#463 – Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza

Speaker 1 following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The War in the West, The Madness of Crowds, and his new book on democracies and death cults.

Speaker 1 We talk about Russia and Ukraine and about Israel and Gaza. Douglas has very strong views on these topics and he defends them brilliantly and fearlessly.

Speaker 1 As I always try to do for all topics, I will also talk to people who have different views from Douglas, including on the next episode of this podcast.

Speaker 1 We live in an era of online discourse where grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths roam the vast, beautiful dark land of the internet. It's hard to know who to trust.

Speaker 1 I believe no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others. Some are insightful, and some are delusional.

Speaker 1 The problem is, it's hard to tell which is which, unless you use your mind with intellectual humility and with rigor.

Speaker 1 I recommend you listen to many sources who disagree with each other and try to pick up wisdom from each.

Speaker 1 Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face to face with people who have spent most of their lives living there, whether it's Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia.

Speaker 1 Let's try together to not be cogs in the machine of outrage and instead to reach towards reason and compassion.

Speaker 1 There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today. Plus, there are thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire.
Human civilization hangs in the balance.

Speaker 1 The 21st century is a new geopolitical puzzle all of us are tasked with solving.

Speaker 1 Let's not mess it up.

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Speaker 1 It's volume one of his trilogy called The War in the West. I believe it's focusing on 1939 to 1941.
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And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.

Speaker 1 What have you understood about the war in Ukraine from your visits there?

Speaker 1 Just looking at the big picture of your understanding of the invasion of February 24th, 2022, and the war in the three years since.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, several things. There's

Speaker 1 political angles which are forever changing, but

Speaker 1 on the human level, as you know, if you visit troops, frontline troops, you have that admiration for people defending their country, defending their homes, defending their families.

Speaker 1 I'm struck by the way in which that is at a remove from the sort of political noise and the media noise and

Speaker 1 much more.

Speaker 1 It's very easy to get caught up in the

Speaker 1 twos and fros of today's news, but that to my mind is that's the single thing that struck me most in my visits there

Speaker 1 is just

Speaker 1 the people I've met

Speaker 1 who who are fighting for a cause which at that level is unavoidable, undeniable.

Speaker 1 So the thing that struck you that's different from the media turmoil is just the reality of war. Yeah, of course.
I mean,

Speaker 1 you know, people who

Speaker 1 have either lived under

Speaker 1 Russian occupation from the invading armies and then come back out into the world having been liberated as in late 2022, or the people now organized most recently there in recent weeks who were

Speaker 1 just getting on with their job as soldiers

Speaker 1 whilst the world was talking about them.

Speaker 1 When were you there in early on in this escalated war of twenty two? Yes, first time was in

Speaker 1 I was with the the Ukrainian armed forces when they retook Kherson. And I was back in recent weeks and was there when the

Speaker 1 Trump Trump-Zelensky blow-up happened. In fact,

Speaker 1 I was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when I was watching it.

Speaker 1 How's the morale? How's the way

Speaker 1 the content of the conversations you've heard different

Speaker 1 from the two visits separated by, I guess, two years?

Speaker 1 One level,

Speaker 1 I mean, nothing has changed much. As you know, it's a sort of

Speaker 1 it's not a

Speaker 1 total standoff because intermittently each side gains territory from the others, but it's it's not, I mean, there have been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.

Speaker 1 I think uh my experience of the the soldiers, the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there's a

Speaker 1 intense optimism about the outcomes of the war. There's a sense that

Speaker 1 they're going to win.

Speaker 1 And the definition of what win means was like

Speaker 1 all the territory is going to be won back. Yeah, I certainly

Speaker 1 on the front lines facing Crimea

Speaker 1 became quite familiar with people who thought that the Ukrainians in late 2022 would even be able to get Crimea back. And that struck me even at the time.

Speaker 1 And I said, I thought that that was an overreach.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 now

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted. The morale,

Speaker 1 the dreams, the certainty of victory

Speaker 1 has

Speaker 1 maybe faded from the forefront of their minds. Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.

Speaker 1 What did you think of the blow-up between Zelensky and Trump as you're sitting there in the dugout?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it was a very disturbing place to watch it from. Perhaps anywhere would have been.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously, it was a meeting that shouldn't have happened. It was far too early.
Why do you think so? There's not enough actual pathways to peace on the table.

Speaker 1 Well, I think the mineral deal, I mean, I love the fact that everyone's now an expert in Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits.

Speaker 1 I think as I've learned, and we'll talk about Israel and Palestine, I'm learning that everybody's an expert on geopolitics and history of war on the internet.

Speaker 1 And now mineral deposits, obviously yes the and i'm really speaking at the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here but no i mean i i from what i could see the deal that that uh the american administration was trying to uh get the ukrainian government to sign was it was sort of too early to um

Speaker 1 too forced the ukrainians weren't were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure.

Speaker 1 And I think certainly Zelensky wasn't expecting to actually wasn't expecting to go until pretty much the day before,

Speaker 1 was obviously visibly tired and exhausted again, as you are after that amount of pressure for that long a time. And,

Speaker 1 no, I mean, the thing that struck me, and I said this in my column, the New York Post from there, that

Speaker 1 the thing that struck me was I said to some of the soldiers I was with,

Speaker 1 you know, what do you make of this?

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, one of them just said to me,

Speaker 1 Well, you know, we're advised not to follow too closely the ins and outs of the politics of this, you know.

Speaker 1 And, but of course, everyone has Instagram or scrolls, and among dog pictures and the, you know, the hot women or whatever is,

Speaker 1 you know, what happened in the Oval.

Speaker 1 And, but what struck me was this same guy and saying,

Speaker 1 I've got a job to do. Right.

Speaker 1 And there's a clarity and a wisdom to that.

Speaker 1 But uh your job is is is bigger than that, right? It's to uh understand the politics as well. And what do you think about the politics of that moment?

Speaker 1 Because that was a real opportunity to come together and and make progress on peace, right? And it from by all accounts

Speaker 1 was not a successful step forward. I don't think by any account it was a successful step forward unless

Speaker 1 to some extent it was uh play but but from DC to say to Putin look we duffed off Zelensky and you know now give us something

Speaker 1 that's the only

Speaker 1 remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it but I think it was just one of those extremely

Speaker 1 I mean just awful

Speaker 1 political moments

Speaker 1 Zelensky was obviously

Speaker 1 deeply

Speaker 1 irritated by the

Speaker 1 the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington.

Speaker 1 It was only a week after the Trump comments about Zelensky being a dictator

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 people in the administration implying that Ukraine has started the war. And I think that

Speaker 1 must be... for Zelensky a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in.

Speaker 1 And I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering

Speaker 1 because it would be bewildering. I think the sad thing to me also

Speaker 1 on the mundane details of that meeting and just the unfortunate way that meetings happen, I think it's true that he was also exhausted. Yes.

Speaker 1 There was a dickhead of a reporter that was asked a question about outfit in a way that, listen, Zelensky, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses.

Speaker 1 He's an emotional being, for better or for worse. And there's a dumb dickhead of a reporter.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend.

Speaker 1 He is.

Speaker 1 The things you know. See, you're a real journalist.

Speaker 1 He's from one of the new... I'm all for opening up the White House press pool and all that sort of thing.
But it means that you get some people in who are sort of

Speaker 1 from blogland. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means that you get somebody who will do something like that.

Speaker 1 The problem with that interaction, as I saw it, was that the that guy asked that, well, disrespectful question.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think it was disrespectful. And

Speaker 1 I'll very quickly say why. I mean, I think that

Speaker 1 I think that when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, the people in the realm of peace should have some respect, or at least concession, that the the other man has come from the realm of war.

Speaker 1 And that

Speaker 1 if you're sitting in a political environment where you talk about people being destroyed and

Speaker 1 decimated and defenestrated, and much more to a man who's

Speaker 1 for whom none of that is metaphorical,

Speaker 1 I think that's extremely hard to

Speaker 1 accept.

Speaker 1 And I think that probably also at that moment there was a sort of sense of,

Speaker 1 you know, Zelensky is being disrespected by

Speaker 1 being asked about what he's wearing when as everyone knows you know Churchill during World War II used to wear his fatigues on foreign visits and it's sort of just that it's to remind people you're coming from the realm of war

Speaker 1 and I think that probably in that

Speaker 1 in that moment one of the things that would have been going through his head would be but I mean if if if this was Putin sitting here being assaulted by a journalist, you know,

Speaker 1 you'd hope your host stepped in and defended you. I mean, if, let me try this one out.

Speaker 1 I mean, if, say, if a journalist in the Oval Office, if Putin was sitting there, or a putative journalist, said to Putin, you know,

Speaker 1 everyone knows you've had a lot of facial work done, and word is you've used the same guy that Berlusconi used to use.

Speaker 1 Can you comment on?

Speaker 1 on that?

Speaker 1 You'd say, well,

Speaker 1 that's a kind of disrespectful question for journalists to ask, and it's a little bit

Speaker 1 off

Speaker 1 what needs to be gone over.

Speaker 1 And it's the same thing with Zelensky with the outfit. I think it was just petty and

Speaker 1 threw things off in a bad way. Yeah, I know it's poorly researched because I think Zelensky was explaining this like three years ago at the beginning of the war, why he wears what he wears.

Speaker 1 And he's been consistent in wearing the same. It's also, by the way, it's an example of the frivolity of a lot of

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 attempts to understand what's going on.

Speaker 1 I mean, my view is that, is that since actually most people, in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything, one of the things that we always do is to seize on

Speaker 1 minor and really quite unimportant things.

Speaker 1 I mean, for, I mean, every site does it. Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years.

Speaker 1 I didn't want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because it just, it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama's foreign policy.

Speaker 1 It was just the easy shorthand.

Speaker 1 I think it's the same. We're always tempted to that.
But the thing is, I think you mentioned Putin. I think Putin would have been able to

Speaker 1 respond himself to that journalist effectively.

Speaker 1 And he would have done it in Russian. Oh, yeah, the language thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I wanted to sort of of lay out several just unfortunate things that happen in these situations.

Speaker 1 I think it happens in all peace negotiations, and it's funny how history can turn in moments like this.

Speaker 1 I do think there's a dickhead reporter combined with the fact that, you know, with all due respect, but Zelensky's English sometimes is not very good.

Speaker 1 Yes, and apart from anything else, if he had agreed to not have done it in English, he would have bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed. Yeah.
Yeah, and have the wit.

Speaker 1 The guy is funny, witty, intelligent.

Speaker 1 You know, he could do that in the native language of whether it's a Ukrainian or Russian to be able to respond and get the interpreter.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 all of that is really unfortunate because I think on those little moments, it's a dance. And there's an opportunity there.
You know, the Republicans,

Speaker 1 the right wing in the United States, have a general kind of skepticism of Zelensky.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean it has to be that way. It can turn, it can change, it can evolve.
It's very interesting why it has happened. Why do you think it's happened?

Speaker 1 Politics in the United States is so dumb that at the very beginning, it could just be reduced to,

Speaker 1 well, the left went Putin bad, Zelensky good, rah-rah, Ukrainian flags. Therefore, the right must go the opposite.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's literally as dumb as that. Let's each pick a side and call the others dumb.
I had a line I used used recently.

Speaker 1 The necessity of people who live too long online to try to wade their way out of the memes.

Speaker 1 It is sort of that, isn't it? Because yes, I mean, I can understand the people who find it very irritating that so many people who would put BLM flags or pride flags or

Speaker 1 trans flags in their bio, then put Ukrainian flags in their bio, despite almost certainly not knowing where Ukraine was.

Speaker 1 And if that happens, the inevitable instinct of a lot of people who aren't really thinking is to

Speaker 1 that's really annoying. These people are really annoying.
I'll sock it to them.

Speaker 1 But that's where you've got to try to rise above that and say, actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn't depend on my tolerance for memes online today.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I think the memes can be broken through in meetings like the one that happened between Zelensky and Trump. There can have been real camaraderie.

Speaker 1 I've seen the skill of that just recently, having researched deeply and interacted with Narendra Modi, here's somebody who has the skill of, you know, for his country, for his situation, being able to somehow be friends with Putin and friends with Zelensky and friends with Trump and friends with Biden and friends with Obama.

Speaker 1 It's very skillful. And that,

Speaker 1 while still being

Speaker 1 strong for his country and like fundamentally a nationalist figure who's like

Speaker 1 you know very not globalist not

Speaker 1 uh anything but pro-India India first nation first in fact nation first with a very specific idea what that nation represents

Speaker 1 and that you know Zelensky could do all of those things

Speaker 1 but have the skill of navigating

Speaker 1 the Trump room because every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated.

Speaker 1 Yes, the obvious one, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like it was all Zelensky's fault, but I mean, the obvious one was at the beginning of the meeting to say yet again, as he has done for three years, thank you to America and the American people and American politicians from across the aisle for your support for my country in its hour of need.

Speaker 1 We're deeply grateful.

Speaker 1 And because he for once forgot to say that.

Speaker 1 I think it's not that simple. I think there's a...
It's not that simple. It's one reason.
I think saying thank you, he didn't need to say thank you.

Speaker 1 That was why Vance, that was what Vance leapt in on. He's just picking a thing to leap on.
There's a whole energy.

Speaker 1 You have to acknowledge in your way of being that you have been very Biden buddy-buddy with the left for the last four years. There's ways to fix that.

Speaker 1 Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that.
And you basically have to say a kind word to Trump, which is like

Speaker 1 showing there's many ways of doing that. But one of them is saying,

Speaker 1 feeding the ego by acknowledging that he is one of the world's greatest negotiators, right?

Speaker 1 I'm glad we're able to come to the table and negotiate together because I believe you are the great negotiator and mediator that can

Speaker 1 actually bring a successful resolution to the

Speaker 1 as opposed to have an energy of like

Speaker 1 it should be obvious to everybody that Ukraine are the good guys and Russia Russia is the bad guys. There's this whole energy of entitlement that he brought.
He forgot that there's a new guy.

Speaker 1 You got to like convince the new guy that this global mission that this nation is on, this war that is in many ways the West versus

Speaker 1 the East, that there's ideals, there's whole histories here, that this is a war worth winning. You have to convince them, right? Yeah, no, sure.
And they obviously failed on that occasion.

Speaker 1 But as I say, it must be bewildering to have landed in a place where people were seriously talking about Ukraine starting the war and Zelensky not Putin being the dictator.

Speaker 1 I did the front page of the New York Post the day after the President's comments on that, saying that, the big picture of Putin, just saying, right,

Speaker 1 this is a dictator. And, you know, I think that people can be

Speaker 1 lithe enough to be able to recognize that, you know, you can make criticisms of Zelensky or the Ukrainians, but it doesn't mean you have to fall full Putin.

Speaker 1 And again, unfortunately, a lot of people in our time don't have that capability.

Speaker 1 Can we go right into it? What is your strongest criticism of Putin? He's a dictator who's very bloody,

Speaker 1 as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition. He's kleptomaniac of his country's resources, has enriched himself as much as he could,

Speaker 1 as he has with the cronies around him.

Speaker 1 He's not just acted to

Speaker 1 destroy internal opposition in Russia, but has gone to other countries, including my own country of birth, and killed people on their, our soil, using,

Speaker 1 as it happens, weapons of mass destruction the use of polonium in the center of London not good

Speaker 1 the use of incredibly dangerous nerve agents that could kill tens of thousands of people in a charming Cathedral city like Salisbury not good if the sort of apologists of Putin and say well he's just a sort of tough man who's looking after his house business

Speaker 1 well

Speaker 1 I don't think even if you think he has the right to do that he should be doing it in third countries deliberately using uh weapons that are meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of british citizens yeah i mean that's just for starters what do you make for uh do you think he's actually popularly elected no

Speaker 1 do you think the the results of the elections are fraudulent

Speaker 1 yes i mean

Speaker 1 you think it's possible that it's just that the opposition has been eliminated and he's legitimately popularly elected. It definitely helps a chap if he's killed all of his opponents.

Speaker 1 Something about using the term chap in that context is just marvelous. But, you know, no, I mean, but I mean, seriously, you, you,

Speaker 1 if, if, if people are worried about...

Speaker 1 This is another of the sort of sight the Alice in Wonderland things recently about Zelensky is people are saying, well, why hasn't he's a dictator?

Speaker 1 Because he hasn't held elections during a total war of self-defense.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well,

Speaker 1 you know, if you're really, really passionate about free and fair elections in that neck of the woods, you'd at least notice that Russian elections are not free and fair in any meaningful sense.

Speaker 1 But this doesn't mean that you have to say that, therefore, they should have Western-style elections and freedom, that Russia is ready to go and become a Western liberal democracy.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean any of that at all. It's just at least note

Speaker 1 that this is what Putin is.

Speaker 1 What do you think is the motivation for his invasion of Ukraine in 22?

Speaker 1 It's what he's said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union. Do you think there's

Speaker 1 empire-building components to that motivation? I would trust most of my friends in Eastern Central Europe who certainly do think that.

Speaker 1 There's a reason why the Baltic countries are the countries that are spending highest in percentage of GDP on defense. And it's because they're very worried.

Speaker 1 I don't think they're faking it. I don't think they're faking it for me or for anyone else.

