome to The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, Bassem Youssef on as guest host today. Bassem, great to see you, brother. How are you doing?

**Bassem Youssef** (0:19)
Hi, Cenk, how are you? This is Bassem Youssef, co-hosting today with Cenk. I'm good, brother, I'm good.

**Cenk Uygur** (0:23)
We do have a lot of people here who are very interested in watching the show. And we have a lot of people here who are very interested in A lot to get to. We do have a lot of news on the Iran war front. One is really positive piece of news. The other two are very negative pieces of news. We're gonna give all three to you guys. And then we've got a lot of discussion about Abdullah El-Sayed and the mainstream media, the establishment Democrats and the right wing all converging to attack them. We will defend them.
And then there's discussions about Hasan Piker, the never-ending discussions about that. We'll tackle that in the second hour, plus flock cameras. A lot of Americans are saying flock off. So will we see the end of those? So that's an interesting conversation as well. So a lot to get to. Let's get started with this first story.
So, in a move that is going to make peace a lot hoarder, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government has rejected Donald Trump's peace offer to Hamas. And Hamas had already accepted it, but Israel says no to peace. Now I'm going to break down what Trump said, what Netanyahu said, which is back, which is basically an open-handed slap. But, Bassem, real quick up front, I know you must be shocked that Israel has rejected peace.

**Bassem Youssef** (1:45)
Of course, I'm shocked.
I mean, I don't know why would you even give any kind of importance to these kind of statements or these kind of events, like Trump is offering peace and then Trump. It just, I think it's a game, it's a game, nobody really believes that anymore. I think they're just buying time in order to strike again and to hit again. They did that with Iran many times, they go into a peace process and then they would bomb them. They would bomb Qatar who are actually like the intermediates.
Israel doesn't want peace and today, actually, it's mainly today, I guess, in the Jerusalem Post, I think they have a headlines where it doesn't matter that we have peace with our neighbors, they are just secretly planning to have war with us. And they're talking about Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt. So these people, I'm just like, I don't know, it's theatrics. And I don't know why we even waste time on them.

**Cenk Uygur** (2:37)
Yeah, well, that's actually a really interesting point that I want to discuss a little bit more in a second. Let me tell everybody what Trump said, because I thought that there was a 1% chance that it was encouraging. We'll see if that 1% was justified or not. And then what Netanyahu said in return. So Trump said, today the Board of Peace reached a historic agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza.
The other armed groups are actually very relevant, we'll come back to that too. There's a monumental step toward lasting peace and security. He said, the agreement will be carried out in carefully structured phases, which actually makes sense.
As disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors. There's actually a logical plan, that's why both sides, America and Hamas, has agreed to this. The one, of course, stumbling block is always Israel, cuz they never want peace. But here, Hamas is saying, look, well, let's do it in parts. We disarm, they withdraw, we disarm, they withdraw, we hand it over to an international force, makes perfect sense. Well, here comes the Israelis to screw that up. NPR first says, it's envisioned Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and Hamas' disarmament as part of a phased process, rather than requiring Hamas to fully disarm before Israeli forces began pulling back. And that makes sense, part of the reason is, the reason Trump mentioned those other armed groups is there's armed militias working on behalf of Israel inside Gaza. So if Hamas gives up all of their weapons first as Israel wants, gets no concessions back and not even disarming the Israeli-backed militias, then they'll be at the mercy of those militias. So that is a totally undoable ask, and they would never agree to it. It would basically be a death sentence for them. And then Israel will get to run Gaza completely and having done absolutely nothing in return. So that's unreasonable, that's why Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on it. First, watch him speaking in Hebrew, that's whenever he wants to hide something. It's got the subtitles and then for our audio audience, I'll read it as well.