Speaker 1 I think the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, and others are genuinely worried for the first time in some decades.

Speaker 1 Do you think there's a possibility

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 the war continues indefinitely?

Speaker 1 Even if there's a ceasefire and the peace reached, the war will resume. Do you think you will seek expansion even beyond Ukraine.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And the most obvious thing is that if Trump manages to negotiate a ceasefire, it'll be a temporary pause.

Speaker 1 And whoever comes in as president after Trump, Putin will use the opportunity to advance again.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Again,

Speaker 1 one of the things that I have heard from parts of the American right and others is that all he wants is Ukraine.

Speaker 1 That that's all he wants.

Speaker 1 And that he has no history or of rhetoric or actions that suggests anything else and again it's one of the reasons why it's useful traveling to places and seeing things with your own eyes because i very much remember being in the country of georgia uh after putin tried to invade in 2008 so

Speaker 1 i i just

Speaker 1 again people don't have to be the greatest supporters of the ukrainian cause just to recognize that

Speaker 1 that it doesn't seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin's vision.

Speaker 1 Do you see value and maybe depth and power to the realist perspective of all this? You know, somebody like John Mearsheimer's formulation of all this, that

Speaker 1 in these invasions of Georgia,

Speaker 1 of Ukraine, it's using military power to expand the sphere of influence in the region in a cold calculation of geopolitics. Aaron Powell, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 One of the fascinating things about the last few years is that there's been an act of sort of necromancy of certain figures who are totally, totally debunked

Speaker 1 in the area of Ukraine, Miersheimer, and in the case of Israel, people like Finkelstein. And it's been interesting because these are people that one hadn't heard of for some years because

Speaker 1 they were not listened to for usually for good reason. But by the way, first of all, I'm very skeptical of the term realist in foreign policy because

Speaker 1 most people,

Speaker 1 to some extent, will say that they are a realist in foreign policy.

Speaker 1 Very few people are surrealists in foreign policy. Very few people are unrealists.
I would like to meet them. A surrealist foreign policy analyst.

Speaker 1 We did mention Alice in Wonderland.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, maybe we should introduce the term. But

Speaker 1 I mean, if you want to say, if you want to look Gimlet out, eyed out across the world,

Speaker 1 you're a realist. I think the steelman of their argument would be

Speaker 1 Russia has or believes it has a sphere of influence and it is regrettable, but there's very little we can do about that.

Speaker 1 That would be about the best version of that argument that you can make.

Speaker 1 Well, to expand on that, Steelman, isn't this how superpowers operate

Speaker 1 in the dark realist slash surrealist way? Meaning, the United States uses military power

Speaker 1 to have a sphere of influence over the whole globe, really.

Speaker 1 China appears to be willing to use military power to expand its sphere of influence. And political power, yeah, more importantly, in the case of China.
Political power.

Speaker 1 Non-kinetic warfare to take over areas, Hong Kong being the obvious one. But behind that, isn't there always a kinetic threat? Oh, yeah, of course.
Yeah, I mean, you disappear some booksellers and

Speaker 1 students who are protesting, of course. I just, but to go back to this, yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 Okay, countries believe they have or would like to have spheres of influence.

Speaker 1 I do think at some point that the so-called realists on that have to try to decide how much leeway that allows you to give to a

Speaker 1 fairly rapacious regime.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's not the easiest calculation always to make. You have to work out whether or not, for instance, it is true that if

Speaker 1 Russia had, if Putin had managed to go all the way to Kiev in the first weeks of the war in 22, he would have gone straight on to other places.

Speaker 1 And, you know, maybe he would have done, maybe he would have taken his time, maybe he wouldn't have done. And this is a very fine calculation that changes

Speaker 1 every week, let alone every year.

Speaker 1 You know, my friends in Georgia, I thought, were

Speaker 1 wildly off the mark when they were believing that after 2008 they could get, for instance, either NATO membership or EU membership. And I thought that was completely unlikely.

Speaker 1 And I still think it's unlikely and

Speaker 1 almost certainly undesirable for Europe and for NATO. Because you've got to be very careful.
And obviously, this is one of the issues with Ukraine and has been since the 90s: is

Speaker 1 you know, are you going to set up a tripwire to start World War III? And that's not a small thing to consider.

Speaker 1 So, what do you think the

Speaker 1 peace deal might look like?

Speaker 1 And what does the path to peace look like in Ukraine in the coming weeks and months? I'd thought it would be

Speaker 1 regrettably

Speaker 1 the Ukrainians ceding some territory in the east

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 making sure they rearm uh during whatever peace period comes afterwards.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 probably

Speaker 1 all four territories of uh Danyas Lukan's parishioner Pharzan. You couldn't lay any of that out because it has to be negotiated on.

Speaker 1 But I I mean I think that and I think the ease with which non-Ukrainians are currently speaking about the Ukrainian ceding territory is is concerning because these territories include hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin's rule and people who have families in the rest of Ukraine and much more.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I recently interviewed children who had managed to get out of the Russian-occupied areas.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's brutal for a Ukrainian to be growing up in that territory. So

Speaker 1 when people say, well, obviously, you know, Donetsk has to be given to Putin, I think that that is

Speaker 1 not as easy a

Speaker 1 thing if you're in Ukraine as it is if you're sitting in New York, say.

Speaker 1 And by the way, I think that on the issue of, there is a school of thought that

Speaker 1 obviously President Trump to some extent was

Speaker 1 floating in recent weeks, which is that if a deal is done, a a business deal in relation to minerals or anything else, you get this great you get a kind of buffer zone of American businesses and investment and therefore American business people in the region, which would effectively warn Putin not to

Speaker 1 invade.

Speaker 1 I don't

Speaker 1 follow that idea because not least there were Americans in the regions that were invaded in twenty two and they left fast.

Speaker 1 And we know from Hong Kong and other places that just because there are international financial interests in the region does not mean that a dictatorship will not either militarily or covertly take over.

Speaker 1 I don't see American miners as being an effective buffer zone against Putin. By the way, what did you

Speaker 1 learn from talking to the children, Ukrainian children from those regions?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean,

Speaker 1 it's heartbreaking because

Speaker 1 the only schooling is

Speaker 1 Russian schooling.

Speaker 1 Obviously, teaching the Russian language, Putin's view of history and effectively indoctrination. And

Speaker 1 people can quibble with that term, but it's Putin-esque indoctrination schools.

Speaker 1 And any children or families that do not want that effectively have to hide and not go out.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there were I spoke to children and parents who'd had school friends who'd, for instance, the Russians set up in 22 and 23

Speaker 1 summer camps for the children of some of the areas that have been occupied. And the children went off to the camps and then they didn't come back.
But they were just stolen.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's thought that around 20,000 Ukrainian children have been stolen in this fashion. That's not a small thing.

Speaker 1 It's not got very much attention. But

Speaker 1 yes, I mean, children who would hide whenever the Russian troops came to the door.

Speaker 1 One teenage boy who described to me how when his mother was out,

Speaker 1 a woman came around the house, knocked on the door,

Speaker 1 and gave him his papers

Speaker 1 and said that he had to attend the next week to sign up for the Russian army.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is...

Speaker 1 This is not good.

Speaker 1 And that's obviously what life is like for thousands of people behind the Russian lines in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 I just have it in mind when people say things like, you know, well, obviously these regions have to be handed over.

Speaker 1 It's very, very hard if you're Ukrainian to concede to that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and even if they are as part of the negotiation and handed over, I think it'll probably

Speaker 1 be generations

Speaker 1 or never that that could be accepted by Ukrainian people. Absolutely.
And I would have thought never.

Speaker 1 What do we know about this kidnapping of children? The stories of the thousands of children that the Russian forces kidnapped?

Speaker 1 Some of them were in orphanages in eastern Ukraine. Not all by any means, but some were.

Speaker 1 And it's a very complicated story, actually, because many children were taken from their families.

Speaker 1 Many, the Russians said, well, look at these Ukrainians. They don't even look after their children.
Therefore, we will look after them.

Speaker 1 And I was recently, when I was there looking into this story, because it's a very interesting question as to why it hasn't had more attention.

Speaker 1 You know, one thinks of, for instance, the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls some 12 years ago now in northern Nigeria, and that

Speaker 1 appalling abduction of 300 girls by Boko Haram

Speaker 1 completely gained the world's attention. And I was very interested into why the Ukrainian children who'd been...
taken by the Russians have not gained similar attention.

Speaker 1 There's a slight similarity with the war in Israel, which I'm sure we'll come on to. But

Speaker 1 I do think that one reason is that they were effectively hostages and the Ukrainians knew,

Speaker 1 this is my estimation of the terrain, is that the Ukrainians knew that if they made a great deal about this, or is it worth more than they did,

Speaker 1 that the children would effectively be the most effective bargaining chip.

Speaker 1 And I do think there's considerable truth in that, because if you look at, for instance, the way in which

Speaker 1 pressure has been put on the Israeli government by the Israeli population about the kidnapped Israelis, you'll see that it's a pretty effective tactic for

Speaker 1 any

Speaker 1 totalitarian regime or terrorist group to operate in a way that means that the population of the country you're attacking pressure their government to do something in terms of concession.

Speaker 1 It's a very effective tool. And I think that story was partly played down, not just outside of Ukraine, but also within Ukraine, partly for that reason.
As a truth seeker, as a journalist,

Speaker 1 how do you operate in that world where,

Speaker 1 at least to me, it's obvious that there's just a flood of propaganda on both sides? Now, of course, when you go there and directly experience it and talk to people,

Speaker 1 but those people are still also swimming in the propaganda. So unless you witness stuff directly, sometimes it's hard to know.

Speaker 1 Like I speak to people on the Russian side, and they're clearly, first of all, hilariously enough, they almost always say that there's no propaganda in Russia. Of course.

Speaker 1 Which makes me realize, I mean,

Speaker 1 you can be completely lied to.

Speaker 1 Maybe I am in the United States as well. and just be unaware.

Speaker 1 Maybe Earth is run by aliens. Maybe the Earth is flat.
So I don't know. Maybe you've taken mushrooms.
I have before this.

Speaker 1 And I finally see the truth. And it's you that are deluded, Douglas.

Speaker 1 Okay, but back to our round earth discussion, round earth shills that we are.

Speaker 1 How do you know what is true?

Speaker 1 You can tell it when

Speaker 1 the bare facts become

Speaker 1 not true.

Speaker 1 Like you can tell it when

Speaker 1 somebody is willing to claim that everything

Speaker 1 caused the invasion of 2022 except for vladimir putin invading ukraine yeah there's a there's a hilarious thing that happens and i think you've actually speak about this that uh people are generally just much more willing to criticize the democratically elected leader always

Speaker 1 always so the interesting thing that happens is these wise sages that do the narratives of like nato started the war right Which there is some interesting geopolitical depth and truth to that, like that NATO expansion created a complicated geopolitical context, whatever.

Speaker 1 For sure, but they forget to say like other parts of that story. Well, yes, of course.

Speaker 1 I mean, and I mean, of course, to some extent, it's, you know, there's a, there's a, the very, the most irritating type of question asker at any event is the person who says, I was disappointed that in your 30-minute talk, you didn't address X.

Speaker 1 And I tend to say, well, looking forward to coming to your next talk where in 30 minutes you'll cover everything that could possibly be covered.

Speaker 1 There's always stuff that's going to be left on the sides. There's always going to be stuff that's left unaddressed.
There's always going to be other angles. There's always going to be somebody else

Speaker 1 who has this interesting perspective, and you can't cover it. Nevertheless, if you cover everything other than the central things, then it's suspicious.
Many years ago, I was at a debate in London,

Speaker 1 and there was a debate about the origins of World War II. And Pat Buchanan, talking of necromancy, was one of

Speaker 1 the speakers.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Andrew Roberts, the historian, was one of the people on the other side. And at one point, you know, they got so completely stuck into issues of iron ore mining in Poland in the mid, you know,

Speaker 1 something like this. And the moderator, I remember, it was just, it was just a melee.

Speaker 1 And the moderator turns to Andrew Roberts and says Andrew Roberts why did World War II begin and he says World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland

Speaker 1 and it was a magnificent moment because everything had been a mush they were just so lost in all the intricate and clever and interesting things that you can talk about about the origins of a war that you you forget

Speaker 1 to mention the thing that's most important. And

Speaker 1 certainly my experience as a journalist and writer is that one of the reasons why you need to go and see things with your own eyes is because people are certain to tell you that what you've seen with your own eyes didn't happen or hasn't happened.

Speaker 1 And it helps to steal you

Speaker 1 for that moment. It's a gradual thing that happens where the obvious thing starts being taken for granted and people stop saying it because it's like the boring thing to say at a party.

Speaker 1 And then all of a sudden, over time, you just almost start questioning whether, you know, like the obvious thing is even true. I don't know what that, how that happens in psychology.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it does.

Speaker 1 I think it does. I've observed it in a lot of different places, which is the important thing is the only thing you do forget.
Everything else is what you remember.

Speaker 1 And some of us are, for some reason, wired in a way where

Speaker 1 we try not to forget the important thing. Remember the obvious thing, yeah.
Yes. And as you say, no, I'm not wanting to be the boring guy at the party who reiterates what is true.

Speaker 1 Because what a douchebag you'd be if you were that guy. Nobody likes Captain Obvious at a party.
Okay. Is it possible that Donald Trump is a mediator,

Speaker 1 a successful negotiator, that brings a stable peace to Ukraine? It's possible. We'll have to see.
I think it's just too

Speaker 1 early and complicated to tell.

Speaker 1 That he wants to bring a peace seems seems to me to be obvious. He's stated it a lot of times.

Speaker 1 Whether he can, we're just going to have to see.

Speaker 1 It's extremely hard to see some of the parameters of the peace still.

Speaker 1 And I would suggest that the most one, not the most difficult, but

Speaker 1 one of the most difficult is that there is no peace guarantee on paper that the Ukrainians can possibly believe.

Speaker 1 I just

Speaker 1 it doesn't matter because we've we've

Speaker 1 we in the West, we, some of the countries in the West have said it before that we'd secure their

Speaker 1 peace. And we haven't.
And so

Speaker 1 what other than NATO membership, which is not possible in my view, what other than NATO membership would reassure the Ukrainians that they are going to have their borders secured and the peace of Ukraine secured?

Speaker 1 I can't see. I think

Speaker 1 there's not going to be ever a guarantee that you can trust.

Speaker 1 I think the way you have a guarantee, implicit guarantee, is by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible. So you have partnerships with

Speaker 1 the Middle East, you have partnerships with India, perhaps even with China, with the United States, with many nations in Europe.

Speaker 1 All of which still suggests that if there's enough financial interests in Ukraine, they would prevent another Russian invasion. There would be financial pressure.
Yeah. There would be,

Speaker 1 you know, Russia needs to be friends with somebody, either China or the West.

Speaker 1 I think a world that's flourishing would have Russia

Speaker 1 trading and being friends with the West and the East. Torture would be ideal.

Speaker 1 It would be ideal

Speaker 1 if the regime in Moscow wanted it, but that's that not I mean there again you get into the thing of you know uh people accused of Russophobia, but I mean um th the the I do believe that after the fall of the wall uh

Speaker 1 Russia was ill-treated by the West, not treated with the uh some of the courtesy that it required. I do think that

Speaker 1 and at the same time that doesn't justify uh

Speaker 1 the actions of Russia in the last 20 years.

Speaker 1 Right, but let's descend from the surrealist to the realist. It's very possible for Russia to

Speaker 1 be on the verge of military invasion of these nations and that being wrong

Speaker 1 while also not doing it because they're afraid to hurt the partnerships with the West and with China.

Speaker 1 It's possible, but the alliance they formed with this sort of rogue alliance with China to a considerable extent,

Speaker 1 North Korea, not useful,

Speaker 1 and Iran is

Speaker 1 something they seem to find bearable.

Speaker 1 It's not a very good alliance in most people's analysis, but it's an alliance. It's bearable, but I don't think

Speaker 1 maybe you disagree with this.

Speaker 1 I don't think the Russian people or even Putin

Speaker 1 wants to be isolated from the West. I think it wants to be friends with the West and with the East and with everybody.
He just also wants Ukraine, right? And there's,

Speaker 1 how does the Rolling Stones song go?

Speaker 1 Which one?

Speaker 1 Not the satisfaction one. Sympathy with the Devil?

Speaker 1 That's the one. You got me on that one.
No, like there, there's interests.

Speaker 1 Well, there's expanding the sphere and influence. That's one thing on the table.
But that can be put aside if you want to maintain the partnerships with these nations.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 if Ukraine has strong economic partnerships with those nations, then that prevents Russia from invading. I think the premise is one that I've seen before.

Speaker 1 There was a famous, what was his name?

Speaker 1 Norman Engel.

Speaker 1 He wrote this book, which is a fantastic bestseller in his day, where he believed that Europe would be in a period of endless Kantian peace because the prospect of European powers going to war was so economically unviable.

Speaker 1 The book was reissued after World War I,

Speaker 1 and I never got the second edition, but I assume it was significantly rewritten.

Speaker 1 That's a very kind of cynical take, that just because the book is wrong. I'm not saying just the book is wrong, I'm saying that the idea that

Speaker 1 cooperation on an economic and other levels

Speaker 1 is any

Speaker 1 significant preventative device to madness breaking out is is not something I see.

Speaker 1 Could deter some people, it could deter some very, very rational, economically driven actors, but it it fails to take into account all of the other things that motivate people to go to war and to invade and to go mad.

Speaker 1 Okay. Well, I would argue that in the 21st century, one of the reasons we have much fewer wars is because of the much more global.
Well, so there's a few tools here on the geopolitical stage.

Speaker 1 One of them is that we're just much more interconnected economically,

Speaker 1 globally interconnected. And that is always a present pressure on the world to keep peace.
There's a lot of money to be made from peace. There's also a lot of money to be made from war.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of interested tension. And I'm just presenting one of the tools that a leader should be using.
The alternative is what? Military force.

Speaker 1 That is an interesting one, sometimes a useful one. But unfortunately, it has its downsides also.
And after three years of war and the hundreds of thousands dead,

Speaker 1 you have to start wondering what are the options on the table. I agree.

Speaker 1 I'm obviously for economic cooperation,

Speaker 1 but my only caveat is not to think that that is something which

Speaker 1 is of

Speaker 1 ultimate interest, or even at the top of the list of interests, of

Speaker 1 despots, tyrants, extremists who want something else.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 can you read the mind of Vladimir Putin? No.

Speaker 1 A lot of the ideas I hear about peace is

Speaker 1 Putin bad,

Speaker 1 victory must be achieved, NATO membership required.

Speaker 1 There's this kind of like,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 what's the other, you have to come to the table to end the killing, that's one,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 two, have different ideas of how to

Speaker 1 have a non-zero chance of peace. So that,

Speaker 1 you know, the options are, it seems to me the only option,

Speaker 1 not the only option, but the likeliest option is a lot of strong economic partnerships. There's, of course, other radical options.
There's

Speaker 1 Russia joining NATO or something like this. Or there's

Speaker 1 giving, you know, doing, flirting with World War III, essentially, giving nukes to Ukraine or something like this. There's like crazy stuff.

Speaker 1 a totally new military alliance with France and

Speaker 1 Britain and Germany

Speaker 1 European nations and Ukraine, or some weird network of military power that threatens Russia in some way, or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India,

Speaker 1 China, and Ukraine, something like this. Just some really out there ideas.
And I think that's how the world...

Speaker 1 That's how the world finds the balance and realigns itself in interesting ways. No, it could be.

Speaker 1 I hope your idea is right.

Speaker 1 I think it's about the

Speaker 1 well, it's certainly the most peaceful way for this to be resolved.

Speaker 1 My only caveat, as I say, is,

Speaker 1 and also

Speaker 1 never forget to factor in

Speaker 1 that people want different things in this world.

Speaker 1 And some people don't dream as you dream.

Speaker 1 I think we'll talk about that in your new book, Death Cults. That one is an easier one for me to understand

Speaker 1 to the story that you're describing.

Speaker 1 I am more hesitant to assign psychopathy to

Speaker 1 leaders of major nations. Sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm not by any means urging you to regard Vladimir Putin as a millenarian madman who cannot be in any way understood.

Speaker 1 I think he could be negotiated and reasoned with.

Speaker 1 From your lips to God's ears.

Speaker 1 Can you steal me on the case for and then against Zelensky as the right leader for Ukraine at this moment? Is he the right person to take it to the point of peace? We'll see.

Speaker 1 If he can,

Speaker 1 then of course he is.

Speaker 1 You know, he deserves enormous respect for galvanizing his people, for being elected in the first place, for galvanizing his nation at a time of incredible peril,

Speaker 1 for playing the international game of getting support for his country well.

Speaker 1 And sometimes the person who does that, not that there are many people like that, can be the person who also brings about a peace deal, and sometimes not.

Speaker 1 I think there's a degree to which he may have seen too much suffering

Speaker 1 of the people of the land he loves to be able to sit down at a table with a world leader who

Speaker 1 did the destruction and to be be able to

Speaker 1 compromise on anything.

Speaker 1 That's possible. Again, it puts the onus on him though.

Speaker 1 It sort of slightly presupposes that Putin doesn't have the same human instinct on that. It is extremely hard.
I've noticed this in a lot of conflicts.

Speaker 1 It's extremely hard the way in which outsiders come in.

Speaker 1 and others who haven't seen what you've seen or gone through what you've gone through and say, you know, it's time to get around the negotiating table and just,

Speaker 1 you know, you think you didn't see what I saw, you didn't go through what I went through. Who are you to tell me?

Speaker 1 Goes back to that thing with the visitor from the land of war and the visitor from the land of peace.

Speaker 1 The visitor from the land of peace can easily talk about getting around negotiating tables.

Speaker 1 But the visitor from the land of war has seen other things. And

Speaker 1 it's very hard for somebody who hasn't seen it to tell the person who has that they should

Speaker 1 act differently.

Speaker 1 And the sad thing

Speaker 1 about humanity is both the person from the land of peace and the person from the land of war are right.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's a struggle.

Speaker 1 That's definitely a struggle.

Speaker 1 It's like asking somebody to forgive. I've seen that at a lot of ends of conflicts.
People say, you know, the important thing is that we forgive and move on.

Speaker 1 And then the other person says,

Speaker 1 you know, your child didn't die of shrapnel wounds.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is, you know, I got a lot of heat for an interview I did with Zelensky. By the way, people privately, the people that message me is all love and support.

Speaker 1 Even the people that disagree in Ukraine, soldiers, people online are ruthless. They're misrepresenting me.
They're lying. People online are ruthless and misrepresenting and lying.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Good God, Lex. You've discovered a new phenomenon.

Speaker 1 I'm a real radical intellectual.

Speaker 1 Nothing misses your eye.

Speaker 1 I see the truth and I'm unafraid to point it out.

Speaker 1 No, there's a degree,

Speaker 1 this idea

Speaker 1 that you

Speaker 1 need to compromise with the person, with the leader of a nation you're at war with, and in so doing, to some degree, are forgiving their actions.

Speaker 1 Because the actual feeling you have is you want it to be fair.

Speaker 1 And the definition of fair when you've seen that much suffering is for him and everybody around him, and maybe even all of the people on the other side to just die because you've seen too much suffering.

Speaker 1 But the other side of that is: yes, there's children that have died, but you go coming to the negotiation table. All the children from dying, yes, of course.

Speaker 1 And so, like, there is just you had this kind of way of speaking about it, embodying that perspective that it's naive to say to come to the negotiation table.

Speaker 1 And it is for a person from the land of war, but the very smart, intelligent, and not naive person from the land of peace that is often right in some deep sense about the long arc of history,

Speaker 1 for them, it does, it is the right thing to come to the negotiation table to end the more killing.

Speaker 1 The one thing I would add to that, though, is that you know, don't forget that it also depends on whether or not there's a clear shot of winning.

Speaker 1 Sure. If there's a clear shot of winning, and that's

Speaker 1 the most important. The most important thing in wars is not

Speaker 1 final negotiations or anything like that. It's simply winning and losing.

Speaker 1 And if you have a clear shot of winning and you can take it and you're near it,

Speaker 1 then having somebody else come in and saying,

Speaker 1 why not stop just before victory

Speaker 1 is very hard. That's one of the complexities, one of the many, many complexities of the conflict we're talking about.
You know what's the other big complexity of that?

Speaker 1 Because the clear shot of winning is like a man walking through the desert seeing water.

Speaker 1 It could be

Speaker 1 during war, it really is an illusion. So here's what happens.
The really complicated aspect of negotiation is in order to negotiate peace from a place of strength,

Speaker 1 you have to have victory in sight. Yes.

Speaker 1 And so the temptation from that position is to not negotiate, is to keep pushing forward to achieve victory. And this, I would say,

Speaker 1 hindsight is 2020, but this is the failure in 22 and two occasions to achieve, to negotiate a ceasefire and peace. One in the spring, because

Speaker 1 Ukraine was in a real big, I would say, position of strength,

Speaker 1 having fended off the Russian forces around Kiev.

Speaker 1 That's one. And then, as you mentioned, in the fall of 22, with Kherson and Kharkiv, had a lot of military success.
They were in a place of strength.

Speaker 1 And from that place, they've decided to keep going because victory was in sight. But that was also an opportunity to make peace.
It's perfectly possible. Yes.
That's the hard thing. It's very hard.

Speaker 1 It's all hard. But I'm just again, it's

Speaker 1 victory can be won in wars and is often won in wars. And you're right.
They can also grind on because

Speaker 1 nobody

Speaker 1 has the capability to make a breakthrough.

Speaker 1 It's a case. I mean, the wisdom about civil wars tends to be that they sort of burn out after about 10 years or so

Speaker 1 for similar reasons. When you're in the war, can you actually know that a victory can be won? It's a very good question.
And

Speaker 1 you mean troops on the battlefield or military leaders or political leaders? Military and political leaders. It just feels like, like I said, man in the desert seeing water.

Speaker 1 I think there's a sense that victory is so close.

Speaker 1 There's times in a war when you feel like victory is close.

Speaker 1 No, you're right. And then it just slips away.
Yes, it's an interesting insight. It's like the way in which

Speaker 1 there's a force in nature, which is that if you amass an army,

Speaker 1 amassing it will

Speaker 1 pull you in to using it.

Speaker 1 Extremely hard to amass an army somewhere and then say, let's go back.

Speaker 1 Yes, you're right. No, it's one of many, many interesting aspects to warfare.
I think the sad thing

Speaker 1 about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader, which I would argue that Zelensky really unified Ukraine in this fight in the beginning of the war.

Speaker 1 You have to be that, and like you said, after you amass the army and have military success to be able to step back and make peace.

Speaker 1 Those two just don't often go hand in hand. Because again, as a wartime leader, especially one who has seen the suffering firsthand,

Speaker 1 walking away is

Speaker 1 tough, especially also combined with that. just the realities of war where there is probably corruption, that there is things, you know, once the war ends, there has to be investigations.

Speaker 1 Because the war wasn't won, you might not turn out to be, when history looks at it, the good guy. And a leader doesn't want to,

Speaker 1 a leader always wants to be the good guy. So there's just all psychological complexities that are, and you look at this whole picture

Speaker 1 in the basic sense, if you want Ukraine to flourish, if you want humanity to flourish, you just ask the question, okay, so what

Speaker 1 is the thing I would would like to see?

Speaker 1 There's so many historical analogies you can give, but

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 1 surely

Speaker 1 not rewarding Putin's actions in any way would be a good way to deter

Speaker 1 him and other

Speaker 1 dictators from trying to grab land

Speaker 1 in the future.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, but this is nuanced because, like, you, it's very probably good to be the boring person at the party that says dictatorships are bad.

Speaker 1 Democracies are good.

Speaker 1 Many of the ideals of the West are good. Democracies are better.
Better? Yes.

Speaker 1 That sounds like an animal farm, but yes, two legs better. But yes, democracy is better.

Speaker 1 And invading countries is bad.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 World War III is bad too.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 after you say something is bad, what's the next step? Because military intervention in a lot of these conflicts.

Speaker 1 It'll be about deterrence. Yeah, but what's effective deterrence? That we're going to have to keep going over for a long time to come.
My question is, how can we achieve peace in April?

Speaker 1 In May, right? Not like the adults at the table all seem to tell me, well, it's a process. It's complicated.
You know,

Speaker 1 it just feels like this is a thing that might go into the next winter. And there's still

Speaker 1 maybe initial ceasefire, and the ceasefire is broken, and there's more people dying.

Speaker 1 And it's that mess.

Speaker 1 It seems like civility and politeness ignores the fact that people are dying every single day.

Speaker 1 I mean, of course, like we all, almost everybody, not everybody, but almost everyone would like the cling to stop immediately. Of course.
No, like, I think that is the boring thing at the party.

Speaker 1 Yes, but they don't say it often enough. Not often.
There has to be a frustration.

Speaker 1 There has to be a frustration. I don't understand why Putin, Zelensky, and Trump can't just meet in a room together without signing anything.

Speaker 1 Leaders meeting and discussing and like the human connection. There's so many layers of diplomats.
It's the problem I have with a managerial class.

Speaker 1 They schedule meetings really well. They don't get shit done.
And would love it if people got shit done. So the soldiers get shit done.

Speaker 1 They have, they're fighting the reality of the war.

Speaker 1 And then the leaders have the capacity to get shit done on the scale of nations and geopolitics. But like these diplomatic meetings and

Speaker 1 I share your frustration about it. At the same time, I think

Speaker 1 I share your frustration because I've seen it all, a lot of it, you know, my own eyes. I mean, there was a

Speaker 1 battle and I was with the other week and they were hit just after I left their base and you wouldn't believe what a

Speaker 1 thermobaric bomb can do to the human body

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I share your frustration with that at the same time one of the things that happens

Speaker 1 if you are rushing

Speaker 1 is that you do, and I've seen this elsewhere,

Speaker 1 you will put pressure on the people you can pressurize, pressurize, and you will not put enough pressure on the people you can't pressurize.

Speaker 1 And that is

Speaker 1 one of the worrying things that could happen with this. Simply, you can put, America can put extraordinary

Speaker 1 diplomatic, financial, intelligence, military

Speaker 1 pressure on Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And it can put significant pressure on Putin, but it's much easier to pressure Zelensky.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the many things that makes it harder, is that the temptation to rush for peace, accepting that peace is the most desirable thing, accepting the horrors of war, which

Speaker 1 we can linger on, but

Speaker 1 accepting all that, if somebody says we've got to get peace today, and the three of them are round a table, the most likely thing is that

Speaker 1 it'll be the person who you can pressure most easily who will be be the person that you pressure, and as a result, have an outcome which, yes, might stop the killing as soon as possible, but might also set up a situation which rewards the aggressor and effectively punishes the victim.

Speaker 1 And that's an extremely ugly and common thing to happen. Yeah, and that's the other boring thing to say.

Speaker 1 The boring truth that the easy shortcut here is

Speaker 1 to punish Ukraine. And

Speaker 1 you just have to not do it. Let's keep being the boring people of the party.
Yeah. Well, nobody's going to invite us.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Let's go from one

Speaker 1 complicated conflict to perhaps an even more complicated one.

Speaker 1 Israel and Palestine.

Speaker 1 Can you take me through what happened on October 7th, as you understand it, and as you outline at the beginning of the book?

Speaker 1 Well, the book on democracies and death cults is a mixture of first-hand reporting and observation interviews and a wider reflection, not just on the war that's been going on since the 7th of October, but the war that's been going on a lot longer.

Speaker 1 And also, I suppose, on what for me is one of the overwhelming questions, which I'm sure we'll get to, which is the reaction in the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 Obviously, on the 7th itself, it was a brigade-sized attack on Israel from Gaza.

Speaker 1 Hamaz

Speaker 1 broke through the security fence and

Speaker 1 attacked all the softest targets they could.

Speaker 1 They

Speaker 1 swiftly overwhelmed things like the observation base in Nahalaz.

Speaker 1 They

Speaker 1 ran through the communities in the south,

Speaker 1 very peaceful, peacenick, effect-free communities of the kibbutzim, as they're called, the communities,

Speaker 1 and murdered, and raped, and burned, and kidnapped. And

Speaker 1 of course,

Speaker 1 they, from their point of view, had the great good fortune of also coming across hundreds of young people dancing in the early hours of the morning at a dance party and

Speaker 1 rampaged through that with RPGs and Klashnikovs and grenades and hammers and more, and

Speaker 1 got

Speaker 1 within, well, 20 kilometers into Israel,

Speaker 1 places like Ofakim and Sterot, important towns, and carried out their massacres there as well.

Speaker 1 We now know that the plan was that Hezbollah did the same thing from the north.

Speaker 1 Hezbollah joined in the war within 24 hours by starting firing rockets again again in very large numbers into northern Israel from southern Lebanon.

Speaker 1 But the plan was that they would do the same thing from the north and carry out similar massacres there and effectively be able to meet in the middle and garat Israel from the center.

Speaker 1 The interesting reason why I think it'll be found out in the future, but why they didn't coordinate better was that Hamaz didn't trust any line of communication to Hezbollah to let them know exactly when they were going to do it that

Speaker 1 wouldn't be intercepted.

Speaker 1 The iranian revolutionary government in tehran which obviously funds hamaz and hezbollah and trains and arms knew of the plan it was a very successful attempt to annihilate the state but they didn't get close to that but they got worryingly closer than people might have thought they were capable of i think from the israeli side uh it was obviously one of the most if not the most catastrophic intelligence and military failure since the foundation of the state.

Speaker 1 And I think there are several reasons why.

Speaker 1 One is a perception problem. What a lot of military commanders and others describe to me as a conception.

Speaker 1 The conception that had prevailed in Israel for some years in the security and military establishment was that Hamas

Speaker 1 were

Speaker 1 content with being corrupt and governing Gaza and, you know,

Speaker 1 lining their pockets and living in Qatar and becoming billionaires, but that like many other terrorist groups and

Speaker 1 cults, that they would end up becoming just corrupt and

Speaker 1 not losing their ideology, but the ideology becomes secondary.

Speaker 1 That's the first thing, was there was just a massive error of the conception in Israel.

Speaker 1 And then there were the multiple manifold security and military failures of the day and leading up to the day.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there already have been quite a lot of people held to account for that. And there doubtless will be in the future as well.

Speaker 1 The single

Speaker 1 thing I heard, which I heard most and which was most distressing in a way,

Speaker 1 was the number of people who described to me, you know, who survived the massacres in the south, who said that, you know, they'd said to their children, don't worry, the army will be here in minutes, and they weren't.

Speaker 1 You know, in many places, it was many hours till the army got there.

Speaker 1 And there are reasons for that. There are some reasons that will be military failings, leadership failings.

Speaker 1 Other things were very, I discovered were very human failings.

Speaker 1 I don't want to overstress the failure of the army because actually certain units and things got down very fast.

Speaker 1 There's a unit of Devan who got down to the junction, you know, by within about an hour, 90 minutes of the massacres starting and joined in the fight.

Speaker 1 And then there were self-starters who I write about in the book, extraordinary people who just

Speaker 1 broke orders and just realized the magnitude of what was happening and said, we're needed in the south, go, and fought very hard for hours, days, in some cases.

Speaker 1 But the complexities on the ground were unbelievable. I mean, as usually happens in warfare, but what they call the fog of war is a very real thing.

Speaker 1 You know what it's, you can see it in hindsight, but you can't see when you're in it. And one of the things that made it very complicated was, for instance, Hamas coming in,

Speaker 1 taking uniforms off dead Israelis,

Speaker 1 wearing them,

Speaker 1 coming in with Israeli-style

Speaker 1 apparatus on them.

Speaker 1 There's a Muslim doctor I quote in the book I interviewed who describes how he was going to his, he's an Israeli Muslim Arab and he was going to, he's a doctor, he was going to his shift at the hospital at 6.30 in the morning.

Speaker 1 The rockets start coming in because the rockets started first and then the full invasion. And he described to me how,

Speaker 1 you know, he's one of the members of this group, the United Hatzalah, which is a first responders group. And

Speaker 1 they sort of, you know, they get an alert and it tells them that, you know, a car has crashed nearby and they put on their,

Speaker 1 you know, first aid kit and so on and go. And he got one of those alerts at one of the junctions and realized there was a car, that something had happened and there were some dead bodies.

Speaker 1 And he stops and he sees these men dressed as soldiers

Speaker 1 uh and they start and he's wearing his tatzalah gear and they start firing at him and he just thinks what the hell what the hell is going on

Speaker 1 and uh they turned out to be hamaz dressed as israeli soldiers they uh used him as a human shield to try to protect from any air assault and

Speaker 1 in the end they shot him and left him and he survived he's a very very brave man um

Speaker 1 So there was a lot of confusion like that. There was a girl whose father

Speaker 1 I interviewed, she was at the Nova party and

Speaker 1 I met him at one of the reunions of the party and the weeks after and

Speaker 1 the reunions of the survivors and the family and so on. And he described how in the last moments of his daughter's life, she phoned him on her phone like a lot of people.

Speaker 1 He reassured her that the army would get there and so on. And

Speaker 1 her boyfriend was shot in the head and was lying on her lap, and she was obviously panicked.

Speaker 1 They'd managed to get into a car and escape the party, but they went to

Speaker 1 a community where they thought they'd be safe in the south of Israel. And

Speaker 1 they were told to stay where they were by somebody who she said was a policeman. And he wasn't a policeman, he was her maze dressed as police.
And she died, she was shot and killed as well.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so there was a lot of confusion like that.

Speaker 1 Hopefully,

Speaker 1 the world will find out exactly what went wrong. Israel will find out exactly what went wrong that led to this catastrophe.
But I mean,

Speaker 1 it was a complete catastrophe. Do you have a sense of how such an intelligence failure could have happened? So there's a bit of a temptation to go into conspiracy land.

Speaker 1 Because it's such a giant intelligence failure. It seems that there is

Speaker 1 some manipulation on the inside for political reasons or for you don't need to go into conspiracy land. I mean, I think

Speaker 1 there are people who say that there were parts of the intelligence network and so on that were trying that were withholding the information. I don't know.
Again, people will find out.

Speaker 1 There's an awful lot of politics inside Israel.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's hard to know that at this stage. I think that most people are sort of still Israeli and not israeli including people who are anti-israel who just believe that

Speaker 1 you know israeli military and particularly intelligence dominance is so so strong that there must have been some kind of conspiracy otherwise how could this have happened i don't think you need to go into that i think that i mean for instance some of the young women at the observation base have are on the record.

Speaker 1 They've said, I've spoken to myself, and they who said that they had been warning in the weeks running up to the 7th that they were seeing

Speaker 1 maneuvers and training by the border, which suggested that Hamas was going to do something like this.

Speaker 1 And they say that they were ignored.

Speaker 1 You speak to some of the more senior commanders about that, and they say the thing is that this stuff was happening all the time.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's very hard to know at the moment.

Speaker 1 Can you talk through your understanding of who and what Hamas is, its history, and

Speaker 1 the governing ideology of this group?

Speaker 1 Well, Hamas, in a way, quite easy to understand because

Speaker 1 they say what their ambitions are, they say what their beliefs are. They

Speaker 1 said it from their governing charter onwards.

Speaker 1 And you also have the advantage with Hamas that they, as it were, in trying to understand them, is that they tend to do what they say and act on what they believe.

Speaker 1 The primary aim of Hamaz is to destroy the state of Israel and then see.

Speaker 1 They're not an unusual group, sadly.

Speaker 1 The bit of it that is hard for some people to understand, I think,

Speaker 1 is that they really do mean what they say and that they really do mean what they say they want to do. And I give a number of examples in the book of this, but I mean, the most

Speaker 1 obvious

Speaker 1 is the case of Yahya Sinwa, the Hamas leader, who

Speaker 1 is generally regarded as having orchestrated and arranged the 7th of October.

Speaker 1 We know a fair amount about him because he was in prison in Israel in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he was released in the prisoner swap for the, he was one of the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners inside Israel who was released in a swap for Gilad Shalit, the abducted Israeli soldier.

Speaker 1 And Yahya Sino in prison in Israel

Speaker 1 talked to, among others, a dentist who ended up saving his life because Yahya Sinwa had a brain tumor. And this dentist identified this and actually sent him to the hospital.
And the Israelis famously

Speaker 1 removed the the tumor and saved Sinois' life. But this dentist used to speak to him in the prison

Speaker 1 regularly and has related, not least to the New York Times, his conversations with Sinois. And

Speaker 1 Sinois said in one of those conversations, he said, you know, he said,

Speaker 1 at the moment, you, Israel, are strong,

Speaker 1 but one day you'll be weak, and then I'll come.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's what he did is it a hatred of Israel

Speaker 1 or is it a hatred of Jews is it on the level of nations or the level of religion both

Speaker 1 it's both I mean it originates from a religious mindset but it's of course political as well

Speaker 1 I mean the Hamas Charter, of course, some people sort of think the Hamas Charter is of no significance. And I've often noticed this sleight of hand that people do.

Speaker 1 Again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier:

Speaker 1 forget everything other than the most important basic things. But the Hamas Charter,

Speaker 1 among other things, quotes the Hadith that the end times will not come until all of

Speaker 1 the rocks and the trees shout out, O Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that is

Speaker 1 so Hamas is both obviously anti-Israeli, obviously, and anti-Jewish, obviously.

Speaker 1 And by the way, I mean,

Speaker 1 one of the many painful stories I tell in the book is of the fact that so many of the people in the communities that they attacked, it's not as if there'd be a right community to attack and a wrong community to attack, but that many of the communities they attacked were communities which deeply, deeply dreamed of the idea of living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors.

Speaker 1 There's a woman

Speaker 1 whose name has become relatively famous since, certainly famous inside Israel, Vivian Silva, who was a peace activist who spent every weekend

Speaker 1 driving Gazan children from

Speaker 1 the border to, if they had very rare medical needs that could not be seen attention to within Gaza, would drive them to Israeli hospitals.

Speaker 1 And she spent every weekend doing that, worked for all of the sort of left-wing peacek organizations in Israel. And

Speaker 1 for a while after the 7th, her neighbors and others thought that she had been taken captive into Gaza and actually there was a hostage poster for her, and there were appeals by the various peace NIC organizations for Hamaz to hand her over.

Speaker 1 But it turned out she'd been burned alive in her home. And

Speaker 1 this wasn't discovered for quite a long time because there was so little DNA left of her that it was very hard to identify the remains as being hers.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there were just a lot of people in the Gaza envelope, as it's called in Israel, in the area around Gaza,

Speaker 1 who would have been the people who

Speaker 1 wanted to live peacefully with the Gazans someday. And

Speaker 1 there's a certain among the many, it's not an irony, but just among the sort of

Speaker 1 pains of the day is that

Speaker 1 so overwhelmingly, these these are the people that Hamaz brought hell to.

Speaker 1 The response to October 7th by Israel. Can you steal me on the case that Israel went too far?

Speaker 1 Well, the case that started from very early on that critics of Israel had was the

Speaker 1 claim that

Speaker 1 I think I first heard it on about the 8th of October before Israel had done anything in response, was the claim that

Speaker 1 Israel must act proportionately in response. And I have a critique of this that I've often expressed, which is that there is such a thing as proportionality in warfare.

Speaker 1 And at the same time, Israel is always accused of acting disproportionately.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the proportionality that

Speaker 1 much of the rest of the world seems to think Israel should express in warfare is to

Speaker 1 have

Speaker 1 an equal level of suffering or killing on both sides. I don't think there's any

Speaker 1 law of war that says that if you kill 1,200 people and you kidnap another 250, that as it were, the other side's allowed to do the same back.

Speaker 1 But that's what a lot of people think. And then when they see the death toll escalating on the Gazan side, they say Israel has acted disproportionately and has

Speaker 1 over-reacted.

Speaker 1 That one

Speaker 1 is tricky because

Speaker 1 it's my belief that, I mean,

Speaker 1 again, this is a basic thing, but it has to be stated that 9 million citizens of Israel, if you extrapolate that out to what the 7th of October would have meant in American terms,

Speaker 1 you'd be talking about

Speaker 1 a day on which,

Speaker 1 if the attack had happened in America, where 44,000 Americans were killed in one day and 10,000 American citizens taken hostage.

Speaker 1 Nobody can tell me that if such an atrocity occurred,

Speaker 1 that America would not do whatever it needed to destroy the groups that had done that and to retrieve the hostages who'd been taken. So just on that point, I agree with you 100%.

Speaker 1 America would do, would hit hard back. And I think a lot of Americans would feel justified in that.
But it's also possible that

Speaker 1 the military-industrial complex and the politicians would do something like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means extend far beyond hitting back and actually do a thing that's destructive to everybody, including America financially and the flourishing of America and the flourishing of humanity broadly and the region and the stability and the war on terrorism.

Speaker 1 If that's a real thing,

Speaker 1 the war in Iraq and Afghanistan did not

Speaker 1 maybe succeed in defeating terrorism or even making progress. It probably made more terrorists than not.
So there's a justified feeling of hitting back and

Speaker 1 going after somebody like bin Laden in the case of 9-11.

Speaker 1 And then there's just the actual implementation.

Speaker 1 And it seems like the implementation can sometimes

Speaker 1 intended or unintended have consequences that are bordering on war crimes, if not downright war crimes. Now,

Speaker 1 this is a general statement. And now we'll look at Israel, where things are

Speaker 1 small

Speaker 1 land.

Speaker 1 Everything is very compact.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of complexities that are well studied.

Speaker 1 We've talked about extensively.

Speaker 1 Well, the two stated aims of the Israelis after the seventh were to get the hostages back and to destroy Hamaz. And many people said that you could do one, but not both.

Speaker 1 And I actually think they've gone a long way to doing both. By no means everything.
There were still hostages as we're speaking held in Gaza, including a young American.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Hamas is not completely destroyed. It's very, very significantly degraded, but it's not completely destroyed.
But those are the two aims.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 believe that

Speaker 1 I've seen

Speaker 1 as much of the war as any outside observer

Speaker 1 I don't know there are some exceptions maybe but

Speaker 1 and so I think I can say with considerable certainty what the Israelis have and haven't done

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 the oper there were various operations at the beginning various uh plans

Speaker 1 which didn't happen,

Speaker 1 like storming straight in and getting, for instance, as many hostages as possible out of the Shifa complex, which is called a hospital, but

Speaker 1 also at the very least, the Hamaz command headquarters. And

Speaker 1 there was a plan to maybe go and

Speaker 1 do that fast, but it was avoided because of the number of deaths on all sides that would be likely to happen. The Israelis did actually hold back at the beginning.

Speaker 1 There was a period of making sure that when they went into Gaza, they didn't do so

Speaker 1 in any way blind.

Speaker 1 But Gaza is a very built-up area in population-wise,

Speaker 1 is densely populated.

Speaker 1 Something, by the way, which the people who claim frivolously that Israel has been committing genocide never take account of, which is the fact that the Gazan population has boomed since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005.

Speaker 1 It's almost doubled.

Speaker 1 But yes, it's a densely populated area, and it's an incredibly difficult place for the train of war because of one thing in particular, which is that Hamas goes back a bit to our conversation earlier, but this is a much more extreme example.

Speaker 1 I mean, Hamas really don't play by the rules. In fact, they use the rules of war, the laws of war, completely to their own advantage.
You know,

Speaker 1 it has to be reiterated: you are not meant to

Speaker 1 disguise your army as civilians.

Speaker 1 You're not meant to use places of

Speaker 1 care, like hospitals, as

Speaker 1 bases for your military operations. You're not meant to use schools and places of worship as operating centers of war.

Speaker 1 And Hamaz does all of these things and has always done so.

Speaker 1 And it does so with the very obvious reason that for them, the whole thing is a two-for-one offer.

Speaker 1 You get to operate everywhere.

Speaker 1 And if the Israelis operate anywhere, you claim that this is a war crime because how could they attack this group of civilians, these people who are dressed as civilians, these people merely fighting from a mosque and so on.

Speaker 1 And that's why That's why

Speaker 1 everybody who's been to Gaza, who's seen the fighting, knows the same thing, which is this is just incredibly difficult, difficult warfare of a kind that

Speaker 1 American troops have seen in the last 20 years in Fallujah and elsewhere.

Speaker 1 Kurdish

Speaker 1 militia, the Peshmerga, saw when they were fighting as our frontline troops in the war against ISIS. Similar house to house, but by no means with the same entrenched

Speaker 1 bases.

Speaker 1 You know, again, it can't be stressed enough that Hamaz has used the years since his ready withdrawal from 2005 to build this vast

Speaker 1 underground tunnel network. And again, it's obvious, but it has to be remembered

Speaker 1 when is, and I quote one of the Hamaz leaders in the book saying this in an interview, when they build their tunnels, they do so in order that their tunnels are used by them, Hamaz, to store their weaponry,

Speaker 1 to secure their fighters, and to hold hostages. They do not build their underground tunnel networks for the safety of Gazan civilians, avoiding aerial bombardment.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 every difference in the world seems to me to exist between a country which does build

Speaker 1 bomb shelters for its citizens and

Speaker 1 a government which builds bomb shelters for its bombs. bombs.

Speaker 1 Can you discuss the flow of money here? So, how does Hamas how does Hamas, the leadership, use the money? So, you started to talk about the tunnels, but how much corruption is there?

Speaker 1 Can you just lay it all out?

Speaker 1 Because I think that's an that's an important part of the picture here. It's totally corrupt.
Every Hamas leader who's uh

Speaker 1 now dead died a billionaire

Speaker 1 with a B.

Speaker 1 With a B.

Speaker 1 To say that they

Speaker 1 used Gaza's resources or the resources that came into Gaza for their own ends is to just vastly understate matters.

Speaker 1 Hamas used everything that came in to build the infrastructure of terror that allowed them to do the seventh and everything since.

Speaker 1 Um they militarized the whole of the Gaza. They

Speaker 1 um by the estimations of troops I've been with there, they every second to third house had weaponry stashed there, bombs, RPGs, Krashnikovs, rockets, tunnel entrances.

Speaker 1 Uh the

Speaker 1 network th th th that they just embedded all these years was was total. They they

Speaker 1 And one of the many, many tragedies of this is that whatever you're reading of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli withdrawal in 2005,

Speaker 1 it was an opportunity for the Gaza to become something else. It could have become a thriving state-lit.

Speaker 1 It could have been a thriving Palestinian state. It's just that Hamas,

Speaker 1 like the PLO before them,

Speaker 1 decided that they wanted to destroy Israel more than they wanted to create a Palestinian state.

Speaker 1 And that is to the great, great detriment of the Palestinians of Gaza, to put it at its mildest.

Speaker 1 So just to outline here, leadership of Hamas are stealing the money that gets sent by Qatar, by everybody.

Speaker 1 So they're putting in their pocket.

Speaker 1 By the American taxpayer and by the European taxpayer as well, yes. Yeah.
Well, yeah, but I mean, it's not just about the stealing the money.

Speaker 1 It's about using the money and the infrastructure to annihilate your neighbor. I mean, that's those two things.

Speaker 1 But the corruption is a signal from an economic perspective, but it's also a signal of deep moral corruption because they're

Speaker 1 screwing over the Palestinian people. Yeah, it's a cynicism, certainly.
Yeah. Okay.
And then with the money they do spend on the Palestinian cause, they're not doing that to

Speaker 1 build up Gaza. They're doing it to strengthen the militaristic capabilities

Speaker 1 of the terrorist organization of Hamas.

Speaker 1 You have,

Speaker 1 maybe you can correct me on this,

Speaker 1 have said that

Speaker 1 the people of Gaza have some significant responsibility for the actions of Hamas because they've elected them. They elected them.
The what-ifs are endless, but very unwise of the George W.

Speaker 1 Bush administration to push for elections in Gaza

Speaker 1 after 05.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 Hamas were elected and they

Speaker 1 then in two thousand seven killed the other Palestinian faction that was their main challenger, Fatah,

Speaker 1 killed them, threw them off rooftops, dragged their bodies behind motorbikes through the Gaza and from that point they had total control.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you know, this is difficult because

Speaker 1 you can get into the realm of being accused of advocating or in any way justifying collective punishment if you talk about this. But it should be borne in mind that,

Speaker 1 you know, Hamaz had

Speaker 1 effectively 18 years to run the Gaza.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's the time that it takes from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education.

Speaker 1 And in 18 years, they could have presided over and produced a generation of young Gazans

Speaker 1 who were productive,

Speaker 1 productive for their people, for their society, for their neighbors, for the rest of the world. And they didn't.

Speaker 1 They spent 18 years indoctrinating the children of Gaza into a death cult and into

Speaker 1 a genocidal hatred, which

Speaker 1 obviously is, was most dangerous to the Israelis,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 it was obviously disastrous for the people of Gaza.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, there is

Speaker 1 just if you speak to soldiers who were there in 2014 when Hamaz started a war again,

Speaker 1 one of a set of rounds of war since 2005. If you speak to the soldiers who were there in 2014 going house to house and who were also involved in the war since 2003,

Speaker 1 they all say the same thing, which is the marked radicalization of the Gazan population, the marked increase in just, I mean, the most, I mean, it's so banal in a way to even cite it, but you know, like

Speaker 1 the numbers of copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic in an average Gazan household, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion.

Speaker 1 There are so many what-ifs and other paths that Hamaz could have taken, but that was the one they took. They decided to take the path of

Speaker 1 using their time and power to build up their infrastructure, radicalize this population, and encourage them to believe that they could destroy the state of Israel.

Speaker 1 And then on October 7th, they gave it their best shot.

Speaker 1 And by the way,

Speaker 1 there is no organized collective punishment of the citizens of Gaza. Collective punishment would just be dropping bombs with no purpose across civilian areas, carpet bombing, this sort of thing.

Speaker 1 This is simply not what the IAF and the IDF have done since the 7th.

Speaker 1 They have been fighting a house-to-house war. against this terrorist group.
They do do aerial strikes. Gaza is very, very badly beaten up.

Speaker 1 The buildings, I mean,

Speaker 1 the infrastructure that existed,

Speaker 1 there aren't many buildings standing.

Speaker 1 But this is not the result of just

Speaker 1 wild and imprecise bombing by the Israelis. It's been extremely

Speaker 1 concerted.

Speaker 1 It's extremely difficult. But when people say, well, this must be collective punishment, punishment, I think that the people who say that

Speaker 1 simultaneously that's not true.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 there is not a hostage who's come out

Speaker 1 who Donald Trump made this, President Trump made this point recently.

Speaker 1 There is not a hostage who's come out who I've spoken with

Speaker 1 who

Speaker 1 found any Gazan

Speaker 1 Palestinian

Speaker 1 who expressed even the slightest human kindness to them

Speaker 1 if you if you look at the footage from the seventh that Hamaz recorded themselves of them taking young Jewish women into Gaza and so on

Speaker 1 you will notice that

Speaker 1 the trucks and the motorbikes and so on are not stopped by horrified Gazan civilians saying why have you got this

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 Israeli girl who you've whose tendons you've cut and why are you bringing her here?

Speaker 1 It's all celebration. It's all celebration.

Speaker 1 And it's the same with those

Speaker 1 couple of cases of hostages who managed to escape from the civilian houses they were being held in,

Speaker 1 who were immediately returned by the citizens they met.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the celebration, I do wonder what percent of the population they represent, but there's something really dark. There's several ways to explain the celebration.

Speaker 1 It could be that there's a deep indoctrination where you do legitimately hate Jews.

Speaker 1 And there also could be a place of just deep desperation.

Speaker 1 And it's a kind of relief that you have to convince yourself that you're

Speaker 1 on the side of fighting for freedom

Speaker 1 in order to justify to yourself that this is the right way to fight out of desperation or extremely harsh conditions.

Speaker 1 Because the way we're kind of speaking about this with the celebration, it's very easy to project a kind of evil on the populace

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 I just am very hesitant to project, especially on the general populace. You don't have to project it onto them.
You can just listen to their own words.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I'm sure you've heard the one of many audio recordings you hear from the morning, but I'm sure you've heard the audio recording of the young man who ends up in one of the communities in the south of israel and uh calls home calls back home have you heard that yes i've heard it i quoted in the first chapter of the book he he calls back home and he says uh to his father who picks up it's on what's i think he's he's he's on the phone he's saying turn on to whatsapp because i can show you he says um i've killed 10 jews with my own hands oh father your son has killed 10 jews and his father is saying, Where are you?

Speaker 1 Where are you? I want to show you, Dad. I want to show you.
I've killed Jews with my own hands. Your son

Speaker 1 put mother on the phone. Mother comes on the phone.
The brother comes on the phone.

Speaker 1 This is

Speaker 1 one of many, many

Speaker 1 stories from the day

Speaker 1 that suggest

Speaker 1 something which I would say is not just indoctrination, but yes, evil.

Speaker 1 First of all, those phone calls are somehow uniquely horrific. But I've also heard recordings of phone calls made by Ukrainian soldiers to their parents and Russian soldiers to their parents.

Speaker 1 And they have not as intense and not as horrific, but they have a similar nature to them,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 there is an aspect of war where you

Speaker 1 dehumanize the other side, right? Sure. In order to fight that war.

Speaker 1 So we have to remember that that element is going to be there in a time of war, in a time of desperation.

Speaker 1 It would be a strange type of

Speaker 1 simple sort of, I don't know, pride in war

Speaker 1 to go into an 80-year-old woman's house and

Speaker 1 kill her on her floor

Speaker 1 and then film her dead body,

Speaker 1 her body in its final moments, and send it round to all of that woman's friends on her phone, on her Instagram account.

Speaker 1 You may have heard different things from me, but I mean, I would be surprised if there were even the most vociferous of Russian soldiers phoning back home to Moscow and saying, Mom, you won't believe my luck.

Speaker 1 I managed to rape and kill this 80-year-old woman.

Speaker 1 That's quite unusual, even in warfare.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the things about Hamas and what I describe as the death cult types,

Speaker 1 which makes them different from other people. But that's the channeling of evil and hatred and anger in the human spirit, spirit, but that doesn't make that person evil.
No, I disagree.

Speaker 1 You commit that once. I think that there is such a force as evil in the world, and I think

Speaker 1 it can descend and it can be used. And

Speaker 1 it's very hard to find a non-theological way to talk about this, but of everything I've seen,

Speaker 1 there are actions that

Speaker 1 people like Hamaz committed on the seventh that cannot be described as anything other than evil.

Speaker 1 The things that happened at the Nova party were especially appalling.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was all appalling, but it was especially appalling because, first of all, it's the sort of party which people like you and I, or at least you and I when we were younger, might have been at.

Speaker 1 And so everyone knows, you know, the

Speaker 1 world of a dance party and all night, you know. rave in the desert to

Speaker 1 commune with nature and the universe and to take some psychedelics and to, you know, expand your consciousness and your love, and all of that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 The fact that people doing that

Speaker 1 at 6:30 in the morning then encountered people coming in to the party on

Speaker 1 trucks and military vehicles and just

Speaker 1 massacring them and raping them. And I mean, I give examples of the first-hand accounts of people who survived, But I mean, it's beyond belief of

Speaker 1 almost anything else I've covered in war.

Speaker 1 And it's because it seems so.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 an army facing another army is one thing.

Speaker 1 A terrorist group in civilian clothing facing an army is another thing.

Speaker 1 But a terrorist group facing a group of young people

Speaker 1 at a dance unarmed

Speaker 1 and doing what they did is is is

Speaker 1 pretty hard to comprehend unless you use the lexicon of evil somewhere

Speaker 1 so that stated

Speaker 1 can you empathize with the suffering of palestinians in gaza with the destruction that resulted as a response Yes.

Speaker 1 What has happened in response is terrible, terrible for the citizens of Gaza.

Speaker 1 I was there

Speaker 1 on the first time, a couple of days early into

Speaker 1 the ground invasion

Speaker 1 when the citizens of Gaza were coming south. I was in the middle of the strip and the

Speaker 1 humanitarian corridor had been set up to try to stop the hostages being taken south, deeper into Gaza, and to try to stop the Hamas leadership from making it south.

Speaker 1 It actually didn't really work because they just they'd already got a lot of the hostages south.

Speaker 1 It was an attempt to keep Hamas there and fight them in the north so as not to be dragged all the way in. In the end, dragged all the way in anyway.
But

Speaker 1 yes, and I mean watching the the citizens of Gaza moving through the humanitarian corridor and you know they everyone was che being checked for for bombs, suicide vests checked for you know particularly young men of military age

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 and uh

Speaker 1 you know i mean you look at this tide of human misery and you think this is terrible but this is a terrible thing that had been brought upon them by the people who'd been misgoverning the place that they lived in and

Speaker 1 Of course, on a human level, you feel terrible that these people are going through this. At At the same time, human empathy for them can coexist beside

Speaker 1 an

Speaker 1 unspeakable anger

Speaker 1 that they had come to this point

Speaker 1 because of

Speaker 1 the fact that they had elected a terror group to run their territory.

Speaker 1 And one of the things, obviously, is that, you know, a lot of people like to say, and it's true, of course, that, you know, this didn't all start on October the 7th. Absolutely true.

Speaker 1 This particular round, this particularly intense round of war, started on October the 7th, without doubt. Hamas did not have to attack on October the 7th.

Speaker 1 It wasn't like they were forced to

Speaker 1 liberate themselves or something, as some of the defenders of Hamaz claim.

Speaker 1 But the conflict, of course, goes back a lot earlier. But

Speaker 1 you will have to always keep on contending with this fact that there is one central issue to the paradigm of that conflict, what used to be called the Arab-Israeli conflict and now has become

Speaker 1 interestingly rebranded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But there is one absolutely essential issue to this, which cannot be forgotten, which is

Speaker 1 do the Palestinians

Speaker 1 want a state

Speaker 1 or do they want to destroy the Jewish state?

Speaker 1 And if they want to destroy the Jewish state, as they've tried many times,

Speaker 1 it's a disaster for them. It's a total disaster for them.

Speaker 1 If they want to create their own state,

Speaker 1 they've already had several very good shots at it,

Speaker 1 one of which is Gaza post-2005.

Speaker 1 But they've never shown in their leadership the desire to live with a Jewish state.

Speaker 1 and that's the catastrophe for the palestinians

Speaker 1 can you steal out the case of the lived experience of palestinians and pro-palestinian voices that describe the gaza situation as a occupation the west bank too and uh in the case of gaza open-air prison

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 to take them in order um

Speaker 1 there's nothing about gaza that was an open-air prison they had ability to trade they had the ability to move in and out in increasing numbers.

Speaker 1 Egypt wasn't so keen on allowing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, still isn't.

Speaker 1 But at the time of the seventh, there was actually an interesting that one of the things the international community was pushing for was for more Palestinians to be coming into Israel every day through the Eretz crossing and others to work in Israel because they can make a better living in Israel than they can in Gaza.

Speaker 1 And this, the, as it were, normalization route was slowly being attempted is being pushed on Israel by the international movement a little bit too fast for Israel's comfort but it happened

Speaker 1 that completely came to an end and that that dream is

Speaker 1 done

Speaker 1 gone since the 7th of October can you clarify the dream the normalization relationship

Speaker 1 between Gaza and Israel gone

Speaker 1 there will be really yeah no normalization no not after that and one of the reasons is the number of people, again, who I've spoken with who employed Palestinians, worked with Palestinians, worked alongside Palestinians, encouraged more Palestinians to be coming from Gaza in order to work in Israel.

Speaker 1 And these were their brothers and sisters, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 One of the reasons why the massacres of the 7th were so successful in the Kibbutzim, the communities in the south, was because of the number of the terrorists who came in with detailed house-to-house maps of those communities.

Speaker 1 I spoke with

Speaker 1 one man who, his community, they had a security officer, chief, and Hamaz came in. They knew to go and kill him and his family first and then which families.

Speaker 1 It was just, I've seen the maps myself.

Speaker 1 They came in with incredibly

Speaker 1 accurate information about these communities. How did they have them? Because it was given to them by the brothers, by the workers, by the people of Gaza who were coming in and out.

Speaker 1 So there is nobody that will trust that ever again.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of Palestinians that have lived and flourished inside Israel.

Speaker 1 What are they saying? What are they feeling? And what are the Israelis feeling about them? Is there still camaraderie to some degree, or is it completely destroyed?

Speaker 1 My observation at the beginning was that everyone was extremely wary.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 if you've worked beside somebody and then found out they sold out your family,

Speaker 1 you will never trust again. And that, particularly in a small country like Israel, the word of that happening goes out very fast.

Speaker 1 The very beginning, there was intense, intense fear about that, including of the 20% or so of the population who are Arab Israelis.

Speaker 1 I actually

Speaker 1 one of the few sort of positive news stories of the period is that that population within Israel has, by and large,

Speaker 1 held.

Speaker 1 There hasn't been an intifada.

Speaker 1 One of the reasons why there hasn't been more activity, terrorist activity in the West Bank and Judea and Samaria is because the Israelis have been very careful along with the Palestinian Authority to some extent cooperating to keep that down.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there wasn't

Speaker 1 a full war on three fronts, for instance, which was at risk of happening.

Speaker 1 So I think that the sort of coexistence within Israel has pretty much held. There are some terrible examples, far too regular,

Speaker 1 but not as regular as it could happen of

Speaker 1 Muslim-Arab Israelis carrying out acts of terror in, as it were, sympathy with Hamas. I was in the middle of one such attack myself

Speaker 1 late last year

Speaker 1 and in a town called Hadera. And those things have happened, but they

Speaker 1 it's it's not that that particular catastrophe has not occurred. Can we talk about Benjamin Netanyahu? For a lot of people

Speaker 1 who spoke of evil, they refer to him as evil. On the spectrum between good and evil, as a leader, Where does Netanyahu fall?

Speaker 1 Well, he's certainly not evil.

Speaker 1 Interesting if people looking at this conflict were to be reluctant to use the word evil of Hamaz and eager to use it of the Israeli prime minister. It would be sort of telling, I would say.

Speaker 1 Can we just actually linger on that point? There's a point you've made multiple times, which is we're more eager to criticize and maybe even

Speaker 1 over-exaggerate the criticism of of democratically elected leaders. Yes.
It's a dark, weird, other quality of discourse at parties, aforementioned parties. Isn't it also, I mean, not

Speaker 1 to be flippant for a moment, it's a little bit like,

Speaker 1 who do you show your worst sides to?

Speaker 1 The people you love.

Speaker 1 You is like, you know, my intense irritability is something that tends to be felt most by people who are closest to me because

Speaker 1 if I express it to absolutely everybody I met at a party or a social setting, it would be hard. I mean, there's a tendency to lean heavily on the people who are closest to you, the people who

Speaker 1 will put up with it.

Speaker 1 And something similar happens. in international politics.

Speaker 1 You pressure the people who will listen.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's one of the i mean one of the things you hear a lot in the last years you know people sort of ignoramuses and the governments in places like britain you know will say we need to put more pressure on the israelis to do x

Speaker 1 and you go well

Speaker 1 you know

Speaker 1 in part that's because they will listen if you go we need to put more pressure on the ayatollahs in iran to to persuade them that hamaz are really bad and they shouldn't be doing this

Speaker 1 What the hell do you think they're going to do? They're going to listen to you, they give a damn. You're talking totally different worlds, not just a different language, it's a different world.

Speaker 1 And by the way, that happens in Israel. I mentioned it earlier, but it happens in Israel.
When the hostage families forum came about, I spent a lot of time there.

Speaker 1 I got to know a lot of the families, and

Speaker 1 they're remarkable. But one of the things you did notice from them as well was that a lot of them

Speaker 1 protest outside Netanyahu's house? They clacks and horns to make sure he can never sleep. They will,

Speaker 1 you know, put up great big posters by his house of him with bloodied hands and

Speaker 1 so on. And

Speaker 1 I have,

Speaker 1 you know, I think as much sympathy as you can for these families.

Speaker 1 The plight of knowing that your child is sitting in a tunnel in Gaza

Speaker 1 for a year, a day, an hour, is intolerable.

Speaker 1 But there's a reason why the families protested Netanyahu,

Speaker 1 and that's because Sinoa

Speaker 1 didn't care.

Speaker 1 That wouldn't work. If you said

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 understand my plight, I'm a Jewish mother and my daughter is thing.

Speaker 1 You think Sino and the heads of Hamas care?

Speaker 1 You think the leaders in Qatar who host them care?

Speaker 1 The Qatari Emir's mother, when Sinoar was killed, praised Sinoa.

Speaker 1 You couldn't talk that language to these people, but you can talk that language to the elected prime minister of Israel because that,

Speaker 1 first of all, he's somebody who might listen to your pressure, could be pressured. And secondly, is simply the only person you can pressure.
There's no one else. Hamas doesn't care.

Speaker 1 Hezbollah doesn't care. The Iranian revolutionary government doesn't care.
Yeah, so let's just sort of say once again the obvious thing that

Speaker 1 while it is possible to discuss

Speaker 1 Hamas

Speaker 1 soldiers as freedom fighters, I'm not one of the folks that can take that perspective. It's a tough one to take.
I don't see how you can call them freedom fighters.

Speaker 1 So this goes to the man from the land of peace and the man from the land of war. There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza.
And if you fully load that into your brain in a

Speaker 1 in a real way,

Speaker 1 not using the words of good and evil, but in a very deep human sense, from that place, from that place of desperation, when your home and your family is destroyed, doesn't matter why.

Speaker 1 Doesn't matter if there's evil all around you that caused it. It doesn't matter.
The facts are the facts. And from that place,

Speaker 1 somebody who's fighting for for you can feel like a freedom fighter.

Speaker 1 I think it should be called out that, yes, it can feel that way from the lived experience, but Hamas is very clearly, since we're talking about Netanyahu, Hamas is evil.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now, you can still, in that context, discuss the degree to which Netanyahu is the right leader for this moment and whether he goes too far, whether he's too politically selfish in the decisions he makes, whether he's too much a warmonger, whether he's utilizing the war

Speaker 1 for his own political gains and is

Speaker 1 not caring about the death of civilians in Gaza, for example, but more caring about his own political

Speaker 1 maintaining power. That's a perspective that I could steal, man.
And that's a perspective worth discussing. And that's a perspective many in Israel hold when they criticize Netanyahu.

Speaker 1 He's increasingly less and less popular. Nothing wrong.
Put in polls last month when he's in Washington and showed him at an all-time high.

Speaker 1 But you were saying.

Speaker 1 I make my own poll. And according to my poll,

Speaker 1 I'm the greatest, I'm the nicest, and the coolest person in the world.

Speaker 1 100% of people agree. So I didn't mean to laugh that much.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You laughed a little too much.

Speaker 1 More than the joke. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But you were saying, I mean, yeah. Okay, let's steel man the criticism of Netanyahu.

Speaker 1 Can you and then steel man the case for him that he's the right leader, actually, at this moment?

Speaker 1 The most devastating thing that anyone could come up against Netanyahu is, is uh that the seventh happened on his watch.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Golda Meyer, who is a very distinguished prime minister of Israel and a remarkable woman, but she effectively took the

Speaker 1 political hit for the Yom Kippur invasion

Speaker 1 by Israel's Arab neighbours happening on her watch. And

Speaker 1 I would have thought that most critics, fair-minded critics of Netanyahu, inside Israel and without would always hold that against him.

Speaker 1 I suppose that the

Speaker 1 one of the criticisms you hear a lot as well is this thing of Israel being divided in the year before the seventh because of the judicial reforms.

Speaker 1 I think there's a strong case for judicial reforms in Israel, but it's a sort of niche Israeli governance issue, which we don't have to get into.

Speaker 1 The point is, is that Netanyahu and his government were pushing these reforms through judicial reforms.

Speaker 1 And it was very divisive. And on the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities every weekend, there were protests.
And the

Speaker 1 police were tired because they'd spent week after week on overtime policing these protests which often turned

Speaker 1 raucous not to say violent

Speaker 1 sometimes violent and you could say well if you see that something is dividing your country this much mightn't you stop There is a claim by some people that one of the things that prompted the seventh was that Hamaz and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division in Israeli society, saw the Israeli population, you know, a significant chunk of it every week on the streets, shutting down highways, shutting down services and so on, and thought, good, now's the time.

Speaker 1 In other words, what I quoted Sinoir as saying earlier when he was in

Speaker 1 prison in Israel was, you know, this thing, one day you'll be weak and then I'll strike.

Speaker 1 Maybe that is one of the things that Sino

Speaker 1 thought.

Speaker 1 Israel was very weak. It had been divided, and therefore the time strike.

Speaker 1 There's an argument against that, which is that the seventh was in preparation and being planned before the judicial reform process in Israel began. So

Speaker 1 you can look at it several ways.

Speaker 1 But you could use that. You could say, look, this is, you know, if

Speaker 1 your nation was divided, don't push through anymore on that.

Speaker 1 There's lots of things like that. You could say that Netanyahu was one of the people responsible for the conception.
You could,

Speaker 1 there are critics of his, including critics who were in the war cabinet, who thought that he was too focused on

Speaker 1 Hamas and not focused enough on Hezbollah. Other people think he was too focused on Hezbollah and not enough on Hamaz.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there's them and many other criticisms that people make of him. I would say I've interviewed, I think, every political leader in Israel from right to left, pretty much.
And

Speaker 1 I have have to say, I don't think there's any of them that wouldn't have responded similarly to the 7th of October, to the way he has. Can we, okay, so that's inside Israel.
Outside of Israel,

Speaker 1 you know, despite what he said, he is one of the most hated people in the world. Just the raw quantity.

Speaker 1 Relative,

Speaker 1 he's loved by a lot of people, but there's a lot of people that

Speaker 1 you know, there's a lot of psychological effects that might explain that. I mean, it's sort of strange

Speaker 1 if there is a widespread global loathing of the prime minister of a country of eight to nine million people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that might mean something more than a hatred of the military actions and the policies of the one person. Yeah.
I mean,

Speaker 1 you know, there's an awful lot of people to hate in the world. There's a lot of wars in the world.

Speaker 1 It's always of interest to me. And obviously, one of the things I go into on democracies and death cults is this question of why is this so galvanizing for so many people?

Speaker 1 And I think that is a very, very interesting question. Like, why?

Speaker 1 By the way, let me do a quick addendum to that. You can notice something else like that when people talk about the Republican failures in foreign policy in the last 30 years or so.

Speaker 1 It's very interesting. There's a certain type of person who will immediately mention Paul Wolfwitz.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they will say, well, you know, Wolfowitz. You go, you mean Deputy Under Secretary of Defense under George W.
Bush?

Speaker 1 You think

Speaker 1 he

Speaker 1 guided everything?

Speaker 1 Why would that be? Other than the fact that his name, as Mark Stein once said, starts with a nasty animal and

Speaker 1 ends Jewish.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's a good idea.

Speaker 1 So I do think that

Speaker 1 there are very deep things at play. That's a good line.
You know,

Speaker 1 there are very deep things at play. Netanyahu, irrespective of anything he does, for a lot of people, is a kind of devil.
And you have to say, well, why is that?

Speaker 1 Now, of course, some people will say, well, that's because

Speaker 1 his terrible hawkishness and his actions and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 The case for Netanyahu is

Speaker 1 that he sees it as his historic purpose to defend the only homeland of the Jewish people, and that that's his life's mission.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 on that basis, I think he's been by any measure a historic leader.

Speaker 1 He

Speaker 1 has

Speaker 1 warned the world about the threat. from the mullahs in Tehran.
He warned about Iranian revolutionary expansionism across the region, across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen.

Speaker 1 And after the seventh, he has held together a very, very difficult set of challenges to keep

Speaker 1 international pressure at a tolerable level to

Speaker 1 do all sorts of things, but most importantly, to oversee the two war aims that he set out at the beginning. I thought, let me just express this.

Speaker 1 I thought,

Speaker 1 like a lot of people, when I heard about the hostages,

Speaker 1 my immediate instinct was they're all dead. They're all going to be dead.
We'll never see them again.

Speaker 1 And that was the attitude of a lot of Israelis.

Speaker 1 But although there are still hostages being held, And as I've always said, the war could end tomorrow if they were handed back,

Speaker 1 or at least the beginning of the the end of the war could begin tomorrow if they were handed back

Speaker 1 uh nevertheless because of

Speaker 1 the actions of not just netanyahu but the israeli government

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 most

Speaker 1 of the hostages have been returned did not expect this to happen

Speaker 1 And Hamaz has not been completely destroyed, but it has been

Speaker 1 very, very significantly degraded. And you end up in the definition of of what a total destruction of Hamaz would look like.
But

Speaker 1 they

Speaker 1 are not anywhere near the capability they were

Speaker 1 in November of 2023.

Speaker 1 Their leadership has almost all been killed.

Speaker 1 The second tier of leadership, almost all gone.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this is a just response to to what Hamas did.

Speaker 1 The moment Nesanyahu's reputation in Israel was a little low early on because of what had happened.

Speaker 1 But, and there's no doubt, and as

Speaker 1 I say in the final chapter of the book, I mean, General Slim had this phrase, you know, from defeat into victory. Israel isn't at victory yet in this conflict.
But

Speaker 1 when in September last year, there were a set of operational successes so extraordinary that, I mean, it was just like every day's news was.

Speaker 1 There was one day I remember when

Speaker 1 after the Assad regime failed, when the Israeli Air Force took out the entirety of the Syrian Air Force

Speaker 1 in a day. because they didn't want it falling into the hands of the new jihadist administration in Syria.
It was story number four on the BBC News website.

Speaker 1 The leadership of Hezbollah gone,

Speaker 1 gone.

Speaker 1 The second and third tiers of Hezbollah

Speaker 1 gone or wounded.

Speaker 1 Iran's Rolls-Royce

Speaker 1 destroyed.

Speaker 1 These are very, very significant military achievements

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 are, in my mind, a just response to the attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian proxies to destroy the Jewish state.

Speaker 1 Would another Israeli leader have been able to hold

Speaker 1 firm

Speaker 1 as Netanyahu has?

Speaker 1 I don't know. But I do know that any of them would have done something similar, or would have tried to do something similar.

Speaker 1 Because there's no country on earth, no democracy on earth, which could possibly not respond to such an atrocity.

Speaker 1 to the point the underlying point you made

Speaker 1 of why

Speaker 1 do so many people

Speaker 1 want to call him evil

Speaker 1 and so the implication is it's not just a hatred of Israel. There's an ocean of hatred for the Jews.
Yes

Speaker 1 Why

Speaker 1 is there so much hatred for Jews in the world?

Speaker 1 I would say there's one reason in particular. It's a stupid and gullible person's easy answer.

Speaker 1 why is

Speaker 1 why do certain things happen in the world

Speaker 1 what is what is our explanation of chance

Speaker 1 or unfairness or

Speaker 1 any number of things

Speaker 1 easiest easiest stupidest person's explanation is there's a small group of people doing it

Speaker 1 let's not say stupidest because there's something in the human mind that craves a nice clean theory of everything everything, right? That explains all the problems. It's not just stupid.

Speaker 1 Let me rewrite it. Lowest grade.
Right.

Speaker 1 I have that desire, too, to simplify everything. Be a bit anti-Semitic, what?

Speaker 1 We've all

Speaker 1 been a bit anti-Semitic here and there. Just get a few vodkas.
I mean, no.

Speaker 1 To find, I mean, maybe it's a mathematician. I mean, it's like to find a simple explanation for everything.
Right. Actually, that's nice for everyone.
Historians do this, absolutely. I agree.

Speaker 1 Analyzing why the Roman Empire collapsed, it's so nice to have one, especially if it's a counterintuitive explanation. It's one of the favorite go-to's, right?

Speaker 1 It's an explanation for all the problems in the world. It's the lowest resolution analysis imaginable.
Why is there traffic? Why did my wife leave me? Why did my wife cheating on me?

Speaker 1 Why did I lose my job? Why did I not get the job? Because even on the personal level, oh, especially on the personal level, why did I not not get everything?

Speaker 1 Somebody must have held me back, yeah,

Speaker 1 and it's just that hatred of Jews has been such a popular go-to throughout history that you just always return back to the hits, I guess.

Speaker 1 And I, what is it special about the Jews as a group that people love to hate? Is it just because it's a small number of people? I think there's several things successful. One is small and

Speaker 1 without by any means saying this is a general rule, but

Speaker 1 disproportionately highly accomplished in certain fields at certain times.

Speaker 1 Prominent is a word I would use.

Speaker 1 Prominent slightly beyond their numbers in certain places.

Speaker 1 It's not a full explanation. I mean, you know,

Speaker 1 all sorts of historic reasons why Jews were involved in banking,

Speaker 1 but then there are lots of historic reasons why the Scottish people, my own, were involved in banking.

Speaker 1 And to this day, you don't find many people who blame all international finance problems on the Scots.

Speaker 1 So they're just like easy grooves for people to fall into, it seems to me. We should also mention, you know, banking for some reason.
Money is a thing that people go to, but

Speaker 1 Jews have been disproportionately successful in the sciences and

Speaker 1 engineering, mathematics,

Speaker 1 and the arts and so on. A sensible person would try to work out why that is and see what is replicable.

Speaker 1 A

Speaker 1 I don't want to use the word stupid again now.

Speaker 1 A different type of person. I'm triggered already.
A different type of person would look at that and say, that must mean they took something from me.

Speaker 1 And that's, you know, the most zero-sum game there is.

Speaker 1 It's an endlessly fascinating subject because it seems to me that anti-Semitism is almost certainly a sort of ineradicable

Speaker 1 temptation of the human spirit at its ugliest and cheapest.

Speaker 1 But because it's back in our day, it bears some analysis again.

Speaker 1 And I would say two things about it.

Speaker 1 One is,

Speaker 1 as I and others have said many times in the past, one of the fascinating things about anti-Semitism is that

Speaker 1 it can cover everything at once. So the Jews get hated for being rich and for being poor.

Speaker 1 Both for being the Rothschilds and for being Eastern European Jews, escaping the pogroms.

Speaker 1 They can be hated for being religious

Speaker 1 and for being anti-religious and producing Marxism, for instance.

Speaker 1 Hated for religiosity and secularism.

Speaker 1 They can be hated

Speaker 1 for, most recently, not having a state and therefore being rootless cosmopolitans

Speaker 1 and also hated for having a state.

Speaker 1 And that makes it something very unusual, actually, in the history of human bigotry and

Speaker 1 bias and ugliness.

Speaker 1 But the real

Speaker 1 thing is one of our great heroes, Vasily Grossman, says at the center of life and fate, almost everything that's worth saying about anti-Semitism. And it's it's grossman's genius

Speaker 1 that he could say in three to four pages what most people couldn't say in an entire life even after a life of study but there's this passage in the in life and fate that i quote in my book which which is it just bowled me over when i read it some years ago when he says you know the interesting thing about anti-semitism he says you can meet it everywhere in the um

Speaker 1 in the academy of sciences and in the games that children children play in the yard.

Speaker 1 But Grossman's great insight is: he says, everywhere it tells you not about the Jews, but about the person making the

Speaker 1 claim.

Speaker 1 And the most important gift he gives in his analysis is when he says, describes it as a mirror to the person who is making the claims.

Speaker 1 Culminating in this phrase I've been trying to make popular, which is he says, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I'll tell you what you're guilty of.

Speaker 1 It's a searingly brilliant insight.

Speaker 1 The Iranian revolutionary government accuses Israel of being a colonial power.

Speaker 1 The Iranian revolutionary government has been colonizing the Middle East throughout our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 The Turkish government accuses

Speaker 1 the Jewish state of being guilty of occupation.

Speaker 1 Do you know northern Cyprus? The Turks have been occupying half of Cyprus since the 1970s. Cyprus is an EU member state and Turkey is in NATO.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you can do this on and on. The people who accuse the Jewish state, like the people who accuse Jews, of something almost without fail, is the thing they're guilty of.

Speaker 1 Look at the supporters of Hamaz and Hamas. One of the things they say is

Speaker 1 that Israel is guilty of indiscriminate killing.

Speaker 1 Hamaz?

Speaker 1 Hello?

Speaker 1 What were you doing on the seventh?

Speaker 1 You see, there are these crazy guys online who claim, repeatedly claim that for some reason, Israeli soldiers will rape Palestinians when they meet them whether in a prison or on the battlefield or in a hospital it's just it erupts occasionally these these people go around and say oh my god the IDF are rapists

Speaker 1 excuse me

Speaker 1 you

Speaker 1 you're the ones

Speaker 1 who spent the years after 2016 saying believe all women then from the 7th of October, said, believe all women except for Jewish women who say they've been raped or seen their friends raped.

Speaker 1 And then you say, aha, the Jews are rapists. You've been carrying water for rapists and then go and accuse the Jews of rape.
I mean, it just works. Every way you do it, it works.

Speaker 1 I do think the thing of psychological projection in the case of Israel is wild.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is wild.

Speaker 1 By the way, there's an interesting thing on this that I try to get into in the book, which is this thing of why did so much of the world respond the way it did? I mean, we're sitting in New York.

Speaker 1 There was not one

Speaker 1 protest against Hamaz in New York after the 7th of October. The Believe All Women crowd didn't come out against Hamaz's rapes.

Speaker 1 The Black Lives Matter movement did not turn their attention to the killing of Israeli children or anything.

Speaker 1 Nobody did it. Nobody did it.

Speaker 1 The one thing that did happen

Speaker 1 very prominently was that people came out to attack the people who'd been attacked.

Speaker 1 And as I say in the opening of the book, I saw that myself down the road from here in Times Square on October the 8th, October the frigging 8th, the protests are in Times Square against Israel, justifying the attacks that were still going on.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this is something that deserves deep self-examination on behalf of people in the West who've who've seen this movement overwhelm parts of our society.

Speaker 1 I mean, degraded parts, but parts, bits of the universities, and so on.

Speaker 1 And I think there's an explanation for it, by the way, which again goes back to that issue of projection.

Speaker 1 When you and I last talked on camera, we were talking about my last book, The War on the West. And I remember saying to you there that

Speaker 1 one of the things I was talking about in that book was the

Speaker 1 deeply, deeply,

Speaker 1 wildly biased, unfair, and inaccurate estimation of the Western past,

Speaker 1 whereby, you know, America's original sin had to be identified and the original sin is slavery. So America has an original sin.
Does Ghana have an original sin? No one knows.

Speaker 1 No one really would think it polite to point one out.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you go on and on with these things that I identified in the war in the West,

Speaker 1 these sins of the West.

Speaker 1 And they have in recent years been reduced to the claim that countries like the one we're sitting in are guilty of what?

Speaker 1 Colonialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, slavery,

Speaker 1 genocide,

Speaker 1 and a couple of others you can throw in probably.

Speaker 1 One of the things I remember saying to you when we spoke about that was that one of the deep problems of setting up that system of thought, pseudo-thought, non-thought,

Speaker 1 would-be thought

Speaker 1 is that there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 1 Even if it was true, there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 1 If it turned out that your ancestors in the 18th century once owned a slave,

Speaker 1 what are you going to do? There's no mechanism to forgive or be forgiven because you didn't do it and there's no one alive who could accept the apology.

Speaker 1 And I remember setting it up there in the War in the West. I set up this very, very

Speaker 1 risky,

Speaker 1 dangerous,

Speaker 1 unforgivable, unforgiving thing that had been set up about our societies.

Speaker 1 But I would say that since October the seventh,

Speaker 1 there has been an answer for a certain type of person, which is

Speaker 1 I am from a society where I have been told I am guilty of settler colonialism, white supremacy,

Speaker 1 genocide, ethnic cleansing, and more.

Speaker 1 I've been told all of these things. I have been put in an

Speaker 1 unget-outable of

Speaker 1 situation of moral burden that can never be relieved because I can't ask anyone's forgiveness and nobody can forgive me.

Speaker 1 But ah,

Speaker 1 here's a country

Speaker 1 which i can accuse of all of these things in the here and now

Speaker 1 load my energies my guilts my burdens onto and what's more i might be able to end it and by doing so

Speaker 1 would relieve myself and in other words to slight just to i quote i tweak grossman Grossman with the people in

Speaker 1 America and elsewhere who've fallen into this trap. I tweak him by saying,

Speaker 1 on this occasion, tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I'll tell you what you've been told you're guilty of.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's an interesting kind of projection.

Speaker 1 Just to observe some of the

Speaker 1 sociological phenomena here on top of all this, it does seem that hatred of Jews gets a lot of engagement online.

Speaker 1 Is this

Speaker 1 so? I watch it like a curiosity, like I'm an alien observing Earth.

Speaker 1 Uh, is this dangerous to you, or is it just a bunch of trolls and grifters,

Speaker 1 you know, let's say cosplaying as Nazis? It's just

Speaker 1 fun to trigger the libs, it could be all of those things. I think it is, and a lot more.
Um,

Speaker 1 I mean, taboos,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 taboos can be fun to break, I suppose. And I suppose there are some people online

Speaker 1 who have grown up knowing that, you know, since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was taboo.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they've run out of, it goes back to what we were saying earlier a bit, you know, the, they sort of run out of, they've got bored of that, you know,

Speaker 1 Holocaust Schmolocaus, they'd say, you know,

Speaker 1 I've heard enough about that.

Speaker 1 And maybe those people have gone off in a funny direction as a result, but I don't think that's the main.

Speaker 1 I think that's like a detail compared to the real thing. The real thing is that anti-Semitism is back and

Speaker 1 there is a certain type of person who's loving it. Is it really back? So I watched it.
Well, it never goes away.

Speaker 1 It's just that it's just that it's it's it's it's since the seventh I think that it's had a great resurgence.

Speaker 1 And this isn't to say, just assume that it doesn't mean that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. No, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 But as I have often said, if you don't ever express any interest in the murder of Muslims in Syria, not any interest in

Speaker 1 genocide in Sudan.

Speaker 1 killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, but on the 8th of October, you're on the street with a placard attacking Israel. I'm sorry, you're an anti-Semite, for sure.

Speaker 1 You may not know you are but that's what's motivating you it gets a lot of engagement i watch it watch it it does watch it but i mean it's one of several things you can always see

Speaker 1 get huge engagement i mean so if you if you say that there's like a massive paedophile ring run by prominent politicians it might be total horseshit

Speaker 1 likely to be total horseshit but it'll also get a hell of a lot of engagement yeah but that's still the so the pedophile ring like epstein island that kind of stuff

Speaker 1 Which is very interesting. Yeah.
And it's like, great. All right, cool.
Let's get behind that conspiracy.

Speaker 1 But the Jews thing, the hatred of Jews is still, that's the greatest hits still. It is.
And I mean, you see it with, I mean, some of the people who've made minor celebrities of themselves

Speaker 1 with a sort of made-up version of history with a smattering of this and a little bit of that and then the just asking questions and you know, I'm not saying, but and all there are certain, you know, rhetorical sights of hand that have

Speaker 1 helped this along. But as I said earlier, it's just the lowest-grade explanation of a certain type of mind looking for a pattern and looking for meaning.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I can give you just one quick example of why that in the case of Israel is so extraordinary.

Speaker 1 Is the number of otherwise semi-intelligent people who will tell you that

Speaker 1 the problem is simply

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 the Israelis need to give the Palestinians another state?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that if they do,

Speaker 1 it will solve the problems of the region and the wider world.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 irrespective of the fact that Palestinians are being given several states,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 The claim that

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 particular land dispute would unlock every other injustice in the world should be seen on its face to be preposterous. There is no reason why, if

Speaker 1 the Palestinians have got another state, either in Gaza or in parts of Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, there is no reason why we should expect the economy of Yemen to boom.

Speaker 1 It would not inevitably lead to the mullahs in Tehran giving equal rights to women or anything else.

Speaker 1 It would solve

Speaker 1 the most likely thing is you simply have another failed Arab state run by a sort of proxy of Tehran. That's the best case scenario.

Speaker 1 And by the way, even lifelong defenders of the Palestinian cause, like Salman Rushdie, he said recently,

Speaker 1 he said, I've always been a supporter of the Palestinian people and their cause, but it is an unavoidable fact that if another state was given to the Palestinians, it would simply be at best another front for the Iranian regime in Iran.

Speaker 1 At best.

Speaker 1 So why the passion about why the unbelievable wild passion about this? Why the

Speaker 1 and I say

Speaker 1 some of it can be, should be argued out and so on. Some of it can be explained.

Speaker 1 But there's definitely a realm of it a layer of it which is simply at that level of

Speaker 1 this excites something within me

Speaker 1 this excites something within me yeah there's something there's something there's something compelling to people about hating jews look at the look at the prominence of of

Speaker 1 or you know semi-prominent people who are willing to play around with the idea that 9-11 was an inside job and somehow it was done by the israelis

Speaker 1 i mean or the jews i mean i mean look at the

Speaker 1 like this this shit is going around. I have to admit, you know, I'm, I, there's a part of my brain that's pulled towards conspiracies.

Speaker 1 There's something compelling and fun about a simple explanation for things, what's really going on behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 Because the real world, when you don't look at the conspiracies, first of all, it's complicated. And second of all, it's kind of boring.
It's a bunch of incompetent people.

Speaker 1 Usually opening up Pandora's boxes they don't understand. Yeah, it's a bushy buffoons.
And I've been

Speaker 1 I've uh,

Speaker 1 walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people. And, like, the thing I learned is they're just human beings.
There's not, I'm yet to be in a room where exceptionally

Speaker 1 brilliant psychopaths are plotting.

Speaker 1 You never got that invite? No.

Speaker 1 In fact, like, a lot of people in the positions of power, they're just not good. I mean, I'm just continuously disappointed that they're not ultra.
I love competence.

Speaker 1 The places where I've seen competence, inklings of it, is in low-level, like soldiers, like low-level, what do you call that? People that do stuff with their hands.

Speaker 1 So builders of different kinds, like engineering, like craftsmen. Like, I've seen

Speaker 1 because you've got a very specific task that could be highly complicated. Yes.
But you get to apply yourself to and to solve. Yeah.
Over years, you've master it.

Speaker 1 It's passed across generations and so on. But like state craft and like that that kind of stuff well it's

Speaker 1 because there's so many variables i mean this is this is one of the things when you were trying to lure me on to the prognostications on ukraine and i was saying i just i i've seen enough to know that i just don't know because i know of the amount of things that can change all the time i i was some years ago i was talking to a

Speaker 1 former public servant in the uk when um uh

Speaker 1 uh boris johnson was prime minister and covid started and i mentioned to this friend, I said, Well, you know,

Speaker 1 it's pretty bad luck for Boris that, you know, he came in to do one thing, which was Brexit.

Speaker 1 And then there's a global pandemic from Wuhan, you know, and he's got to like mug up on that and then gets it really wrong. But anyway.

Speaker 1 And I was really struck by the fact that this man, a man of great insight, who

Speaker 1 happened to disagree politically, but said to me, but Douglas is always like this.

Speaker 1 And he said, you know, look at Tony Blair, came into power in 1997 wanting to reform education in the UK, ends up trying to remake the Middle East.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I do,

Speaker 1 I mean, as I say, one of the reasons why I am scornful of conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 1 And most conspiracy theories, not to say that there aren't some that do actually turn out to be, you know, to have something in them. That happens.

Speaker 1 A lot of things are called conspiracy theories that turn out to be true.

Speaker 1 Lab league.

Speaker 1 But in general,

Speaker 1 the suspicion and the scorn I have for people who fall into this is, as I say, it's a very low-grade, low-resolution look at the world by people who clearly have never seen

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 wildness of actions in the world and the way that they reverberate and the number of events.

Speaker 1 I mean, I once spoke some years ago to a politician who literally said to me, I won't name the country, but said to me,

Speaker 1 can you help us out with

Speaker 1 just how to cope

Speaker 1 with the day to and understand the day-to-day

Speaker 1 struggle we're having with the cycle? And I said,

Speaker 1 what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 And they said,

Speaker 1 Our experience in government is that every day something comes up which we have to firefight.

Speaker 1 And that's what we do that day. And then the next day, something else comes up, which we have to firefight.
And we're not getting

Speaker 1 our policies done. And I just thought, for me, that rings an awful lot truer than that that country gets the odd phone call from a member of a Jewish family

Speaker 1 telling them. Yeah, I just, you know, it's like, come on.

Speaker 1 So th you know, that's

Speaker 1 do, before I forget, want to ask about Iran, what role do they play in this conflict?

Speaker 1 It's fascinating how it seems like Iran is

Speaker 1 fingerprints everywhere in the Middle East.

Speaker 1 And it's also fascinating that, you know, I have a lot of friends. My best friend is Iranian.

Speaker 1 It's fascinating that the Islamic revolution in Iran took the country from the leadership perspective backwards in such a drastic way

Speaker 1 and that they're still in power. That confuses me because I know, now it's possible I don't know the people of Iran.

Speaker 1 Sorry to make the obvious statement, but I just have a lot of friends in Iran and a lot of them,

Speaker 1 everybody I know there opposes the regime and they're brilliant,

Speaker 1 educated, thoughtful, worldly people.

Speaker 1 And it confuses me that there's this, this this is one of the, I would say,

Speaker 1 one of the greatest nations on earth.

Speaker 1 That's one of the great cultures of earth. Cultures, like the peoples of Iran.
Yeah, and you look at that, and then you look at the leadership

Speaker 1 when they're behind most of the terror groups in the region, certainly.

Speaker 1 Can you just speak to that and how is it still the same regime since nineteen seventy nine?

Speaker 1 I know, as you know, I start on democracy and death cults with the the flight taking the Ayatollah Khomeini, Khomeini, or other,

Speaker 1 from Paris to Tehran. The flight that you say you wish never happened.
I think it's one of the two worst journeys of the 20th century. What's the other one?

Speaker 1 Lenin's train getting to Petrograd. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's always about the transportation.

Speaker 1 Yes, I know. I'm really a transport guy.
No, I.

Speaker 1 Wait till my book of 10 best journeys

Speaker 1 across the world. No, just as the train to the Finland station

Speaker 1 brought the basilis of Bolshevism into Russia,

Speaker 1 so the flight coming from Paris, bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran, brought the basilis of Khomeiniism, the most radical form of Shiite Islam,

Speaker 1 to Tehran.

Speaker 1 to Iran. And

Speaker 1 it's one of the great tragedies of the modern era, what happened there.

Speaker 1 Like you, actually, I have a lot of Persian friends and I had the great good fortune early in my life to have a very close late friend who had grown up in pre-revolutionary Iran, was very fond of the Shah and

Speaker 1 so on. Her father had been an Ayatollah before the overthrow of the Shah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 and you know, everyone had criticisms of him. But

Speaker 1 when you saw what came after him, it just

Speaker 1 was, among other things

Speaker 1 what I learned from her

Speaker 1 and other friends from that region was that I suppose two things. One is, of course, is that it's a sort of central conservative insight, you know, things can always be worse.

Speaker 1 They can always be worse. Never say this is rock bottom because,

Speaker 1 you know, like you might have a Shah with hundreds or even thousands of political prisoners in cells,

Speaker 1 but you could always have Ayatollah Khomeini butchering them all,

Speaker 1 including the people who helped him get to power, like the communists and the trade unionists

Speaker 1 who simply were fighting against the Shah and then were very useful to the Ayatollah until he didn't need them anymore.

Speaker 1 But the other thing I learned from that particular friend and others was that

Speaker 1 was this

Speaker 1 thing that

Speaker 1 And again, it's very hard for the Western mindset, very hard for the American mindset in particular, that there is such a thing as fanaticism, real fanaticism, and real ideological and real religious fanaticism, and the thing that I describe leads to the death cult mindset.

Speaker 1 That fanaticism is something which is very easy for the West to forget because we haven't seen it in a while.

Speaker 1 You know, we get very

Speaker 1 distant echoes of it in our own societies, really.

Speaker 1 And we're highly attuned to hear them, which is good in some ways.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 hominism

Speaker 1 not only vastly set back

Speaker 1 the Persian people, the Iranian nation, but has managed to keep it in subjugation since 1979.

Speaker 1 And your question of why gets to one of the really

Speaker 1 the biggest questions really that

Speaker 1 that has to be understood, the answer to which has to be understood, which is, it's what Soljanitsin says at one point in Gulag Archipelago, in that passage where he describes, when we heard the footsteps on the staircase, and the knock was on our neighbor's door,

Speaker 1 and we knew our neighbor was being taken away,

Speaker 1 why did we not stop them?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 in the case of the revolutionary government in Iran, you know, it's the same answer as whether it's Hamz governing Gaza with

Speaker 1 whoever the people in Gaza are who would have liked to have seen them overthrown, whatever. It's,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 people don't realize

Speaker 1 that despite the rhetoric and everything else, everything changes if the other guy might kill you.

Speaker 1 And that,

Speaker 1 you know, when the Green Revolution in 2009 started in Iran,

Speaker 1 why was it put down? Why didn't it work? Why,

Speaker 1 like you,

Speaker 1 the sort of Iranians who I

Speaker 1 really hope one day get their country back, why did all these smart young students and others, why after they came out, why was it put down?

Speaker 1 It was put down because the Basij militia will shoot you in the head

Speaker 1 and they'll take you to a prison as they did with the Iranian students and they'll rape you you with bottles and kill you.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 even a little bit of that goes an awfully long way to tell the rest of society not to do it again.

Speaker 1 You know, we know it happens like that from films,

Speaker 1 but too few people understand

Speaker 1 that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale,

Speaker 1 on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality, and that's how they stay in power.

Speaker 1 And one other thing on that, by the way, which is,

Speaker 1 I was, I was reminded of this the other day, but you know,

Speaker 1 thinking about this, sort of, you know,

Speaker 1 what I've just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we just, you know, we like to think everyone thinks like us, and you know, we'd like everyone to sort of be like us.

Speaker 1 And we, we believe fictions that were taught in films, like, you know, everyone basically wants the same things as us. And you go,

Speaker 1 you haven't stepped outside the walls of the city if you think that.

Speaker 1 But the second thing is this thing of the death cults of

Speaker 1 why we sort of

Speaker 1 singly fail to understand that this is possible.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Khomeinianism is both very specific and also very strongly linked to totalitarian and radical and extremist death cult movements that are not that far in our past.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 you know, there's a moment in

Speaker 1 when Ariana Falaci interviewed the Adolo Khomeini in 1979, one of the very few Western journalists to do so.

Speaker 1 She says to him, These people in the street, this movement, this revolution you've begun,

Speaker 1 it's guided by hate. It's hate.
It's all hate.

Speaker 1 And Khomeini says, No, no, it's love.

Speaker 1 It's love.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's actually a scene that appears in the satanic verses of Rushti, where that exact same thing happens.

Speaker 1 But I was thinking about this recently because I was thinking, but how can you explain to a Western mindset that

Speaker 1 that's something that's going on? There are people directed by this hate that calls itself love, this, this.

Speaker 1 And I was reminded of a book I haven't read since I was probably a teenager or something made a great impression on me then did you ever read the the tragic sense of life

Speaker 1 uh Miguel de Unamuno a great Spanish existentialist philosopher who died in the 30s Unamuno had an encounter with students at the university in the 30s when he realized I mean this is the the the early period of the Francoists

Speaker 1 de Rivera and all those people Unamuno is at this meeting and the chant goes up from the eager students who have fallen into this sort of Falangist

Speaker 1 Francoist ideology already. They end up chanting in front of him as he's trying to defend the principles by which he has lived his life.
They end up chanting in front of him, Viva la Muete,

Speaker 1 long live death,

Speaker 1 long live death.

Speaker 1 And he tries to explain to them this is

Speaker 1 a necrophilic chant.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But those young men

Speaker 1 in pre-Franco Spain shouting long live death, they have their counterparts today.

Speaker 1 They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like,

Speaker 1 we love death more than you love life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the line you return to. That's a

Speaker 1 really difficult line to load in.

Speaker 1 Because if you base your whole existence on that notion,

Speaker 1 then,

Speaker 1 well, you're a danger to the world.

Speaker 1 That's a good foundation for committing evil.

Speaker 1 I have to ask, because you mentioned that interview, you had a good interview with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7th.

Speaker 1 And I've been very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview a few world leaders. It looks like I'll interview Vladimir Putin and others.

Speaker 1 One, I have a general question about how do you interview people like this.

Speaker 1 Maybe to put your historian hat on, of like, how do you approach the interview of world leaders such that you can gain a deeper understanding

Speaker 1 in the hope that that

Speaker 1 adds to the compassion in the world? So

Speaker 1 a deep sense that understanding

Speaker 1 people you might hate

Speaker 1 helps in the long arc of history add compassion to the world.

Speaker 1 But even just to add understanding is difficult in those kinds of contexts,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 you know, maybe it's more useful to think about from a historian perspective of how you

Speaker 1 need to interview somebody like Hitler or Stalin or Churchill,

Speaker 1 FDR during World War II.

Speaker 1 It's not,

Speaker 1 you know, I think about this a lot, especially if it's, you know,

Speaker 1 two, three, four, five-hour conversation. Well, there's a lot of

Speaker 1 weight on you when you do those conversations.

Speaker 1 From where? So, like, where, who's watching? Is it historians 20 years from then?

Speaker 1 Who knows? I mean, the whole data might be wiped.

Speaker 1 I suspect there's a weight on you because every major world leader you interview,

Speaker 1 and you've done some amazing ones, but I mean, you, you presumably

Speaker 1 you have a set of people saying, you've got to ask him about this.

Speaker 1 You can't not address this.

Speaker 1 And that's a very challenging one because, of course,

Speaker 1 although in an interview, the politicians should not should not be supine,

Speaker 1 nor can it be endlessly interrogative because

Speaker 1 you're not the prosecutor, and they don't have to be the guilty party answering to you.

Speaker 1 And I've noticed the number of people who interview people, world leaders and others, who go in with a set of sort of

Speaker 1 those things. And

Speaker 1 at some point, the other party can just,

Speaker 1 I don't need this. And people criticizing you don't realize that.
You just can't do that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I suppose why journalists behave the way they do, although I have increasingly less and less respect for the journalists,

Speaker 1 the average journalist.

Speaker 1 I have more and more respect for the great journalists as my respect for the average journalist decreases.

Speaker 1 Because a lot of the journalists seem to be signaling to their own

Speaker 1 in-group.

Speaker 1 But there is a lot of pressure on

Speaker 1 people in that situation to ask what I would say is the dumb question. Why is it the dumb question?

Speaker 1 uh the adversarial question that

Speaker 1 the the world leader the person is ready for they've answered that question and

Speaker 1 what you're trying to do is i guess one to signal that you've asked the question and to push them yes uh two you're trying to like just create drama Because really what people that ask you to ask that question, they want you to embarrass that person.

Speaker 1 They hate hate them and they want you to like make them piss their pants or something or just start crying and run out of the way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, walk out in a way that it's embarrassing for them. They could be like, Look at that pathetic person.

Speaker 1 And that reveals to me nothing except maybe the weakness of the interviewee that they can't stand up to a tough question. Yes.

Speaker 1 But mostly, like, I'm starting, I have to do a lot of thinking because you get attacked a lot if you ask questions from a place of curiosity that actually have a chance to reveal who the person is.

Speaker 1 There's a very interesting line that Robin Day, who was quite a distinguished interviewer back, a very distinguished interviewer back in the day,

Speaker 1 said about Jeremy Paxman, who was a very interrogative interviewer in the UK.

Speaker 1 Robin Day, who was quite good at being rude to politicians, but carefully, said the problem with the new approach, as he saw it from the 90s of political interviewing, interviewing, was he said, if you think the person you're speaking to is a liar,

Speaker 1 you should get them to reveal that they're a liar, don't just call them a liar.

Speaker 1 And I think that is,

Speaker 1 again, it's something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don't realize, is that

Speaker 1 it may satisfy them

Speaker 1 that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn't do anything. And it actually reveals nothing.

Speaker 1 If somebody somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that's that's something else. But yes, I mean, I can, I hear you.

Speaker 1 You're you're obviously, you have a lot of different voices

Speaker 1 telling you what to do.

Speaker 1 It's also difficult because one of the things that I don't think anyone really understands is that, is that in the end, it's just you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you have this about Putin. Like, people say, I know exactly how you can, you know, they could give endless advice, but the end is you sitting down talking to him.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 like everybody knows how to behave on the presidential debate stage, but only a few people have done it. In person is actually pretty difficult.

Speaker 1 It's very difficult because you've got all this weird behind-the-scenes stuff as well. You've got all of the games that people play.
I mean, yeah, with, you know, I interviewed Zelensky.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm pretty fearless in general, and he was a very human and

Speaker 1 fascinating human. But there is soldiers with guns standing all around.

Speaker 1 And you don't have anyone?

Speaker 1 No one was panking on your side? I had one friend, security person, who's also Ukraine, so you never know. You could turn on.

Speaker 1 You've been infiltrated. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, that doesn't have any effect. And by the way, I should mention that because

Speaker 1 it's hilarious to me, but

Speaker 1 process-wise,

Speaker 1 with Narendra Modi and with anyone, they don't,

Speaker 1 they they said it was scripted and all this kind of stuff. I would never do anything scripted.
They don't get to have a say in anything I ask. I have complete freedom.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you'll have people on the team very politely nudge, like, hey, can you?

Speaker 1 And I'll very politely say, thank you, you know, like smile. But that doesn't mean I have to fucking do it.

Speaker 1 I could do whatever the hell I want.

Speaker 1 The comms, this actually, by the way, with world leaders, it doesn't happen. It happens more with CEOs because they have like usually PR and comms people.

Speaker 1 They'll just be like very politely, hey, you know, that

Speaker 1 thing

Speaker 1 about,

Speaker 1 you know, when they, that sexual assault harassment charges they've had.

Speaker 1 Could we just, there's no reason to really linger on that.

Speaker 1 You didn't have to do that. Yeah.
One of my favorite things anyone had ever said in advance, or

Speaker 1 it's only ever happened in private. I know a couple of cases of this happening in private.

Speaker 1 Some friends, some a friend of mine once years ago was debating against the this is before the the war the civil war in Syria was debating something to do with the middle east and one of the people on the other side was the then Syrian ambassador in London the then Syrian ambassador in London says something about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and my friend stands up and starts talking about Assad senior's massacre of the Palestinians in Hama where they killed like 10,000 Palestinians in a day

Speaker 1 and my friend starts talking about the Hama massacre by Assad Senior. And the big fat Syrian ambassador stands up to respond and he says,

Speaker 1 that is none of your business.

Speaker 1 And my friend was like, oh, I thought we were going to get it in denial.

Speaker 1 Let me just ask you one more thing about Netanyahu.

Speaker 1 Because I also have the opportunity to do a three-hour interview with him at this stage. And I've been, if I'm just being honest, very hesitant to do it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I just don't know

Speaker 1 how a conversation there could

Speaker 1 help add compassion to the world.

Speaker 1 And that particular topic, no matter how well you do it, you do take on a very large number of people that

Speaker 1 will just make it their daily activity to hate you and to write about it and to post about it and to accuse you of things.

Speaker 1 In some sense, I don't want to lose the part of me that's that's vulnerable to the world.

Speaker 1 People have very little understanding of things. If they're willing to say that because you're sitting down and talking with somebody, you are ergo platforming them,

Speaker 1 advancing their cause, being used, being a show or whatever like that. You might be actually just finding some things out, which I think is something you do expertly.

Speaker 1 And another thing that your critics wouldn't realize is that they you know life is long

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 you know hopefully god willing both around for a long time and therefore you don't blow everything up at the request of some twat online but i do think that a superpower of a kind is to identify the people whose opinion you care for and

Speaker 1 worry about their opinion and no one else's really and and keep and just you just keep your own guiding light that's what's always done it for for me is that i i i've always said i just don't really i wouldn't care if i was the only person with my opinion and billions of people disagreed i mean i might be curious if the whole planet disagreed with me but it doesn't fundamentally that's not why

Speaker 1 i'll send you churchill's great speech on the death of chamberlain

Speaker 1 i mean it he says the bit he says one of the most wise and brilliant things

Speaker 1 i was thinking about it slightly earlier when you were talking about zelensky but he goes because because one of Churchill's greatnesses was his magnanimity.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when his great political opponent, Chamberlain, died

Speaker 1 in 1940, and Churchill had just taken over as Prime Minister, he could have used the opportunity. And we might even say that some politicians in our day won't be able to resist the opportunity.

Speaker 1 He could have used the opportunity to say, you see, I was right.

Speaker 1 And Chamberlain didn't know what the hell he was doing. And he's led us into this mess.
And you should have all listened to me. Because that would have been a good time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It would have been a good time to say that that would have been one for the win, as they say.
But Churchill doesn't do that in his great eulogy for Chamberlain. He

Speaker 1 talks about how hard it is for mankind to operate in the world.

Speaker 1 And how you can do it successfully. He very movingly says, he doesn't even mention the name of Hitler.
He says, what were Neville Chamberlain's flaws?

Speaker 1 He says, desiring of human peace, to be seeking peace. And he says

Speaker 1 the curse that he had was he was led astray by a very wicked man.

Speaker 1 But then he has this great passage

Speaker 1 where he Churchill says

Speaker 1 beautiful resonant passage about how he says it's not given to men happily for them, for otherwise life would prove intolerable to foresee or to predict to any great extent the unfolding course of events.

Speaker 1 And he he says, In one phase, men seem to have been right, and in another, they're proved wrong, and then there's a

Speaker 1 different scale of values emerges. And he says,

Speaker 1 What is the worth of all this? He says, The only guide to a man is his conscience, the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and the sincerity of his actions.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he says, it doesn't matter what happens. If you have this, he finishes it, he says,

Speaker 1 However, the fates may play,

Speaker 1 that if you have this shield

Speaker 1 to guard you, he says you march always in the ranks of honor.

Speaker 1 All that can guide a man is

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 if you lose sight of it, and some people do, and maybe everyone does at some point, then it's a challenge. And then you get buffeted by the twos and fros of the waves of popular opinion.

Speaker 1 But um and that's dangerous.

Speaker 1 But if you keep sight

Speaker 1 and hold on to what you believe,

Speaker 1 a million, billion foes don't matter.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is the path. We were talking offline about the great biography of Churchill.

Speaker 1 Churchill himself made mistakes and admitted the mistakes and was

Speaker 1 we can even say was proud of the mistakes. I mean, learned from them.
Learned from them. That's all the best you could do.
The worst you could probably do is being afraid of making mistakes.

Speaker 1 That's what TR family says about the men in the man in the arena speech. TR.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The old TR. Those two have made quite a few mistakes, but are,

Speaker 1 in the end,

Speaker 1 some of the greatest humans ever created.

Speaker 1 Norm MacDonald Churchill

Speaker 1 and Tim. Did we do Norm?

Speaker 1 I think we did it before coming on air. Oh, before coming on air, yeah.
Well, he's always and everywhere in the in the air around us.

Speaker 1 One of the great comedians.

Speaker 1 All right. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on?

Speaker 1 Human civilization.

Speaker 1 You've been covering some of the darker aspects. The madness of crowds.
the madness of geopolitics, the madness of wars.

Speaker 1 Sometimes when the sun shines through the clouds and there's a smile on Douglas Murray's face, what's the source of the smile?

Speaker 1 The warmth?

Speaker 1 Endless numbers of things.

Speaker 1 Endless numbers of things. I mean, I get enormous encouragement from smart young people, actually.

Speaker 1 That's just the best thing ever.

Speaker 1 I was in Kiev the other week and I was asked to speak to some students at the university, and irrespective of the rather tricky situation that they are in,

Speaker 1 it's just great to, as you know, to speak to a room full of students

Speaker 1 about things and then hang around afterwards and just answer all the questions you can and hear from them about their lives and what they want to do and remembering what you were like at their age and how

Speaker 1 goofy you were and how much you were going to get wrong and how much you know you had to learn and how much you were going to enjoy it and and seeing the

Speaker 1 the opportunities they have if in front of them if if things go right and

Speaker 1 and uh just smart young people give me enormous encouragement all the time it's it's that's the best thing i mean it's just yeah they're uh you can see endless possibility in their eyes and

Speaker 1 there's uh they're not like burdened by um

Speaker 1 let's say uh the cynicism that builds up. Well, even the cynicism, though, I mean, you can resist that.
I mean, I've got quite a deep well spring of it.

Speaker 1 But, I mean, you can't only fall into that because there's so much else it doesn't cover. It'd be like spending your life being ironic, you know.

Speaker 1 So that said, you have seen a lot of war, especially recently and directly.

Speaker 1 Ukraine, Israel.

Speaker 1 Has that changed you?

Speaker 1 Has that dimmed some of that warmth and light?

Speaker 1 That's a very difficult question to answer.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Differs day to day.

Speaker 1 So sometimes there's a heaviness there because of the short scene. Yeah, I at times, at times.
Do you regret some going as much as you have to the front lines?

Speaker 1 No, no.

Speaker 1 One of the reasons why a war is for a writer kind of

Speaker 1 the ultimate subject

Speaker 1 is because you see

Speaker 1 life

Speaker 1 weirdly at its ultimate

Speaker 1 very, very strange, strange thing.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 you know, it just it is is the truth. Death when it's in front of you is something which

Speaker 1 gives uh a terrible clarity to everything

Speaker 1 and uh

Speaker 1 it it it you see how people will love and even sometimes laugh

Speaker 1 more

Speaker 1 how they'll

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 there's an essay by Montaigne that's always on my mind called Why We Weep and Laugh at the Same Time.

Speaker 1 Everything's just more.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 people, the real thing is that people, you see the very, very best of people and the very worst and beside each other. There's some

Speaker 1 so I've gotten a bunch of chances to interact with soldiers on the front line in Ukraine. And there is some level of like all the bullshit niceties or whatever it is of

Speaker 1 civilian life is all stripped away. It seems more honest somehow.
Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Well, I mean, I

Speaker 1 couldn't agree more. And there's the wild clarity about things, not because of enemies or anything like that, but because of the

Speaker 1 I think I mentioned I joked about this to some Ukrainian soldiers in 22 because they wanted a cigarette and

Speaker 1 we stepped outside. I accompanied them outside because they weren't allowed to smoke indoors in this hotel, which

Speaker 1 there were rockets falling.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I said to myself, isn't it strange that fear of secondhand smoke

Speaker 1 has superseded

Speaker 1 this?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 And seeing the humor in that,

Speaker 1 when you're on the front line, when you're fighting in a war, the humor of that is somehow just perfectly delicious. You could just laugh all day about that.
And the absurdity of life is just

Speaker 1 right there. And it's so honest and it's so beautiful.
And that's why a lot of soldiers are traumatized. They're destroyed by war, but they also miss it.
That's right. That's right.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
There's an intimacy to the whole thing. Absolutely.
Well, that's right. I mean, everyone says, you know, I never felt more alive.
You know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and

Speaker 1 I wouldn't do anything different.

Speaker 1 Well, I hope just like Churchill,

Speaker 1 you keep fighting the good fight and

Speaker 1 not listening to anybody, and I'll try to learn to do the same. Douglas, I'm a huge fan.
Thank you for doing this. Been a great pleasure.
I'm right back at you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Speaker 1 And now, let me leave you with some words from Bertrand Russell. The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.